What's this all about, then?Enormous ScopeIn contrast to normal M&B, cities in Darklands feel huge. Many quests, interactions, and even combat can occur before you ever leave your starting city. We accomplish this the same way Darklands did: rather than walking from place to place in an M&B scene, you transition from one area of the city, from one shop to another, using a hierarchy of menus. Once we get menu graphics, you'll see just how different these areas are from one another - whether you're in Cathedral Square or the Krafmarkt, down at the docks or looking for trouble in the slums.
It's possible that after implementation we may also choose to implement M&B scenes to represent some of the key streets. We'll only do this if we feel that the M&B scenes successfully convey the same breadth and diversity that the menu texts do.
Ninety-two cities of varying size dot the map - if you've blown your local reputation in Bohemia, perhaps the Prussians won't mind - and a limitless set of castles, mines, satan-worshipping villages, ruins, hemitages, caves, and dragon-ravaged countryside lie before you. Find unique and semi-unique locations like the prophetess, the witches' sabbath, Devil's Bridge and the fortress monastery of the Templars, while avoiding or dealing with a host of random encounters which will test every aspect of your skills - from blizzards and plague-ridden refugees, to cruel alchemists and the Wild Hunt.
Invoke 125 individually detailed saints, from Saint George the dragon-killer and Saint Michael (the archangel), to Saint Catherine the Astonishing and Saint Jude - patron saint of hopeless causes. Brew sixty-six potions, from al-Razi's Noxious Aroma to the Smaragdinian Tablet's Breath of Death... if you can find, and afford, the rare reagents they require, and the even rarer secrets of their making.
Become a legendYou will journey with a tight-knit party of adventurers, not a small army of troops. All of the possible NPCs you can recruit will be companions, able to train and be developed as you see fit, but your party will be severely limited to no more than a few trusted friends. Battles will be small, by M&B standards, but the enemies will be tough. A toggle from our Schattenländer-specific configuration menu will allow you to choose between a Standard difficulty and a Hard one. Experienced veterans of M&B should, if we've done it right, experience a challenge even from the Hard setting, and even after their characters have matured considerably.
Your adventure will challenge all of your skills, from combat to tracking to haggling. What a pity your party size will be too small to allow specialists in every area. Do you neglect one approach entirely, or do you begin to generalize? That'll be up to you.
There is no overt magic - at least, none that you (as god-fearing folk) can access. But saintly intervention is very real, as is alchemy. Prayers to a saint can help get you out of trouble, avoid a situation, gain access to a situation, heal your wounds, or boost your skills/stats as combat turns against you. Alchemical potions can distract your opponents, harden your armour, mend your flesh, and even be thrown across the battlefield to set fire to your foes! We strongly recommend, though do not require, that each party have at least a priest, an alchemist, or more commonly both. You can choose to play one, maybe even both, roles, or you can recruit companions who fulfill those roles; the objective is to make either approach fun and competitive.
Your reputation will precede you, both locally and globally; rescue a caravan near Hamburg, and you'll see better treatment there, while driving off a plague of knockers from a mine near Leipzig may be told and retold across the breadth of the Empire. But get caught sneaking into a banker's office at night - to retrieve records of his bastardy, so as to sway his politics as rebellion begins to foment - and you can end in fighting through crowds to rescue your companion off the executioner's block!
And when we've implemented all of that, we'll start adding new content, too.
Radically changed systemNever level up again! Instead, see your skills rise as you use them, or as you spend hard-earned pfennigs on the services of tutors. Play through the most entertaining character creation mechanic ever implemented in an RPG, now successfully ported to M&B, but do so with care - after you start your adventure, only the rarest of circumstances will ever change your attributes again.
Make skill rolls using a hidden dice-pool mechanic, where you're never perfectly guaranteed success... nor ever absolutely guaranteed to fail. Test the best speaker or most skilled surgeon amongst you... or the slowest runner, the noisiest walker. Make smart decisions; if you fail to play to your strengths, life will only get harder.
Forget the M&B skill list, in favour of skills like
Persuasion,
Artifice,
Scholarship, and
Quick Learner. Over half of the original skills now have new, and critically important, roles to play in your search for glory. Think a former abbot, now fifty, has no role to play in a band of glorious heroes? Think again.
In fact, if you come into Schattenländer with one thing on the tip of your tongue, make it that:
Think again.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The original game won the 1992 PC Special Achievement Award from Game Players Magazine, and is a classic (and still rewarding to play) to this day. We hope to do justice to the original in an act of sincere homage. Come help, or just wait and play.
