Pactbinder (Dark / Eldritch Fantasy University WIP, 168k words, MAJOR UPDATE FEB-26 [+97k words])

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Every single new thing I learn about her just makes me like her more.

I haven’t dabbled too much into other character’s variables, but I find the amount of permutations in Alice’s something to behold. She’s got a “sus” and “exp” variable (not completely sure yet what the latter signifies), plus you can get stuck with Alice instead of Adelais and lose some important background information about her (like how she’s of French origin. Quelle surprise!) if you don’t explore the surroundings before diving into the fountain. Like I did. I’ve also been code diving because increasing her opinion is not as straightforward as I thought it would be. All in all, her path is quite the premium experience and we’re at only two chapters.

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Haha, I’m glad that comes across when you read the story naturally! I was hoping that she’d feel that way to immerse the reader / make them feel a sense of what it’s like actually interacting with her; the other characters emote better, so I think you pick up more of a vibe for what they do and don’t like both when they speak and when they’re reacting to the Pactbinder’s choices.

Side note / poll comment.
I find it incredibly interesting how much the Tumblr and forum votes diverge on almost everything except Alice / Adelais dominating the RO vote. Before releasing the demo, I did wonder whether her vibes would be outweighed by the fact that she has like a third of the dialogue of the other characters (though I did think people might like her, and you can still spend a good bit of time with her to be fair), but clearly not!

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I think its expressivness? Seems to go up when you get her to show her emotions

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So obvious an answer, yet it escaped me completely. Not seeing the forest for the trees moment. Thank you.

In retrospect, it is a clear character arc for her, to “live more”. Expressiveness sure seems like the right way to go about showing it.

In another retrospect, I’ve played way too many games and I got fixated on the exp being a stand-in for experience points. No wonder it didn’t seem to click in for me.

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I’ve replayed the available content a few more times, and I’ve got some more random thoughts. I know myself to be quite a verbose person, so please inform me if I’m prattling too much.

Some more (baseless) speculation

Upon several subsequent playthroughs, I’ve come to the conclusion that the Pactbinder’s secret is not as secret as I initially presumed. Leaving Adeleis aside, Silas and Chancellor Harrow are also apparently knowledgeable to a certain extent about the MC’s situation (Silas is rather purposefully ambiguous, and Harrow I mostly assume to be aware from his mysterious staring). This makes me question how grave of a threat is the Entity if all these people, who (might) know of it, don’t seem too concerned about it.

Given that the Entity requires the Pactbinder to do its bidding, I assume it is limited in its potential to affect what it essentially calls a “lesser realm”. The origin of such a restriction I can only presume: perhaps it’s just a feature of its very nature, or is a limitation imposed by those mages of yore (Old King/Revenant?)

On the matter of magic itself, Eleanor says that it was discovered after Caesar’s Civil War, and even though Layla says the mages of the Library of Alexandria indicate a discovery prior to said event, she’s still rather amazed by Hightower’s prowess and and its “old, old” use of magic. Besides the obvious bias of Hightower’s narrative, it is possible that magic was discovered independently in several regions at different points in time, instead of it originating from one single place.

I’m curious if this could be related to the Sorcerer-Kings who, we are informed, traced back their power to some God(s). Perhaps the discovery of magic is made through contact with some “divine” entity, or even a pact. This pact might infuse the being of the pactbinder with some affinity to magic, which gets passed down and so we get the Gifted bloodlines.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but the wording of the following phrase “Not so with you. Like the Sorcerer-Kings of yore, for you all things are permitted.” makes me think that our Pactbinder is not the first pactbinder. And it is perhaps a pact with a “divine” being that kickstarted Hightower’s creation. Who that divine being might be, I have nary a clue (the Entity, maybe? That fresco sure makes it seem important to Hightower, plus the “beware the revenant” bit which might imply an adversarial dynamic).

Perhaps it is the presence (however limited) of such “divine” beings in the first place that allows the proliferation of magic. We are told that the number of mages is declining. The origin of such a decline could be the lack of contact/pacts with the potential higher beings. The original pactbinder’s affinity for magic might become diffused over the ensuing generations and render that bloodline less and less capable of tapping into that power.

Leaving aside my penchant for wild theorising, I find the worldbuilding very interesting and well executed. There are some serious layers of mystery stacked one on top of the other which are presented in a digestible way, i.e. not thrown in the reader’s face. Just enough teasing to get the message across, but not enough to overwhelm them. The several playthroughs I went through made me appreciate it all the more.

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Which, is why if it does happen that others might see my mc using life magic it certainly will not be in public it will likely be in the old ruins we’re going to explore with the also clandestine Explorer’s Society and even then only if the situation is truly dire and likely only to save someone’s life (my mc has no problem with letting Fin be the regular healer). And in the case of the Explorer’s Society it would already be a clandestine society and by then my mc and the others will hopefully be good enough friends or at the very least my mc will know enough of their secrets to insure mutual silence. Even for his first mastery, the matter one, should my mc get as good at it as Julian he will be far less eager to show that off in public too and will likely downplay his abilities there too at least somewhat.

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I love warlock stories. Sign me up twice!

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We have a winner!

One quick request folks - if it’s OK, please could discussion of variables and code be spoilered going forwards? I’m 100% fine with code diving (and happy to chat about it too!), just keen to ensure nobody new reading the thread gets spoiled on stuff if they don’t want to be. Thanks!

Definitely not, I enjoy reading your thoughts! It’s fun to see what conclusions you can draw through knitting together the disparate info hidden across different dialogue trees and the micro-branching already in the game. You’ve found some interesting lines of inquiry, too…

Sounds like a smart strategy to me!

Thanks so much for your interest!

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Oh sorry about that will do my best to remember to spoiler it in future

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No worries at all! Really appreciate it

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February 14th Update

Hi all,

Fortnightly update post (and happy Valentine’s Day to you all!). I can’t decide whether it feels like a long or a short time since my last fortnightly update—I think it feels like Chapter 2 has been out much longer than the ~ 10 days or so it has actually been released for…

  • I intentionally paused writing on Pactbinder after launching Chapter 2, so I could focus on any bug fixes or tweaks that people pointed out (plus also just to take a break, writing 167k words or so over the course of 3 months was not easy). I’ve also spent time thinking ahead to the structure of ‘Act 2’, though I won’t elaborate on that for now!
  • As such, whilst I have started Chapter 3, I’ve only written a couple of thousand words of it so far. As of today, however, I’m returning to writing-focus mode.
  • Chapter 3 will be mainly focused on the Pactbinder’s first term at Hightower, so will primarily consist of classes, the Pactbinder’s choice of Society and the first magic choice lock-in. Oh, and Halloween. My gut feeling is that it will be longer than Chapter 1 (about 56k words) but possibly shorter than Chapter 2 (which was about 97k words). Either way, it’ll get us past 200k total.
  • I’m hesitant to commit to a hard timeline just yet - as predicted, work has gotten a lot busier since the start of February. I’m going to keep aiming for my usual 10k words a week target but I suspect I’ll be missing that target more often and overshooting it less often!
  • As such, tentatively I want to say that Chapter 3 will be out by mid-May. If I can get it out earlier, I will - as always, I’ll keep you guys updated and I suspect this deadline is going to shift a bit more than the Chapter 2 one did. I’m just not sure if that means earlier or later yet!

As always, feedback and constructive criticism on demo contents continue to be extremely gratefully received. I love hearing about what people like about the story and characters, and what they think has the potential to be improved upon (as well as comments like typos and individual sentence flow points which are also gratefully received!)

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Me starting the demo: yay, time to Completely and Utterly Ignore All ROs like I usually end up doing because none of them jive with me
Me after the demo: I’ve only had Finley for a day and a half, but if anything happened to him, I would kill everyone in this room and then myself :slightly_smiling_face:

Still a little bit uncertain about how on earth my utter nerd of a character ended up with a 20 in might, but guess the definition of might might have been a little more blurry than just falcon punching things. Well, time to play a few more times to figure it out. So far, I seem to be able to play the character I wanted to play here without any missing choices or “that’s not what I meant”, which is always great. But guess I’ll do a few more different personalities in the meantime just to see what I’m missing - just skimming the forum it seems like that might be worth it.

The characters also seem distinct enough for me to get a good read on their personalities, but without being too, erm, character-y? Sometimes you can just instantly sort the main cast of a game into the narrative niches they’re filling, and they’re so tailor-made to embody a theme that they kinda stop feeling like people, but these people so far seem to be more subdued in this regard. So they end up being more akin to people I’d actually want to hang around in real life, which is lovely.

I have one thing I’d like to ask, no, BEG on my knees for going forward, seeing as it’s another “mystery in magical school/university” kind of setting. For the love of all that’s holy, including possibly our eldritch patron, PLEASE don’t make actually trying to study a wrong choice. I’m a simple person - I play a game about magic school, I’m actually curious about going to magic classes and doing my magic homework, as boring as it may sound. But I’ve played too many games where the choices you get after the first few introductory ones are always either “actually study?? in?? your?? study place??” or “go interact with the Main Plot”, and it’s always so frustrating :sob: Just maybe keep it in mind when planning the choices - so that we are allowed to keep the balance between being a diligent-ish student and doing the necessary sneaking around. I’d rather have no choice when it’s really necessary to go do plot progression, really, than fail by being too good of a student :rofl:
But that’s just minor wailing about a personal pet peeve. Although seeing as we can already list “I want to learn magic, gdi!” as our main motivation, I am already positive about this aspect - and pinky promise in my free time I will go and sneak around like a good little pactbinder as requested by Eldritch Eldritchsson :joy:

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I just finished the demo and this was a fantastic new game brimming with potential, so much so that I had to post my thoughts on the forum!

I loved the unique approach to the common magic school plotline by having the MC use identity theft and a Faustian deal with an eldritch entity to steal the protagonist role for themselves, as well as the Lovecraftian mystery churning just beneath the surface of the school fantasy esthetic. As a casual horror fan I think you’d do well to lean a bit more into the creepiness factor (One Knight Stand does this really well; huge rec for that game), but overall I think you struck a good balance between all the tones.

The cast was also pretty fun. It’s still too early for me to get an accurate assessment of them all, but for now they do their jobs as supporting characters well enough, and I’m excited to get into more of their backstories in the future, especially Alice’s.

While I only played the demo a few times, I was so engrossed with it during my first run I ended up picking all choices and routes in a single playthrough, ha. Every other run after that was just to create a new MC future playthroughs and romance routes (i.e. Murder Happy MC, Flirty MC, Guilty MC, etcetera).

Though my favorite– and main– MC as of now is the brooding bruiser MC, who’s trying to smother their heart of gold so they can figure out the truth about their otherworldly Patron and whatever world-ending threat they know is coming. I felt like playing the stoic, morally grey badass would be a good, equally out-of-genre fit for the protagonist role, which nicely contrasts our doppleganger’s presumably bright-eyed, fish-out-of-water, chosen one archetype.

Once we get to the magic classes portion I plan on focusing on either Life Magic or Spirit Magic as my “public” magic choice, thanks to their seeming versatility, being complimentary to my 20+ level Might stat and because Mind Magic works best when no one knows you have it– which will be my other specialty. It mostly depends on how each respective magic’s scenes play out and their compatibility with my character however. But I’m for sure picking the Secret Explorer’s Society as my club unless we get a new option.

I did have a couple of questions I was hoping you could answer however:

  1. How many chapters do you think this game will have?
  2. Do you already have a basic outline for the story planned out?
  3. Do you read, watch, or do anything to help keep you motivated? Like YA books or dark fantasy shows and the like?
  4. Most importantly, will we eventually be able to steamroll like 90% of the setting once we get our stats high enough? I’m okay with having a bunch of threats that can still challenge us, but I really want the option to play as an overpowered character when we reach the endgame if possible.

Wishing you luck that you’re still able to get some free time for yourself despite Feb getting busier, and I can’t wait for Magic Month May!

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Thanks so much to both of you for these really lovely comments - was a pleasure reading them both this morning and I’m very glad that you’re enjoying the story so far.

Might is a bit more than just strength, yep - its also stamina and durability - the ability to walk long distances at pace (versus explosive speed which is within Finesse’s wheelhouse), take a hit, etcetera. So any choices made in those veins during the prologue might have made your character a tough guy!

I’m really glad this is working for you - I was intentionally fairly reserved with my presentation of the cast because I wanted them to feel like people, all trying to figure each other (and the MC) out to an extent during their first few days together, even if it risked making them not leave as much of a strong initial impression, so I’m glad that came across.

This is actually pretty much my plan! My goal is to make the core plot relatively structural to the story, for the most part; something that the Pactbinder will always engage with (even if they get choices on how to engage with it). My current plan is for the MC to automatically commit time to studying the Mastery that they choose as their ‘official’ magic, so it won’t compete for their uses of free time. I think it doesn’t make sense given the broader context of the story and the Patron’s instructions for a Pactbinder to neglect all magical study and training outright.

In my mind, ‘free roam’ sections in a story like this are best used to let the player shape their character with character defining pursuits; training stats, exploring ruins, researching mysteries, getting to know townsfolk, snooping around, studying additional Masteries, etc etc -all stuff that can and will impact / foreshadow / overlap with the plot and how it pans out, since these things can affect their abilities, relationships, information they have access to, etc. but aren’t mandatory to drive the core narrative itself.

Hopefully that makes sense.

Will respond to next post separately!

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Thanks again for the lovely comment - glad that the cast is of initial interest, and the tonal balance is working for the most part. I’m intentionally fairly careful with the horror undertones as I want to ration it carefully for the parts where I really want it to matter, but I’m definitely looking forwards to opportunities to dial it up where appropriate.

I defo need to check out OKS at some point too, I’m a sucker for Arthurian stuff!

To answer your specific questions:

13 parts including Prologue and Epilogue - so 11 ‘main’ chapters - is the current structure. I’m not strongly wedded to the exact chapter count, so reserve the right to tweak slightly to combine or split out chapters if I think needed, but I think those numbers will likely end up right.

Yes - I have an overall plot treatment, an outline for each of the story’s acts and shorter comments on what core plot elements I expect to happen in each chapter.

Inspirations

A fairly eclectic mix of stuff, much of which is not really YA! Some of the stuff that inspired me:

  • Books: The Secret History, Babel, the Potter stuff, a tiny bit of Lovecraft. A bit of the His Dark Materials books. A bit of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.
  • More Books: The History of the Modern British Isles: The Double Crown. A little bit of Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. Also, Paradise Lost by Milton and The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain, for a couple of specific characters….
  • Interactive Fiction: Fallen Hero, the Keeper books, Creme De La Creme, the Golden Rose, the Infinity Saga (not the only IF games I love, far from it, but the ones that inspire me for one reason or another and made me feel as though Pactbinder was best suited to the IF medium)
  • Vibes: Expedition 33 (mainly the music), Disco Elysium (there is a very subtle reference to DE in Pactbinder actually!), a lot of poetry but in particular TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, Four Quartets and to a lesser extent The Hollow Men.
  • A lot of other music too - Paris Paloma, Florence and the Machine, a bit of Radiohead, Tchaikovsky, Holst (to whom Silas owes the inspiration for his family name), Mozart, Boa, plenty of other stuff…At some point I’ll try to do character playlists.

Special shout-outs to The Secret History and Babel; as someone who historically actually (bizarrely) isn’t necessarily the biggest fan of Dark Academia, Secret History was the one that made me go like ‘I get it!’

And I admire what Babel was going for, even if one of the things that inspired me to write Pactbinder was kind of wanting to respond to the book, in a weird way! Though that initial thought has merged with a million other things since.

Very mild spoilers on the MC’s potential / power level below (nothing I think people couldn’t already extrapolate from the stuff at the end of C2).

MC's Power Thoughts

The Pactbinder has pretty much the highest magical potential in the setting, or up there at least; as the Patron has implied, the Pact is pretty OP. In fact, they have the potential to be amongst the strongest mages to have ever lived. That said, I would hesitate to call the story a true power fantasy.

This is still the Pactbinder’s first year of studying magic, so even by the story’s ‘endgame’ we will leave them with a lot to learn. There are a couple of threats even a combat-specialist Pactbinder won’t be able to catch up to in a year.

That said, the story has elements of power fantasy; the Pactbinder has a big advantage over 95% of their fellow first-years, having naturally stronger magic and the ability to learn multiple Masteries. There will be opportunities for them to prove themselves against older students too…

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Hmm. Food for thought, that’s for certain. Also, the Dostoevsky classics are quite a signal. For what precisely, I don’t know.

Divinity? Faith? Doubt?

Now I’m in that phase of my theorising where I start seeing patterns that fit my suppositions. I hope I won’t go too off the rails.

Nevertheless, it seems that now I have to go through a few more playthroughs to see if this generous trove of inspirations might unearth something about the story.

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Haha, I hope you enjoy if you do run through again! There are quite a few unintentional red herrings in those inspirations, fair warning - some of those inspirations are more about the prose, the story structure, the dialogue, the vibes, etc etc than they necessarily are about the plot and worldbuilding…

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This was very enjoyable to read. Hope to see major updates to this later on. Im more or so interested in the patron and more about them in this Game. The characters were well written and well introduced.

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Dark academia isn’t my usual go to but the writing in this is really charming and creative. Julian’s character description is my favourite. I also love that we play as a zealous ‘normal person’ who has ripped the magic out of someone else to inflirate elitist magical society. It’s so brutal and makes the mc much more interesting than if they were a passive victim and/or a chosen one. We’re a warlock in a world of mages.

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