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 2025 – The Opening
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.
