Three months ago, I announced the development of a level 10–15 expansion for Dawnsbury Days. Today, I want to give you an update on how that work proceeds!
(This post shows some characters and locations, but doesn't spoil any plot twists.)
First, the first 3 out of 6 chapters are now written and implemented, and as I wanted, they are very varied in terms of what enemies you fight, and what biomes you fight in.
From the magical forest of Arborea...
...through the skies above the Frozen North...
...to the jungles of the Blooming South, and to more biomes besides!
Overall, we're now up to 30 encounters — more than the entire base game, and more even than the Profane Barrier, and that's just from the first 3 chapters, and we still have 3 more chapters to go.
And these are often large encounters, whether with waves, exploration, puzzles, or other special features. So the amount of content is vastly more than before, and while I'm happy for how ambitious the project is, and I hope you will enjoy it, I admit it is a bit more work than I anticipated :/
Now, it's true that one can cut features to reduce scope, and I will be doing some cutting, of course, but reducing the scope or length of the adventure at this point would be difficult. The storyline and content already written, developed, and implemented assumes a six-chapter structure fairly densely packed with plot, so reducing that now by much is probably not possible. So, we will be having a very large adventure!
Second, we now have all classes working all the way up to level 15, with a reasonable number of ancestry feats, class feats, and spells available.
All classes now have pregens filled in up to level 15.
I still want more class feats and more spells, especially for non-arcane spell lists, but we're getting super close now!
Third, we continue to experiment with encounter types and how noncombat elements can affect combat. Pre-combat conversation is now common for bosses and sometimes allows you to affect the coming combat (or in rare cases, avoid it altogether if you wish to).
Some more complex encounters combine noncombat actions, exploration mode, and combat.
Fourth, your homebase during the adventure — a magnificent mansion left behind by Archibald Dawnbringer — is now fairly developed. There are now several slice-of-life cutscenes you can play in the Mansion, starting with the cutscene where you restore it to full functionality:
The expansion also makes heavier use of lore tooltips as the story and setting gets a bit more complex.
These slice-of-life cutscenes sometimes give you minor rewards, but mostly serve to develop characters and to give you a bit of change-of-pace and rest from the more stressful combat.
They are all optional so if you're here just for the combat, you don't need to play them. The main plot happens entirely in mainline mandatory encounters.
What isn't optional is improving your mansion: Each downtime, you'll further improve your Mansion somehow, and these improvements will often give combat benefits, though some of them also affect the story, such as Portal of a dragon's memories which allows you to embark on sidequests.
There will be more improvement options later.
Fifth, we're making great progress on art. The Four-Leaf Clover doesn't use any stock art for monsters and characters, and we have all art drawn by artists specifically for Dawnsbury Days, and further, all creatures with a speaking role now also have a half-body picture so you can see them more clearly. Also, some of the more important characters have special tokens that extend beyond the ring boundary:
There will also be full voice acting, which I'm really really looking forward to!
And that's it for the expansion progress update! I will probably make another update later this month on improvements to the rules engine and the base game which continues to receive updates as well.
If you find the expansion interesting:
Thank you for reading! 💙
