Does seem like our rebel has a penchant for finding trouble wherever they are. Really it’s the Hegemony’s fault though. You can build a refuge all you want but they can’t be ignored when they come for their blood and taxes. Like how you can’t ignore a Xaos-storm on the horizon, until we found that safe haven in Sojourn. Remarkably calm and quiet time there, except for the looming threat of the Hegemony raining fire, but still.
I’ve felt something similar about the whole game, but less about boredom/action and more that there’s not a singular universal experience of Stormwright (by design, I think). You can take two people’s first playthrough and find two dramatically different stories from beginning to end. The anchors of the plot are the revelations about aether and Theurgy as told by Cerlota; the discovery of the City as a safe haven; our meeting with the leader of the Rim Commotion (at least half of it); the discovery of Irduin as an anomaly, and the rising tensions created by the Telone and the Theurge. Strip away the variation, that’s the spine: a (not causally linked) series of thought-provoking discoveries. Blood and taxes. Everything in between – a great deal of freedom, and it’s up to [what’s in] that freedom to drive the action forward. A danger there is that it can be easy to just remember the action or lack thereof.
This is different than Game 1, where there’s a much more shared rhythmic march of doom, constant crisis and response. The threats are the same; our self-expression is in how we respond. For Game 2, not even the threats are the same, and a key question the story asks is where the threat even lies. The choice of rebels of whether Irduin’s order should be preserved or destroyed (or whether to care at all) is probably the biggest example of that, completely reframes the drama in Irduin.
That does make it harder to balance and is something playtesting will ultimately have to sort out.
I suspect high suspicion vs. low suspicion trade-off is going to be a major line that we’ll have to look at once the endings are out, especially since setting that threshold is a numbers balancing question. The Ulmey focus is a good example of that: alleged fragments of a Shayarin Codex are a big deal for those interested in religion, but for now that seems exclusive to those [low suspicion] trusted by Ulmey. (But I do hope people who focus on the priest and innkeeper aren’t expecting a ton of classic action)
Separately, my biggest concern is that people will miss some of the best stories in the game just because they’re even just slightly out of the way, but Havenstone’s discussed that before and it’s a philosophical difference. Vigil in particular comes to mind, but also the conversations with Maurs. The parts of Game 1 that got me back into the story for good in 2021 were parts I’d missed when I first played the game (in 2018): the final conversation with Ganelon, the in-depth conversations with Kala/Kalt, Simon/Suzane in the Brecks, in all their variations. Nothing particularly hidden, just off my beaten path enough that it was a “holy shit” moment to discover them when trying out different things.
But that’s the difference between writing the game and reading it. It’s meaningful because it wasn’t served to me on a silver platter, and what hits for me might not hit for someone else. Maurs and Tamran are good examples of that: I’ve talked before how I enjoy their stories, and they alone demonstrate the narrative significance of Irduin for me, but that’s me as a reader collapsing the catbox story into one thread.
I think the goal is to inspire a similar sense of almost providence to other routes, the click of “This is why I’m here in this moment, to do this, to remember this.” We’ll see how it goes.
At the very least, with extremely limited information, I like the idea of incorporating parts of what would’ve been Chapter 9: Master of Fragments into the end of Game 3, as a sort of Scouring of the Shire. It completes the journey of exile, discovery, and return, changed, that spans all the way back to the Fourth Harrowing. Though there is merit to leaving things not quite complete – cracking open the nutshell of Grand Shayard is probably the biggest “The world’s mine oyster” moment we can have yet, and there’s something to that kind of open-ended hope.
Even if the ending of Uprising is, strictly speaking, running away from certain death, it’s also the world opening up to a place our character had never imagined they could go. But when I finished my first game of Uprising and read that
Here ends Part One of Choice of Rebels.
The rebellion will continue in Choice of Rebels: Stormwright.
I had no expectation that it would ever continue, no clue for how many parts if it did, and the thought that all of the next book would be set in the Xaos-lands (a belief I expect plenty of others to share – though I should note that the Steam page for Stormwright still has an outdated description referencing Grand Shayard). Future books didn’t really factor in; I still had enough to imagine the broad shape of the future rebellion. I think inspiring that imagination and refining it as we
is the point. And that imagination isn’t on a timetable of 5 or 6 books or 10 or 20 years, even if the rest of us are, what’s key is making each book standalone fun and thought-provoking.