| |
 |
|
Date |
: Sept 3rd, 2001 |
| Genre |
: RPG |
| Developer |
: Troika Games |
| Author |
: Jin-Ning Tioh |
|
In this epic role-playing adventure, you must first create your own character, or pick one out of the many pre-configured personalities available, complete with background history and statistics. A long list of history backgrounds are also available for your selection, such as Sold your soul, Hero's Child, Raised by Monks, Scared of the Dark and so on. These backgrounds will serve to affect your statistics, for example, take a look at a lady's man : Women swoon whenever they are near you. Being unusually good looking, you gain a large bonus to beauty (+6). Unfortunately, all that primping and powdering has you lacking in the more manly virtues... You lose points for Constitution (-2), Strength (-2) and Dexterity (-2).
Don't be struck by the seemingly complex character editor though, for it truly is not once you look over it carefully. You'll soon find yourself purchasing extra attributes to enhance your character from his or her many expects using Character Points. Out of all the various kinds of useful information you can find here, perhaps the most important of all would be your statistics. These are divided into two main categories : Physical and Cerebral. Your physical statistics include strength, dexterity, constitution and beauty, while your cerebral stats include your willpower, perception, intelligence and charisma. These statistics serve to decide how you react in live situations. For example, dexterity decides how fast your character can react to a situation, and charisma decides how many followers you can have.
Another other useful functions of the character editor is truly unique to the genre. It allows you to learn three categories : Skills, Spell Colleges and Technological Discipline. Skills consists of social, combat, thieving and technological skills. Combat skills include dodge, bow, melee and throwing. Thieving skills include prowling, spotting traps, pick pocket and backstab. Social skills include gambling, haggle, heal, persuasion. Technological skills include picking locks, disarming traps, repair and firearms. Now for the arcane arts of magic, known here as Spell Colleges. Spells are divided into 16 categories : Conveyance, Divination, Air, Earth, Fire, Water, Force, Mental, Meta, Morph, Nature, Necromantic Black, Necromantic White, Phantasm, Summoning and Temporal. Each college has five different spells each. As for the new arts of technology, they are divided as follows : Herbology, Electric, Gun Smithy, Smithy, Chemistry, Explosives, Mechanical and Therapeutics. Your level of expertise in each field of technology decides what technological wonders you can create. This comes in the form of degrees, which can be purchased or negated. Higher level spells can be learnt if a person has a high willpower rating, while technology requires a higher intelligence rating.
Other useful windows are the Auto-level schemes, which distributes your character points accordingly ; Magick Tech Meter, which shows your alignment towards magic or technology ; and finally your alignment towards the forces of good or evil.
|
|
