Learn more about exploration and dungeon delving in Revenge of the Firstborn:

Exploration and Dungeon Delving in Revenge of the Firstborn

Diving into overland travel and the dungeon exploration options, such as swimming and climbing

Hello everyone!

Winter is in the air here in the Midwest of the USA. Thanksgiving is over, the Christmas carols are beginning to come out in force and it’s time for the end-of-November monthly deep dive into one of the features in Revenge of the Firstborn. This month, we’re going to talk about exploration. We’ll touch a bit on the overland map and look more closely at the ways you get the most out of dungeons in the game.

The Overland Map
The overland map is completely open from the start of the game. There are a number of cities and villages you can visit, most of which will have something for you to do, if you need a distraction from saving the world. There are also a number of hidden dungeons where you can find unique gear, including parts of artifacts that can be combined into powerful items.

Just be careful where you wander, you may quickly find yourself in a fight that is too tough for your current level! Each part of the map has a chance for a random encounter and there are hotspots scattered around the map with their own higher challenge rating. For instance, the area around an ancient ruin will have a higher chance of an encounter with undead, some of them potentially powerful.

The distance you can cover each day depends on whether you are traveling on foot or whether every member of the party has a horse. When traveling on roads you travel more quickly and when traveling off-road, you must make survival checks periodically to avoid getting lost.

There are lots of hidden secrets on the overland map that should make exploring every square inch worthwhile for the wandering adventurer.

Dungeon Delving
The real meat and potatoes of Revenge of the Firstborn is dungeon delving. You’ll find the full suite of exploration options from the 3.5 SRD at your disposal. More and more frequently these days isometric RPGs include a lot of vertical features to bring a wider range of character skills into play. Revenge of the Firstborn is no different in that regard; in order to fully explore all of the dungeons in the game, you’ll want to have at least one character who is good at Climbing, Swimming and the other exploration skills such as Balance and Jump.

Climbing
The game includes a lot of ruins, and many of those ruins don’t have intact stairs anymore, so you will be required to use the climb skill, or the Fly spell if your wizard can cast it, to reach some areas in the dungeons of Revenge of the Firstborn. While some games take the approach of marking specific surfaces as being climbable, Revenge of the Firstborn allows any vertical surface to be climbed, including overhangs if you have a rope!

As per the SRD rules, characters with a higher movement speed also climb higher. Climber’s kits and ropes provide a bonus to the Climbing skill check. Of course, a wizard can make all of this trivial by casting the Fly spell and simply willing himself up to the top of a climb.

Swimming
Some dungeons in the world have become flooded over time. In order to reach tantalizing loot or open up other parts of a dungeon, you’ll need to have a character skilled in swimming. Don’t forget to remove your armor as the armor check penalty is doubled!

Clearing the Gap
Next, we have the Balance and Jump skills. There are many areas in the game where you can reach optional parts of a dungeon by walking over a narrow ledge, or jumping over it if your Jump skill is high enough (once again, the wizard in the party can save the day with the Jump spell).

Characters with higher strength can jump farther. The Difficulty Check for all jumps is equal to the distance of the jump. If you fail the check by less than 5, you clear the gap but fall prone when you land. Fail the check by more than 5 and you will find yourself falling into whatever gap you’re trying to clear, with potentially disastrous results!

Traps
Last but not least are the rogue’s bread and butter, traps. In Revenge of the Firstborn, you can manually search for traps in areas where you’re suspicious, but rogues (and clerics with the Find Traps spell active) also automatically get a chance to Spot traps as they are nearing them. If your rogue’s Spot skill is high enough, they will bring the party to a stop and point out the trap. If your rogue’s Spot skill is good, but not quite good enough, they will stop the party’s movement and warn everyone that the area looks suspicious. This is your cue to manually search for traps. Some traps have search Difficulty Checks high enough that they can only be found by manually searching but this should be rare unless you are exploring a dungeon far above your capabilities. The goal is to not force the player to manually search every 10 feet.

The traps themselves range from fire spout traps, to spike traps, to poison cloud traps and pit traps filled with anything from spikes to water to the occasional gelatinous cube.

Hopefully you’ve found this little dive into how you explore the world of Revenge of the Firstborn interesting!

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Learn more about the martial classes of Revenge of the Firstborn:

Exploring the Martial Classes in Revenge of the Firstborn

Taking a look at the Paladin, Ranger, Barbarian and Fighter

Greetings everyone!

This month we’re going to take a deep dive into the melee classes in Revenge of the Firstborn. The wizards have their flashy spells, but when they run out of juice, it’s up to the frontliners to bring it home.

The Paladin
When someone thinks of a knight in shining armor, they’re thinking of the paladin, at least in D&D-inspired games. With his ability to Detect Evil at will, his immunity to fear and his smite evil ability, the paladin makes a formidable foe for the forces of evil. His Lay on Hands and Remove Disease abilities make him a strong protector for his allies as well.

Add in some limited spellcasting ability and the power to turn undead, and the paladin brings a broad array of skills to bear.

One of the paladin features that is often omitted from computer RPGs is the paladin’s mount, but with mounted combat featuring heavily in Revenge of the Firstborn, having the paladin’s mount in the game was a must. The paladin mount is a warhorse that levels up alongside him, becoming hardier and stronger as the paladin’s gains power. Additionally, any spells that the paladin cast on himself also affect the mount.

We touched on the mount’s improved survivability via improved hardiness in the form of extra hit dice, the mount also gains the ability to use its own saving throw, or its rider’s, whichever is better. At higher levels, a paladin's mount even gains spell resistance.

Some people hate the “goody two shoes” paladin and others love playing the idealistic hero. For those people, the paladins in Revenge of the Firstborn offers a lot to enjoy.

[...]

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Learn more about character creation in Revenge of the Firstborn:

Revenge of the Firstborn Character Creation

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Learn more about the crafting system of Revenge of the Firstborn:

Revenge of the Firstborn's Crafting System

RotFb contains a very accurate implementation of the 3.5 SRD's crafting rules

Greetings everyone!

This month’s feature spotlight is the game’s crafting system. Revenge of the Firstborn features a complete implementation of virtually every part of the 3.5 SRD rules for crafting, from scribing scrolls to enchanting weapons and forging rings. Read on to learn about each of these features!

Have a Drink on Me
The first item creation feat is the Brew Potion feat. As the name implies, this feat allows a spellcaster to create a potion with any spell of third level or lower that he is able to cast normally. The only caveat is that the spell has to be one that targets one or more creatures. So, you can create potions of Haste or Blur, but not potions of fireball or Scorching Ray.

When creating a potion, you decide what level the spell should be cast at when the potion is consumed. This affects how long the resulting spell lasts and a few of the numeric portions as well. So, choosing to brew a potion of Haste with a caster level of 5 will result in the person drinking it being hasted for 5 rounds and brewing it at caster level 10 will result in double the duration when the potion is consumed.

The Pen is Mighty Indeed
The next item creation feat we’ll discuss is the Scribe Scroll feat. All wizards get this feat for free at level 1, any other class can take it as long as it has the ability to cast spells.

The Scribe Scroll feat lets a spellcaster create a scroll that contains a single cast of any spell the spellcaster can currently cast. When the scroll is scribed, its creator decides what level the spell should be cast at. Creating scrolls has a small gold and XP cost. Similarly to potions, you need to decide what caster level the spell will be cast at when the scroll is read.

A scroll or two can mean the difference between a party wipe and making it back to the surface with no losses when your party’s wizard has used up all of his memorized spells.

Like potions, all scrolls are single use and cost a small amount of gold and XP to create.

[...]

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Learn more about the Druid class in Revenge of the Firstborn:

Nature's Champion: The Druid

Learn all about the abilities of the druid, from animal companions to wildshape

Greetings everyone! This month we're talking about one of the most interesting classes in the 3.5e system - the druid. From his animal companion, to his wildshape ability to his exciting nature-based spells. Read on for more!

The Druid's Best Friend

The first ability druid's get is the ability to summon an animal companion. In Revenge of the Firstborn, that takes the shape of a wolf, which druids can summon immediately at level one. As the druid levels up, her wolf gains additional hitpoints, natural armor and high strength and dexterity. It also gains the evasion feature and an increased number of attacks along with a bonus to its will save.

Additionally, any spell that the druid casts that affects herself will also affect her animal companion, provided it is within 5 feet of her at the time of casting.

[...]

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Learn more about Revenge of the Firstborn:

Lore and Campaign Intro

Learn a bit about the lore of Revenge of the Firstborn and what to expect when exploring the world

Greetings everyone! It’s nearly time for 4th of July celebration in America, and it falls on a Friday, so long weekend for me! Looking forward to spending a lot of time debugging, looking into game performance and generally doing nerdy game dev stuff!

As promised last month, we’ll talk a little bit about the game world for Revenge of the Firstborn and a few interesting mechanics that folks have been asking about. Hopefully this doesn’t end up being a boring lore dump!

The Titular Firstborn
The most common misconception about the game is related to the title. The Firstborn does not refer to any sort of royal heir. It refers to a group of immortal beings that were the first beings created by the gods at the beginning of time.

These Firstborn were imbued with immense power, enough to rival the gods themselves. The Firstborn eventually disobeyed the one commandment they were given, to not create life, with dire consequences. So, within the game, you are able to play characters of species created by the gods and those created by the Firstborn.

Prejudices between the gods-created species and the Firstborn-created species have simmered down over the millennia, but you will still run into characters who, for instance, think that the species created via the Firstborn’s disobedience are beneath their contempt.

For their disobedience, the Firstborn were imprisoned, though the methods used to do so were hidden from all but the gods themselves. During the course of the game, it will be your task to decide if this forbidden knowledge should remain hidden and work against those trying to reveal it, or whether knowledge is power that is yours to take. Throughout the game, you’ll find numerous factions looking to exploit this knowledge, or just the pursuit of it, for their own gain and it’s your task to decide whether to help or hinder them.

[...]

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Learn more about the roguelike mode of Revenge of the Firstborn:

Exploring the Endless Dungeon

Revenge of the Firstborn contains two game modes, an epic campaign and a roguelike mode. Let's explore roguelike mode.
Revenge of the Firstborn has two game modes: the classic campaign a la the Baldur’s Gates of the world, and a roguelike mode I’m calling The Endless Dungeon. This month, we’ll delve into the Endless Dungeon and talk about some of its features. Next month, we’ll talk a little bit about the campaign and the world it takes place in.

As mentioned above, The Endless Dungeon is a roguelike mode. This means there is minimal story and all of the elements of the world are randomly generated, from the loot and monsters to the layout of the dungeon itself. The Endless Dungeon is actually a set of three dungeons, each of increasing difficulty. The challenge is to survive all three, reach level 20 and defeat the final boss.

[...]

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Revenge of the Firstborn is using AI:

A look at Revenge of the Firstborn's AI

This month I thought I’d change things up a bit and talk about one of the backend systems in Revenge of the Firstborn, specifically the AI system. RotFb uses an AI approach called utility AI. In utility AI, each action that an agent can take is given a “utility” score where utility refers to how happy the actor would be if it took the given action.

To determine the action with the highest utility score, the game loops through a series of a couple dozen different potential actions, ranging from ending the NPC’s turn, to casting a spell or making an attack. Each action has one or more decision inputs, each of which has a numeric value for when the condition is true and numeric value for when it’s false. Those values are then added up to get the final utility score for an action.

Let’s take an example of drinking a healing potion. To get the healing potion utility score, the game has several inputs that can raise or lower the final score. They are:

• Does the NPC have a healing potion in their inventory? Naturally, if they do not, the utility for this action needs to be set to a very low score. Since I know the score for ending the NPC’s turn is 0, I give this input a value of -100 to ensure that no matter what other decision inputs modify the action’s overall score, it will still be below 0. If the NPC does have a healing potion, the score is unchanged because simply having one in their inventory has no bearing on whether they want to use it.
• The second-most important input involves evaluating the NPC’s health. If they are at full health, this check adds nothing to the score, however if they are below, say, 50% we increase the score so the final score for this utility is higher than the baseline of 0. Let’s say this action increase the utility score to 25.
• For this example, we’ll include one last decision input. Is the agent close enough to an enemy that the enemy can make an attack of opportunity on them if they drink a potion? If so, we reduce the score by 10. This would make the action’s final score 15, meaning it is less likely to be chosen, but not impossible to be chosen.

Let’s say that our hypothetical agent has a potion, is low on health and is not in danger. This would make our Use Potion utility have a final score of 25.
We don’t have any enemies close by, so the attack utility is low, perhaps 10.
However, the ai actor has a fear effect. The fear effect has a very high utility score because fear supersedes any other actions the agent could take. The Run Away in Fear action has a score of 75.

So, we are left with the following utility scores:

• Use Healing Potion – 25
• Attack Enemy – 10
• Run Away in Fear – 75

Making the clear winner Run Away in Fear. The actor will attempt to find a place that is far away from the source of its fear and run to that location.

The game has several baseline utility action collections – it has one for average intelligence agents, non-intelligent agents (undead) and even a few specific ones such as dragons. This helps give agents different behaviors as appropriate. For instance, average intelligence creatures are smart enough to attempt to flank you in combat, but non-intelligent ones are not. Creatures can also add new actions to the baseline collection. For example, the medusa has an addition action for using its petrifying gaze attack.

The game uses a similar scoring system for what type of an attack an agent should make. For instance, a trip attack gets a higher score if the agent is bigger than its target and it has the Improved Trip feat. Grappling is more likely if the agent is clearly stronger (a very large difference in strength score) and if the target is a spellcaster who would be largely neutralized by being unable to freely move their limbs.

The AI also scores spells in this manner. Each spell the agent knows gets a score based on how many targets it can hit, whether or not there are allies in the area of effect (assuming the creatures cares about its allies) and so on. In order to make the choice of spells a little less predictable, each spell with a utility score within 10% of the highest has an equal chance to be chosen. This gets us one of a few viable spells but also excludes all spells that are clearly not applicable to the current situation.

Hopefully you’ve found this little peek under the hood of the engine interesting. Keep an eye out for more details in future updates!

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Learn more about the wizards and sorcerers of Revenge of the Firstborn:

The Arcane Masters: Wizards and Sorcerers

All About Wizard and Sorcerers
Revenge of the Firstborn sports the two main arcane caster classes from the 3.5 SRD – wizards and sorcerers. Below, we’ll discuss the features and differences for the two classes.

Wizards: The Brains of the Party
Wizards are the classic spellcaster in the game; toting around a big spellbook and a collection of scrolls and wands. They must memorize their spells daily in order to be able to use them. They are able to learn spells on level up and from scrolls found during their adventures. Wizards can learn any arcane spell in the game.

Specialist Wizards: Do One Thing and Do It Well
When a character takes his first level of wizard, he has the option to choose a school to specialize in. All of the spells in the game below to a single school, and specializing in that school gains you an improved ability to identify spells from that school as they’re cast and allows to memorize one extra spell per spell level, as long as it is from that school.
The drawback is that you must choose two spell schools which are forever barred from you. This means that you can never learn spells from that school or use wands and scrolls containing spells from that school.

Sorcerer: Fun and Spontaneous
Like wizards, sorcerers can learn and cast all arcane spells in the game, but that is where the similarities end. While wizards must study to gain their spells every day, a sorcerer is born with the magic coursing through their veins. They can cast a certain number of spells per day, but those spells can be chosen when the sorcerer is ready to cast them.
The drawback is that sorcerers get to learn far fewer spells than their wizard counterpart and they may only choose new spells when he levels up. If they grow tired of a spell, their only option is to swap it out for a new one every even level, starting at level 4. Sorcerers cannot learn spells from scrolls, although they can cast spells they don’t know from scrolls.

Metamagic Feats: Customize how your spells work
Metamagic feats are feats that can make your spells harder to resist, more damaging of longer lasting. A wizard must apply metamagic feats to a spell when she memorizes it. Metamagic feats raise the spell level of the spell, the amount the spell level increases varies based on the metamagic feat(s) applied to the spell.
When a sorcerer wants to apply metamagic, he can select it just before he casts the spell. The game’s user interface shows small buttons on top of each spell to select what metamagic feats to apply. A spell with metamagics applied requires a full-round action, even if the spell normally does not require it. The sorcerer must also have the higher-level spell slots available based on what metamagics are applied.

Scrolls and Wands: Always be prepared
The game also includes feats that allow characters to create scrolls and wands (and rods and staves, but that’s another topic) that contain any spell that they know. It costs a bit of experience and gold, but a wand or scroll can be a lifesaver when a spellcaster has used up his allotted spells for the day.

Staffs: Wands on Steroids
One of the more power items an arcane caster can find or craft is a staff. Staffs are similar to wands in that they have a set number of charges, but they differ in two important ways. First, staffs usually contain more than one spell. They also use the wielder’s spellcasting statistics, so a more powerful wizard triggers a more powerful spell from the staff. This is not the case with wands and scrolls.

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Learn more about mounted combat in Revenge of the Firstborn:

Exploring Mounted Combat

Mounted combat is one of the features I'm most excited to have in Revenge of the Firstborn. The game includes ponies, horses, warhorses and paladin mounts, the latter of which gains levels and abilities as their owner levels up.

All of the mounted feats from the SRD are present in Revenge of the Firstborn, so you can use the Mounted Combat feat to protect your mount or use the Ride-By Attack skill to gallop around the battlefield, dealing damage. Equip a lance and use the Spirited Charge feat to devastating effect or take the Trample feat to simply run down your enemies.

Pay close attention to your positioning, because if your enemies can get close enough, they may attempt to pull you from the saddle or ruthlessly kill your mount!

Warhorses are trained to attack with hoof and tooth and act on your turn. Non-warhorses are not meant to be used in combat and require a skilled rider just to maintain control of them in the fray. Investing in the Ride skill also allows you to use both hands on your turn whereas a failed Ride check means you must use one hand to control and guide your mount, foregoing off-hand attacks or, if you’re wielding a two-handed weapon, not being able to attack at all.

You can equip your mount with the basics such as a simple riding saddle, or chose from several types of barding to protect your mount. Keep an eye out at shops and when you're exploring the world to find barding with magical effects to augment your mount's abilities even further.

Check out the video below to see mounted combat in action!

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The indie RPG Revenge of the Firstborn has been announced:

Revenge of the Firstborn announcement trailer

Revenge of the Firstborn is a story-rich, turn-based RPG, based on the classic 3.5 SRD ruleset. Discover the origin of the Firstborn and determine whether they pose a threat too great to be released or whether they are your path to power. Whatever path you chose, the world will never be the same.

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