Hello, earth-dwellers! No, this isn't a political blog post. This is about the races that populate the worlds generated by World's Bane. For now, we have 5 sapient races (Humans, Elves, Goblins, Faeries, Skeletons) and 4 beast races (Dragons, Wolves, Giant Spiders, Abominations).
In World's Bane, the race of an NPC affects many things. Probably the biggest for the player is that it is a character's race that determines what type of minion roles it can be assigned to once the player recruits it. For example, Human minions can only become Diplomats or Seducers while Skeletons can only be assigned as Instigators or Debilitators. All four beast races can only be used for combat, though.
A character's race also affects what actions they can perform as NPC as well as their combat stats and traits. Finally, landmarks can only be occupied by a small subset of races. One landmark may only be occupied by Goblin and Faery colonists while another can only be occupied exclusively by Elves.
Our faction templates have predetermined racial composition. Most of the time, a faction is pre-generated having residents of only one or two different races. The races assigned to a faction strongly affects its flavor since the faction would only be capable of doing actions that its resident races are capable of. Let's have an example: a Necromancer's faction is filled only with Skeletons that do not have experience Hunger or Tiredness and are all capable of reanimating corpses. It gives it such a strong evil flavor compared to say a faction full of Human residents that are incapable of corpse reanimation.
Although a faction may start with only one or two races, they may eventually be able to recruit NPCs from other factions that would affect their capabilities and behavior. We expect his to present wildly varying experiences for players depending on how the factions in their generated world change throughout a play through.
There are other things we want to add in the future to further differentiate the races. Off the top of my head, I'd want to have randomized racial animosities, unique combat classes and unique behavioral quirks. We can't wait to get a demo to players and get their feedback on races! It would be nice to hear what players would want to add to the game to enhance the flavor of each races. Of course, we'll definitely make a poll in the future to ask players what new races they'd want to include.
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