Northern Winds: Dragonships. WIP (Status update 2021-6 on 255)

Born in a fishermen’s village, your idyllic life is taken away as the fates gives you the burden of ruling a village at a young age. Thrown into events that will change the lands of Abalusa forever, can you carve your own path and survive?

The one who first saw the white sails in horizon and black ravens circling above.

Northern Winds series are set in a fantasy world that takes roots in Baltic and Nordic mythology, culture and history around the time we call “Viking Age”.

Features
  • Play as male or female; straight, gay, or bi.

  • Build and customize your longship. Make your village prosper. Raid and trade with your warband! Fight against beast and men alike.

  • Have varied romance options and drama that comes along with going after multiple people (may end with your death).

  • Choose between four different fighting styles (Sword and Shield, Dual Axes, Two handed Long-Axe, Bow and Dagger).

  • Specific Lore section with pages of world’s mythology, culture and its historical counterparts (Walls of text for those who like to dig deeper).

Difficulty:

  • Getting ROs path difficulty is around 50-75% of the “right” choices in interactions with them. (getting with both twins is 90-100% “right” choices. Meant to be hard!
  • Good endings in chapters? They are pretty easy to get to. Not like in other games actually getting the bad end in chapter will be the challenge.
Warband oathgivers (companions and ROs)

With each chapter, relationships between companions will be explored more. By spending time with them player will learn more of their likes and dislikes, their personal problems.

MC can be just friends, have casual romance or serious one. And no, romance and relationships don’t end with sex or getting married. Certain oathgivers might even get together when you shun them away.

Also there are no restrictions of romancing many ROs at the same time, but if you don’t want to involve yourself in drama or keep being alive I wouldn’t suggest that (twins are exception).

All oathgivers can be declined to join you (except Gundar, but he can be killed, so no worries) Thus, you can finish game all by yourself. Alone. It can be a hard route that leads to sorrow and misery. Be warned.

Laine and Kosk: Wild twins that hold powers of nature. Usually are mischievous or blood thirsty.

  • Recruitable in Chapter 1.
  • Can be romanced individually or if you are very lucky both at the same time.
  • Younger than MC.

Viliendi: Oathsworn of King Sturlavg. Enjoys sea voyages and singing. First meeting can be deceiving of his true personality. Don’t underestimate his strength.

  • Temporary joins in Chapter 1 and 2. Recruitable at the end of Chapter 2.
  • Older than MC.

Urve: Priestess of Mothers. Can be very kind to people and very brutal against beasts. Possess shamanic powers and a secret pet. Holds her ale pretty well…

  • Recruitable at the end of Chapter 2.
  • Same age as MC.

Laup: Chieftain of Balg. Same as you have inherited chiefdom, but his is way wealthier than yours. Starts of as hated enemy/rival.

  • Can be either hated or befriended, or even romanced. The latter two will be hard.
  • Same age as MC
Current Progress

Total word count: ~68k (~10% is code, 3k is the Lore pages)

Chapter 1 – Blood-feud [Second draft passed]
Chapter 2 – Talons of War [Second draft passed]
Chapter 3 – Flight of Dragons [Vague outline done]
Chapter 4 – Wolfpack [???]
Chapter 5 – Sword Storm [???]
……
Chapter N – White sails, black ravens (the last chapter)

*First draft – general story written
*Second draft – grammar hammer, bug fixing
*Third draft – editing story, adding things, etc.
*Fourth draft – stat balancing and another pass for grammar.

Progress history by chapter upon the release date(for stat geek like me).

Chapter 1 – Blood-feud [05.01.2020] - 32k
Chapter 2 – Talons of War [30.05.2020] - 68k
Chapter 3 – Flight of Dragons [Hopefully before the 28.08.2020] - 100k mark?

Maps

Full changelog as of Chapter 2 release (07.06.2020)

Updated Chapter 1 scenes.

  • Text fixes. (story holes, world building updates and grammar)
  • Some coding efficiency.
  • Additional dialogue for Kosk at the hunt scene.
  • Rebalanced Laine’s and Kosk’s romance path difficulty.
  • Changes in fighting styles: due the sheer amount of possibilities and not to make 50% of fight scenes into repeated text thus “faking” word count, I have restricted to exactly what weapon character can wield. Depending on circumstances this can change. Also player will have ability to make their own and decorate it how they wish in chapter 3 along with the new ship.
    • Sword and Shield, Dual Axes, Bow and Daggers, Two handed Long-Axe
    • Depending on your choices you receive specific weapon at last parts of Chapter 1.
  • Turns out you can’t get good ending without having twins (oopsie~). Fixed that.
  • Bonus content for Chapter 1 (to quote my First Reader: “yey more content~”
    • After the hunt, if player doesn’t banish the twins, can make oathsworn ritual to accept them (new scenes with ability to customize how followers give oath to you and become your retinue).

Other:

  • Map redrawn and added new places. (I’m drawing it from a real 12th century map that I found in local museum. It represents Norsmen (Viking) river passages from Baltics to Rus and Black Sea. Of course even if anyone saw it irl, wouldn’t recognize it in my work~). Its not the final version, but I lack skill in PS to make it in style I have envisioned.
  • Saving on dashington enabled.
  • Changes on ROs
    • As I have decided not to go all in erotic stuff and keep it candles out style, each RO can be romanced by either male or female MCs.
    • Also there are no restrictions of romancing many ROs at the same time, but if you wanna keep being alive till the end I wouldn’t suggest going all in on them (twins are exception).

Stat changes are shown after choice is made in italics. Also crucial choices that impact story in a huge way have warning before the said choice.

Demo: https://dashingdon.com/go/1589
Tumblr: https://gbwilkas.tumblr.com/

At this stage choices matter and stats might be iffy at some parts.

Game has Lore section (Show Stats->Lore). You can find there a lot of culture and mythology information. Its recommended to read it as game goes on for better immersion and understanding. If you get lost in names of places there is a map too!

Most of character and place names are either derived from real historical people/places or a play on Norse, Baltic, Finno-Ugric and Slavic language trees.

WARNING: Game includes profanity, violence and notes on slavery.

This is ALPHA version, thus everything that can be read and seen may change in the future.

ANY feedback is very welcome. :slight_smile:

278 Likes

Welcome to the WiP community @Kefs.

Here are some basic links for beginning Choice-script authors

Master-List Links For Beginners
CSIDE Scripting Tool Web-Site

The first includes everything linked from tutorials to wikis and the second is a scripting tool to help you write more efficiently …

I have an interest in your subject matter and a bit of knowledge, so eventually I’d like to contribute feedback for you.

6 Likes

Oh thank you ^^. Before I started to actually do smth, I lurked forums for days and read a lot of links and tuts from here xD

2 Likes

Yes finally a WIP thats about “Vikings” eager to see what this story will hold an looking forward of seeing more from this game :smiley:

5 Likes

Excellent.

I will say one thing off the bat for you to consider: Most Americans and modern readers in the West won’t be familiar with the different religions and folklore of the time and area - so you may want to consider making a glossary page in the stats file that has short summaries that people can look over if they want to learn or are curious.

Also, what an exciting time in European history you have chosen to write about - can we follow the Norse down the Rus rivers and maybe help establish Kiev or enter Byzantine service? :wink:

lol.

4 Likes

Yep, I had in mind to explain more in info page. (for now it hold placeholder info that I wanted to put into here as first post. But yeah I will put more explanations and maybe even historic things that happened and how its reflected in game.)

“Norse down the Rus rivers and maybe help establish Kiev or enter Byzantine service?”

hmm haven’t thought about that…but know you gave me excellent idea for new chapter. :smiley: :smiley:

2 Likes

It’s something odd.
And village’s wise one

Baby

1 Like

Yeah first one already fixed…
second one…mby its my bad english, but doesn’t some people talk/say like that? I have to research that I guess.

Not in 13th century :grin:

Damn, that reminded me of the “Vikings” TV series.
Will play the game right now.
:smiley:

:stuck_out_tongue: :stuck_out_tongue:

Okey, gonna edit it -.-

activates lurk mode

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Hehe, i havent fleshed out all the ideas, but yeah ^^ (Actually Vikings showed in first episode fight against Baltic vikings xD …thou not much :frowning: )

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^Another lightning strike flashed in the horizon.

To the south.

Whose thunder.
:smiley:

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If you want, I can use PM instead of posting all the typos and grammar errors here.
:smiley:

Oh geez I can sense already my pride of knowing this language is faltering xD yeah probably better in PM.

“he one who’s thunder” its meant as the god’s Perkons.

Yeah, I hope you don’t take it as an insult, lots of typos. Still, not everyone is a native English speaker.
:smiley:
I’ll use PM.

2 Likes

Nah its oki, I just assumed reading these written lines for a week i would notice such things myself…

I can read my writing for months and still miss things. :gift_heart:

3 Likes


There was supposed to be an image there right?

1 Like