August Update
I am almost done with the Wizard Guild adventure, working on the last two levels of a tower. Of course, after that, I still need to wrap up everything with the guildmaster, when reporting back, but that should not take too much time. That the party will explore a wizards tower was probably evident. And the location provides some new challenges for the player in terms of tricks and traps. Here is one example from this particular dungeon crawl:
Naturally, there are still plenty of monsters to fight. One of the things I like to do is add new monsters into the ever expanding catalogue of creatures, especially D&D classics like the Gelatinous Cube.
When the wizard guild quest is finished, then all six class-related missions will be available to the player. This is an important milestone, and a defining moment for the overarching adventure. As I have mentioned, before the party can receive audience with the King of Castle Hearkenwold, at least one member of the party must belong to a guild. So players will not be able to access any further content until they have accomplished this achievement.
I am going to be spending some time on a related project, recreating Hearkenwold in the recently released Knights of the Chalice 2 engine. It's remarkable how mostly compatible the two platforms are, which so far has proved promising. At the same time, I want to give a ton of credit to slowdive and karl, because in comparison the IceBlink engine is much more intuitive and user-friendly for a builder. Really, IceBlink is an amazing engine. In fact, the main thing KotC has going for it, and why I was interested, is because it has a more robust system of game mechanics already in place. Now I firmly believe that everything in KotC, from races and classes to skills and spells, could be more or less created in IceBlink. But that will take some effort. For the time being, it will interesting to place Hearkenwold in this environment and see what happens. Obviously the opportunity to attract new players is also appealing.
Still, Hearkenwold will remain forever an IceBlink adventure first and foremost. When the time comes for me to resume the adventure, post guild quests, I will be building in the IceBlink engine. Really, I would expect that to be somewhere around the first half of 2021.
Finally, I have had the chance to start a continuous play through of the guild content. So far, the party has done the Paladin, Cleric, and Ranger adventures. Our Thief and Wizard have made it to level 9. And reaching that point, the wizard selected his last spell available. So going forward, definitely need more spells! This will be a good gauge for a higher level party, and help me to design new content accordingly.
The next build of Hearkenwold for IceBlink should be available by the end of this month.