#the Wikke Archipelago

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The Wikke Archipelago

Geography: The vast majority of the main quest (and most side quests) takes place in and around a chain of islands called the Wikke Archipelago. These consist of three fairly large islands and eight smaller ones around and between the larger islands. Owing to the location of the islands and the undersea ridges and shelves that connect them to each other, it is generally considered safer to travel through the island chain than around it, as the islands block some very strong oceanic currents that can push ships off course if they are heading to (or from) the nearby mainland continent. This has made the various islands convenient trading posts and ports of call for the nearby continent as well as explorers and traders from across the sea.

Nations: The most populous and wealthy nation in the Archipelago is Veck, which takes up most of the large island of the same name and three surrounding smaller islands. Veck is a hereditary monarchy on paper but in practice is ruled by the King's Council, a team of advisors who cut out the royal middleman during the Regency Era about 200 years ago. Councilors are elected by various trade guilds, religious orders, scholarly institutions, and other social and economic power players, in order to try to keep Veck running. The other regional powers are the Hafton Princes, who collectively rule / administrate the islands of Hafton and Tuber, and who ostensibly have control of the rest of the smaller islands; the truth is more complicated. Veck island is also shared by a smaller power, the Barony of Barry, which is effectively a vassal state of Veck in all but name.

Magic: The Archipelago is located on a confluence of different factors, not only geological and oceanic, but astrological and magical as well. Each island has historically developed its own magical traditions and practices, which have shifted and evolved with time as different practitioners met each other, compared notes, or got in fights. It is only recently, with the rise of the Rationalist Movement in the last twenty to thirty years or so, that anyone has seriously made progress in combining all of these disparate traditions into a singular Unified Theory of Magic; this has made widespread magical education possible for the first time, and the social impacts are only now becoming apparent.

Technology: The nations of the Archipelago have a fairly high level of technological sophistication, but the road to that point was long and complicated. While the island chains are possessed of considerable mineral wealth, that wealth does not include sizeable reserves of coal, petroleum, or other so-called fossil fuels. Early abortive attempts at widespread industry ran out of inertia quickly, until merchants on the verge of bankruptcy scrambled for workarounds. Some enterprises combined magic with mechanics and alchemy with chemistry, in the first stumbling steps towards what would later be called Occultech. Others simply harnessed energy directly from the environment in the form of tidal currents, river dams, windmills, solar mirrors, and geothermal springs. This has resulted in some interesting combinations and permutations of technology, even before the spread of Occultech; to name one example, steam powered locomotives travel between major cities and ports, while within them people are as likely to ride electrically motorized velocipedes as they are horses or other animals.

Society and Culture: The people of the Archipelago are an eclectic bunch, with a long and complicated history that binds the islands together into a common meta-identity. In the same way that siblings will torment each other mercilessly, then close ranks and team up to fight an outside interloper who lacks the familial bond, the varying islands have a shared sense of connection that is not extended to new immigrants or tourists from the continent or across the sea. ("You can't trust a man unless his grandpa tried to kill yours," as the old saying goes.) Outside of the region of Veck currently undergoing theocratic upheaval, this also extends to the various religious practices throughout the islands, and it is not only possible but likely to see an Earth Priest, Deacon of the Sacred Flame, and Rationalist walk into a bar in most cities without it being the setup for a joke. (Plenty of such jokes do exist, of course.) Suffrage as a political right is limited to organizations with the numbers to make themselves heard, but legal rights are otherwise not demarcated along arbitrary lines of sex, gender presentation, race, or creed. (It's not clear how much of that is because of the potential for shapechanging magic to make it meaningless, but there's a professor in Morningsburg working on a book about it.)

#game design ideas #game design notes #mystery project #the Wikke Archipelago #unreality #so far

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Skill List Contradictions

Lost In Mistranslation: There is some confusion and ambiguity about what skills are acquired from what sources and what skills are restricted or prohibited based on different factors. These tend to come in three forms; conflicts between Lore Descriptions and Programmed Mechanics, translation errors, and straight up unpatched bugs that happen "behind the scenes" and don't produce any obvious graphic, texture, or animation anomalies. (Translation errors include both localization and in-house development notes.)

Class Restrictions Versus Class Focus: The most common examples of confusion stem from the handling of magic spells as skills and how spellcasters are divided into multiple classes mechanically. Both in and out of the setting, War Wizards are trained for combat magic and Occultists study support magic, while Alchemists specifically work with the Alchemy crafting tree. Different Lore entries alternatively treat each class as if it is locked to a specific category of spells, or treat all magic as interchangeable despite the class names and elemental distinctions. What actually happened was a major revamp of the class and skill system after early playtesting, with some changes making it into the Lore descriptions and others being left out due to lack of time or oversight. (This is why an extremely strong Alchemist who has completed the Great Work and can literally bench press a tank in one cutscene can't pull a single person back onto a catwalk in another cutscene.)

Too Narrow Or Too Broad: As a general rule, anyone can learn any skill or spell, but only somebody who has already been training with the appropriate background can make the most use of it. Hence Soldiers and Survivalists doing more damage with firearms class weapons and the Marksmanship skill, and spellcasters getting the best return-on-energy-points with the spells that align with their specific class and specialization. Unique skills are either prestige class rewards or specifically intended for a character as a part of the story and main plot. To a certain extent this mirrors real world education and training, but is so ambiguously handled and explained that it can lead players into blind allies where they spend too much time and energy either trying to make each member of the Party a jack-of-all-trades or overspecialize in whatever their stated class focus is. (While legitimate ways to play the game, they both require knowledge of a specific playstyle and depend on certain equipment sets for the relevant characters in order to keep from becoming a Challenge Run.)

Totally Meant To Do That: In order to get around the contradictions after the fact, many of the developers and writers adopted the same "unreliable in-universe narrator" modus that the Elder Scrolls developers did for all in-universe books and documents. This is at least partly supported by the in-universe history of multiple competing magical systems that was present in the earliest concept art and design documents for the setting, but still results in confusion when the user interface provides incomplete or inaccurate information. (Though this also leans into the reveal about the origins of the Hero's powers of leadership and persuasion by explaining why other people can't learn them, the writers can't take full credit because it happened by accident.)

#mystery project #game design ideas #game design notes #license to screw up #skills stats and spells #character classes #wikke archipelago #next time: full skill list! #unreality #so far

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Summoning in the Wikke Archipelago

Natural, Unnatural, and Supernatural: Summoning as a magical practice is by and large adjacent to ALL of the different magical systems and traditions developed in the island chain. Like most other magical processes, it deals with energy cycles, but where magical cycles are easy to experience and interact with directly, the processes that allow for summoning are a bit more obscure. Most knowledge about the field was accumulated by two different scholars, the first being Occultist Happ Wordden about two hundred years before Veck's Regency Era, who wrote a rather lengthy tome titled A Catalogue Of Visitations identifying the different entities that could enter the world via summoning. The other was an alchemist and astronomer named Nathanial Harker who wrote The Cacophony Of The Spheres seventy years later, a treatise on astrological cycles vital for the practice of alchemy and the limitations of working within those cycles, which is credited for inspiring the creation of the first Alchemical Orrery. This book included an appendix correlating multiple astral bodies and their orbits with the entities described by Wordden decades before.

Spirits And The Netherworld: According to both Wordden and Harker, summoned entities fit into four broad categories. The first, most readily understood, and easiest to contact, are the spirits of the the departed, because they have an established connection to the world already. Through the careful questioning of these spirits, occultists and necromancers have gained vital insight into the cycles of life, death, and undeath, and have also made some headway in understanding the afterlife... or rather, afterlives, plural. When a person dies, they may awaken to find themselves in a dimly lit, shifting counterpart to the waking world which has variously been called the Netherworld, Underworld, or Afterworld. By definition, these are the spirits easiest to summon because they are already so close to the world of the living, for the same reason that it takes less time and effort to walk down the street to a neighbor than it does to travel across town.

What In Reincarnation?: In other, more difficult cases, spirits appear to reside in some sort of realm beyond the Netherworld, though exactly what the nature of this world is remains unclear. One notable case study documents a spirit who told the summoner, "I stand in a grand library, and can recite to you one sentence of all these books. Which would you choose?" before the ritual connection was lost. The most baffling outcome appears to support the idea of reincarnation, in that the spirit believes that they are alive and well if they can be communicated with at all; in the most notorious case a man who died in a construction accident claims he was lucky to get out of the way of the wall that crushed him. Scholars have debated the meaning and implications of this conversation for decades, with the prevailing theory being that the spirits are in denial about their state, but a vocal minority promotes a more radical idea; that rather than contacting the spirit of the departed in this world, the summoner managed to reach another universe entirely where events turned out differently and the counterpart to the deceased survived whatever killed them in the original universe. Nobody knows how to prove or disprove this theory, including its strongest supporters.

Demons Versus Archons: Spirits tend to be the concern of necromancers specifically, those who deal with life, death, and undeath, while summoners proper are more concerned with (and associated with) two mutually antithetical beings from Beyond. These come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and forms, but follow two broad categories of similarity, those being Demons and Archons. Demons are physically, if not physiologically, associated with fire, sulfur, and high temperatures, and socially or mentally appear fixated on games of chance and skill. Archons, in contrast, physically appear to be made of ice or crystal, and are associated with extreme cold and frost, and are rigidly logical and organized. These extremes between hot and cold, chaos and order, make these two categories of entities mutually antagonistic, but at the same time means they are unlikely to ever meet each other without the intervention of a summoner in the first place; that said there are natural magical cycles that make it easier for one or the other to cross over into the physical world of the islands without help. Their goals and motivations are extremely difficult to discern at the best of times.

The Umbrals: The final and most obscure category of summoned entities are the Umbrals, beings who are either made of or perpetually cloaked in darkness. Of all the otherworldly entities they are the most difficult to contact, but arguably the easiest to work with once contact is established; while getting a Demon to do anything requires a professional gambler's dexterity and head for odds, and working with Archons is best done with the aid of a very good lawyer, Umbrals literally just trade favors. Simply put, do something for them and they will do something for you. Of course, what the Umbral asks might be something beyond the summoner's ability or skill, or take decades to successfully manage, or violate various legal, ethical, and moral codes; there isn't any clear correlation between the difficulty of what the summoner wants and the difficulty of what an Umbral wants in exchange. Significantly, Umbrals have been known to intervene in the world without the aid of summoning rituals during times of great strife, granting great power to someone on the verge of death and allowing them to turn the tide of battle; how and why they choose to interact with one specific person out of all those involved in the conflict, as well as what they get in exchange, is not understood. (Different Umbrals give different answers when questioned, so it may be that there is no overarching ethos at work and each individual Umbral is pursuing its own distinct goals.)

#mystery project #game design notes #game design ideas #wikke archipelago #summoning #magic system #unreality #so far

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Meet The Party: Cass and Jeff

Full Name: Cass Theodoma Class: Occultist (Gravity) Age: 29 Pronouns: Any (Their Gender is Bird, by their own admission) Faction: Confraternity of Eternity Biographical Summary: In another time and place, in a different culture, Cass would have been called a furry, or some bird-themed variant within the furry subculture. In the time and place they were actually born in, their fascination with anthropomorphic animals had a direct connection to the world through the power of magic, specifically the breathing exercises of the Confraternity of Eternity. Cass joined early in their life, going so far as to run away from home, and devoted themselves to the task of full mind-body integration with a fervor that actually kinda freaked out some of the other members of the Confraternity. In exchange for this single minded pursuit of a dream, that dream has become Cass's reality; their cells and tissues reorganize themselves on demand within the limits of their existing size and mass. These demands are typically bird themed, and while Cass can temporarily adopt the full form of various (person-sized) birds, even their default form is gradually adopting avian features, a metamorphosis that they are extremely giddy about. Cass gets entangled with the Hero and the rest of the Party if and when they travel to the enigmatic Island of Tomorrow, as the Confraternity is curious as to what is going on there.

(While Cass has the unique Shift skill that turns them into en enormous murder-bird in combat, their class is actually Occultist with a Gravity specialization. All other shapeshifting, even bird themed, is scripted sequences.)

Full Name: Jeff Pillman Class: Chrononaut (Variant Survivalist) Age: -132 Pronouns: He / Him Faction: Temporal Anomaly Research Center Biographical Summary: A time traveler from over a century in the future, Jeff was sent back to investigate allohistorical readings and artifacts that the Center detected coming from a small island in the Wikke Archipelago. Unfortunately, Jeff was only supposed to be the point man of a twenty person team of scientists, historians, soldiers and time magicians, but the portal destabilized right after he went through. Stranded and alone in history, with the fate of the future on his shoulders, Jeff is under a lot of stress. Teaming up with the Hero and their entourage may or may not violate the Timeline Preservation Directives but Jeff needs help to figure out what the hell is going on with that island, and if he can't stabilize the timeline, the Center won't even exist to enforce those Directives.

As the Chrononaut class is a tweaked version of the Survivalist class, Jeff has a similar prestige class choice; in theme with the events of the DLC, his choice is between Anarchist (bonus damage against police and soldiers) and Zombie Hunter (bonus damage against undead) instead of the Camp Cook crafting tree unlock.

#game design ideas #game design notes #mystery project #meet the party #unreality #so far #next time: The Archipelago!

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Alchemy in the Wikke Archipelago

As Above, So Below: Like all magical practices in the islands, Alchemy is based around the study and use of cycles of energy and activity, specifically cycles that correspond with the passage of astral bodies through the sky. Nobody can argue that the activity of the sun has a defining influence on life, and the passage of the moon marks the tides; so it is also with the other planets even if their influence is more subtle in comparison. Rationalists are still attempting to isolate the exact mechanism by which astral bodies exert their influence on the world and everything in it, usually by reverse engineering the processes by which Elixirs and other Alchemical substances are made; light is obviously part of it, but there is definitely something else in play. (Great Works are accomplished less often, and with greater effort, meaning opportunities to study the involved processes are similarly scarce and difficult.)

Light, Sound, And Substance: Alchemical manuscripts often speak of attributes such as Sulfur, Mercury, and Salt, that do not necessarily correspond to the chemical substances of the same name. This has resulted in more than a few self taught or apprentice alchemists poisoning themselves, and the linguistic confusion alone has driven a wedge been Alchemists and non-magical chemists. Alchemists that have the benefit of an entire Society to maintain continuity of knowledge (and set proper safety standards for apprenticeships) understand that these terms are archaic definitions from proto-alchemy and proto-chemistry that stand for whole classes of properties instead; Salt represents the solidity of physical mass, Mercury stands for physical motion or mechanically measured energy, and Sulfur for heat, light, and electromagnetic energy. Learning how and under what conditions these properties can become interchangeable is the stereotypical pursuit of alchemists, but in practice learning the ins and outs of transmutation is only the first step in a long journey - and it involves so much mathematical calculation that the less devoted apprentices who want to make gold as a get rich quick scheme are filtered out very early.

Water Treatment: The body is between two thirds and three quarters water, depending on what medical authority is being used as a reference, and maintaining this balance is vital for all known vital processes. Water is also a relatively abundant substance in and around the islands (if not always fresh and drinkable) meaning it is and has been cheap and easy to experiment with magically. It has been argued that Alchemy originally started as a practice when water was discovered to be such a potent reservoir for magical energy; others argue that true Alchemy didn't begin until it was merged with Astronomy and the study of the heavens, but however it started, Alchemy boils down (pun intended) to collecting energy in water so that whoever or whatever drinks it gains the benefits (or drawbacks) of said energy. This was done earliest with plant life and herbs, harnessing existing cycles in plant growth throughout the seasons, though purely medical herbalism evolved independently of Alchemy and eventually lead to non-magical pharmacology. Later refinements involved complicated chemical processes done under auspicious astrological events, which were both more effective and more dangerous due to the risk of heavy metal poisoning.

Star Power: The most recent development in Alchemy involved the creation of the Alchemical Orrery, a miniaturized model of the solar system that replaced the planets with a set of mirrors made of their corresponding astrological and alchemical materials; gold, silver, tin, etc. Not every material is easily rendered reflective, and mercury being a liquid must be suspended in a carefully created hollow glass lens in order to maintain the proper shape, but the end result exploits the principle of As Above, So Below by recreating the same astrological influences on a smaller scale. The practical upside is that the Alchemical Society in particular, who could afford to build many such mechanisms and had the people to operate them around the clock, has become quite economically powerful; Elixirs and other substances that once took weeks or months to prepare in small batches can now be cranked out in bulk on a daily basis.

Skilled Trades: While the Orreries have drastically reduced the time scale needed for many things created with alchemy, this does come at a price. Part of that price is reduced efficacy; the mirrors capture less sunlight / moonlight / starlight compared to exposure to the actual Astral bodies they represent, and while the optics have been refined over many years and experiments the mass produced stuff still isn't as potent as the bespoke stuff. The other drawback is that operating an Orrery correctly requires the same knowledge of interacting forces that more traditional alchemy does, with the added burden of being able to make very precise calculations and adjustments to the mirrors and lenses, otherwise the astral influence will be dissipated or diffracted rather than concentrated. So the modern Alchemist has to be an accomplished herbalist, chemist, metallurgist, mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer like their predecessor, while also adding mechanic and precision tool-making machinist to the mix.

The Great Work: For the particularly visionary, stubborn, inspired, and insane Alchemist, there is also the ever-present temptation of the Great Work. This multi-stage process gradually transforms the body of the Alchemist into an idealized state, banishing weakness and illness and leaving only strength and grace and clarity. Like so many things in life, it is easier said than done, as the ritual preparations for each stage are increasingly complex and demanding, and the margin of error for failure shrinks dramatically the closer an Alchemist gets to perfection. (Which makes sense if you think about it.) The process depends on the body being present at certain locations where astral energy is exceptionally potent, during planetary conjunctions that either amplify or diminish a given astral influence. There are many different ways to pursue the Great Work, but importantly, they are mutually exclusive; an alchemist can start with any number of conjunctions or eclipses or alignments but each one is only compatible with certain combinations of events going forward, and each of THOSE available events leads to a smaller number of future events. Trying to use an incompatible time or place to progress the work invariably leaves the Alchemist with too much of one influence, not enough of another, or some combination of mutually antagonist forces in their body with no mitigating third element. None of these outcomes are pleasant or healthy, with the exact degree of each depending on how far the Great Work has progressed.

Quitting While You're Ahead: For those unable or unwilling to attempt the full Great Work, there are various points to stop along the way, known appropriately enough as Lesser Works. These enhance the body, senses, and mind, push back the aging process a fair bit, and also add a fair amount of social standing too. The established theory states that the third step of the Great Work is the last step before the point of no return; beyond that point, the simple passage of the seasons and the planets in their courses can incapacitate or kill an Alchemist as their body still tries to reconcile all of the different forces running around inside it. By way of comparison, missing a conjunction for a stage two ritual progression will leave the Alchemist moody and irritable and in ill health for a few days to a week surrounding it, while missing the stage three ritual can leave an Alchemist bedridden for a day or two, and it only gets worse from there. Nobody knows for sure what happens if somebody misses the final stage ritual, but fragmentary texts (as in, the texts were blown up into fragments) point to widespread destruction of some form or another.

#mystery project #game design ideas #game design notes #alchemy #the great work #unreality #so far