KOTCL Dev Diaries - Holiday Special, Death, Hooray!

In honor of Halloween, a bright and joyful event, I suggest we talk about death—not about our death, but about the Mistress who embodies one of the fundamental forces of Midian.

But first, let’s start with something more grounded.

Localization

The final re-balance we’re working on is causing changes in the text—and significant ones at that, especially in card and item descriptions. Just imagine the volume of those changes! I mention this only to remind you that the re-balancing process is well underway and it’s steadily drawing to a close.

Now Let’s Talk About the Mistress

When we were personifying death, our main source of inspiration was dualism. If there are Primordial Spirits symbolising life, there should also be a Mistress of Death—for counter-balance and the unity of opposites.

It is easy to understand the nature, meaning and purpose of the Spirits’ existence; to do so, it’s enough to have a general idea about pantheism. The spirits are the divine origin of all that exists in Median, they’re both the weavers and at the same time the fabric of reality itself.

Meanwhile, grasping the nature, meaning, and purpose of death is not only hard, but also harmful in itself. Death servants have been pondering these questions for centuries without reaching a consensus. And if we are able to now easily find the answers, does it mean that all death servants were stupid? No, that doesn’t make sense.

But we are still free to muse.

Nature, Meaning, and Purpose

We could search for the essence of death in the law of energy conservation. The Primordial Spirits couldn’t appear out of nothing. For a pendulum to start swinging, you first need to apply some force to it. After that it will necessarily swing in the other direction. The Mistress is precisely the other side of the pendulum. Right?

The meaning of the existence of death may lie in dialectics. If all phenomena in the world develop and change through the interaction of opposites, then without death Midian couldn’t evolve and reach the final goal of its existence.

What’s the purpose of the Mistress? This is the most important and complicated question that death servants grapple with. But we’ll set the lengthy musings aside for now and focus on service.

Why serve Death?

• Are you willing to risk your life for a chance at immortality?

• Are you a scholar, painfully aware that one lifetime isn’t enough to make your great discovery?

• Are you a mage, just a couple of centuries short of achieving absolute power?

If so, the path of serving the Mistress is open to you. You can invent your own reason — she doesn’t care.

​​How to Serve?

To become an acolyte, you need a special amulet made from the thumbs of right hands. Any death servant will make it for you, or won’t—that’s for the servant to decide alone, but you can try to persuade them.

Now let’s suppose you’ve got the acolyte amulet. The next step is to—on the first day of leaf fall—go to any death idol. If you’re the only one to show up, count yourself very lucky because there’s only one opening. But most likely a whole group of contenders will gather around the idol, and you will have to kill each other until there’s only one of you left. That person will become the servant of death.

What to Do Next?

Basically, you don’t have to do anything more; you’ve already earned at least some kind of immortality. When your body dies, you’ll rise in the form of a ghoul, find yourself a cozy crypt and feed on corpses. You’ll no longer be in danger of starving to death, but hunger will haunt you, and you will need to eat a lot.

But do your ambitions go further than a ghoul’s fate? If so, then you will have to offer sacrifices and await the attention of the Mistress. She will certainly get in touch with you and wish for something special from you.

Fulfilling her wishes, you will sooner or later turn into a lich, build an army of skeletons and zombies, and you’ll be undead happily ever after. It would be better to not attract the attention of the firebrothers, but let’s see what happens.

Whoever doesn’t fulfil a Death's wish will be turned into a wight, a submissive slave, bound to one place until a brave hero in shining armour delivers them from eternal suffering.

Skeletons and Zombies

Unlike wights, zombies and skeletons aren’t enslaved. They’re puppets, the remains of people and animals misused by someone.

You shouldn’t mistake undead zombies for zombies of the Rotten Bog, they only look alike (although it makes no difference for the firebrothers). But that’s a complex matter, and we’ll leave it for later.

Happy Halloween!