Raventhal

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cartons
Posts: 73
Joined: Mon Jan 11, 2021 5:38 pm

Raventhal

Post by cartons »

Maybe it's not my place to start a new thread for somebody else's module. I just wanted some place to discuss Raventhall after my first completed playthrough!

Probably SPOILERS.

I feel like I might have missed some content? The game advertises a playthrough getting you up to levels 4-6, but I ended on 3-4, with 740 XP on my Cleric, Bathak, Rani, and Anu. I never did go back to that Troll...I think after getting whupped too many times early game, I was just too afraid to go anywhere near that lake again.

Also, Bathak; there's a bug...I tried to do my duty at the end, and take out the Homunkulus, but upon killing him, I get an error message tht says "failed to open conversation with tag: bathak dies", and then the game bugs out and freezes on a previous dialogue box with him.

Other than that, I love how harsh this game is! I loved being a total SP miser and just scraping by each battle; and that I was only able to defeat Bathak at the end with my anemic Cleric because I'd saved one last SP restoration bottle which was just enough to allow me one cast of Bug Swarm. It gave me the same sense of catharsis I got at the end of the similarly brutal Red Carnival.

How did you do that anyway? I forgot to check, but is the enemy Bathak actually equipped and HPed like the one that just left my party? Was the game developed *for* IBBasic, or did you translate it from IB?

In any case (Pongo, right?), I saw on the old forum that you were developing a sort of island base module? How is that coming along?
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Dorateen
Posts: 316
Joined: Thu Jan 16, 2020 3:03 pm

Re: Raventhal

Post by Dorateen »

cartons, I meant to suggest you should also definitely take a look at Pongo's "The Eldarin Stone". It is a great dungeon crawl and makes use of a rations system, which also will keep players aware of their resources.
cartons
Posts: 73
Joined: Mon Jan 11, 2021 5:38 pm

Re: Raventhal

Post by cartons »

Thanks, Dorateen. I just started it yesterday, actually.

I'd like to eventually get through the whole IB canon, not even just to learn what is possible with the engine, but because the games built are, so far, really satisfying!

Raventhal was actually the first game I tried. I got wiped out pretty early on and veered off into Volturnas and the Red Carnival for awhile. Then Hearkenwold. Then, re-moralized, aced Raventhal! It's fun to actually watch myself learn the logic of resource management in these goldbox-style games which I've had no prior experience with.

Also really looking forward to Malkin, and whatever other projects are being cooked up right now!
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slowdive
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Joined: Wed Jan 15, 2020 4:37 am

Re: Raventhal

Post by slowdive »

And Pongo's Blackwinter as well. It is short, but follows the same setting and lore.
Pongo
Posts: 156
Joined: Fri Jan 22, 2021 8:39 am

Re: Raventhal

Post by Pongo »

Hi cartons, thanks for playing the Raventhal and the feedback! Great to hear that you enjoyed it.

Missing content - I think its hard to miss much content to be honest, although there are a few optional fights that only trigger depending on decisions taken earlier in the module. I haven't played it in a long time but I normally ended up around level 4, so it sounds about right to me. Maybe I had higher aspirations when I developed it but never got around to amending the game text.

Yeah the troll is totally optional, I think you get a cool weapon if you kill him but there's no impact on the story. He was designed mainly to be a fun and interesting way of blocking the western edges of the map from low level characters (although you can get around him through the tunnel system). Originally I thought he would be linked with the story villains, but in the end I just preferred having him as a random bit of chaos on the map!

Thanks for the Bathak bug report. I pulled the Raventhal together originally using normal IB ages back - it was 2013 I think. I'm pretty slow at developing mods, but the Raventhal came together really easily over about a month. I purposefully tried to restrict myself to just populating one main map (although I "cheated" in the end with a very few submaps like the house and the caves) - the scope limitation helped I think.

With Bathak, I guessed what his level 4 stats and damage would be and created him as a new enemy. Then, if the "fight him" dialogue option is taken, Bathak is removed as a party member and a fight is triggered with the new, separate Bathak enemy. I wouldn't use the Raventhal as an example of how to build a module though - I had a lot of bad habits when I was building it, such as using global variables to trigger events linked to items rather than having them linked to specific item properties. It all works fine, but when I carried these bad practices over to the Elderin Stone the larger scale of the project caused me lots of problems (especially with keys), which would have been much more simple had I just linked to item properties! There's other stuff like that in there I expect.

The Island project is kind of still alive. I've not been able to do much Iceblink over the last year so it has stalled, but with a fair bit of content already pulled together for the first handful of maps. I replayed it the other day and quite enjoyed it, but the tone was a bit jarring. I have a tendency to be tonally inconsistent and the Island is particularly bad for this. I love the idea though so I'm planning to either come back to it or lift it for a new purpose. I'm currently pulling together a progression for levels 1-5 for a range of classes that can be the backbone for a new module, or to use for the Island, not sure!

Thanks again! I see from the forum that you're working on something as well? Look forward to hearing about it.
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