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Thief fan missions and campaigns

skacky

3D Realms
Developer
Joined
Mar 5, 2013
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2,506
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The City
Not many woodsie FMs. The Order of the Vine, Augustine's Revenge, Geller's Pride, Invitation to Castle Morgoth, Lord Beilman's Estate, The Hand of Glory, Projekt Hammer, Returning a Favor... most of these aren't Pagan in theme but are less known perhaps.
Man I wish vexd would finally finish and release Merrick's Cellar.
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
Best way for me to answer that is just to post the T1/Gold missions I keep around, which sadly are far too few:

A Noble Death
Augustine's Revenge
Autumn In Lampfire Hills
Between These Dark Walls
Calendra's Cistern
Deadly Darkness
Dirty Money
Endless Rain
Geller's Pride
Gems of Provenance
Gold in Fort Knocks
Hammerhead
Lord Bellman's Estate
Lorgan's Web
Nigel's Hidden Treasure
Prowler in the Dark
Returning a Favor
Sepulchre of the Sinistral
Shadow Politics
Shunned
The Chalice of Souls
The Order of the Vine
The Secret Way
The Skull of Herzeloyde
 

Yandros

Savant
Joined
Jan 24, 2015
Messages
186
Location
Fields of blue grass
YanRanTan's mission The Drymian Codex has a heavy pagan involvement in the story, as well as new pagan AIs, if you've never played it - but it is of course for T2.
 

Dev_Anj

Learned
Joined
Jan 14, 2015
Messages
468
Location
Auldale, near the great river
While browsing through TTLG I came across a very well written post related to level design:

Observations
I replayed Lord Edmund Entertains last night.
Bloody hell.

The authors of the current crop of ordained classics would do well to revisit missions like this and figure out what they've been missing. Because I hadfun, for the first time in a very long while. The most recent mission I genuinely enjoyed playing like this was The Focus, and it was an awfully long dry-spell before that one too.

The mission certainly isn't without its faults, of course. There are no light radiuses which can make sneaking too unforgiving in places. There's technical issues like roombrushing problems and double doors not being linked, and the mission layout is too linear and contrived for my liking. But there were so many things it did right.

  • Like AIs. Probably the best compliment I can give is this: it didn't feel like if I knocked out one AI, I might as well knock out them all, and I haven't been able to say that for a long while. It was a mission that genuinely rewarded sneaking, as opposed to ghosting. There were enough AIs to provide a challenge, with cunning overlappings of areas, but there were never too many in one area and most of the patrols made timing a pleasant challenge rather than a chore. Instead of throwing AIs at the player every 5 feet ("Expert really means expert!") the mission used lighting, terrain and floors very well to put the AIs it did have to the best advantage.

    To get personally critical for a moment, the very first scene of Coterie of Smokers was 9 guards guarding... a garden. If that doesn't explain why I stopped playing the mission right there, then you're probably reading the wrong thread.
  • Like loot. The total loot in the mission was 2008, and it was sparse and well-placed. The lord's table had 3 gold plates, an extravagance. The inn had one treasure goblet, hidden carefully at the back of a shelf. In a modern mission I would expect to walk out of there with 5 goblets (from the Low Poly Guild), 2 fine wines and the purse on someone's belt, and that's if the author had been feeling cautious that day.
  • Like architecture. This was one of the most detailed and elaborate missions at the time of release, but the careful simplicity was a breath of fresh air after the overwrought victoriana I've been getting for the past 2 years. Once again, more brushes and custom textures doesn't mean more atmosphere. Perhaps this is Thief 2's fault more than that of FM makers, but I think the starkness of Thief 1's late-medieval 'vibe' offers a much cooler and more involving feel, and I wish people would try to capture that more often. (I'm looking forward to that Thief 1 mission, Zaccheus!)
  • Like one of the best readables I have ever seen in an FM. Anyone planning on writing 7-page diaries for every character in their mission, and naturally I am not looking at anyone in particular, should read Lord Edmund's journal and decide if they can match it. If you can't, then don't. The other readables were also well-articulated, to the point and hinted rather than underlined.
  • Like being as long as it *needed* to be, and no more. This is something I know is more subjective right than most, but in my book more doesn't mean better and I'm just not a fan of long-winded FMs. A 4-hour FM simply does not contain double the fun of a 2-hour one, though it certainly can contain double the tedium.

I'm not saying LEE excelled, nor that these points are the be-all end-all. But its strengths highlighted the distinct flaws I've been seeing in modern missions, flaws that seem to have their roots more in current FM culture than personal technique.

Nor do I think this is just a matter of my personal taste. I've talked to many people who have expressed the same malaise with modern FMs, and who have also noticed the many authors who have stopped authoring and being part of the community since this climate shift. To put it bluntly, nobody seems to give a damn about good old fashioned gameplay anymore, which is to say gameplay with a small g that comes before the word 'style' in the dictionary.

So I guess the point of this post is, can we stop patting ourselves on the back for our miniature opuses and get back to making missions that are actually enjoyable? I'm getting tired of wading through Concept and Achievement and general self-indulgence in search of kernels of fun.

http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=90551

Not sure how relevant it is today, but it's worth noting for anyone designing levels for the Thief games, Dark Mod or even for commercial games in general.
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
It's still relevant in the broad strokes, though some of the finer details he comments on may have lost their meanings in the 11 years since he made that post.

But if I may point out what stood out in his post:

# Good level design is an underlying foundation of a good FM. Thief is the last game that should have linear hallways or "conveniently" placed terrain/furniture.
# Readables. If he thought they were bad back then, he'd flip his lid today. "Audiolog syndrome" is a pandemic in FM writing. While it gets the job done, it reeks too much of laziness.
# Appropriate length. This is one that many FM-authors of today just flat-out ignore on purpose. Yes, NewDark raises the stakes in what can be done...but does that mean that FMs should go all that distance? This is the biggest complaint I have against FMs like "Being Thief 2" - an ambitious cityscape-mission that had to be split into 2 parts because NewDark couldn't contain the author's full vision...yet the division between the 2 missions ended up being 95%/5% - the second mission could have been ignored entirely and the end of the first one cleaned up a bit to make everything much smoother.
 

Melan

Arcane
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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! I helped put crap in Monomyth
I remember that post; read it when I was getting into mission design in 2007, and kept nodding along. The 2003-2004 period was definitely a time like that in FM design. Lots of overwrought Victoriana, dime-a-dozen tragic family stories, frustrating design practices and lots of one-upmanship. In hindsight, it was also a period of FMs coming into their own as their own genre instead of the early phase of imitation and plain weirdness. But this also meant that many people just wanted their Thief to be the Victorian burglary simulator they never got in TDP, and only sorta got in TMA.

This is one of the reasons I like to replay early fan missions, because they are fun and inspiring in unexpected ways. I recently played The Hand of Glory on your recommendations, and while it has some really flat and badly proportioned architecture, it succeeds as a double breakin mission. Good clues, tight sneaking, interesting places to explore, and a few touches that are really worth stealing - simple things like a "fortified" barred window that opens with a lever.

(Lord Edmund was also an early model for my missions. I never believed in replicating things like Calendra's Cistern, but thought I could do something like Lord Edmund or The Circle of Strain 3, only with a few more extra locations. Bad Debts only expanded into its final XL-size due to getting scale consistently wrong in the editor. It was a mission that wanted to be anything but grandiose and huge, and utterly missed its target. How much plain incompetence shaped it may be a story worth telling, but it is probably better told in the form of an LP.)
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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33,048
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KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
So I just played through Errand Boy, the first mission of the Trickster's Gem Mine campaign, as it's one of the first missions I played thanks to Unkillable Cat's recommendation, and I rated it a solid 6/10 because it definitely shows potential and has great ideas, but the execution is kinda lacking. It stretched on for too long, usually I don't mind long missions - and with 2 hours, this is far from the longest I played - but this one grows tedious later on due to all the backtracking, and most of it looks like a typical early Thief FM, with rooms too large and empty. The concept is solid, but all the backtracking through city streets swarming with guards you're not allowed to knock out makes it a tedious affair, and there is some minor keyhunting involved, but that's mostly fine as the relevant keys are easy enough to find. There is some verticality, as you have to enter a few locked houses through the windows by using rope arrows, which is cool. Overall, a solid mission that could've been a lot more enjoyable if some things had been designed differently.

The mission's concept, however, is pretty great and shows some of that early FM creativity people here have mentioned.
 
Joined
Apr 19, 2008
Messages
3,059
Location
Brazil
Divinity: Original Sin
FUUUUUUUUU....

Playing through darkstone gem 2. Everything is going fine. 2 hours in. Forget to create multiple saves. Falls from hammerite tower. press f9 to reload, but i'm playing in a darkroom, accidentally preesed F5. Game is saved before death!!!

:x:x:x

Does this game has a fly cheat???
 

Max_b5

Augur
Joined
Feb 8, 2015
Messages
217
Location
Argentina
FUUUUUUUUU....

Playing through darkstone gem 2. Everything is going fine. 2 hours in. Forget to create multiple saves. Falls from hammerite tower. press f9 to reload, but i'm playing in a darkroom, accidentally preesed F5. Game is saved before death!!!

:x:x:x

Does this game has a fly cheat???


Yes it does. Load Dromed > Go into game mode > Load your saved game > Press SHIFT+Q and save in a safe place. Exit Dromed, execute the game and load your saved game.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Messages
33,048
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KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Holy shit, I don't know why I missed Darkstone Gem when the first episode came out - but now I'm starting from the beginning and have a whole bunch of cool missions to play! The first mission already looks gorgeous as fuck, I love the lighting and texturing, and that is probably the most atmospheric Mechanist church I've ever seen. Usually, Mechanists don't really fit that well into the Thiefy atmosphere, or basically have a different, "colder" atmosphere compared to the other factions, which are darker and more "earthy". But this Mechanist church? It almost seems Hammerite, and fits perfectly into the general Thief atmosphere. It's probably due to the lighting.
 
Joined
Apr 19, 2008
Messages
3,059
Location
Brazil
Divinity: Original Sin
Well, finished playing Darkstone Gem series. One thing I loved about these missions is how a simple door or window is an entrance to a big new area, instead of just a small closed room. That hammer compound in the last mission was bigger than I expected. It was like a level inside of a level.

Oh, and as it turned out, I had to restart because my savegame had a dead garrett...

Now that I finished, today I played the most of Cryptic realms, and I'm missing one secret. The problem is, I now know where this secret is supposed to be, but in the black & white version I'm playing, there's a solid wall behind a breakable wall, making it impossible to fetch the last loot. I've seen only the color version of the walkthrough, and there's no wall in the secret room, only the breakable. Is that how it's supposed to be?

EDIT: well, i downloaded a new version and it fixed...
 
Last edited:

moraes

Arcane
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Joined
Jan 24, 2011
Messages
701
Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Codex USB, 2014 Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
So, I'm playing the unofficial expansion (T2X) and I'll finish it soon. What are some of the best FMs out there? Also, is there a website wich collects and archives these missions, like the old NWN Vault sites?

And should I play Deadly Shadows?
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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27,088
Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
To answer your first question, I suggest reading this very thread from the start.

As for your second question, there's a recent thread over at TTLG that answers that better than I could, hopefully one of the TTLG regulars that post here can point you towards that.

As for Deadly Shadows...yes, play it. It's not as good as Thief 1+2, but it's still a neat stealth game, and there's a unofficial patch out that helps make it closer to T1+T2 in various ways.
 

Melan

Arcane
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Civitas Quinque Ecclesiae, Hungary
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! I helped put crap in Monomyth
http://thiefmissions.com/ is the main fan mission archive, but it is down at the moment.

TTLG maintains a mission listing by type that's fairly handy, with a special category linking to "best of" and "recommend me" threads. There is a 4chan FM guide that aligns well with my tastes (potential bias: it starts with one of my missions in the #1 slot +M):
4chanfmchart_zpszgoc2fam.jpg

large: https://i.warosu.org/data/vr/img/0013/97/1392328437271.jpg
In no particular order, my top suggestions to continue from T2X would be:
  • The Seven Sisters by Lady Rowena
  • Skacky's Thief Gold series - Shadow Politics, Within These Dark Walls, Endless Rain, The Chalice of Souls and Dirty Money
  • The Rocksbourg Series by DrK
  • Gems of Provenance by Stinkykitty (this four-mission pack is a bit rough around the edges, but very rewarding when you get into it)
  • Purah's mission series - Autumn in Lampfire Hills, Calendra's Cistern and Calendra's Legacy (features non-standard gameplay)
  • The CoSaS missions, all two of them.
T2X is the most evenly polished "full campaign" for Thief, but the individual missions are arguably not among the best. Expect the recommended fan missions to be more uneven, for both better and worse.

Deadly Shadows is worth playing, but don't expect it to be nearly as good as the first two games.
 

Yandros

Savant
Joined
Jan 24, 2015
Messages
186
Location
Fields of blue grass
But it's outdated. taffersparadise.net is being constantly updated.
Unless I'm doing it wrong, Taffersparadise's latest mission in the big list is from Apr 2012, although there are individual posts about recent missions. Thiefmissions' big list appears to be complete through Nov 2013, plus has a couple more since then (which happen to be mine for some reason... maybe I'm the only author who ever emails him asking him to host any more).
 
Joined
Apr 19, 2008
Messages
3,059
Location
Brazil
Divinity: Original Sin
Unless I'm doing it wrong, Taffersparadise's latest mission in the big list is from Apr 2012, although there are individual posts about recent missions. Thiefmissions' big list appears to be complete through Nov 2013, plus has a couple more since then (which happen to be mine for some reason... maybe I'm the only author who ever emails him asking him to host any more).

Well, for me, Taffer's paradise has all the new missions of all games, including the dark mod. They have a list for each game separately. Just click on each icon of each game.

Most recent that aren't on the list are on the main page:

 

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