Frayed Knights: Heroes of Bastionne
It's time for another installment of the seemingly never-ending saga of the development of Frayed Knights, the indie RPG that refuses to take itself too seriously.

Cold Medicine and Dungeon Building Don't Mix

I only have a cold. I say "only" because, although it's the nastiest one I've endured in about three years, it's not the swine flu, which our neighbors down the road have. The ones with the son who is in the Junior High carpool with my daughter. Yeah, exposure potential there. Terrific. I'll count my blessings.

But a lot of building and testing (repeat, repeat...) of game levels for Frayed Knights while under the influence of both a cold and cold medication can have a strange effect. When followed by brief snatches of medication-encouraged slumber, things get... weird. Really weird.

I found myself walking (or floating) down the same corridors I'd been building (and testing, etc) in my dream. There was no escape. There was always something just not right about it, though I could never exactly put my finger on it. Over and over I'd pace the corridor in some kind of brain-loop.

So now I have a freakin' dungeon that haunts my nightmares. Great. It's not even that impressive of a corridor - there's nothing complicated about it. I may have to put some really weird encounter in there to commemorate the dream-loop I had about it.

Fear not, I will be raising the ambient levels a bit above what you see in the screen capture. I just turned everything down to see the other lights better.

Right before coming down with this happy little plague, I'd decided to completely overhaul the Tower of Almost Certain Death. I wasn't happy with what I'd done before, and it was getting hard to maintain. The tower itself was too dinky, for one thing. Adding the larger underground section helped, adding about twelve rooms to the total, but something had to be done about the tower itself. All told, the tower is a bit larger than the Temple of Pokmor Xang, clocking in at about double the number of rooms (depending upon your definition of "room").

In fitting with the Frayed Knights universe, the tower itself is only a small part of the actual structure. By room-count, it still dominates, but at least half the square-footage is underground. The wizard who built the tower wasn't quite so worried about its vulnerability to aerial attack as its convenience, but it has a traditional underground bolt-hole. Plus, the underground complex was a place to billet his guards and drudge-servants where they wouldn't stink up the place. And finally, the underground area housed one of his greatest - and most successful - experiments.

One which has now been found, and controlled by the forces of evil. Duh. You leave anything laying around like that, you just KNOW some dark overlord or something is going to take advantage of it.

The Heroes of Bastionne

Polly has been feverishly working on the rival group for the Frayed Knights - the Heroes of Bastionne. You met one of them (kinda) in the pilot - Florentine. She's getting a complete overhaul as well. New graphics, new everything. Except her attitude. That stays.

The artwork style doesn't quite match that of Shawn Boyle's drawings for the main characters, but nothing's gonna exactly match that - not even the game world itself. Though I will keep trying to make some changes to make things a little more compatible. But ultimately, the main characters are probably just gonna end up standing out a little bit from the rest of the world. That's true on several levels, so I think that's okay.

The Heroes of Bastionne are designed to be in many ways the opposites of the Frayed Knights. Florentine, their leader, is the cleric - Benjamin's counterpart. Where he's a tree-hugging nature priest who only reluctantly engages in the violence that is the adventurer's lot, Florentine is a priestess of the goddess of battle. Benjamin is the newbie on the team who isn't quite sure what's going on half the time. Florentine is the group leader, and has the most experience of them all. Benjamin is a little naive and bumbling, but Florentine at least projects the aura of being ultra-competent. Benjamin is kind-hearted, and will push to do what's right in spite of the potential for his own detriment (note that he's the one who lobbies to free the "prisoner" in the temple). Florentine is cold, calculating, and ruthless.

Oh, and Florentine is fiercely loyal to her team... and Benjamin (inadvertantly) betrays his own...

Yeah, but guess which team ends up saving the kingdom?

Labels: Frayed Knights

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