[Game] The "what are you currently playing?" thread #2

It's an old game, circa 1998 or something, purely text and decision driven with lots of hand drawn screens, no real-time action. It doesn't even have animations. What it does have, however, is everything else.

In KoDP you take command of a small clan of viking-esqe warriors and farmers in a place known as Dragon Pass. Surrounding the world is this INTENSE mythology and history the writers of the game designed. As you start, you answer some questions about how your clan acted throughout history and how it dealt with the mythology, and that basically sets your village's stats at the start of the game and plots your strengths and weaknesses to a degree.

Once that's going it's like a combination of Dominions 3, Risk and a bunch of choose your own adventurers. You get a council of advisers who are all warriors and sages and expert farmers, who give you advice on how to decide on the dozens of issues that require your judgement every year. Diplomacy. Trading. Raiding other clans. Crop distribution. Workforce distribution. Tribal law and conquest.

Their advice is really important too because they know more about the world than you do....but their advice is also relative to what gods they worship AND how much skill they have in the area you're asking their opinion of. So your council, among other in-game effects, really comes across like a group of diverse individuals and you have to listen to their advice carefully, if not always follow it, and you have to remember WHO the advice is coming FROM.

So for example, if one of your advisers has a **** combat score relative to others, and they worship Emal the Trickster God, they'll generally give you an answer that is the complete opposite of your more normal advisers on military matters. Where most people argue for peace or limited engagement, he'll call for a full war. Where people say fight, he will say run. And yet occasionally he drops a nugget of important wisdom or brings a special option to the table that means you can't completely discount them or their advice.

Or maybe the adviser's focus is SO narrow that they recast every situation in terms of what they're concerned about. Your adviser that's primarily concerned with the happiness of your carls (farmers) and the agricultural health of your tula (village), will react to things based on how they affect them. If bandits want 5 cows for the caravan they hijacked, they'll react based on how many cows you have at the time......while the rest of your council is yelling at you that you can't let a bunch of ruffians blackmail the clan. (Even though blackmail, extortion and kidnapping are like, every day occurrences.)

As another example, the adviser with the highest combat score is your warlord, and if you ask their opinion on most things military, and your army is strong enough, they'll tell you up and down to unleash your warriors. But your magicians, on the other hand, might remind you exactly who those people's allies are and how many people you might potentially piss off by attacking or retaliating. And yet again, your Etiquette expert might tell you EXACTLY what tribal law says about this, further outlining your options for response. Maybe you unleash your warriors. Maybe you ignore it, at the cost of other tribe's respect. Maybe you write a poem that embarrasses your foes and leaves your hands clean.

So who you pick to be on your council of advisers (which you can change at any time, from a pool of applicants that grows and shrinks every year with births and deaths) can mean the difference between an adviser saying:

"I don't have an opinion on this."
"[Random historical fact that relates to this matter]"
"Let's attack the Bayberries!"
"Barley makes good beer."

Or saying:

"The Urdala Cult has many members of the Pelski clan in it, who are our allies. We shouldn't refuse them."
"The typical compensation for a weaponthane of Thalin's character is 5 cows. He's asking far too much from us."
"Their army is stronger than ours and so are their fortifications. An attack would be suicide."
"We have 397 farmers farming 165 plots of land. We could handle another 8 plots."

So who you surround yourself with has a huge impact on what you actually know AND what you can do about it.

These are MINOR examples of the kinds of things you have to deal with on a yearly basis in game. Once clans can form tribal alliances, the convergence of Clan affiliation, Tribe affiliation, God affiliation, legal vs. illegal, friend vs. foe vs. ally into ONE decision means there are repercussions for doing almost anything. If you're making your clan happy, chances are you're making someone outside your clan unhappy. If you're making someone not your clan happy, chances are some segment of your clan, either your warriors or your farmers or both, are unhappy. If you've pleased several allies, chances are you've pushed several neutral clans toward hostility. If you're pleasing your tribe, you're not endearing yourselves to the other tribal organizations.

There's all kinds of weird monsters and magical threats out there too, so you're not always dealing with mundane political or military decisions.

And then there's the vision quests, where members of your tribe undertake quests to relive the stories of the gods, and there by gain power. But first you have to sacrifice (a ton of crap) to each individual god so they'll teach you the mysteries, so you can complete the vision quests AND so they'll grant you their godly blessings in the form of buffs you ask for and build shrines to maintain.

The Vision Quests are like a Choose Your Own Adventure story, where your success is based primarily on 1) the abilities of the person undertaking it and 2) knowing the secret mysteries of the story so you can progress through it. So until you've sacrificed a bunch to a god and they've told you the secrets of the past can you relive it accurately and gain power. When you start the VQ you decide what you're ultimately doing this for. It might a mystic treasure, power for the person undertaking it, a specific blessing like protection from spirits for a year. OR, it might be for something very specific, like the ability to form clans into a tribe and become its king, which is a victory condition of the game and part of the story itself.

Succeeding means not only knowing the story (as in, you the player understand it so you know how to navigate it and it's been "unlocked" for you), but choosing the right person for the quest, seeking enough support for the quest from your allies (which as a passive effect on your chances of success) and allocating enough clan magic at the start of the year for quests in the first place (which is basically a yes/no kind of thing.)

Failure can have dire consequences, for the quester or your clan. They might die, obviously. They might make it harder to succeed for the next person who tries the quest. You might have a huge bite taken out of your clan magic pool (which basically fuels your activities for the year. Without it, you're very very vulnerable to, well, EVERYTHING!)

The game tracks everything that's happened to your tribe and logs in it in an epic. Clan leaders grow old, die, new ones take their place, tribe members try and convince you who to elect as the new clan chief. Maybe a rival tribe sends your tribe chieftan a skirt sown with runes of evil and your chieftan dies....but not before working a divination to figure out who you should take revenge against. Maybe your chieftan writes an epic death poem that both moves your whole village, gives them resolve and makes them hot for vengeance. Meanwhile all your other leaders slowly get better over time, eventually becoming heroes of their own age.

For a game with absolutely zero action in it, it's ****ing amazing. A real story-driven RPG that is highly addictive and is so stuffed with content that I'm constantly new vignettes and challenges. The game is dynamic and fluid in a lot of ways that other RPG games try to do but fall short on the necessary number of things going on to keep your attention. Put another way, if this was more like a standard 4x game, it would probably be declared the greatest 4x game ever made. The only game in KoDP's arena that I think is even close to its equal is Dominions 3, and to me KoDP just stomped Dominions 3's depth into the dust, which is a hard feat to accomplish.