Merchants, Clans & Palace Rooms

Merchants

Merchants are obviously the folks you must visit for services and to buy / sell goods. They can be easily found in the Mariah Lowlands, the most populated region of the game where all the players would start. So, usually the first order of business for most players will be to travel around visiting merchants and stocking up on goods. Depending on the map configuration being played, there may by 1 or 2 specific terrain tiles that feature a specific merchant.

The merchants in the game include: Blacksmith (weapons, armor), a pub or two (gambling), The Guild (companions for hire), Healer (health services and goods), Kingdom Bank (cash in your gold), Kingdom Jail (don't let the Kingdom Guard drag you there), Lapidary (will appraise and buy your gems), Mariah Dock (buy boats or rolls of canvas, if you want to build your own), Market (general goods), Psychic (get a psychic reading and/or hire Tygal's; telepathic beings which act as the Kingdom's cell phone service, so to speak), Theurgist (magical items and spells).

Here's an example of what you might see if you visited a merchant ...in this case, the Blacksmith. It shows a description in the top banner and you can see the goods they currently have for sale. Following the shop sample, you'll see some samples of merchant tiles that would reside on the map:

     


     

Clans

The game can have 6 players with each belonging to a clan. The clans are used to identify a player side with each having their own shield to easily identify them. Icons of these shields are also used as tags on collectibles and other cards to indicate that they belong to a specific player. Here's the 6 clans along with the newly created shields:

              

Palace Rooms

Laurica's Palace is the place the players must search, room by room, to find the relic of their quest appointed to them by Zerox the Kingmaker. When a player first enters the palace, all the rooms will be unknown. The first time a room is entered, it is flipped over to reveal what it is to everyone. The room may have a number of events to encounter and may also have tasks to perform before the player may look at the relic to see if it's the one they are looking for.

There are 40 palace rooms in the game although only 12 are used in any particular map configuration. This means that a player may play the game several times and still encounter new rooms they've never seen before. Here's an example of a room that's just been flipped and it's description detailing the tasks that must be performed to see the relic. After that is a few samples of other palace rooms.

  


     


     

As I go about updating all the rooms in the module, I'm going to be completely rebuilding how the palace system works. I'll keep the Development Blog up to date on my progress.