Well, it took a little work, but I finally managed to get the cast together for a little party and to pose for a Christmas card photo. So a Very Happy Holiday from all of us here at The Sanctum! 🙂
And thanks to TarotRedhand for his NWN Map Mats Ice Sculpture Christmas Card Kit!
I thought readers might enjoy some plot and character previews from Sanctum of the Archmage 3: The Miracle Worker, Act II – Mission to Rayche, currently in development. The following are excerpts from the Sanctum 3 design document, edited slightly to remove spoilers.
The party will land on the roof of Castle Highpeak. The Pegasi will tell them that they will be on call to fly to nearby areas should they be needed, and then leave. If Robin is in the party, she’ll don a disguise to keep her from being recognized by any of the Raychian nobility. When they try to enter the castle, they will be confronted by a squad of guards and brought to the Castellan…
From the Castellan they’ll learn that Chancellor Rhys has just been assassinated and the Royal Treasury looted, and that the city and castle are in chaos. The King has retreated to his apartments under heavy guard, with strict orders that no one except his most trusted and loyal advisors be allowed in to see him. The Castellan is loath to make an exception to his orders until or unless the party can win his trust…
The party will need to fulfill a certain number of “points” worth of quests to build up their reputation with the King’s advisers in order to gain an audience with him. The King and his Court are also influenced by public opinion, so developing a positive reputation among the people will help to win their support as well.
Captain Flynn is a young officer who is also Marshal Briggs’ most trusted assistant. He’s charming and a bit of a rogue, romantically speaking, and will flirt mercilessly with a player that shows an interest in him… As a henchman, he’s a fighter with excellent combat skills. He’s charged by the Marshal to help them with the Defeat the Demon Force and Destroy the Demon Base quests… He’s also a skilled dancer, and if the player enters the Dancing Competition in the Grand Tourney she can choose him as her partner.
High Priestess Aleanne is worried about the peoples’ morale in face of the demon threat and the crushing taxes that have had to be imposed to make up for the looting of the treasury. She is convinced that they need a symbol of divine favor to inspire them, and proposes that the PC undertake a dangerous quest to recover a holy artifact: The Shield of the Defender, once wielded by the great hero Calindra. The shield is a symbol of the archetype of The Defender from the statue gallery in the Ancient Ruins from Chapter 1.
The Legend of the Defender is an ancient story, now thought by many to be more myth than history. But Aleanne believes in it, and the tale of Calindra is a personal favorite of hers that has always filled her with inspiration. She has faith that the shield can be found again, but doesn’t know where to look for it. She recommends that the party start their search by visiting the library in Highpeak Castle and consulting the definitive book on subject, aptly titled The Legend of the Defender…
Prometheus Antonos, also known as “Prometheus the Giant-Slayer,” is a member of the renowned adventuring group, The Heroes of Glorn. He was sent by the Magistrate of Glorn as an emissary from the Free City-States of Landis to coordinate the hasty marshalling of the Landissian and Raychian armies at the mouth of Stonegate pass. He can be found in the King’s Throne room and the player can talk to him about his adventures, and the lands of Landis and Glorn. He adventured with Nimrod and will recognize it if the player is wearing Nimrod’s Ring.
Prometheus is a large and powerfully muscled fighter who wields a huge battle hammer named “Iron Thunder.” He also has bright green hair, the result of opening a cursed door in a dungeon on one of his adventures. He affects a pronounced “tough guy” manner, but has a keen intellect and a highly developed sense of honor. Prometheus can join the party during the endgame sequence (for the “Find the Traitor” quest), and as henchman he’s a ranger with giants and demons as his racial enemies.
Well, the move I mentioned in my previous posts is now complete! We’ll be busy unpacking for a while to come, but we’re now safely and completely in our new home. It’s much larger and much nicer than our old place, so we’re quite pleased and excited about it. And after a bit of settling in, I should hopefully be able to get back to working on the Sanctum Saga. 🙂
Another thing I’ve finally gotten around to doing is merging my two websites. I’ve wanted to do this for the last year, and it became a necessity now that the free hosting package from my cable company (which was providing the original domain) was going away with the move. I’m pleased to announce that the (newer) andarian.com and the (older) andarian.net domains are now merged into a fully integrated site. That includes both the New and Legacy Sanctum Blogs, the urls for each of which now point to a single Blog with (as you can see by looking at the archives list to the right) all posts going back to March 2007. My old andarian.net website is still archived (for “historical” purposes). Here are the links:
Posts on the Sanctum Blog have been fairly sparse recently, though I hope to be able to start changing that again soon. The main reason for the dearth of updates is that I’ve temporarily had to set aside work on the saga (especially on Chapter 3) for a couple of other priorities. The main one was professional: my career was badly in need of a reboot, and I needed some time this year to work that out. The good news is that I have a new position now, with better prospects and in a better area. I’ll be moving over the course of the next month, and hope to be able to get back to modding again in a more serious way once that’s done.
One thing that I have been working on, though, is a final remake to the first two chapters to implement a lot of the design changes I’ve made to the series for Chapter 3. I mentioned this in a recent blog post, and the changes are actually quite major. Part of my motive in doing the update was that I wanted to get some of the good work I’ve done for the third chapter out there. Some of it is custom content related, such as integrating Project Q and CEP 3.4, using the fabulous Sanctum Flying Skyscape tileset that Estelindis built for me to remake the flying areas at the end of Sanctum 2, revamping the score with some of the new tracks from the expanded Sanctum 3 soundtrack, and so on. The technical base of haks used by the v4 update will be the same one used by Sanctum 3 when it’s released, which will make integrating the third chapter with the first two a much easier task.
Some of the changes, though, are to start removing some of the unnecessary D&D references included in the modules. I originally did a lot of that for convenience, and to help make the setting feel a little less unfamiliar to NWN players. When I first built the modules my ability to do things like create new races and appearances was limited, and using player-familiar ones from the toolset was much easier. Most of these elements really don’t fit well with the non-D&D story world of the Sanctum novels that I’m working on, though, and on which the modules are based. Some examples of this are the Drow and the Deep Gnomes, which don’t even exist in them at all.
I’m reworking a lot of that now, and including a lot more of the lore from the original world of the novels — including things like history, religion, custom races, and the like. (For a spoiler hint about what will replace the Drow, and the new face of General Y’Thra, see here and here.) I expect to have the v4 update out before the end of this year, and be back on track building Sanctum 3 for release sometime next year.
Here’s a patch update (version 3.4b) for Sanctum of the Archmage Chapters 1 and 2:
This patch adds a cutscene that I’ve always wanted to include in the climactic confrontation from Sanctum 1. Players will probably get the idea from the title, but here’s a video clip for anyone interested:
This is just an “intermediate version” of one of the major changes going into the V4 update, but I thought I’d make it available now. The final version will actually replace the Drow with one of the custom races from the Sanctum novels. But more on that later…
My schedule’s been very hectic this year, for example with work for the AME and preparing for a big job move. In keeping with a desire to keep my blog more up to date, though, I wanted to announce that I’ve started work on a major update to Sanctum 1 and 2, to add a number of features to them that I’ve been developing for Sanctum 3. I’m hoping to get that out in the fall, and it will include (among other things):
and many more things besides.
A fellow CRPG modder pioneers the path of adapting his epic game saga as a novel, e-published as a Kindle book. This is an intriguing approach that I may follow with Sanctum of the Archmage, although in my case work on the novels actually predated the game adaptations.
Nature Abhors a Vacuum — The Aielund Saga, Book One by Stephen Nowland
(For more information, see The Aielund Saga Website.)
I just posted an update to the “patch hak” (to level 3.4a) for Sanctum of the Archmage Chapters 1 and 2. The patch adds a couple of very minor playability features, and fixes the following bugs:
The updated patch hak is available on the module download pages for Sanctum 1 and Sanctum 2.
The Escapist Magazine’s “Extra Credits” section published a very interesting video opinion piece yesterday. Although pitched in the form of “An Open Letter to EA Marketing,” it indicates a wider issue that goes beyond any particular company or its marketing. Rather, it goes to the heart of how most games are made today, and how that is too often driven by increasingly obsolete and inside-the-box assumptions about customer demographics. Over the top marketing campaigns are just the most obvious symptom of that phenomenon.
Speaking personally, I very much share the vision expressed in the video (and apparently, at least at one time, by EA as well). Indeed, the reason why I became interested in game development in the first place was to learn how to help bring it into existence. Gaming qua interactive art has enormous potential, but it’s still to a great extent in its infancy (pun intended).
Sigh… The latest WordPress update seems to have messed up the site’s formatting. Fortunately it looks like the only real issues have to do with the formatting of images with video links behind them increasing in size and over-extending into the link bar on the right. I should be able to fix that up over the weekend, but so please bear with the appearance for the time being. 🙂