Reworking

Did some work on the module last night that actually amounted to a reworking of certain things I had already done that I'd never been quite satisfied with. Specifically, I wasn't happy with the first area after the cutscene. In that area, the PC runs into a group of peasants being attacked by goblins. After helping them defeat the goblins, he learns that they're heading north for the safety of the castle. The PC also wants to go to the castle, but the peasants warn him that the goblins and other creatures are moving up fast, and that the road is dangerous, so the PC might want to head Northeast thruogh the forest instead, which is a longer trip, but potentially safer.

The problem I always had with this is that if the road isn't safe, then why would the peasants head that way. The excuse was that because they didn't really have any choice, since they couldn't go through the forest. That's fine, but the thing that bugged me is that after the conversation, the peasants head north and vanish, to simulate that they're moving on. However, if the PC does the same, he moves onto the next area, but the peasants are nowhere to be seen. That bothered me: if both the PC and the peasants are heading north, then why do they disappear? They're both on the same road, after all. For that matter, why doesn't the PC just travel with them?

After thinking about this, I decided to change things so that the instead of heading north to the castle, the peasants are now heading west to a neighboring village, to escape the monsters, which are coming out of the east. This actually resovled a couple of issues: since the PC's goal is to make it to the castle, he won't have any reason to travel with the peasants. Since the monsters are coming from the east, it makes it more believable that they might intercept the PC before he can make it to the castle (beforehand they were coming from the south, and yet for story purposes, they had to get ahead of the PC, even though the PC has a lead on them). And since the monsters are coming from the east, it makes sense that the peasants would move away from them, rather than heading in a direction where they know they'd likely be putting themselves in danger.

Changing the module to accomodate this largely involved resizing the area, adding a new road going west, and moving the peasants and some triggers and placeables. The most onerous part was actually one of the most trivial: replotting the flight path for the two blackbirds that I included for a little extra color. I had to do a lot of tweaking to make sure they didn't run into any trees. Then, when I tested the area, I discovered that my peasants were vanishing a few seconds after my character spawned in. It turned out one of the birds was passing through the trigger that destroys the peasants. I don't know why the bird would trigger it, but it did.

Other fixes involved rewriting some of the journal entries (including changing everything from first to second person) and conversations, and moving the south gate in Cheswick to the west wall, since it no longer made sense for it to be in the south wall. I also put up some signposts and discovered, to my irritation, that I don't know how to make it so that when the player "uses" the signpost it says "X - North" and "Y - West" with the former appearing over the latter. It's a minor thing, but very annoying. It's also annoying that the palette only has one roadsign placeable. Speaking of minor but annoying details, I realized that the reason the peasant women stops walking away if you talk to her, but the peasant men don't, is because the women have a custom script in their heartbeat event. It's a small thing, but details matter, so I'll have to set up the heartbeat script as a user-defined event. Fortunately, that's a fairly simple matter.