Cough. That’s literally the premise of this place; I must have hit the nail on its head with the lore. Or did you check it out already?
Yeah, this all sounds great to me. I think it makes a lot of sense for individual areas to have their own magic “feels” and themes, and we can avoid needing to try to get everything rationalized onto a single framework by leaning on the Rift and the narrative conceit that this world isn’t particularly single-framework-y.
Grins I haven’t yet. But it messiahized Maggie the other week!
I think the complex is open for tenants. I think it’s reasonable to link personal qurters and larger rooms (like @anon78591655’s tavern) as long as you stick to the primary area themes:
- the Obsidian Plateau is within the mountain. You can have windows cut in the rock or paths outside but you need to theme the primary rooms like they are within the mountain;
- limit the use of teleportation magic (i.e. no exits that teleport you to far-away lands straight on). This is due to the tear’s imminent presence. If you must, you can absolutely use hidden exits for that.
You are encouraged to build your room lore around:
- the magical theme of the area. This is where mages live, hang out and do the research;
- the technical themes of the Obsidian Plateau’s heritage. It’s not technomagic per se, so just some lil’ bits and bolts of technology will be fine. You’ll get extra credit for making it Black Mesa/Half-Life themed somehow.
PS: @Alexander_Riven: if you’d get back to me on changing the exit structure around your room that’d be lovely (in re. making it less teleporty-looking).
I got the area reviewed by Tasho and I acted on the feedback. If any other builder would drop by that’d be lovely. Otherwise I’m good to have it linked via a public exit: the path currently goes from the Azurite Hills.
Admittedly, I did get a bit stuck on the ‘obsidian plateau’ reference. X)
Popped around a bit otherwise and it looks fine, but my mental image is definitely aligned to the joke.
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That aside, with teleportation/rift travel being a theme of the reference material, there’s a good opportunity to have a chamber that goes to random (off-grid) 1-room (too dangerous to move away from the portal) unintended destinations - since the idea is that teleportation isn’t working right?
That said: I wouldn’t be in a rush to make a ton of rooms, but you could certainly have a hidden exit pattern in binary that goes places when correctly aligned or nowhere when the combination is wrong (until a destination is ready to be added) go 0000/ go 0101 / etc, etc…
Can we do that without acci hacking something to make it work? It does sound fun.
I don’t think we can properly randomize it without some form of programming language, but you could certainly have researchable unexpected destinations by simply adding them as hidden with simple naming conventions like a string of 4/5/6 numbers (16/32/64 options) set to either 0 or 1. (call it shrouding or unshrouding of crystals or whatever mechanic fits a 0/1 flip.)
Mega-Mushroom Colony Area, Subterrane Chasm, Otherwise Unreachable Mountain Peak, Mid-Ocean Sandbar inhabited by native Albino Hopping Crabs? Just little one-off fooling around rooms mixed in with some neat scenery destinations too - only accessible from the chamber.
That’s a perfect idea; I’ll get onto that.
It feels like a good way to have some fun with some rift instability and outlet some creative concepts without getting too heavily into them and turning them into full scale projects, plus if those unexpected destinations don’t actually tie to anywhere else except the tear, then you can neatly contain them within a sub area inside the facility one by one as you feel like adding them.
Added a couple of those now!
I decided against adding them to any area for now, does it make sense? Otherwise I’d have to create a subarea for each (and the tool doesn’t quite support managing the areas yet so I’d have to do that manually).
I was more thinking that you could simply contain all the unexpected destinations within a single subarea, but I suppose that would spoil them if the names were to show up in the list while in any one of them? Not sure how to tackle that part.
There’s functionality by using dark that causes a room not to show up in the area list unless you’re in it, but that’s tied to the room darkening functionality too sadly, so its not a good fit for solving the problem fully.
@farcaller said he can add the area management in the next version of the tool so that will solve it as I can have a new subarea for every room with them set as private. Otherwise it’d be too much of a hassle to manage the area descriptions and rules for those.
…when I re-write that thing in a more manageable way.
the what now? I thought they were setting up a mobile app?
I must have too much spare time on my hands or Shin is just hard to ignore. But this one wasn’t much of a time sink and I used it as a spinoff to test some of the protocol code for the mobile app. Basically what it does is that it allows you to write the area down in a single file like this and it will sync that to wolfery. Also does some linting for exit names, common typos, spellchecking etc.
So… you have to log into it directly or something then? How does it get around to modifying all the values for the individual rooms and exits contained within?
Yeah; you need to add your login/password/char name to the config; that’s the only way for it to talk to wolfery until Acci comes up with some bot tokens. Makes it a bit annoying to use because your character will also teleport around when you run it. But overall I found it so much better for rooms authoring becasue I can reliably verify all exit mesages are set up proper and descriptions are spell-checked nicely.