The Hammer of Thursagan

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The Hammer of Thursagan

Post by Development Team »

This is the main development thread for the mainline campaign The Hammer of Thursagan. The original first post for this thread follows.
esr wrote:I have a new campaign in development, The Hammer Of Thursagan. The 0.1 version is available now on the development campaign server. Look for the sign of the runic hammer (and thanks to Jetryl for that).

I have written and balance-tested 6 of 13 scenarios; the rest are storyboarded here http://www.catb.org/~esr/wesnoth/thot.html. I'm looking for balance testing and feedback.

I'm open to collaboration as well, from map- and battle-designers. If one of the not-yet-written scenario premises in the storyboard strikes your fancy, doodle something up and we'll talk.

This is aimed at mainline; I want to have it ready for the 1.4 feature freeze around Christmas, which doesn't leave a lot of weeks to get it finished.

Note: You'll need a trunk build of Wesnoth at rev 21566 or later to run this -- 1.3.10 will be the first point release qualifying. The problem is that older revs don't fully support the new-style directory layout with _main.cfg that this uses; they can download it and even run it, but it won't be visible in the "Play a campaign" menu.
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Aethaeryn
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Post by Aethaeryn »

An error said:

Unknown Scenario: '01_At_The_East_Gate'

Or something like that. I'm using SVN revision 21576 and just downloaded your campaign. I'd like to play it, sounds fun!

Also, it says it needs 1.3.8 devel in its description but it needs 1.3.9+ SVN as you've said here.

EDIT: I think that's because the .cfg files are designed for mainline but it's installed as an add-on.
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I'll have that fixed shortly

Post by esr »

You were correct in our discussion on IRC; I need to insert some @ characters in the paths. I'll upload 0.2 shortly.
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0.3 is up and should be playable.

Post by esr »

0.3 is up and should be playable.
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Post by turska »

There's a bug in the second scenario (the plot only one). The main character is a Fighter even if you leveled him to a Steelclad on the last level.

Edit: In "Invaders" villagers can pop up multiple times from a single village, is this intentional? Additionally, the scenario makes seems to cause crashes, dropping "error engine: Cannot create unit: location is not on map, and player 5 has no recall list." in STDERR.

Edit2: As of version 0.4, the crashes in "Invaders" seem fixed, but the scenario is still ridiculously easy, as you can just let the villagers kill the majority of the orcish forces and then proceed to kill the leaders. And I don't think it's a good idea to let the player only recruit two kinds of units in the majority of the scenarios.

Edit3: Including a changelog wouldn't hurt.

Played on Steelclad (normal) difficulty.
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Post by 7th wonder »

I'm waiting for 1.3.10 to play your campaign :) .
P.S. I hope you fix all the bugs till then :wink: Good luck!
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Known bugs

Post by esr »

turska, thanks for the feedback. I've added a changelog and will be working on those bugs for 0.5.

You didn't answer the most important question, though: was it interesting?
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Post by turin »

OK, I just started the campaign.

First thing I noticed was, I cannot understand what this sentence if trying to say. It seems grammatically incorrect: "The dwarves begin mining their past for inspiration in ways to rebuild Knalga do it would be even greater than before, and reaching out for contact with their scattered kinfolk."

Second thing was, there are double-spaces at the end of sentences, but the Wesnoth convention seems to be to to just have one space after a period, as you do in between words. (And I've read somewhere, I think in an issue of The Atlantic, that this is actually the proper way to do things - the double-space-after-period convention is always and everywhere bad.) This is going to bug me the rest of the campaign, so I thought I might mention it.

Third thing: I didn't know Thursagan had a famous hammer. :P Sounds interesting.

Fourth thing: "Aiglondur" seems like a rather forgettable name; it could easily be a name randomly assigned to a recruited dwarf. This isn't necessarily bad, but it struck me as odd.

---

OK, now I've played the first scenario and read the talking scenario that follows. I liked the first scenario, and the second scenario was interesting. I like the set-up of book and hammer.

The only thing that seeemed... odd was the stuff about how all the other Runemasters "died o' shock at the same moment of Thursagan". That just sounds kind of silly. Especially since apparently the Hammer is still intact; why would the other runemasters die just because Thursagan happens to die in a volcanic explosion (that he intentionally causes)? I think the phrase "died of shock" in particular makes little sense. Shock at what? Hearing that Thursagan had died? An imbalance in the force a la when Obi-Wan feels Alderaan being blown up? The first one doesn't sound right, and for the second I don't think "shock" is the right word.
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Post by esr »

turin wrote: First thing I noticed was, I cannot understand what this sentence if trying to say. It seems grammatically incorrect: "The dwarves begin mining their past for inspiration in ways to rebuild Knalga do it would be even greater than before, and reaching out for contact with their scattered kinfolk."
There was a typo in there; , "do", where it should have read "so".
Second thing was, there are double-spaces at the end of sentences, but the Wesnoth convention seems to be to to just have one space after a period, as you do in between words. (And I've read somewhere, I think in an issue of The Atlantic, that this is actually the proper way to do things - the double-space-after-period convention is always and everywhere bad.) This is going to bug me the rest of the campaign, so I thought I might mention it.
I'll fix that, too.
Third thing: I didn't know Thursagan had a famous hammer. :P Sounds interesting.
Gets more so...I hope.
Fourth thing: "Aiglondur" seems like a rather forgettable name; it could easily be a name randomly assigned to a recruited dwarf. This isn't necessarily bad, but it struck me as odd.
Do you have a replacement suggestion?
I think the phrase "died of shock" in particular makes little sense. Shock at what? Hearing that Thursagan had died? An imbalance in the force a la when Obi-Wan feels Alderaan being blown up? The first one doesn't sound right, and for the second I don't think "shock" is the right word.
Perhaps not. The second was the intention -- some kind of magical backlash got them. Perhaps I'll change that to "died, as if strucjk down by magic".
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Post by turin »

esr wrote:There was a typo in there; , "do", where it should have read "so".
Ah,makes more sense. Still, should it really be in the present tense?
esr wrote:Do you have a replacement suggestion?
Not ATM. The name's beginning to grow on me too, I must say.
esr wrote:Perhaps not. The second was the intention -- some kind of magical backlash got them. Perhaps I'll change that to "died, as if strucjk down by magic".
That'd make more sense, I think.
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Post by thespaceinvader »

I got the impression from tSoF campaign that Thursagan was a bit of a rogue, sidelined Runesmith, who they were forced to call upon due to the esoteric nature of his expertise. I don't see any logic behind his death causing every runemaster among the dwarves to suddenly pop their clogs. It seems a very unlikely plotline. He's just not important enough, let alone the fact that i don't think that should happen even if he were the head Runesmith.
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Post by zookeeper »

Why not just have the runecraft slowly die out when a large number of their best, like Thursagan, were killed in one go? It's not like it needs a grand magical happening as an explanation: there's several hundred years between the happenings after all, with Knalga being invaded at least once in between and all that.

Every runecrafter dying of "magical shock" because the big guy holding the hammer they've all stroked a bit dies is...uh, well, somewhat as cool as this:
MEDICAL DROID: Medically, she is completely healthy. For reasons we can't explain, we are losing her.

OBI-WAN: She's dying?

MEDICAL DROID: We don't know why. She has lost the will to live.
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Post by thespaceinvader »

NNNNooooOOOOOooOOooOOooOOOOOOOooo!!!

etc

EDIT: yeah, that sounds like a much better idea - having a random magical event do something you could just as easily do without is FAR better. I'd go so far, in fact, as to suggest that the art was already dying out at the time of tSoF - it makes sense to me that in their height, any master runecrafter could have done the necessary with tSoF - you could use the fact that there was only one left alive who could, and he was treated as an eccentric by mainstream dwarf society, as an indicator of the decline of runesmithing in general. Imply that runecraftng is a very secretive society and difficult to get entry to and teaching in at the best of times. So when you're unlucky enough to lose those in its higher echelons, it's difficult to reattain them.
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0.5 is available

Post by esr »

Fixes all reported problems with scenarios 1-4. Scenario 5 needs some rebalancing work.
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Death of the runemasters

Post by esr »

I think that event will make more sense if you read the storyboard. The Hammer is an *extremely* powerful artifact -- a character will say later on that it "holds the soul of the dwarves" and that is not far wrong.
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