Team NQR Dev Diary -- DoR's Road to [COMPLETE]

Parrhesia · December 20, 2025, 1:34pm

Greetings. My name is Parrhesia, the Drums of War, Dream of Five and Homecoming guy, one half of Team NQR, and I’m here to tell you about what’s… the one after next. (NQR’s slated 2026 release will be something different that I can’t remember if it’s been formally announced yet, but I probably won’t be the one to announce it.)

This doesn’t look like a project thread, and it isn’t. Days of Reckoning – a title I’m still convinced I’ll change at the drop of a hat – isn’t ready for that. It’s down to a princely zero playable chapters, having once been at a peak of about four. And, besides, that would just be a distraction. I’m not ready to offer concrete details and certainly

I used to do a lot more open-letter dev-blogging in the past, throughout DoW’s development and then in the leadup to Do5, but I’ve been more cagey recently. But whenever I make a post just sort of rambling about The Process, people seem interested, and besides, why not use this to keep myself accountable to making constant progress? Why not show people the work that goes on, let people see a project take shape, while also maybe giving some lessons or inspiration or cautionary tales along the way. Maybe I’ll explode some myths, like the one where I have any idea what I’m doing.

So, that in mind, on the 21st of every month until this is publically released – or at the very least, is gameplay complete behind the scenes – I will drag a dead rat to the thread, come what may.

More Theoryposting

Effortposts on Good Units
Effortposts on Good Chapters
Effortposts on Shifting Design
Reflections on Romhacking
How To Excel At FEBuilder Without Being Good At It

Table of Contents

December 2025 – The Pitch
January 2026 – The Opening
February 2026 – Fits and Starts
March 2026 – Call Me Sobek
April 2026 – Reverse Ferret

DECEMBER 2025

How We Got Here (Detour after Detour)

I first started writing about a sequel to Drums of War before DoW itself was even finished. Still living abroad, unemployed, stuck in a failed relationship and counting down the hours before I could book it for the airport, I bolted together a few ideas which included, from memory:

SkillSys custom build!
Two routes that ultimately join up!!
One route has a conventional economy, the other Captures!!!
Capture squad introduced through raiding a caravan!!!
The caravan has the other lord in it!!!

Nothing all that original, and I think it’s pretty clearly influenced by having just played Vision Quest at the time (though not wholly; actually, the 2012 version of Drums of War was meant to have split parties. Good luck with that on FEditor…). Certainly hearing about the convoy split was the kind of thing that made me think, hey, I should make a game around the convoy split. So I tried to make a SkillSys custom build, failed, tried again, succeeded, and then pretty much didn’t touch that version of the ROM ever again.

Anyway, during all this, I start floating as a joke-but-not-wholly-a-joke that maybe I’ll revive Do5, all I’d need would be Astra’s blessing, while I know that I know people who are like one or two degrees of separation away and it’s extremely possible to get. And it happened, so, fuck, now I gotta make Do5 and get that monkey off my back. Then I go do it. But I knew for awhile even before starting that Do5, really, was what I wanted to make. First, anyway.

Okay, now time to go make Drums 2, I have a better idea of what I want to do now, no SkillSys, et cetera, and I get to work. I start casually streaming Chapter 1 in a room, and it’s fine, but someone makes a smart remark about being surprised how dull and generic the gameplay looks and… no shit, Sherlock, it’s a very early WIP Chapter 1. But I guess it sticks with me enough that I remember it a couple of years later. I make Chapters 1-4, and they’re playable, but it doesn’t quite feel right. It doesn’t quite click. The process doesn’t feel wholly aligned, and I don’t know how to make it fit, but I have been thinking a whole lot about another concept that might be a nice breather, a very classic design, riff on old Kaga-era concepts, you know, just try and tell The Fire Emblem Story with my own flair. I start referring to it as ‘fourthhack’ because, yeah, I’m going to go do that. After DoW2. I’m just going to split off the DoW2 ROM now because I don’t want to re-insert all those classes and items and patches. Okay. So that’s something for later– aw, beans, now I’ve gone and created FEA: Homecoming. And again, if I’m honest with myself, I just wanted to make it more than DoW2, a while before I committed to that.

Well… here we are. I don’t have another plan in the pipes. Not a custom campaign, anyway. I mean, hell, DoW was itself the thing I started work on as a ‘breather’ to ease off on the novel trilogy I will always now have written about 1.8 books of. And I want to get back to writing prose, and I don’t, ultimately, have a fifth custom campaign as lead developer in me.

But it’s finally starting to click.

The Pillars

I don’t rip all my ideas apart and start from nothing. I’m an iterator. I have a vision of what FE I want to design, what I want to play, how I want it all to look and feel. But of course, DoW, Do5 and HC have very different identities, and they look, feel and play very differently in practice, despite sharing a lot in common.

Still, DoR is going to wrap up the trilogy. You can actually populate that trilogy however you like – DoX trilogy in terms of story and setting, Do5 → HC → DoR in terms of being full-length NQR ROMhacks, DoW → HC → DoR in terms of me running the show from the very beginning – but either way, it’s not going to be the one to randomly take a hard-left turn and end up as… well… a Capture hack with a route-split, for instance.

There’s a huge amount of the campaign that’s shifted over time. Some things that came out as ‘non-negotiables’ turned out to be pretty damn negotiable. It’s an important writing exercise to know to kill your darlings, and every now and again during the process of plot tuning I’ve taken to just… knocking down an assumption and seeing how the pieces align. Often I then put it back, of course. But it’s important to explore.

Still, one of the pillars that’s been here since the very start is to build the campaign around ransom. DoW wasn’t planned much from the off; it was kind of just winging it, seeing where things landed, doing things that made sense short-term. Worked out in the end, of course, and I think there are things about DoW that work better than things in Do5 or HC. But I do want to really lean into the system this time.

For any unfamiliar, the big flagship system in Drums of War is that at the end of most chapters, one of the bosses who surrendered to your power will give you the opportunity to either press-gang them or ransom / imprison / whatever them for money. It is not controversial to say this was a great system. But I didn’t lean into it as much as I might have. You could recruit everyone and, okay, you were poor, it was more difficult, but it should’ve been a proper challenge run. Similarly, if you’d sold everyone off (which basically nobody did anyway), there were still too many safety nets. Units in Act 1 had a real rationale of ‘this unit will be your MVP next map’ (except for Etienne, because C3 didn’t originally exist, so he was built to be a bulwark in C4), but as your guaranteed squad depth improved, that gave way to a flimsier ‘this is your one representative of such and such a class’ in Act 2. Granted, that’s kind of to be expected, but still.

So part of the design is going into that. The ransom system must be the primary source of recruits AND money. Recruiting has to matter, and so does money. But also, from a story perspective, the ransom system gave Roxelana, a very set character experiencing an otherwise linear sequence of events, a series of choices. What if leaning into the ransom system meant more than mechanical things?

So, DoR’s core identity splintered from ‘the ransom game’ into two pillars. The first, I’ve been thinking on for months; the second is a more recent breakthrough.

Day of Reckoning, the Money Game

So, if ransoming has to matter, money has to matter. If money is to matter, you need to… not be able to just coast by without it, or at least, without it being a challenge run. And if that’s to be the case, irons need to fucking suck ass.

Well, they don’t need to, but it fits, anyway. And it also fits another desire of mine, that enemies be tougher than HC’s were and returning to the 2RKO standard. HC enemies work for HC and are a big part of why HC flows as it does, but I liked how in Do5 you really had to earn those ORKOs with expensive weaponry, and that makes particular sense to return here. You earn the kills with silvers and you earned silvers as a reward for hanging your only potential Outrider. And, hey, if you do manage a kill with Irons, you get to feel frugal!

This also means money choices going beyond ransoms, as well. Particularly ones that are a little more bespoke than just ‘buying stuff’. The execution could have used improvement, but I always did like you could hire some green mercenaries in the end of DoW Act 3 to help out two chapters later.

Something I’m considering is having almost no free drops of weapons, outside of things like legendary weapons or non-ransom units coming with a workable kit (and, of course, not having many non-ransom units to lean into it from the other end). Also, maybe lower durability largely across the board. All about making the player make calls, breaking weapons through use, etc.

Anyway, you get the idea.

Day of Reckoning, the Choices Game

But the other half of ransom is that it puts decisions in the protagonist’s hands. Roxelana is always the same person who always makes the same decisions, except when it comes to whether Tiimo or whatever gets hanged or press-ganged. And, sure, some part of that can be explained by other circumstances outside the story control (Roxelana knows how strong her force is, if she has a use for medium infantry, etc., and the player’s decision represents her taking these circumstances into account) it is a little bit of a breach.

And Dream of Five also becomes relevant here. Not because it had the ransom system – obviously it didn’t – but then there’s the route split, and also the late Arran/Samson recruitment. Rena always makes the same choices except for the big one that dictates events right through to the end of the game. And of course there’s decisions in gameplay that are inevitable. What soldiers get trusted, which are left in reserve? How fast does the army press?

So lean into this. We have a protagonist, our Acting Magistrate Lindauer, who largely does the same things. Largely has the same personality. Has mostly been through the same circumstances. In combat, she’s the same unit. But there’s choices all the time. An attractive trait of Do5 was that there were enough secrets and such that it contributed to the sense that no two playthroughs were the same, and the ransoming led to some of the same texture in DoW. So, leaning into that now… and I’m really starting to run out of steam for this update, so I’ll cut to the chase.

As far as RPG protagonists go, a contender for the gold standard remains DA2’s Hawke. Hawke is basically the same guy with basically the same background; you basically just pick from a fight/fawn/flee set of trauma responses. I’ve often felt it was an example FE Avatars could lean into, if they’re going to exist. Obviously, a custom campaign is going to be more limited, but I still want a sense of ownership over the Magistrate… while still emphasising the sense that the guard-rails are still here. I’ve had a sense, more or less, of who she was going back two years, now, even as she’s flitted between names, none of which fit quite right.

Well, turns out I can lean into that, too.

Right now, I have character creation envisioned as a selection from 12 given names – presented in alphabetical order, to avoid the sense of one ‘canon’ name – which then leads into a few choices. In my head, this is structured kind of like System Shock 2’s opening, or Pentiment’s, or… it’s a familiar recipe. ‘In your first year of education, the Magistrate went [here to do this] or [here to do this]’, get corresponding trait that will give dialogue options in the future. Dialogue options? Yeah, leaning into that, too, though I don’t have many specifics in mind.

But one thing I am leaning towards is relatively frequent town interludes, probably every 3-4 chapters, with a few permanent characters lingering around. Maybe all the permanent characters, but that workload’s probably kind of insane. Okay, now that I’m writing that, absolutely not all permanent characters. To avoid spending years in these places – and to provide another choice! – the Magistrate can only have deep conversations with three of them in a given chapter.

Actual Progress

So that’s a lot of ideas, but what’s actually happened? Okay, look, if I showed you any pictures of the ROM it would look a lot like vanilla FE8 right now. A lot of classes and animations and foundation work is done. Some dialogue is done but it all needs to be replaced because the story’s changed again; still, I think it helped me capture a vibe and will make it easier to refine going forward. Class stats are in. The few portraits that were done a couple years ago are in, but that’s just a handful. Graphical work won’t start in earnest until Lumi rests, then does the next project, then rests again (similarly, I’ve got to finish the writing for the next project, which is roughly half done).

It’s a lot of work, and certainly in terms of writing this is going to be the heaviest workload I’ve ever given myself. But these ideas have given me the momentum to press on.

Next update: plotting, maybe? Because that’s been an uncommonly thorny process, too, given that I’ve known exactly how this story ends (and more or less how it starts) for like two and a half years now. But this is more than long enough already. Far too long. Shorter post next time. Probably.

DoesItEvenMatter · December 20, 2025, 3:07pm

Dayum that was a lot to read and I will reply with what I have understood from what I’ve read. ( Ima try to make it short )

Ok so firstly the idea of your lord making choices matter is a really good one in my opinion.

Secondly, the ransom system shi sounds nice but i haven’t played DoW so I really don’t know much about how that will play out and how much important it can be made .

Note: I’ve played a fair ammount of DO5 not finished but I have finished HC and it’s my fav hack of all time mainly cuz of the story

Thirdly, the idea of making this dev log every month is a really neat one or atleast I think so because of will help you keep track of how your work is progressing and it will help us be informed and know what to look out for and what has been done.

So ya that’s all I hope whenever this hack comes out i enjoy it

Parrhesia · January 20, 2026, 9:23pm

JANUARY 2026

I typed 2025 at first. Fuck

Overall Progress Checklist

All core items in the game (implemented with stats, sprites)
All core classes in the game (implemented with stats, animations, sprites)
Pretty much all of the non-CHAX code implemented
Prologue and C1 mechanically complete (very limited polish, partial writing)
Significant work on C2-3
12x map in complete state (iykyk, bydk)
Very clear outline of first 15 chapters including gameplay concepts; more vague outline of rest of game. Set to be 28-30 chapters
Much of the game’s music inserted

This conversation is the one where I most felt like: yeah, I’m back. Obviously several mugs are placeholders drawn from HC because I don’t want to deal with looking at Sepia Vigarde for half the game again.

So this was very much a month of securing the foundation, meaning there’s a lot to talk about. This time, I was very good about putting down the groundwork before continuing on. In part, this is down to the kind of first (gameplay) chapter I wanted to make. So expect another update where everything kind of interlinks. There’s going to be a lot of spreadsheets and dot-points.

THE OPENING POST

The Gaul, a fool in war, used barbarian tactics. After the first surprise, he was always beaten by the Greeks and Romans.
The Greek, a warrior, but also a politician, had tactics far superior to those of the Gauls and the Asiatics.
The Roman, a politician above all, with whom war was only a means, wanted perfect means. He had no illusions. He took into account human weakness and he discovered the legion.

– Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq, Battle Studies (1870)

The words you open your thread with are important. I don’t care much for the idea of a cold open into, hey, here’s a download link! Put something in the OP. Build some intrigue.

I won’t pretend I didn’t run into du Picq the same way everyone else did, through him being quoted and linked in ACOUP. But I did go through and read his whole, uh, sequence of notes, posthumously published as ‘Battle Studies’, and the above line immediately stood out to me. While the actual grasp of antiquity history is… loose, of course, certainly when it comes to the Greeks (I’ve read Ditch Guy’s PhD thesis, okay?), it clearly and concisely outlines a line of thinking.

And that’s one that, to anyone who has played DoW (though it’s also thematically relevant to Do5 and HC), should be pretty familiar. The Confederation draws inspiration – pretty clearly, I’d imagine – from the Roman Republic. The events of DoW are pretty much a dramatisation of the Social War (which I find it really funny to tell the couple of people who have accused the plotline of being ‘anachronistic’). And while the Confederation is clearly waning, as per… the events of DoW, and their hubris is leading them to defeat, their thought process is still summarised here.

So this sets the audience’s expectation up before they even boot up the ROM. This is going to be a story of a powerful state pursuing its own interests through warfare. Not a matter of honour or glory, no classes called ‘knight’. These factions are going to be bludgeoning each other into submission for the sake of realpolitik. The central conflict is not going to take a spoiler warning; the Confederation wants Rijesca back, and it’s going to try and seize it by force. Only, this time, you’re on the northern side of that border…

Look, I really just like the quote and need a place to stash it for the next couple years before I shadowdrop this thing.

ON CLASSES

I’ve been working on this framework on and off for months. HC’s class list was very limited, which was great in some ways, but felt a little stifling at times. As ever, mapsprites and animations partially dictated what I could do here.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

Welcome back, sword Mercenary, Soldier and Pirate.
Ironclads were initially going to be sword/axe, but with the move to retain HC javelins and the addition of the Gallant class, they needed lances to stand out. I did consider lance/axe… but I’d already implemented the sword sprite. Ultimately, given the weapon rework, I think they can make good use out of the full melee suite.
I considered a lancelocked defensively focused enemy-only T1 armour class, using the animation the armour in Do5 use. Ultimately this was rejected.
Scouts from HC were going to return, but ultimately got squeezed out. They just didn’t really find a niche in this setup.
I tried to avoid having any particularly sticky Spd/Def class, which tend to be the most annoying enemies to fight.
Magic swords pulling from Resistance is going to return, which meant that classes with truly good resistance had to be swordless; mostly, this means Wind Riders. I did throw Duelists a little bone, though, mostly for the sake of enemies.
I wanted to move from Archer → Sniper into Hunter → Marksman, a little less defence on enemies, but there’s also a separate Elite Archer promoted class (using Sniper animations) which does not get crit, allowing Marksmen… to get crit, and allowing the Hunter promotion to not feel like the ugly duckling on promotion, and allowing for more longbow units in general without reusing mapsprites.
Grunts were a great success in HC and return. Looters being enemy-only means they can have 5 move for the purposes of pacing, and will just be item pinatas. Also no player Revenants, Dire Spiders, Clerics or Soulless.
Terrain tiers are more streamlined now, less weirdness like ‘Warriors move a little better in hills and a little worse in forests’ which I’m not convinced anyone remembers anyway.
Above all, I tried to iron out inconsistencies in base vs. growth stuff. Being fully consistent will drive you insane, especially when promoted stats are just unpromoted + promo gains, but… it’s close enough to keep me sane.
Defenses are generally pretty high to give an even feeling, like having FE12 statspreads where armour have better speed than defence is just weird to me. But this is counteracted by largely high damage on weapons.
I want stickier enemies than HC had, but with one-shotting still being viable. We’ll only see through gameplay if the balance is right, but early signs are good.
DoR is going all in on LeoLink animations this time for whatever reason.

I’ll probably talk about this more later, but there’s a lot to get through today.

WEAPONS

This one took a lot of thought, and a lot of scribbling mad notes on paper until I finally found a system that worked for me. As ever, a really useful exercise remains kicking out what you envision as a core pillar. In this case, after a lot of flow-charts, the pillar was ‘an iron sword and an iron axe should have different stats’. With HC’s stronger weapon triangle making a comeback, you’ll still have big swings in practice, and with a larger focus on unique weaponry, I feel as though the different weapon types will feel more different than ever.

Putting together a coherent set of weapons and stats that didn’t have internal consistency motivated me to write down my internal logic as I went, so here are my stream-of-consciousness notes.

in the money game, your E-weapons are terrible, but really cheap. a significant bonus for arcana is having a pretty okay E-weapon that they can use very well even if it lacks punch
if you want consistency between figures, The Issue is that you’re never quite going to find consistency. +3 weight on slims doesn’t matter. +1 might on effectives becomes disproportionate. You can either live with this and the consequences (me previously, particularly in Do5), fudge the numbers (vanilla), or sweep the board.
weapons as basically colours from MTG. every colour can sort of do everything, but not always as well or using the same keywords
swords in part get rogue’s edge because swordmasters get avoid and they can lean into that some more
minor D cycle: a slightly more expensive low-grade weapon that’s still leaning into what the weapon type’s good at. fivefinger can quad and fish for crits, pike hits hard but at destructive weight, cleaver has shaky hit and… i’m buffing it slightly to 16 might and 13 weight
minor B cycles: edge, warding, sweeping all about damage mitigation. swords avoid, warding just blocks damage, axes simply skip it
minor A cycle: maximising killing power in the most on-brand way possible. crits for swords, big might for axes, and what’s more reliable for spears than ignoring defence?
each weapon gets an A weapon that leans into their strengths, as well as a brave weapon that riffs on their usual strength and takes it to extremes (so the sword can quad, the axe has immense damage potential, and the lance is reliable).
ultimately looking at it they all needed a generically good silver equivalent, but these do deviate slightly. bastard/barbed/battle all linked by ‘b’, except that yew bows break that.
‘shortspear’ looks a lot better than ‘shortlance’
ranged weapons all offer something the melee weapons don’t; pure power for lances, accuracy for axes (i mean, look at the respective animations), res hitting for swords.
shortbows hit a little softer than longbows but have much better hit and weight. again, longbow archers probably only fish into shortbows when they have to, and there are no shortbow-only classes. but the options to punch up into cranequin (their A-weapon in the vorpal/lethal/brutal cycle) gives shortbow-users some texture
more hit on shortbows is redundant, so they just pick up the bow D-weapon. again, it makes sense to me.
horn recurve: worst of both worlds as far as ridersbane might and hammer hit goes, and can’t counter fliers. but they’re more versatile as a whole, obviously
knocking composite bow down to 100 hit because 100 being the highest hit is pleasing to me.
the class fantasy of arcana users is that they have all the answers… but you’re only equipping 4-5 of them at a time. an arcana guy with free supply would be cracked and involve a lot of micromanagement. And they do have a relationship of Ice getting more damage and worse weight, Fire getting better damage and worse hit, and Wind getting better weight and worse damage; it’s fine here that that creates better and worse relationships, because they’re still split by range. Ice gets the numbers fudged in its favour because… melee.
dark was originally a bit more tiered but got chopped back down over time, though I’ve left the spaces clear in case I go back on that. again, a focus on weird esoteric shit in general and anti-magic in particular
light isn’t a core type, but there also won’t be the mage Prfs of HC (though a couple of those Prfs are set to come back as one-offs)
lumi would not forgive me if i removed the runesword
Not included here: S-ranks are not going to be a clear set of 7-8. The idea will be more legendary weapons rather than boosting a particular set with similar bonuses (currently you pick up Kreshnikeve, Agovanje and maybe Lacplesis, but probably not the rest of the originals; Judita in particular would kind of be redundant, but tentatively you pick up Joyeuse)
Happily, I’ve managed to put this all in order, avoiding the scuffed convoy ordering of prior campaigns and, indeed, vanilla

INTRODUCING [TACT] LINDAUER

Last post, I said what I would do. Now I’ve started to actually implement. And things basically work as I’d hoped! I’ve mentioned the broad strokes already. You get a choice of twelve names and zero choice of one surname / face / class, and the person Lindauer is is largely set in stone. She’s always intelligent, articulate, measured… with an arrogant streak and an uptight manner. She will always be the woman plucked from obscurity to learn in Covenant, and that will always teach her the same set of lessons, shape her into broadly the same person. This is the person written of in the Stars. It’s just those moments that could have gone either way that it comes down to. Lindauer is always Lindauer… but Elva can be your Elva.

That aside: my favourite genre of RPG protagonist is the kind of person who is not a big power, but holds just enough to stand above the people she generally talks to. Great examples include:

The Imperial Agent from vanilla SWTOR. You’re a cog in the secret police in a fascist state, and most questgivers you talk to are acutely aware you could have them disappeared at any moment… but you’re still beholden to Sith at any moment, and have to dance on eggshells and work around their whims.
- MMO stories are denigrated for good reason but a free trial of SWTOR genuinely gives you seven RPGs ranging from solid enough to genuinely strong, and Jedi Knight is also a class you can play.
The Shaper from Geneforge. You wash up in an island backwater, where you’re regarded with reverence / fear / hate, in large part because you’re assumed to be extremely powerful… when in reality, you’re a shipwrecked apprentice who never received their training, and have to build up your power so you aren’t swallowed whole.
And (sigh) the Fatebinder from (sigh.) Tyranny, a game that fails on all merits beyond ‘having really interesting ideas’. You theoretically hold supreme authority, but the Big Lads of the realm know the law is a farce and are not intimidated. Your superpower is also to gradually learn the law is a farce and to bludgeon people into submission by interpreting it as conveniently for yourself as you can, until you have the power to murder and subjugate your enemies.
- This isn’t even the first time I’ve taken inspiration from Tyranny, whose shitbag rebels who only wanted to overthrow the state to re-establish the old status quo were a direct inspiration for the Exiles.
  - (Guess who make their inglorious return 23 years later?)

So as part of a general philosophy of leaving it all on the table in my final custom campaign as lead designer, this is the sort of figure Lindauer is. Initially merely Acting Magistrate, she holds a huge amount of power and authority in theory, but enforcing it is a different prospect. Her powerful and influential patron is dead, her retinue consists of one guy and some hangers-on, everyone is looking to her to resolve the turmoil… and she has an election to win!

You get a set of three branching choices establishing significant flashpoints during her education. These activate global flags. I haven’t decided what those global flags do yet, but it’s not going to be ‘change your starting stats / gear / party’.

Now, there is one time where technology has let me down… but that’s probably going to save me effort in the long run, and we might have had a moment where necessity is the mother of invention. See, the special route menu thing (which I use for name selection above) has to be reinserted every time you fuck around with it. Okay, so I could presumably use text switching to lead to a different outcome… but that would also need constant reinsertion. Either way, the dialogue trees I’d envisioned just aren’t practical.

That’s fine.

Did any of you play the The Bard’s Tale reboot for the PS2, inexplicably starring Cary Elwes? I don’t know if that game’s actually any good – I suspect not – but it does stick with me for one reason or another. It’s referenced precisely once in DoW or Do5 in an R-text somewhere, I don’t even remember which. And it came to mind for one particular reason. See, as part of the streamlining into an ARPG, you didn’t get dialogue trees either… just, sometimes the game would prompt you to be either Nice or Snarky (it was 2003.), and Cary Elwes would raspily take it from there.

Introducing the Iron Fist // Velvet Glove system.

Lindauer is a theoretically powerful woman. She wields the Senate’s authority, she speaks with the Senate’s voice, she is First Among Equals in most interactions with her fellow citizens. Among her powers is… discretion. Sometimes, actually, it is best not to act as the distant unfeeling face of the Confederation.

Well, let’s see how simply allowing your minion to introduce you and giving these vigilantes a paper chit works out.

Okay, so Ulrike doesn’t take kindly to the high-handed approach, but she’s stuck with you all the same. There’s no mechanical difference here… though she might bring it up flintily down the line. Other times, though, bulldozing someone by wielding your rank as a sledgehammer is going to be more productive than trying to reason with them. Some people aren’t worth compromising with. Some people need you to pick your battles; it’s probably not going to be productive to tell the Exiles their Gods are fake and their ways of life are backward and savage, not when you’re looking to recruit their cavalry for the Cause (and their knowledge of mountain passes), but you do need to hold firm when they question your authority. And I’ve just now realised I forgot to extend Asger’s portrait…

Obviously the ultimate form of this is going to be The Ransom System. Execute or press-gang the deserter? And so on. Unlike DoW, this system does not come at you from the word ‘go’. Instead, it’s a slightly slower buildup before taking over as a core mechanic in the early midgame, or maybe a little earlier. Right now, it’s looking like Chapter 7. In the current blueprint, you get all your tier 1 units and a couple of others, before leaving your power base, entering Rijesca and having to live off the land, where almost all of your money will come from the meat market and pretty much all your recruits, too.

CHAPTER 1: The second chapter in the ROM

So C1 is playable from tip to tail. Let’s talk about that.

DoR, as you’ve seen, has a pretty heavily overhauled weapon system. There’s some things to get used to, and throwing the player directly into the deep end wouldn’t be fully appropriate. At the same time, it’s a custom campaign. You’re supposed to have played vanilla GBAFE already. And DoW, and statistically if you’ve played DoW you’ve probably played Do5. Hey, if you haven’t played Do5, go play Do5. If you haven’t played DoW, go play DoW. Either way, play HC.

Cerulean Crescent opens with a neat little tutorial these days showing your starting forces doing what they’re supposed to be doing, which is cute, but I don’t need to go to those extremes for these kinds of statblocks. I was inspired by Absolution, which has a first chapter where you’re basically guided into 100% reliable matchups and failing to hit them was 100% going to fuck you up. But… you have four guys, funnelled into a split of two guys per flank in a pretty short map. Finding the ‘correct’ solution is not exactly arduous.

Wow it’s just like I deliberately made this matchup happen woooow

So I wanted a Chapter 1 that was sort of like that. Four guys against four guys in a fairly tidy matchup, setting up for an enemy phase where an enemy archer bounces off your ironclad and a myrmidon dies. Turn 2 is also pretty tight, and then on Turn 3, another squad of six guys rocks up, each with A Guy To Kill of their own. Then you converge and roll through the rest of the map. So, some amount of variables (through ‘the rest of the map’), but at the same time there’s also other, less optimal ways to force through a victory, and your guys aren’t about to be one-rounded for the most part, so you can weather a misplay. I wanted to make sure a loss of tempo wasn’t fatal, which was an issue with the DoW prologue.

It also sends a particular message. Hey, you can get one-rounds using your decent weapons. If you try and beat this map cheaping out with Crude weapons, you’ll eat shit and die! Use your tools!

Chapter 2, then, will take off the handrails and just let you push on (like C1 in DoW or HC), assuming you have a handle on things. You know Ulrike hard-counters enemy mages; you know Triss dices up low-defence units on player phase; you know you have a dog. We’ll know more about it all plays when I, uh… get there.

Really, I knew what snippet would create the most hype.

Next time: The Cast, Probably???

paprikamayo · January 20, 2026, 9:51pm

i’d like to comment on something specific but honestly im just overall really hyped… cant wait for more info!

Some-day · January 21, 2026, 2:55pm

It is a pleasure to read such a thread after a long discussion with my supervisor.

And now I find, even water sleeps,but Parr & Lumi know no rest.

Having viewed these tables, I’m wondering that whether the Arcana user will perform better this time…? I have some guesses, but still too little known. Looking forward to next month’s post…

(Btw, no rest is a joke. Rest is necessary.)

cb1052 · January 21, 2026, 9:55pm

Damn that means I can’t have an even more dogshit thief than Pavel.. How will thief bros ever recover from this

squidaccus · January 23, 2026, 6:07pm

Of course you can! Just use Ramond!

MissVanity · February 11, 2026, 4:08pm

This thread is inspiring me to play DoW again. Just to get a touch-up on the story

Parrhesia · February 20, 2026, 6:51pm

FEBRUARY 2026 – Fits and Starts

Overall Progress Checklist

C3 and C4 theoretically playable, but not tested
Much of the cast plotted out
Figured out how to set up base chapters, and set up 2x
Got the ball rolling for dialogue in earnest, including in C7 for some reason
Finally settled on antagonist’s name

If I’m honest, not quite as much as I was hoping for, but work came back and I’m still figuring out my rhythms. When I start being able to poke at it again after work, then that’s where the magic will happen.

REGROUPING

It’s nice to think of a reality where I just have to knock out two chapters a month for 18 months, spend a little more time tweaking and get to release by FEE3 2027. Unfortunately, progress is never so linear as that. I haven’t quite made the progress I’d have hoped for in the ROM itself, but I have had a lot of ideas for stuff that will go into it, and the cast is starting to stabilise. I’ve also hit a rich seam when it comes to the writing itself.

There’s also other factors. For one, work has started up again, and I’ve been struggling to get into a groove with that and spending my free time productively. My free time was also hit like a truck by a The Pitt marathon that basically spiked a weekend. Also, looking around a very incomplete, very clearly WIP ROM just… is not nearly as fun or satisfying as one that’s properly taken form. DoR hasn’t yet hit its stride. I’m anticipating that when I have chapters complete through to C6 it’s going to be smoother sailing, particularly as the first Act has been by a long distance the hardest to plan and undergone by far the most rewriting.

It’s also a little bit haunted and some weird shit has happened, but HC had the same phase and got through it, so. You know, it’s probably fine.

RESHUFFLING (or: why the fuck is Lindauer doubling this myrmidon?)

There was a flaw in my plan.

I had wanted to compress and deflate stats a little, but a range of 0-7 in most stats wasn’t giving the right amount of ranges for the damage numbers and player stats being thrown around. After a playtest of the first couple of chapters, it was clear that they were pretty much functional, but enemy stats needed to be pushed further. Introduction of the weapon types also needed to be slowed down, I think. In the earlygame, the weapon being held was just overshadowing the actual class holding it. There is a fair chance that almost all weapons wind up getting cut down by 2-3 might and condensed a little; the numbers are just somewhat unwieldy, particularly for earlygame.

Still, the first step was to stretch out the range of stats up to 10 (or 11 power), reestablishing some immediate difference in classes.

It was a blow, but I’m not too shaken up by it. These numbers came from ripping things up from the ground, and it’s natural that this will need some recalibration. I believe in the overall system, and there’s no reality where it’s truly untenable. It’s just going to take time and testing to get them in a place that makes me happy.

THE ROGUE’S GALLERY

DoR’s approach to its cast is somewhere between DoW and Do5. From DoW, I want to give the sense of a tight-knit early group, one that will generally retreat on death and can be relied upon to chip in with lines here and there; I think that was only sometimes effective in DoW, but it also does really help to have someone you can call on to be The Voice of the Army (most obvious example being Kolbane in Do5) where needed. It being a more tight-knit group of retreaters here, instead of just Everyone, will balance things a lot better in theory.

What I really want from a character perspective is to have every playable character really represent some section of …

uh…

… Navara.

Your Chapter 1 complement comes in two groups. First-up are the more respectable folks. Lindauer herself, her lictor Asger – bodyguard, mentor, potential love interest, guy I’m trying not to just give Garath’s voice – the rider Fyodor Harkov, of Voorstenet yeomanry, and wandering swordswoman Triss Coleman, who is here looking for someone. The second group of arrivals comprise of hardscrabble refugees from the ruined town of Isling, counting among them the reluctant leader (and potential love interest) Ulrike, fellow temple ward Tascha, the itinerant sin eater Fomirach, asylum-seeking noblewoman Jadzia, anxious nerd Clovis and a large dog. Those people, by and large, have a connection to Isling’s temple, and will be able to elaborate on what role religion and faith still play in the Confederation.

(This was originally going to be a more major theme, and for a long time in development Lindauer actually was a priestess, but ultimately I couldn’t find an elegant transition between circumstances that would have allowed the story to go where I wanted it to. So she’s an official, now.)

But they’ve all got to be a little more than just statblocks, and each has some kind of sidestory or very concrete connection to the world that will be shown through the sidestory maps, not just supports. Triss is looking for someone in Barossia, and it’s not a spoiler to say that person will be found. Ulrike was thrust into a position of leadership because she kept a cool head in the crisis, but is deeply uncomfortable with that and relieved to have Lindauer to foist it on. Other times, it’s more about who they are and who they represent. Fomirach is your only Rhiannite party member for a long stretch, and is here through disillusionment with his own people and his former life. Jadzia is a Rijescan in exile from the events there, and offers a window into what’s going on there that is separate from the propaganda you’re usually fed, along with her own biases. Clovis can speak for the Confederation’s wealthy citizens, Fyodor for its former nobility, while Asger is a voice rather closer to the ground. In later chapters, as the boss recruit game picks up and – it is not a spoiler to say – you enter Rijesca, you’ll get to see more Opinions, more of the kinds of people there. Szalai doesn’t really have an axe to grind with the Confederation, he just really fucking hates the rebels. Kulesza (third love interest!) is forever climbing a greasy pole. Prii is a harpy. And so on.

While there won’t be full-on relationship bars, repeatedly mistreating a character will be remembered, while some might only open up if talked to consistently. Just looking for small ways to reaffirm that a given playthrough is uniquely yours.

Future cast members will include the likes of Margrethe ‘Rethe’ Flick, by a distance the most of a true believer in the Cause that you have, a patriot in the way only a second-generation immigrant can be (speaking as one myself), the semi-repentant deserter, Lennart, another couple of descendants of DoW cast members (including one already established), and the now-obligatory skeleton.

(A moment of silence for Urban, Ansehelm, Gisel, ‘Big’ Magda and Tamiska, who did not make the transition from the last version of DoW2 even though I was quite fond of all of their lines. Better luck in the next life.)

CAST DESIGN: I Don’t Think He Knows About Second Cast Section, Pip

So that’s who they are as people. Here’s who they are as statblocks.

The re-shuffled character stats have allowed for enough difference between stats to allow for clear differentiation in statlines; Asger can take a lot more hits than anyone else, Triss can double everyone in the universe, Fyodor is pretty decent at everything, et cetera. Nothing too exceptional here, I’d say these units more or less resemble those in prior NQR campaigns.

Don’t get too excited. With the new focus on the economy, it’s going to be important to keep this lot shackled, so that the prospect of a new unit really is exciting, and that squads change up as the campaign moves on. See, there’s a bind in feedback. When you have a midgame prepromote show up, sometimes people will complain if this unit is competitive with the units you already have, as though that made their training pointless. But if you have a new prepromote show up with a great design and cool characterisation, it’s the worst feeling in the world when actually using them would basically be a strict downgrade over the troops you already have. Sometimes you thread the needle really well, and hear both kinds of complaints about the same unit (hi, Corentin).

Anyway, new units need to be worth the money, and the consolation for anyone who wants to stick with the old crew no matter what is that, hey, they get to pocket the cash. So while these units need to do a job in Act 1 and remain viable in endgame, I’m a little more free to hobble their growths to some extent. We’ll see how it pans out.

And of course, C1 exists in large part to showcase their talents, everyone able to jump on someone’s head going in. There’s still no need for SkillSys, but I anticipate more fun C-enabled effects on weapons (Bloodmoon Rise might well return…)

Miscellanea:

Concoctions are back. I tried a Miracle Tonic only setup but it was a little forced, and rough with just one healer (without Physic) for the first few chapters. Right now instead of two Miracle Tonics it’s probably one Miracle Tonic and however many Concoctions… which feeds into the economy system, anyway. There’ll be fewer freebies. In Do5, I tended to give pretty much every new arrival a healing item, but here, well, most of your recruits after a certain point are from ransom anyway.
I’m trying to ensure a gender balance on most classes, mostly for the sake of having different mapsprites and benefiting from extra visibility. Wanting most two-tiered classes to have an unpromoted representative in the cast helped flesh out the early cast. Like, hey, that gives 15 characters, plus lord and a couple of prepromotes and special cases, and that suddenly looks pretty healthy for a unit count by C7 Preps, meaning later units can then have more of a specialist vibe. Mix of weirder classes and more generally solid units.
I liked how the compromise experience formula worked out in Homecoming, so that’s coming back.

I PROBABLY DON’T NEED TO HAVE ANOTHER SECTION BUT IT FEELS A LITTLE BARREN WITHOUT IT, MAYBE THIS IS NOT THE MOST FUTURE-PROOFED CONCEPT AND I SHOULD JUST ATTEMPT TO SHIP THESE UPDATES WITH WHAT I’VE GOT NO MATTER WHAT

A brief note on faction colours, since there’s had to be a minor shuffle here.

DoW’s weren’t really future-proofed, the casualty of allegiance palette freedom only being something I found awhile in; it wasn’t yet a patch, and was actually I think the first time I went into the .txt file of something to EA insert. I knew changing the main three palettes was possible – Christ, if GhebFE could do it, of all things… – but it took me awhile to settle, and when Act 2 was complete (albeit without C3 or C10) the player colour was actually purple, though this was more to shake things up than to actually reflect, for instance, Roxelana.

When it emerged, the big central idea, really, was to take inspiration from Starcraft 1’s first campaign. You start out in blue, representing the provincial militia of some backwater planet, allied with and ultimately abandoned by the (white… as player colour) Confederacy; along the way you ally with rebels, and your faction colour changes to red to reflect this, turning on the Confederacy as well as an assortment of zerg broods (usually favouring orange). Those rebels ultimately turn on you, though, and you revert to blue to fight their red terrans and kick the shit out of them in the final mission, the visuals supporting the story in a small way.

The parallels are unsubtle.

(Related note: playing around with faction colours is so routine and expected in RTS campaigns (let alone multiplayer!) that it’s startling to run into conservatism with the idea these days. Original C&C? White/red Nod, yellow GDI. AoE2? The campaigns have at this point seen the player in seven of the eight team colours (Grey tends to be the least favourite and is often given to ‘neutral’ factions, but even then it’s found some life as the signature Teutonic Order colour). WC2 was blue or white as humans and black or red as Orcs against enemies that ran the full gamut, with each colour explicitly assigned to a particular nation or clan. WC3 cycled through blue, purple and red, SC2’s Zerg campaign switched you from orange to purple at the midway point, the Total Wars let you play as any colour under the sun, Dawn of War has a modular painting system… all of these in games where you’re expected to read the situation on the fly and output 100+ APM, not with the comfort of a turn-based situation, and generally not with team colours that show up anywhere close to as clearly as GBAFE’s. Now, colourblind accessibility is a very real concern, and obviously the colours – whatever they are – need to be distinct from each other. It’s the sort of thing that demands a separate patch, and applying Contro’s Mirrored Enemy Sprites patch will do more for readability than fiddling around with values.)

WC2 is the gold standard. Though note the absence of a true green, which would blend in with the vibrant DOS-era grasses (similarly, it’s difficult (though not impossible!) to make yellow work with GBAFE and its reliance on bright yellow for trim). Every colour was associated explicitly with a nation or clan, and the player colour would change at one stage in each of the vanilla campaigns to reflect a new front. And to at least some extent, these associations remain in WoW today!

The Exiles, then, had to be red to have that visual of the player’s allies turning red, playing on those traditional GBAFE associations (I did draw a line at the player’s faction colour changing mid-campaign). The Confed are shown as blue in battlesprites and portraits – often literally using the generic player palettes, at least for unpromoted Guardsmen – but that could never translate to the mapsprites, because the Company were already holding down teal. Purple wound up in the slot of the generic enemy colour – teal vs. purple popped nicely as a core match-up – while also being the Aulestri colour, with them being your enemies in the bulk of Act 1. Generic mercenaries were grey and brown – these led to some bland-ass palettes, motivating a shift to orange in HC onwards – and the Ecorcheurs, of course, were a distinct orange. Rhiannon were never fought as a primary adversary, so were free to be green. Clear battlesprites and portraits, but you could tell that the mapsprite integration was an afterthought.

These ideas were refined across Do5 and HC. Do5 had green as the Aukeman loyalist colour – influenced in part by Wyclif’s existing design and the generic green soldiers reflecting them in the 2012 version, but also by the visual of fighting against green units early on, again playing on the GBAFE associations. Then the different sides of the route split just mapped nicely and naturally onto purple and orange, and naturally set the scene for the Wardens to take over in Act 3 (with cyan/red firmly established as their colours from 2012) and Visharans taking a very classically imposing scheme in black/red for Act 4. Blue as Player 1 fit the classic vibe, was a secondary colour to the main Aukeman faction anyway, and was the main colour in Rena’s outfits. And given that you at some point faced greens and needed allies against those greens, that required white as an ally colour (when those allies weren’t loyalist Aukemans).

So moving onto Homecoming, where the Velians needed a classic black and red colour association – and I wanted black for the player and red for other Velians. Needed cool colours for Palnata but wanted to stay away from blue, so that led naturally to purple (with blue as a secondary colour on battlesprites and portraits). There was an issue for awhile where the black clashed with the purple, but Lumi helped out with her, uh, ‘actual knowledge of colour theory’ and tinted it slightly green. Sjoersund, the third and final nation even mentioned, get the third faction colour of green, setting them a little apart from the others. And that sets up generic ally white (which almost never appears anyway) and generic enemy orange.

And here was me worrying I wouldn’t have anything to talk about.

Anyway, for DoR, Lindauer’s portrait came back green, and I wanted green to be a nice, distinct player faction colour, helping the player stand apart. Aaaand green’s my favourite colour, and DoR’s the ‘get everything completely Right for me, leave it all on the table’ campaign, so it just made sense; besides, then I could continue to explore white as an ally colour, in its blue-tinted form (which I think of as ‘Lordaeron’ for how they conveyed white in WC3 without being able to go fully white, as they needed it for trim; I don’t feel WC3’s team colours are very good on the whole, but Lordaeron makes more sense to me as an adult). Without wanting to carry on blue, the Confederation kiiiind of just have to shift into purple at this point (the Aulestri legions won’t feature, freeing the space), coasting on their association as an enemy colour in DoW; this leaves room for orange to return as a generic enemy colour (hey, there’s the Ecorcheur associations here too, though the company is long dead and buried), but I want a deeper, redder shade this time, which is fine so long as it never coexists on the same chapter as red. Red winds up being the thorniest one; it has a soft association as the Rijescan national colour, by way of the Exiles. It can link the Exiles and the Rijescan armies in terms of mapsprite, but with different patterns in portraits and battlesprites; Exiles primary white and secondary red, Rijescans primary red and secondary teal (playing off the player colour of the Company), and that I think leaves the Exiles well-placed to be white while Rijesca is red when the factions are both on the same map. Would it shape up differently if I didn’t have DoW’s somewhat messy associations to build off? Yes. But this gives a sense of continuity that’s worthwhile.

That’s all. Watch Sinners.

Next time: base chapters, probably? And, with luck, Act 1 will truly take shape…

luminescentblade · February 23, 2026, 7:25pm

Feb 2026 BONUS ENTRY

I’m supposed to be making custom tilesets for this other project we’re doing, but that’s somewhat intimidating, so I’m doing…not that. I really need to get to that though. This week.

the other day in a discussion about highly above curve prepromotes in general among one of our friend groups I noticed that we have an overstatted sword woman that joins mid-lategame in all of our [complete] works, with Estrelle, Thyra, and Dryche. So I started drawing them – it does help that even Estrelle is my portrait, where there’s less of those in DoW than the other 2 – anyway here’s a work in progress. I’ll post the finished one to my art thread later, probably.

Now, I didn’t hijack Parr’s thread just to post half-painted art of our already complete games. So I brought up that we kinda have this Estrelle archetype going now we gotta make it a thing and he tells me that he does have a character in mind already.

Going back our previous games again, for design contexts–DoW was built on like 18-20 of my 2012 portraits for something that was made, well, back in 2012, There was a lot of community contributions, also, which is super cool, and I also wasn’t actively involved in DoW dev, but it does mean that there’s less visual cohesion than there is in Do5 and HC. Do5 was built on a set of 2012-2013 era portraits, but because I’ve taken over as art dictator, I edited a lot of the portraits – of which i was involved with in the first place anyway – both for quality touchups and to modify the outfits to fit my visions of each country’s visuals, which has been a, heh, dream of mine since the 2010s also but we were too young and strapped for time then to really realize. Do5 promo designs go harder into the national dress aspects, as I’ve detailed in an effortpost a year ago, and while I’m happy with how Do5 visual came out the national cohesion aspect is something that I had to wrangle and balance with keeping the vibe of many 2013 era assets. HC I was able to do from scratch, but given HC’s premise, I didn’t actually use my main design skill (taking historical inspiration and putting my spins and liberties on them and mash up a few diff time periods as needed) much outside of the Sjoersundrs and a bit of Flame Temple, as most of HC’s visuals draw from FE3-5 official art and tcgs. It’s the right choice for the project and I had fun taking on the challenge, but it was definitely very different than how I normally do character and costume design.

So DoR aims to do what I wanted to in Do5, but I can build this from the ground up. Our protag is from Barossia of the Confederation countries, and Parr mentioned HRE and Landsknecht as his visions for Barossian looks, so I’ve been working off historical paintings and it’s good to be in my element again.

You ask, Lumi, what does this have to do with overstatted sword women that join mid-lategame? Well, I do want to make each of them feel different, so while I was doing the sketch I was like, wait, Estrelle and Thyra both have ponytails. Now, they look totally different, but that did make me want to take a diff direction with regards to hair, and all 3 currently existing are long-haired. Parr also told me that she’s Barossian, like our protag, and gave me a few snippets about her vibe

well, I can work with this, and certainly is distinct enough from the other 3 I’ve designed. So I started doing some research and landed on referencing Lucas Cranach’s “Judith with the Head of Holofernes” painting, adapted the long dress into a fwooshy coat for better mobility, and added in a bit of swashbuckler vibe.

So the end result is this. Meet Nectar.

and then I sent this to parr and he sent me this

So, while this is obviously a joke, it did get me thinking. Lindauer’s portrait was made before we started work on HC and her character was very different, then. She was a priestess in that iteration, and she’s a magistrate now. We can still repurpose the design for a different character, and in fact Parr has a character already in mind with a good fit, so the portrait is not going to waste. This gives me room to design Lindauer to fit her current personality and occupation more.

I think the coat/sleeves thing I’m actually yoinking off Tudor menswear (probably not as, wide, as Henry VIII’s though) because it really evokes stateliness. And while Tudor England is not within the Barossia’s loose guideline of Looks, it is what I decided to do for Bretwald, another country in the Confederation. Parr told me that Bretwald’s vibes are very English-english, and I used Victorian (+ Lolita/Ouji JP subculture) already on Aukema, so Tudor being another period I’m decently familiar with but is very distinct visually works well in this regard. Being both Confederation countries, there’d likely be some degree of fashion-co-influence also. In addition to that, with Holstejn and Bretwald being the more ‘inner-confederation’ countries, adopting some manner of their dress can help to get ahead in politics, which fits Magistrate Lindauer’s persona.

(Pictured: loose beta draft of world map, DoW/R-land edition)

Anyway
new Lindauer design, based off Portrait of Susanna Stefan (Nicholas de Neufchatel), and with a modifcation on the Tudor coat. I ended up with pants because I liked the silhouette more in the end and female mages dont often wear pants so it’s a fun switch up. I picked a design with a more restrained hat so I can bling shit up more on the promo design. Good to leave my self some design space to go up

(also had to preplan her portrait palette here to make sure i can fit all the colors i want)

Some-day · February 24, 2026, 1:28pm

A bonus update! Praise Lumi… & Parr!

Welcome, NQR’s first ~~blond sword~~purple-haired mage lord. I still remember hats that some units in HC got when they were promoted. Lasse and Coretta’s seem to belong to the same series.

To be honest, if Nectar’s portrait were given to Lindauer, combined with previous diaries, I would probably imagine the story as follows: Lindauer became the magistrate in a conflict zone because she felt there was a loophole to exploit, but later, she found herself caught up in an unexpected struggle…

The new world map! It’s always good to see more information about this world.

(Unfortunately, it occurred to me that the first time I played Dow, I thought there was a big river south of Rijesca… and… for a long time I thought, Oceania was to the southwest of Africa, sort of like Aulestra versus Rijesca in this picture… Sorry Parr…)

Anyway, it’s great to see new dev diary every month. I’ve always loved this type of post. In fact, I have watched DoW’s video for FEE3 2022 several times, but I really didn’t understand most of the content. Obviously, my listening is poor either…

ShirleyVaga · February 24, 2026, 3:43pm

I have to say i’m well surprised how you made purple hair /lips work so well with the mostly green outfit.

luminescentblade · February 24, 2026, 8:14pm

thanks!
in my experience most categories of colors can work with most other categories of colors but the subtleties are in

exact shade
proportions
coolshifting/warmshifting

so I ended up with lavender here bc

I really did want to avoid red this time, the jokes are a little overdone at this point, so that cuts out pink/red/orange which is actually a pretty big L because complementaries are one of the easiest ways to make shit look good
Blonde is out bc Nectar took that palette config already and I like what I came up for Nectar so I’m not changing it
I wanted black secondary color because emerald green + black as the main palette gives a weighty, authoritative feel, so brown on top of that would be kinda drab

so that leaves not a lot of options. another green or blue hair would be not enough contrast in this case, purple is good bc there’s still some red in purple from a color mixing pov but it’s clearly not going to be called red, so then it’s just dialing the exact shade that’d look harmonious and provide a pop of visual interest with the largely dark baselines.

Parrhesia · February 25, 2026, 4:02am

Glad you’re enjoying!

To be fair to you WRT the DoW 2022 video, my audio mixing on that was terrible. I’m kind of surprised it was accepted, in hindsight.

Parrhesia · March 20, 2026, 8:17pm

MARCH 2026 – CALL ME GOD OF CROCODILES BECAUSE WE ARE SO BEK

If I was making this a Homecoming retrospective, I could headline it ‘March of the Black Queen’.

Overall Progress Checklist

Chapters 3, 4, 5 played through to completion
Chapter 6 ready for playtesting, theoretically ‘complete’
Vast majority of Act 1 writing complete, some in Act 2
Some rebalancing of equipment and class stats
Stat R-descs, shop chatter, various other minor details complete
Spelling of ‘armoury’ corrected in all menus

With that thought out of the way, you can probably infer this was a good month for The ROM. It’s better than you think, because I’ve started writing this on the 5th. What made the difference is simple: we hit The Moment, the one I was looking for in February’s updated that I was sure would come.

See, in February, it hadn’t really clicked yet, and the ROM was also acting weird… well, there wasn’t none of that this time, either. Did you know, if you try and force more than 50 traps into a map, it puts garbage data in your save’s convoy? But necessity breeds invention, and actually, I was forced to find a more graceful implementation for my map gimmick, one that actually works a lot better anyway.

That gimmick belonged to Chapter 3, and completing that today (at time of writing: again, the 5th) is when things really started to click for me. Sure, I had to redo the first turn because I forgot to clear the cutscene enemies outside (which included siege); sure, I had to fling overloaded enemies to the far reaches of the map; sure, I played the whole time with the enemy in white because I forgot to turn off a flag; sure, I needed to manually increase a generic enemy’s stats so he could use his siege tome, which I ultimately took off him anyway. That one scuffed run really clicked. I’m not going to pretend it was the peak of gaming or whatever, but the numbers felt right. The interactions worked nicely. The gimmick was fun, as soon as I made it start a turn later.

This is how every myrmidon vs. shaman interaction should go. Don’t worry, HC Hit Thresholds are returning, I just haven’t had Lumi implement them yet. Also FUCK I need to change one of these mapsprites. I’ll let you decide which I mean!

Even now, looking at it and thinking of it, I want to keep playing. Which means we’re officially past the ‘pulling teeth’ part of the process. Act 1’s writing is close to the finish line at time of writing (and will be closer still at time of posting), and overall there’s just far more of a sense of things taking shape. And I like the shape it’s taking!

Shifting Hollace

There’s been further changes in the Fiddling With Things category.

I’m finding myself gradually nerfing lethality and buffing durability. I still want one-shots to be plausible, but I found myself thinking in testing that failing to ORKO was disappointing… which is not what I’m looking for. Getting back the 2RKO Standard was a key objective and so far not really one that’s materialised.

I’m also returning to Infantry Swap. That hadn’t originally been the plan. In DoR, you’re stuck with a convoy unit, and the idea was that your extra mobility was just, your one Reposition from that convoy unit. But I’m hoping that Repo+Canto still makes that useful, while ensuring that a unit that can’t attack anything or get into defensive posture for EP can still contribute outside of item trades.

Between all these shifts, I think it’s going to necessitate another redesign of the prologue. Less tight and telegraphed by necessity, because the numbers just aren’t where they need to be for that anymore. That is, without finagling enemy stats in the prologue to be appropriately oneshottable… which I don’t want to do! Realistically, you’re going to look to a new enemy class whenever it first pops up and then imagine that those stats are going to be built on going forward, leaving aside how artificial it would feel to have Mysteriously Fragile / Slow Enemy Unit turning up at convenient places. But I’m really tired of toying with and poking at Chapter 1, so that’s a Later Problem.

Perfectly ordinary attack forecasts. Not even a little cursed.

How are you playtesting this, Parrhesia? I am so glad you asked. Just sort of gunning through. Same lightly scuffed save file has zoomed its way through Act 1. It’s not exactly future-proofed, given that there’s a few minor unimportant things like, for instance, ‘the experience formula’ aren’t yet implemented. Whatever. What’s most important for now is checking that the chapters function properly and that they’re 80, 90% where they need to be. Besides, what good would it have done to have polished Chapter 2 to a razor sheen when I then decided two maps later that every class needs +2 HP? What about when such and such a unit winds up needing a buff down the track? It’s an art, at this point, not a science.

Please, call me [Tact]. Frau Lindauer was my mother

So now that we’ve hammered down our main character’s design (see Lumi’s post above), we’re starting to really pin down what our main character, like… is.

This is not going to surprise anyone, but the protagonist’s personality is a real driver of the feeling of each campaign, and I don’t think I’m flattering myself to suggest that the three so far have been very different personalities.

Roxelana’s sins were sloth and arrogance, which combined to get her in over her head more than once. But she was a stalwart soldier who felt a real duty to her men and did right by them as best she could, an intelligent woman who had put it all together in her head and was in the right place at the right time to act. The worst thing she ever did was – mitigated by circumstance – try to attack and kill an innocent.
Though starting in a similar position on paper, Rena is far younger (21 instead of 33), and far more of a ruthless schemer. She was capable of far greater deceit than Roxelana – honest to a fault, and to her cost – could ever manage, and her worst act was to perpetuate a lie (though this unravelled her in time). She was able to see the big picture more.
Bronwyn was trusting, to a fault. Being sheltered from the world meant she was able to see the world in shades of grey rather than giving into nationalism (and becoming anyone’s pawn), but she also put faith in people who didn’t deserve it, to her repeated cost. But trust is itself a good thing, and her open nature was also what allowed her to break the cycle and triumph.

I could go on, and I’m tempted to, but you take my point. They were tailored to drive the story I wanted to tell in each case (and the way they developed influenced changes made later in each story, as I got a better sense of who they were). Lindauer’s destination has always been known; key points have always been known. But now I’m getting a stronger sense for who she is.

I actually debated whether or not this was TOO unkind an option to give Lindauer (the context isn’t particularly flattering), but then decided it was funny. We’re still largely keeping to Iron/Velvet, but incorporating a little more flexibility in meaningful moments (and this moment which doesn’t actually change anything).

It’s a curious situation for Lindauer specifically because the ideas for What Would Happen In The Sequel, initially, didn’t really revolve around her. The story hook from my perspective is that I wanted to push the setting to breaking point, after the barely stable position attained post-DoW. In particular, DoR, thematically, seems mostly interested in an exploration of power; what people will do to attain it, what people do with it once it’s there, how they hand it off. So Lindauer becoming an increasingly cold-blooded careerist makes sense to help her fit in. She seeks power and does what she needs to do to attain it within the confines of the Confederation, achieving remarkable social mobility by hook or by crook. She is an outsider within that society, and for all its pretense of egalitarianism is seen as just some hayseed from the sticks, promoted to a station she hasn’t earned as one of the favourites of her now-dead mentor. And she needs to get her foot in the door.

At the same time… she does need a heart. There’s a place for villainous protagonists, but I do tend to keep a relatively optimistic tone in endings, at least, and would like to see the world in a better position for having had 28-30 chapters of Lindauer rampaging across it. So her position lends itself to a journey of: well, she knows she wants power, but she gets an increasingly sophisticated understanding of how she wants to use it, such that by the time she’s ready to make a decisive impact it’s with a view to creating a better world. And she will. Might not stop any apocalypses or kill any demons or be any closer to finding the ‘Fire Emblem’ of the setting (which is probably somewhere north of Xuanhe, not in this backwater), but she’ll make a difference to enough people.

You always have to have a rationale for a Jagen’s stats, I feel. Old? Coasting and washed-up? Well-trained but inexperienced? But I haven’t really explored ‘high-functioning alcoholic’, yet.

So that’s the aim, but we’ll see how it shakes out. I don’t really buy into the whole idea that ‘oh the characters tell me what to do!!’, like, these things are all in service of the story, but sometimes you do find something developing organically and then decide to let it come to the foreground. Sometimes it’s something small (Roxelana taking and sustaining an immediate dislike to Saszkia, Rena’s fastidiousness, Bronwyn being pedantic and this being a hereditary trait), sometimes… less so. We’ll see what comes out of Lindauer with further prodding and testing.

Name? Job? Bye.

Providing another avenue for her development is one of DoR’s Big Things, the interlude chapters. Not that they’re by any means unique; in fact it feels like most custom campaigns have some sort of base mechanic (like Hag’s) or interludes (like CotA’s), and all of DoW, Do5 and HC have had at least one. Battle Preparations is vanilla FE7, for Christ’s sake.

I went through a few ideas for what I wanted with DoR. Initially, I really wanted base conversations. Works for Tellius! And supposedly there is a menu implementation, though it’s a lot more finicky to work with Builder. I started planning things out, and then came to the realisation that they didn’t really suit my purposes. Two main reasons for this:

Timing. Tellius base happens, then preps. So you can have scenes in a point of safety, then those optional talks, then you’re on the battlefield and setting up the chapter. In GBAFE, there’s not that extra stage.
Pacing. You’re probably just reading all the base conversations you can. That’s a massive increase in the amount of Words to take in before gameplay, and by definition these ones aren’t wholly necessary for driving anything forward… but people are probably still going through them anyway. Is it ultimately just self-indulgent?

So I discarded this idea, with the added advantage that I didn’t have to figure it out (by asking Lumi to figure it out). I liked Hag’s implementation of bases, for Hag, but it didn’t quite work for what I wanted to see (besides, Hag Bases™ are a specific enough concept that… they’re really just Hag Bases™ at this point).

Ultimately I came back to interludes, but ~with a twist~. Of course, a classic custom campaign interlude gives you a selection of units and lets you conscript one or two (as seen in Do5 and HC), but that mechanic would distract from the ransom system for the most part, which is already your main vehicle of player expression through roster-building. So that’s not here. What is here is the opportunity to check in with your crew, see how they’re reacting to the current situation, maybe advance a few personal dynamics.

Of course, this is far from novel. It’s quite routine in, for example, an RPG, to have some sort of ‘home base’ you keep coming back to, where you can chat up your companions. They’re in just about every Bioware RPG from Neverwinter Nights on, for a start, if not earlier. I’m in two minds about these. I feel they do create pacing issues. I’ll use Dragon Age Inquisition for my example, but it’s far from alone; often you get your base and your opportunity to talk to your companions, but that winds up being… here, have 18 dialogue trees to exhaust, with them all helldumping their backstories onto you, their thoughts on the current situation… worthwhile in isolation, but taken on aggregate? You wound up getting lost in it. And, sure, they’d update eventually… so what does that mean, keep going back to check every time anything happens? I’ll do that for Sandra in Pyre, but nobody else… or, well, if I do, I’m checking boxes, not paying attention. My Trevelyan sleepwalked her way into fucking Josephine, but I can’t really say I remember at all who she was or what she was like, besides ‘polished’ and ‘available’. And this is all one thing in an RPG where talking to people is the main draw of the game, but in an FE, it’s really meant to be more of a garnish.

So the implementation is as follows:

Every 2-3 chapters, you get a non-combat chapter with fairly short before/after scenes, generally the option of shopping, convoy access from a tent, and three Time Units.
These TUs can be spent talking to any of the 9-10 other player units hanging around the map. Conversations are purely for flavour, but might affect later conversations down the track (for instance, if you were initially rude to Ulrike and follow on with that by harassing her about her dog’s name in 2x, she’ll give you the cold shoulder in 5x).
There’s also generally neutral units who can be talked to to get a feeling for the lay of the land.
Instead of one base camp, it’s set in wherever the player is. Random abandoned outpost for 2x, Rech Township for 5x… an actual base camp for 8x, and so on.

So three scenes in some level of detail, and if you don’t really care about picking the brains of your little minions, you don’t have to. And for the ones you do, hey, you get to express yourself through choice, prioritising the blorbos you most want to inhale. To which you will reasonably say: well, people will savestate to see them all anyway. To which I will say: that’s fine, but they can’t then blame me for pacing issues, and the absence of rewards takes any gamification out of it.

Curiously, menu bases might actually come back separately… though not really willingly, on my part. If they do, it would be very much stripped-down and stapled on in the aftermath, purely as a way to redeem support conversations. I don’t really want to do support conversations at all, but the base system as implemented hasn’t really left room for them otherwise and… unfortunately, Full Supports is just a really good marketing keyphrase. Homecoming’s reception has been extremely strong, but its link click downloads haven’t quite been doing the business as I’d hoped. Putting in the OP that most of the cast had just a handful of lines may have been a little too bold. If I can have there be on-map setup and then the conversations take place off the battlefield, that works out well. We’ll see what’s possible in a couple of years. If I run out of steam, that’s the first thing I’d want to sacrifice.

Misc

I’m becoming increasingly enamoured of breakable walls in indoor maps. Honestly, I think you’d see them more often if they weren’t really annoying to set up.

The early front-runner for ‘most Marmite character’ is Prii, a termagant you have the option to acquire in Chapter 8x. The second-favourite is… Traxhar, the mauler you have the option to recruit instead of Prii in Chapter 8x.

The recurring RPG mechanic where you rob a tomb and get loot at the cost of awakening enemy undead is cool. It’s past time it came to the GBAFE format.

Time for a transparent plug. Hey, did you know that there’s a bunch of custom campaigns on Backloggd (DoW and Do5 among them)? Well, there are. What’s Backloggd? It’s Letterboxd but for games. If you want to leave a review out in the wild, there is a place one can leave reviews.

Next Time: Act 1 Complete? Probably?

ATHATH · March 21, 2026, 10:28pm

That’s not necessarily mutually exclusive with a villainous protagonist. She could lose in the end, or at least fail in her personal ambitions (while still disrupting the plans of worse people). Maybe that’s a fate to reserve for only “evil” Lindauers, though? Like, the Lindauers who fail the moral test you mentioned at the end of that paragraph and actively choose to not bother trying to make the world a better place.

luminescentblade · March 21, 2026, 11:34pm

perhaps, but that also isn’t what we’re looking to do

we have a fairly overarching plan already.

Parrhesia · April 18, 2026, 10:43pm

APRIL 2026 – Step Back, Move Forward

Overall Progress Checklist

Chapters 6, 7, 8 played through to completion
Chapter 9 should be ready to playtest on the weekend
Wrote a lot more, including scenes up to 14x (though not nearly everything in between)
First wave of battle palettes added
Settled on Will magic mechanic implementation

With the foundations increasingly set, this is going to look more and more like ‘this chapter is done’ without many trimmings. Slightly early post this month because I’m going to be very busy over the next couple of days.

Reverse Ferret (Which Is Not Quite A Rodent)

Sometimes in life you encounter setbacks. Maybe it turns out that the 2011 version of Do5 Chapter 3 sucks too much ass fundamentally to be saved by making one-tile hallways into two-tiles. Maybe a conversation gets eaten because you’re writing it in-engine and you make the mistake of using Portrait 100 for anything, which has the unique effect of eating the entire conversation the moment you hit ‘Write to ROM’. Maybe your new computer really likes to crash Builder, which invariably freezes the rest of the computer and forces a hard shutdown in a way that cannot be healthy long-term and you can’t buy a new computer because that’s still really wasteful and, besides, the AI bubble has driven up costs to a ludicrous degree. Maybe you’re about to name two units who are associated with each other and in this order ‘Grond’ and ‘Prii’ and you’re happy with those names because one’s a Tolkien reference and the other, well, it just feels right for a harpy’s name, and then you accidentally say it aloud once and realise it just sounds like you’re trying to make a pun on ‘grand prix’ for some fucking reason when your only interaction with F1 is the Netflix series.

Okay, so, anyway. The whole Time Unit system is dead on arrival. Rest in peace. Here’s the thing: ultimately, the people who don’t care can still skip. If you’re going to read 0-1, it doesn’t matter if that’s out of three, five or ten. The intent had been to cut down on peoples’ burnout and improve pacing. I think it was a noble idea, but it doesn’t work for this particular medium and in this particular way for a couple reasons.

The thing is that there are different kinds of readers. Personally – as can probably be seen from my style of writing – I value verisimilitude, but not worldbuilding for its own sake. I don’t care if there’s a fully laid-out system for how food gets from farm to table, rooted in real-world economic structures of an analogous time period and culture. I view it all as being in service of the narrative, and just want to make sure the cracks aren’t visible. In my own work, sometimes I will go the extra length to establish systems that I have a grounding in and care about, but not the ones I don’t.

But some people really like worldbuilding, and view the production and presentation of a fully realised world as the point of speculative fiction. We pretty much got Lord of the Rings out of that philosophy, so I can’t exactly knock it. Sometimes these people ask me a question about the setting and the honest answer is ‘I don’t really know or care’, but it’s out of love.

So where does worldbuilding in an FE go? Supports, mostly. Real estate is crowded for scenes. My usual is a journal and then between 2-4 scenes before and 2-3 scenes after a map; usually at its most basic, something along the lines of:

Journal: “We arrived at this place. Morale is low. We have this objective. I’m concerned about the revelation of last chapter”
Scene 1-1: Arrival at such-and-such. Conversation about the surroundings foreshadowing [chapter gimmick]. Oh, no, our scouts have encountered the enemy!
Scene 1-2: Conversation between enemy bosses expressing Thoughts about The Situation and, oh no, the player is attacking! To arms! Obviously the enemies feel they will win easily
Scene 1-3: Erase background, fade from black, scan the field; mid-bosses and recruitable units say their lines
(The battle itself plays out)
Scene 2-1: Asger/Anghara/Garath/Roxelana says ‘boss I killed everyone’ and Lindauer/Bronwyn/Rena/still Roxelana says “I am a tactical genius.”
Scene 2-2: Ransom opportunity as one of the captured bosses admits he would happily fight for the Cause given a chance
Scene 2-3: Musing over the immediate implications of their victory and fretting over the greater situation

This is all assuming a relatively filler chapter, and where there’s room to develop further, characterisation and personal dynamics tend to take priority and be easiest to weave in anyway. What there’s not is a lot of time to say, ‘Hey, these are the intricate windmills that have given such and such a nation an industrial advantage’ etc. etc. etc. So worldbuilding gets shipped to supports and characters tend to represent some greater social group and supports tend to explore how they interact with the world. Examples from Do5: if you want to know the deal with Onduris on A-route you will find it out through Blixa’s supports; Wren talks about what life is like for Yscatra’s followers there; you can extrapolate Bellona’s lines to the circumstances of most Visharan knights-errant and Lizaveta’s to most Visharan nobles.

And, of course, I’m not planning to have supports. I’m planning to have towns and camps.

One of the troubles with the Time Unit system is it’s unpredictable which guys will drop which lore. I found myself increasingly thinking that there were character beats and interactions I wanted to be seen by most players, and they weren’t always predictable. Hell, I didn’t know Lindauer would pointedly not say something important about her hopes and dreams to the fucking harpy until it was already written. So I wanted to feel free to say more important things, though obviously nothing completely crucial. And I can now portray a more full picture of the world through characters’ circumstances, in a campaign where I’m trying to push even more the idea of these characters as microcosms of a greater societal group. And, ultimately, it just felt like an inconvenience to the people who wanted to engage with the world and the characters most, instead of a particularly interesting choice.

It still means that I’m going to ignore anyone who says there’s too many scenes but refuses to skip any of them, though.

Processing Disorder

The thing with The Hackrom is it’s always very uneven. Right now, what’s leapt ahead of everything else is progress on the script… in parts. I follow what’s inspiring me for the day to keep myself fresh. At time of writing (a fortnight before posting…) Chapters 1-6 are playable, but not fully polished. C7 is pretty close, C9 is pretty close, C8 is… a page of notes in my notebook, largely sketched out in a few minutes before trivia. Some stuff is missing. You get the picture.

Anyway, I’ll give an idea through what I did today, on the 7th (happy 17776 Day). Without ever really knuckling down to work on the hack, I…

Put down a bunch of enemies on C7 – not quite all of them, because I got sidetracked when I…
Saw that they were a new faction, which reminded me to make the faction palettes for them, also…
Remembered that not all bosses to that point had correctly assigned music and I’d been meaning to fix that, so I went ahead and fixed that for pretty much every boss up to that point, then…
Wrote most of C10 from scratch, which reminded me to…
Fetch the name for a track in use, which meant looking up a playlist on OST, which meant I may as well fetch the names for every other track from that same game, also…
Being struck with inspiration for how a later thing should play out and writing it down so hopefully I remember it in ten chapters, and…
I’m probably forgetting some other shit.

The next day (that’s today, I’m adding to this) I started poking at C12. So I haven’t played C7, have not meaningfully touched C8, have set up a ton of complex events in C9, have almost written C10 (but nothing else), haven’t touched C11 outside of spawning three temporary units, but right now it just made sense to poke at C12. Including setting up more generic unit IDs, which means more palettes…

And when I do play C9, this is what it will look like.

It’s a chaotic process, is what I’m saying. I can focus on hammering out one chapter a time if that’s where my mind settles, but at this early stage where there’s just so much that needs work on… easiest to just let the hours flow as they’re productive. Hey, now I’m sitting down here on the 12th having done things like battle palettes (generic and otherwise) and gradually working on a final deep dive to fill out the music list, and C8’s still barely begun. Now I’m adding to this paragraph the following day and I wrote some of C14’s end scene last night.

You take my point.

Fight Smarter, Not Harder

With one mechanic already on the scrap-heap, it’s nice that another piece of the puzzle is moving into place. While this isn’t a mechanic per se, it’s an important part of what I’m looking for with map design. You spend much of the campaign fighting against seasoned soldiers, not just thugs, cultists, unwashed rabble or crack teams of assassins (twelve Level 7 steel lance soldiers at a time). Even the ‘bandit arc’ – we know that you don’t have to start with bandits, but it is convenient to find an excuse to beat down underlevelled trash and reserve the Big Enemy Army until your forces are more powerful in turn – is largely comprised of deserters. I’d like maps to feel a little more reactive, and enemies a little more clever.

Of course, some of you probably read ‘smarter’ in relation to ‘enemies’ and your pattern-recognition brains forced the subservient fleshbag it’s attached to to projectile vomit on your keyboard immediately. Of course, we’ve all tried to play FE4 with ‘clever’ enemies and watched them simply run past your Holsety user. But to my mind, ‘clever’ isn’t a matter of seeing 0% hit on a battle forecast and deciding to simply run past a guy. Rather, it’s a matter of tactics and positioning; that’s how it can be communicated within FE, anyway.

So it’s a matter of small things, conveyed through events, formations and AI settings. The real stupid thing, in my view, is when a guy on a throne just sort of sits and waits for death and all his stationary AI minions just let it happen. So I’m trying to give missions unique flavour in ways that express a plan, through, for instance;

Frequently, reaching the boss room or final area will trigger every other enemy on the map to charge, just in case they’ve been left behind.
Enemies on different flanks often have ‘Squad AI’ on the later stages of maps, to try and lead into a pincer attack.
In Chapter 3, your defensive position starts the map, uh, ‘on fire’. Human enemies stand back while summoned zombies are left to suicidally charge you and try and keep you pinned down.
In Chapter 7, the boss on a Seize map is an archer; if he leaves the gate, a stationary armoured midboss hustles up to cover the position.
Chapter Eight.
In Chapter 12, you need one door key, there are two bosses carrying them in the NW and NE corners, and when one goes down, the other will charge and force the issue.

Et cetera, et cetera. It’s just small things that are meant to add up to the sense that the enemy is not just waiting for death, but is trying to kill you, and, ideally, survive. It can’t be a truly reactive experience – and it shouldn’t be, that way lies FETO / FEH PvP – but adding a little push and pull to the later turns of the map to sustain interest is a consistent design goal.

On the other end of things, Lindauer also gets the chance to feel clever mechanically, not just like she’s smashing head-first through obstacles with brute force. After all, it’s the enemy that should have the brute force! So Chapter 4 sees you ambush an enemy column and sandwich them between your men and a Guard battle-line; 10 has you attack a lance of wind-riders in the rain, where their mobility is crippled; in 11, you requisition some ballisticians to shoot down enemy messengers as they try and make a break for it. I’ve always felt better about writing a chapter when there’s a real rationale for the chapter to play out as it does, and it can help add sauce to even something that becomes a straightforward, stock objective map (C15 in HC springs to mind).

The added spice also helps, given that DoR is aiming for a similar level of gimmickiness in most chapters to DoW. It’s not quite the same vibe, but after the two introductory chapters, there’s always meant to be some kind of hook to help it stand out. Break out of the fortress that’s on fire. Ambush the enemy column with your pick of 24 slots to place units. Race your powerful allies to the boss. Break statues. Of course, I do think sometimes you need The Big Seize Map every now and again, or a relatively straightforward outdoor slugfest, almost to contextualise everything else. Nevertheless, I’m pleased with how distinct the first twelve (of 28-30) chapters all feel.

Next Steps

So with Act 1 in the rear-view mirror and Act 2 careening towards the finish-line, it’s time to start thinking in earnest about Act 3. The way the process goes, I have the chapters I know I need to include, and now it’s about shuffling them around and figuring out what goes between them. I also need to develop personal dynamics in time for the Big Payoff to come… and I suspect that means I’m going to need to add a couple more chapters to Act 3 and subtract a couple from the final stretch. We’ll see. But I have a solid foundation to work from and, though I hoped to make four chapters this month (and probably could have, but burned out over the past couple of days), we’re making very good time. If I can sustain two chapters a month I’ll have everything done by March; realistically assume I can’t quite manage that, call it May; give five months to polish and that’s another FEE3 release on time.