Stormwaltz 2016 Q&A/Question 27
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Question 27: Witch Cave
Q: In an interview, you mentioned the first dungeon and quest you designed for AC1, Witch Cave. You said it would have spanned half of Dereth, and involved some characters that already existed in the game. Could you provide more details on the Witch Cave quest?
A: Witch Cave was learning while doing, getting used to tools and processes... and not necessarily by doing it right. I started it the first week I was at Turbine.
The good news is, you don't really need me to tell you about it. I was surprised to find that at some point after I left, someone dug up the bones of the quest and put it in game: it's the Temple of Xik Minru.
I'm not sure what to think of that. Someone took this thing I abandoned in June 1999 to add to the game in September 2005. Did they like the basic ideas? Were they looking to save some implementation time? Was it a test for some new content developer; "here's an old piece of junk, make it work with the modern game?" I'll probably never know.
The original plot was essentially the same as what you see now, though their revisions made motivations and context much better than where I'd left it. Branwyn's husband Geowulf went someplace he shouldn't have, and she asks the player for help. I cracked open the doc for what must be the first time in 15 years, and I'm struck by how awful my original writing was. It's stuck in the Ultima Online mode of thees and thous, no contractions, and excessively proper grammar. That was normal in 1999, I suppose.
From the wiki I see they dumped all the original dialogue and notes, and replaced them. Good. My stuff sucked.
I wish they'd changed Geowulf's name too. It amused me at the time, but to English speakers it seems goofy for a dramatic story. I'd pulled it from a doc full of hundreds of possible Aluvian names. We had such a doc for each player heritage group; pages full of hundreds of names that "sounded right." We'd grab them as needed for NPCs, strike through the ones we used in the doc, and move on.
I don't remember who put those together, but it sounds like the sort of job Chris Pierson would have done. Before I was hired, he actually did the linguistics to figure out what phonics the original tusked Tumeroks would have been able to pronounce, and wrote a doc on that... which to my chagrin I didn't know existed when he came to me slightly irate about our Tumerok names in ACDM.
Anyway. The general idea was that the cave (the quest was originally set in a natural cave that changed to dungeon architecture at the bottom) was a Falatacot temple where they made sacrifices, and as millennia passed a few of them just sort of... hung out down there, sacrificing each other to stay alive until just the one was left, preying on passing Isparians who came hunting Empyrean treasures. I think there may have been Shadows involved somehow too... it's hard to tell from the doc I have. I was just starting to understand the lore when I came up with this, and a lot of the details hadn't been invented yet.
As you went through the cave you'd find notes dropped by Geowulf talking about what he faced and his sketchily-developed relationship with Branwyn. Honestly, Greg Slovacek later worked the same tropes to far better effect in his Frore expedition notes, and by that point I had a grasp of the lore that allowed me to better stitch his superior writing and dungeon design into the greater continuity.
As in Xik Minru, you find Geowulf's ring on his corpse and bring it back to Branwen, who gives it to you because she "can't bear to look at it." It was intended from the start to be the Rose of Celdon, as described in "Reign of Alfrega," though at first it was identified to the player as "Branwyn's Tear."
A bit of trivia about "Reign of Alfrega." When I wrote the first draft, I was obsessed with the idea of using an authentic mediaeval literary voice for that sort of in-world "primary source." So I used an old writer trick and read a bunch of Boccaccio's Decameron, then mimicked its style.
If you think text that made it in game was dry, you should have seen the draft. You know how most medieval literature seems dull and grammatically overcomplicated to modern readers? I nailed that, unfortunately. Eri Izawa must have wondered if I could write at all after seeing it, because she sat down with me to rewrite it line by line.
Anyway (again). As described in "Reign," the Rose disappeared into history on the night the Orts were betrayed to the Queen. Here was my first draft on what happened, from the Witch Cave design doc (rev 1.04, June 7, 1999):
- Using the powers of the ring, a young forester named Bannhorn managed to escape the slaughter, and fled to the woods. Most of his comrades were put to death by Alfrega, though a few, still moldering in the dungeons, were freed when Osric the Wise came to power. With no further use for magical protection in the budding golden age, Bannhorn locked the Rose up in a trunk. Years later, he would, upon being smitten with the daughter of a merchant, use the Rose as an engagement ring. He never told her the true extent of its power, only that it would protect her from harm; neither she nor her family would have approved of his participation in the Alfregan underground.
- Bannhorn had planned to tell his young son about the ring upon his majority, but, unfortunately, he was set upon by brigands on his way home one day, and the truth was lost.
The Rose of Celdon was passed on in that family through the centuries, becoming a heirloom wedding ring. To find out the ring's true identity, you had to give it to Harlune the Misanthrope - who I invented for Witch Cave, but didn't make it into the game until later. Pretty much the same path as what made it in game, but they made everything a lot clearer in their implementation.
My plan was that Harlune would start you on a chain of quests taking you hither and yon across Dereth, leveling up the number and power of spells on the ring while you dug up its lost history. My vague goal was to keep adding new quests as time went on, as quest ideas occurred to me, and the power level of players grew. I had a vague idea that it should be an heirloom players could carry throughout their career, that would grow with them.
I was terribly fond of this kind of obscure "traveler" quest in 1999. You find an item, you read a seemingly unrelated piece of lore / NPC dialogue and (theoretically) realize what the item's for, then go on a long walk to execute on it. (In beta, MS' QA department referred to AC as "Microsoft Jogging Simulator.") Mount Lethe was another relic of that period.
The only other thing worth noting is that Witch Cave was the first place I suggested the use of translator NPCs at the racial libraries. It made no sense to me that everyone would know these ancient languages, so I thought a "bonus quest" to translate obscure lore at the capital city libraries would be interesting for people who wanted to know the full story. That's a bit of design that probably wouldn't fly these days.
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Chris "Stormwaltz" L'Etoile |