KOTCL Dev Diaries - The Bjorn domestication

At the last meeting Misha announced that he’d be reducing Bjorn’s eight basic mechanics to three. I got very curious and thought you might be interested too, so I decided to grill Misha a bit.

Misha Explains

Misha: Hi! So see for yourself. To describe Bjorn’s current gameplay, you need to consider the following:

• In the elf form, card costs are doubled

• In the elf form, playing cards uses health

• There are also notches

• These notches increase when dealing damage with attacks

• They also increase when taking damage from attacks

• When the notches fill up, Bjorn transforms into a lycan

• In the lycan form, playing cards uses notches

• Now those notches refill at the start of a turn

• If the notches run out, Bjorn returns to the elf form

• If the notches don’t run out, a Scourge of a Lycan card is added to the discard pile

• If a Scourge of a Lycan comes to hand while Bjorn is in the lycan form, a Curse of a Lycan card is added to the deck

• The Curse of a Lycan remains in the deck for the rest of the run, and if it comes to hand while Bjorn is in the lycan form, he gets Blight

This all looks somewhat complicated, and that’s not even touching the perks!

Me: Yeah, only a little bit complicated :) So how are you going to put it all in order? What’s the plan? Do you have any strategy?

Misha: Yeah, I do, and I’m sticking to it. It’s reducing the number of involved entities and mechanics to make it easier to understand them. That’ll also make development simpler, because right now Bjorn’s healing isn’t so much an analogue of defense as it is a forced measure due to his mechanics.

Me: But from what I understood, the variety shouldn’t suffer dramatically. In theory, creating builds will become easier, but not more boring.

Misha: Overall, that’s right. Bjorn’s entry barrier will definitely go lower, and there will be fewer possible gameplay dead ends that the player can trap themselves in.

Me: Could you briefly and concisely outline the updated Bjorn as you see him?

Misha: I see him as more similar to Persivall than he is now, but more recklessly aggressive, with an ace up his sleeve. The rest would be spoilers.

That’s how it stands for now. I liked the bit about spoilers, though. Many of us have extensively played Knock and know it inside and out, and now we’ve got some more spoilers, hmm… I don’t know about you, but I’m intrigued—no joke. Misha won’t even spoil anything for me in private.

Anyway, let’s get back to our lore. I’ll probably start an epic tale about the Empire, which may carry on for quite a while.

An Empire Without an Emperor

Whew, this is a big topic. I don’t even know where to begin. The Empire is enormous and well-developed, despite the location not being present in the game. It’s well-developed because it’s often mentioned in the game and is very important to the game world as a whole.

Why No Emperor?

I’ll start with this question. When Emperor Septim died without leaving any direct heirs, all the lords of the Empire gathered to choose a new ruler. At that council, it was decided that they didn’t actually need an emperor for the time being, and that all contentious issues could be resolved at such gatherings. And so it was agreed. The decision was named the Edict of the First Great Council.

In the face of a common threat, under the rule of a strong and wise leader, the human Empire is capable of uniting into a single fist and repelling any enemy, and this has happened more than once. But no strong ruler has been born in those lands for a long time, and the Northern Gate reliably shields humanity from external threats, so the Empire has existed without an emperor for quite some time now.

Great Councils

Local issues in the Empire are usually resolved through private talks within a narrow circle of the lords involved. For another great council to take place, the problem has to be truly global, which is why there haven’t been many great councils in the Empire’s recent history.

I can only tell you about the First Great Council (which I already did) and the most recent one. The others aren’t fleshed out—and that’s a good thing. My style of myth-making requires leaving as much room to maneuver as possible, so if our game designer decides that we urgently need to find a place for some astral reptilians armored in tempered glass with a pseudo-Buddhist ideology, I’ll be able to do that.

But let’s get back to the great councils. The most recent one so far took place very close to the events of the game. The agenda was the following: one of the border provinces had grown excessively powerful and gained de facto independence. You know this province well—it’s called the Northern Gate.

A Brief History of the Northern Gate

Originally, the Northern Gate was subsidized and it suffered greatly from orc raids. The Empire poured a significant portion of its resources into it with no demand or hope of return, all for the sake of its own security.

But times changed. Trading relationships with the elves and the dwarves were established, and even the orcs eventually grew tired of getting their teeth kicked in beneath the walls of the Northern Gate. The province grew strong and wealthy to the point where it began to cause envy concern.

What Could Be Done About That?

Nothing can really be done. Historians consider the edict of that Great Council to be the most empty and uninformative of them all, and they rack their brains trying to understand why that is. What they seem to miss is that an edict is a public verdict—it doesn’t reflect everything that went on behind closed doors. And behind closed doors, Lord Ingvar, in an extremely polite and diplomatic way, told all the other lords to go to a certain place, about which the edict tactfully doesn’t mention.

The reasons

1. The overreaching lord of the Northern Gate couldn’t stand against the combined forces of all the other lords. Together, they could easily destroy the Gate, but that would leave the Empire without protection from the orcs. Everyone understood this, and no one wanted that.

2. The sphere of interest of the lord of the Northern Gate lay in the north; that is where his influence vector was directed as well. Ingvar had deliberately distanced himself from imperial intrigues and internal power struggles. Within the Empire he had no rivals, no allies, and no secret pacts. In short, he refused to take part in the eternal self-serving power plays.

Thus, preserving the status quo turned out to be the optimal decision at the time of the Great Council, much to the displeasure of all the lords—except one.

I seem to have gone deep into geopolitics, but there’s no way around it. Next time, I promise not to get so political. I’ll probably talk about the borders of the Empire, which should be interesting, or maybe about the Monastery of the Fire Brothers.