ASATW: Valley of Torryn

It's been a while since I last posted an update. I've been getting ready to move soon and extremely busy at work (which given the state of things I guess I can't really complain). When I've had time, however, I've been working on an initial area for ASATW that will set up a few of the subplots I've been planning. I'm calling it the Valley of Torryn: a place where the road the players have been traveling down forks off to the small village of Riverstop. Here are some screen shots:

The area is roughly based on Registerdebakel's Forest Prefab XXL (Part A). There were some good thoughts in there, but I had to do a lot of work on it.

Here's a quick list.

• I cut the area down from 32x32 to something more like a quarter of that.


• I made major changes to the walkmesh to cut off areas that were not accessible and also added a road.


• I re-textured most of the map to use grass to give it a more vibrant tone than the original's goal.


• The walkmesh required some major reworks to fix a number of places where walkmesh cutters were not used and the ground looked like it was made up of hexes.


• I also ran into an issue of there being over 25 types of trees, with each tree having unique seeds. This seemed to be breaking the 5 seed rule and I had to mass edit all of the trees and remove/replace a good amount of them.

While it still required a good deal of work (I'd guess something like 50+ hours) starting with the prefab still gave me a better end product. It also took me in some directions that I probably would not have gone if I'd started from scratch.

One down side I did have is that somewhere along the way I ran into a very nasty walkmesh bug. For some reason, after placing a hay pile placeable, the Toolset would crash if I tried to delete, then bake. This actually set me back a number of revisions and made me have to work around the bugged placeable. I probably lost two full weekends and a good amount of sanity on that one. It probably had something to do with me not updating this blog for a while either. I'm feeling inspired again and looking forward to wrapping this area up and then continuing to work on the non-DM conversations in the village.

I've got three quests planned for this area. One is done, one is in testing and the third I've just figured out how I want to do it. My hope is that this will allow players to jump into some action right away to help get some momentum going. I'm also hoping it will do a better job of showing them what's happening in the area instead of just having the people in town tell them.

OK, long post, but I had a ton to catch up on there. Thanks for reading!