At long last, an update to the core RealmSpeak game is here. As I've been promising for the last year, and really in the last several months, a version of RealmSpeak with Steve Schacher's "Questing the Realm" variant implemented. Questing the Realm is itself a variant of the original Book of Quests published by Jay Richardson et. al.
What is Questing the Realm? Let me quote from the
Users Guide:
Elements of the Book of Quests have been isolated into a set of Quest Cards that can be played during a game of Magic Realm to dynamically generate goals for players in a way that replaces the standard victory conditions.
Quest Cards depict daily life, travels, dealing with natives, fighting monsters, completing missions, and earning fame and fortune. Quest cards will combine to allow the player to tell a unique story for each play of Magic Realm.
Essentially, you play the game not with a single quest, but smaller quest pieces (though some can be quite complex) that earn victory points. Rather than scoring by collecting GTs, Gold, Notoriety, etc, you score by completing quests. As it turns out, this is really quite a fun twist to the base game.
With this update, you'll get 100 quest types in a deck of over 300 cards to draw from. Each player get's a number of cards equal to their level plus one (so a typical non-development character gets 5), and uses these to guide them through the realm, and earn points. The
users guide contains information about how this variant is setup, and played in RealmSpeak, so I suggest you read that first. For your first game, I suggest choosing the Questing the Realm variant on the options page, along with Sudden Death set to 15 VPs.
Of course, this version of RealmSpeak also supports the Book of Quests variant. There are two BoQ quests provided that will let you try that variant, if you like. If you want more quests, you may want to invest some time looking at the new quest builder. You were introduced to this new tool in version
1.0.24.0, but it's undergone a lot of changes. Lots of bugs were fixed, lots of features were added, and most importantly, all the requirements and rewards are working. Oh, and there's a full featured quest tester in there too.
Before you dive into making any quests, I recommend first playing the game. Then when you have become familiar with a few of the quests, open them up in the quest builder, and see how they were implemented. I'm going to avoid going into a lengthy discussion on the tool itself, until I know people are interested. If there is enough feedback, I may even put together some (gasp) documentation for it.
One more thing - this release would NOT have been possible if it weren't for all the hard work Steve Schacher put into developing, testing, and chasing bugs for me. He put up with all kinds of random issues along the way, and helped me get the code into shape for this release. Of course, there's the 100 quests he designed, which I can tell you was no easy feat. Thanks Steve!!!!
Ok, that's a lot to digest. Here's what's new:
QUEST UPDATE:
- Preempt quest step works
- New quest step logic to allow ANY required step as opposed to EVERY required step
- Adjustments to quest view to make it fit the screen better
- "Questing the Realm" (Quest Cards) logic is implemented
- A deck of quest cards is shuffled at the start of the game
- Each character draws a number of cards equal to their starting level plus one
- Quests must be activated
- ALL PLAY Quest cards allow the first player to achieve the requirements to earn VPs.
- Discard and redraw unstarted quests at any dwelling or Lost City/Castle chit
- Changed the in-game quest panel to be a bit easier to look at (no more quest diagram - that will only be for the editor)
- Finished SearchResult requirement
- Finished MissionCampaign requirement for testing when a mission/campaign is picked up, abandoned, or dropped off
- Added quest debugging option
- Lots of new rewards and requirements
NEW FEATURES:
- "Show Card" button on character frame shows the whole spy window now
- Full Featured "Quest Tester" so you can try out your quests without having to play the game.
- New "OnFail" quest step behavior, so you can implement actions when requirements are NOT met.
- Better Quest Deck viewer
- Fixed a problem with companion editor in character builder
BUGS/ISSUES:
- Fixed a bug that was causing the generated map to be the same every time when quests were active
- Fixed the behavior of quest points
- Fixed a bug that wasn't removing the effect of a mission/campaign when the chit was abandoned.
- Fixed many issues around how Minor Characters worked
- [1793] - Endless Option should be endless now.
- [1781] - Fixed some issues with sound errors.
