RPGWatch Forums - The Great Whale Road - Kickstarter begins on November 17

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The Great Whale Road - Kickstarter begins on November 17

The RPG The Great Whale Road is coming to Kickstarter on November 17:

Quote:

DESCRIPTION

The Great Whale Road is a medieval RPG with turn-based tactics, longships and axes. Players travel the whale road - an Anglo-Saxon name for the sea - to supply their home settlement. Recruiting a crew and the occasional hero requires renown, which the player can earn in combat as well as by trading and exploring.

KEY FEATURES

GAMEPLAY (EXPLORATION, CREW MANAGEMENT, Turn-Based Combat)

Explore the early medieval North Sea coast with historical settlements and trading hubs.
Select your hero and crew from historical cultures, including Anglo-Saxons, Picts, Danes, Franks and Britons.
Select different historical ships and ship types from skin boats to the Sutton Hoo ship.
Pirate, raid or trade to support and develop your home settlement.
Follow the stories of your heroes and champions along the Whale Road.
Single-player campaign.
Multi-player arena where players can match their crews against each other.

The inspiration for the gameplay and design comes from a myriad of games, books and movies. The most obvious might be classic RPGs like Baldur's Gate, turn-based giants like XCOM, sea trading games like Port Royale. But we also played a lot of Darkest Dungeon and Sunless Sea to see what they did well, and not so well.

[…]

More information.

Thank you for the info, Joachim!

In early medieval language, a formulation like "Whale Road" is a kenning.

A kenning is a kind of description of something incorporating the thing which is typical for the thing describes.

"Whale Road" is a very typical example of a kenning : What do whales do ? Swim. Where ? In the sea. Plus, they do follow certain "lanes" or, in this description, "roads".

A similar kenning for the sky would be "The Goose's Road".

The Beowulf Epic is full of these kennings. Sometimes, they are obviuous, sometimes, one must - in our times, at least - thing about what could be meant, because kennings often act like miniature riddles, too !

[The word "kenning" itself is related to the German word "kennen". And "kennen" is usually translated as "knowing" or as "to know" in its basic form. The German-language version of PS:T is full of the word "kennen", by the way.]

It sounds pretty awesome so far, but this is an absolutely terrible time of years for Kickstarter campaigns (see the tragedy known as the Deathfire: Ruins of Nethermore campaign). A Princess to Save Me is struggling with their relatively small goal of $10K.

Looks like it's fairly early in production, but here's hoping their goal is small / if this KS is just for publicity or a bit of extra funds for polishing. Either that or I hope they're prepared to relaunch early next year.
Edit: After reading their dev blog it seems the combat will have be in that card game style. Ugh…Interest declining. On the plus side they will have a playable demo… on the downside it will be multiplayer only as the enemy AI is not implemented yet. Meh.

Beware the cards!

Developer here …

Our combat design is tactical turn-based with an icing of cards. Our first paper prototype design was card-based with formations, but we wanted more tactics. The multiplayer demo will showcase the direction, we call it the first pass. It will get more content, features and undergo a lot of balancing before we will release the game into Early Access in May. We kept some of the cards as we like the way they can be used to implement special abilities, leadership and battle luck (or the lack thereof).

We will add AI early next year, this is a major feature on the backlog and we didn't want to bodge anything for the showcase. The multiplayer implementation is a lot less complex in comparison.

The 'cursed period' on Kickstarter … If we are successful then we can get the game complete before the end of 2016. We could add for example another artist to the team (and in our case art is the lion's share of the cost), and get more expertise on-board in areas like writing. We are also talking with a publisher, and how good the deal will be depends on the outcome of the KS.

More next week.
Joachim @ Sunburned Games

Our Kickstarter for The Great Whale Road is live!

Regards,
Joachim @ Sunburned Games