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?)