The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
[King of Dragon Pass] - Celtic Vikings Riding Triceratops
Rhan9
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
What is King of Dragon Pass?
I'll shamelessly ape Wikipedia for the synopsis:
Why should I play KODP?
Because it's fun, unique, and cheap?
Also, Triceratops cavalry:
What makes it different?
KODP is an odd mix of the Civilization-effect(grabbing you and not letting go until the wee hours of the night), managing and developing your tribe/community, and a visual novel/choose-your-own-adventure. The game puts you in the place of a sort of "leading spirit" of a clan, and you interact with the game mainly through the actions of a leading council of elders.
That sounds kinda neat, how does the game play in practice?
You play KODP in a turn-based fashion that cycles through different seasons in a year, with different foci per season. Sea, fire, earth, dark and storm. Sea and Earth seasons are meant for planting and harvesting, Fire for raiding and Storm and Dark seasons are essentially the winter. You don't want to mess around during the Winter. There's also a "season" called Sacred Time, during which you make decisions for the following year(such as allocating clan magic towards bonuses for your clan).
The gameplay is composed of static images, which represent events and choices you can make. Many are tied together, and can have consequences down the line. You'll have to manage your clan, produce food, solve problems, explore new lands and raid your neighbors/defend against raids to guide your people to prosperity. The objective is to become, surprise surprise, the King of Dragon Pass.
Oh boy, that sure is tempting! Where can I find this ambrosia of gaming?
Why, it's available on Good Old Games. Check it out:
http://www.gog.com/gamecard/king_of_dragon_pass
Oh, and really, you should read the manual before you play. Makes life so much easier, since the game doesn't have a tutorial.
Few more screenshots to whet the appetite:
Other handy links:
KODP Wiki, handy beginner's guide and everything over there.
kingofdragonpass.wikia.com/wiki/King_of_Dragon_Pass_Wiki
I'll shamelessly ape Wikipedia for the synopsis:
King of Dragon Pass is a 1999 computer game published by A Sharp. Set in the fictional world of Glorantha, it depicts the lives and fortunes of one of several barbarian clans, settling the untamed lands of Dragon Pass over the course of several decades. The clans bear some similarities, such as fyrds and lawspeakers, to the Iron Age Nordic peoples.
Why should I play KODP?
Because it's fun, unique, and cheap?
Also, Triceratops cavalry:
What makes it different?
KODP is an odd mix of the Civilization-effect(grabbing you and not letting go until the wee hours of the night), managing and developing your tribe/community, and a visual novel/choose-your-own-adventure. The game puts you in the place of a sort of "leading spirit" of a clan, and you interact with the game mainly through the actions of a leading council of elders.
That sounds kinda neat, how does the game play in practice?
You play KODP in a turn-based fashion that cycles through different seasons in a year, with different foci per season. Sea, fire, earth, dark and storm. Sea and Earth seasons are meant for planting and harvesting, Fire for raiding and Storm and Dark seasons are essentially the winter. You don't want to mess around during the Winter. There's also a "season" called Sacred Time, during which you make decisions for the following year(such as allocating clan magic towards bonuses for your clan).
The gameplay is composed of static images, which represent events and choices you can make. Many are tied together, and can have consequences down the line. You'll have to manage your clan, produce food, solve problems, explore new lands and raid your neighbors/defend against raids to guide your people to prosperity. The objective is to become, surprise surprise, the King of Dragon Pass.
Oh boy, that sure is tempting! Where can I find this ambrosia of gaming?
Why, it's available on Good Old Games. Check it out:
http://www.gog.com/gamecard/king_of_dragon_pass
Oh, and really, you should read the manual before you play. Makes life so much easier, since the game doesn't have a tutorial.
Few more screenshots to whet the appetite:
Other handy links:
KODP Wiki, handy beginner's guide and everything over there.
kingofdragonpass.wikia.com/wiki/King_of_Dragon_Pass_Wiki
Rhan9 on
0
Posts
Doing things like taking choices that emulate the history of your tribe (fighting ancestral enemies, taking/not taking thralls, etc.), doing hero-quests, requesting magic for favors from other tribes, and so forth all increase magic. Doing the opposite obviously decreases it. Sometimes you can gain magic from events, pleasing spirits/gods etc. and other ways like that. It's a highly mutable amount.
But you always get a bunch of magic all at once at Sacred Time. Having the leader of the Ring be a worshiper of your clan's main god/dess increases the amount by 1. Having worshipers of seven different gods also gives you an extra point of magic at that time (I believe). I just wondered if there were other such conditions.
-Honour your history/ancestors
-Events
-Heroquests
-Calling in favors
Apart from that, I don't know.
http://lparchive.org/King-of-Dragon-Pass-(by-Haifisch)/
http://lparchive.org/King-of-Dragon-Pass/
At least they'd be hours well-spent.
Imagine, taking your ragtag tribe through trials and tribulations to greatness, and become the King! Unite the tribes, solve petty disputes and murder some innocent travelers for profit!
That's just reprehensible.
Travelers are unlikely to have cows with them. There's no profit to be made there.
On the one hand, they're hard-core Humakti who're really good at destroying undead and if you piss them off enough they (and their friends) will fuck you up.
And yet, nobody takes them seriously anyway. Poor little guys.
I don't think they're even touching the PC version any more. My understanding is there are a lot of improvements made for the iPad version that they haven't ported over.
Sacrifice to Chalana Arroy so that she might heal your wounded sense of time.
The series is hilarious. Give it a look if you feel like it.
I got a little excited when I saw your ship.
I have not watched the whole series, but I did see one part where
Amen. It's hard for me to get heavily into this on my PC (super lo res ho!), but I would love to be able to play it on my phone. Thanks for being mean, devs.
The Orlanthi may be barbarians, but they set great store by tradition. And with tradition comes legal precedent. And with legal precedent comes lawsuits.
........................................Yes, because playing something stretched onto my 26" monitor and playing that same game on a 5" touch screen are the exact same experience. Thank you for your input.
Edit: Regardless of that, this game is super fun! I wish I could play it in a more convenient fashion, but all of my IOS buddies seem to love the experience, and the PC version is fun regardless of the oldness present in the game.
Personally I'm quite fond of almost any situation that involves his Token Trickster.
That motherfucker is hilarious.
Also this moment.
I got a little excited when I saw your ship.
Which then promptly caused me to lose a bunch of weaponthanes because they all spontaneously became pacifists.
Not quite my intention, but at least nobody died.
edit: What is this in my King of Dragon Pass Folder?
The thing that screws me over most of all is not having the nobles I need to cast the sacred time magic I need. Heroquesting without an Eurmal guy is very painful. What's worse, I have no idea how replenishing my supply of nobles is supposed to work. Like, I've seen the Eurmal guy die of old age, then an 18-year-old Eurmal guy appeared the next year so at first I thought the game was making sure I'd never run out of a specific deity, but then last game he got cut in two by a duck (yes, literally cleaved in two) and no replacement ever came. I've also had my Issaries bargainer just randomly die of a hereditary illness (aged 28) leaving me with no other Issaries worshippers, and nobody with a bargaining skill better than "Good".
I like this game, but I anticipate a LOT of do-overs before I beat this thing on normal difficulty. Even Grimith, who normally likes to iron-man games was broken by this game. It looks like I can't post youtube links that include timestamps here, so skip to 56:57 for the hilarious meltdown that followed the death of his chief (WARNING: LOUD!):
He conveniently lost all the progress he'd made that year after that.
Seriously, Uralda's Hero Quest is a meat grinder. Uralda worshipers are not known for being good at Combat, yet they're expected to repeatedly survive attacks by biting things? Come on.
Also the women of the tribe are mad because the hilarious military blunders killed too many men. So I'm like okay we'll just hook the rest of you up with the bachelors and everything will be fine.
They were okay with that for some reason.
I think all that not having a follower of X god does is increases your chance of a follower showing up when there is room for more godtalkers. If you ever need to get rid of someone in hopes of someone better, nothing works quite as well as the "send the pathetic bastard out, alone, on a long scouting mission to the far corners of the pass." strategy... As long as you don't accendently awaken some primodial evil that wipes out you clan. There is alway the risk of that.
Do you have enough horses?
Also, you can send expeditions into relatively safe areas with a few weaponthanes along and then hire more weaponthanes to fill the "void" that doesn't actually exist the moment the expedition comes back (if the expedition comes back, of course). It's kind of exploiting the system, but I like to think of it as evening the odds.
Yeah, the game saves a .txt file of everything that happened as well as a normal file every time you save. Neat little way to chonicle everything you've done. It can be useful too, if you have multiple saves and trying to figure out which one you want cause the game doesn't let you name the file when you save and you keep forgetting to go into the save folder to change them to something you can remember.