Danelaw
Overall Layout
- ASCII roguelike
- Only available in English (saves me a hell of a lot of work getting a translation system in place on my own)
- Takes place in Wessex c. ~880 CE
- Stone walls and archer towers to prevent PC from leaving Wessex (to limit world scope)
- Keep certain skills (such as literacy or understanding certain languages) behind skill points
- Latin, Welsh, Cornish, or Norse are available second languages
- Latin, Futhorc, and Younger Futhark are available literacy scripts (younger futhark was technically still transitioning from elder futhark at the time but whatever)
- NPCs that speak English to a Norse-speaking PC or vice-versa get text that is worded differently to reflect they're mostly mutually intelligible but still different
- Offer choice of religion for PC out of 9th-century Catholocism, a lingering form of native English or Norse paganism, or none
- If native English paganism could possibly have survived for this long, some artistic license will need to be applied to cover the huge blank spaces in its recorded history
- Regardless, non-Christian faiths could provoke certain NPCs
- Light fantasy elements like folklore creatures, rune spells, or divine events
- A bit of artistic license for gameplay and also to allow for player expression and interesting interactions
Stuff That Needs Artistic License
English Faith and Lore
- Wooden: Chief of the gods, son of Sun
- Free: Wife of Wooden, mother of humans
- Tue: Husband of Sun, retired chief of the gods and tries to keep the sky clear
- Thunder: Controls weather and argues with Tue about it, son of Earth
- Moon: Brother of Sun, husband of Earth
- Sun: Sister of Moon, wife of Tue
- Earth: Mother of Thunder, wife of Moon, mother of animals
- Elf: Small person that can shoot people or cows with arrows, lives outside
- Hob: Small person that can do cool stuff for you if you leave out food while sleeping indoors
- Pillywiggin: Flower fairies that sleep through winter and generally leave humans alone to instead playing around in flower gardens
- Thirse: Umbrella term for large monsters
- Boggart: Big swamp monster that eats livestock and people
- Ettin: Big monster that eats livestock and people
- Knucker: Water dragon that eats livestock and people
- Standing stones
- Rune spells
- Healing charms
- Flint arrow head pendants to ward off elf-shots
Technical Details
28.4 signed fixed point for world positions
each turn is an 8th of a second, normally walking 1 meter is 8 turns
map is split into 256m superchunks with 16m subchunks (TODO: interpolated or mixed with noise?)