King of Dragon Pass. A wonderful game. A unique game. So unique that it's hard to put it in a genre. There is no other game like it. If any game could be called innovative, this is it. And the graphics are wonderful, too. More beautiful than Oblivion could ever wish to be. So, why is it that this game is so unique and unlike anything else? Well, you'll see.
This is the starting screen. A nice hint on the graphics of the game, already. And some wonderful music playing there. The music will be wonderful throughout the game, and really set the mood. It changes in every season and during some special events, of which there are plenty. Well, so let's start a new game, shall we?
Now we'll have to create our clan. The clan creation process is very interesting and nicely made. It's made up like a story about the old times when the gods walked together with man on the earth, and you gotta choose your clan's decisions it made back then. This will determine things like who your main deity is, what race is your arch enemy, and so on.
Those decisions are made by getting questions like this and having to choose one of the answers, much like character creation in ADOM or Elder Scrolls. The effects of the answer you choose are obvious, of course, and determine some basic things of your clan, as I said. Also, before each decision appears a picture depicting the scene, which is painted in a bit blurry and mystical way to show its mythical character.
There are several decisions to be made, and after that you'll be presented with a screen showing you what your clan is like.
Here you see the overview of what your clan has done. Especially the choice of accepting the strangers as Thralls is an important one, as it determines if you can have slaves or not. Take them as Thralls, you can have slaves; adopt them as family, you can't. Clicking on any of those decisions lets you change them again. Then you finally type in a name for your clan and choose a difficulty and the game length, where in a short game you must only be the king of a small clan alliance for a few years, and in a long game you must become king of whole Dragon Pass. So, let's start!
Now we're greeted by the new year screen, as I call it. You'll see this screen at the beginning of every year. While now it doesn't show any real information, later it will be quite important as it shows you the important facts of your clan economy and development.
Basically, you see how many more people, goods and animals you clan has gained. Cattle is the most important resource in the game, as it is used for sacrifices and as a kind of money, and if you're low on food it can provide you with meat.
Now, after continuing from the New Year screen, you can allocate your clan magic to certain things like farming or hunting, which makes those more successful. Then you'll be greeted by the population screen, showing you info about your population. You can also assign people to different professions here, like hunters and crafters, you can hold a feast or give gifts to your farmers or weaponthanes. Feasting and giving gifts increases the happiness of your population and your reputation among them. At the top of the screen you can select the different screens and skip the current turn by clicking on the sunwheel between the date. At the bottom you see your council. You can change the councilmen by reorganizing your clan. The councilmen will give you info, tell you their opinion or give you hints on what to do. Those hints aren't always the right thing to do, though, they just reflect their opinion. To hear their opinion, just click on their portrait any time. Now, let's look on the other screens.
That's the screen where you manage war things. You can build fortifications, train your people to be weaponthanes, assign your weaponthanes to patrol your lands and make raids against other clans. Raids will make you lead a war party and have the possibility of killing as many of them as possible, taking prisoners or just skirmish. Cattle raids will send a small group of soldiers to capture some cattle. So, let us make a raid on the Konthasos clan with whom we have a feud...
On this screen you can choose the clan which you want to assault and how many soldiers you want to send. Let's attack the Konthasos clan, then!
This screen appears after attacking a clan [or after being attacked by someone], and you can choose the basic tactics, the goal of your warriors and how much magic to use during the fight. After choosing all of that, the battle results are calculated.
Sometimes, though, something special happens and one of your leaders has to react to it. You can choose how he should react to the threat. There is no best choice in those situations, but I usually let him lead the soldiers to victory [then a description how he collects some warriors and leads them into the fight shows] or let him fight hard [which shows a description of how he fights]. Either he's successful, and beats the enemies, or fails, and either has to retreat or might even die. Once I won a battle but my hero was still slain, which was a sad moment. Well, in the end I won this battle and took a few prisoners who now serve as my thralls.
Now we shall look at the trade screen. The black lines connecting our clan name with others shows that we have a trade agreement with them and constantly trade goods with them, which gives us a profit of a few goods each year. You can also send one of your nobles to trade with some clan [give them some goods in exchange of other goods] or to start a trade agreement with them.
Here you can see the diplomacy screen, where you can send one of your nobles to make an alliance with one of the other clans, and also select to see only those clans with which you have a certain relation, or all clans.
Here you see the Farming Screen, showing how much food you're expected to harvest till next year, and how much land you have assigned to farming, cattle and wilderness. You can also set how much of which kind of crops you plant, while some give more food than others but are less reliable to grow well. Farming land is needed to plant crops, pasture for feeding your cows and sheep, and wilderness to feed your swine and let your hunters hunt some game.
Here's the Religion Screen, where you can sacrifice cows and goods and even slaves to your gods to either get a bonus or to learn new secrets [new blessings that you can choose when building a temple, or a new legend], build temples to get permanent blessings [requiring yearly sacrifices] or go on a heroquest, which I will talk about later.
Here you can see the Exploration Screen, where you can basically send a small adventuring party to explore the lands. I'll talk about exploration more in depth later on, but first let's look at the...
...Saga Screen! Here you can see the different sagas that you know, and those with a small circle besides them mean that you know their details. Knowing the details of a Saga iis required to go on a heroquest. But more on that later.
This is one of the Sagas we know in detail, the Sword Story. You can see a pic showing a scene from the Saga, and you can read through the whole saga. Not every saga has a heroquest associated with it, but if you want to go on such a quest you should read the saga that it's about before going on the quest. It is important to know the details of what the gods did on that quest, so your hero can do the same and succeed.
Now here's the Clan History. On that screen you see what your clan has done and what the prophets have said for the coming year. Not much to see here yet, as we've just started the game. Let's go exploring, then.
Now we're going to assign a small adventuring group to explore our own Tula, and guess what they found? Yay, some Ivory which we can use to craft things out of! Those goods we can use for trading, then. Nice find!
Let's go on exploration in our Tula again, shall we?
Now our explorers have found a rock where a spirit resides in! I chose to give it annual sacrifices, and the spirit promised to aid me with his blessings in return. The spirit stone will appear in your shrine list from now on. Well, let's go on then... but wait, something is happening now!
And now we're talking about the real thing. The core feature of the game. Random [or not-so-random] events! Here's some warriors of the god Humakt wanting some help from us. We can get the advice of our councilmen by clicking on their portraits at the bottom, but the one councilman who is specialized on the nature of the event [in this case war] always gives us advice automatically. The blue choices are the ones that he would suggest, while the others might also be good choices. Usually you should help priests or warriors who visit you, as it raises your reputation with the god they worship, and you can get a reward, even, like your warriors bringing back some loot with them.
Another event, now some priestesses of Uralda offering to make a ritual for us.
And another one, this time a bit more severe and where the choice is more important. Choosing a divination is almost always a good idea, as your ancestors saw who did it. I conducted a divination, and was told that people of our enemy clan did it! Then I chose to raid them as a punishment, and my people were happy that we punished them. Yay!
Another exploration event after exploring my Tula. I conducted a divination again, and my ancestors told me that the spirits in there are benevolent and I should send for some shamans to raise them. The shamans want a few cows as payment, and then they raised the spirits, and they promised to help me.
Now for the other unique and interesting feature of the game: Heroquests. I'll load a savegame of my other clan here, because our new clan doesn't know a lot of sagas yet.
Let's start the Quest "Ernalda feeds the tribe". Jenesta is the best of my nobles for this quest, so I'll take her. Every noble has different attributes like Strength and Wisdom, and also different wisdom in different skills like farming or war. So, let's send her on the quest!
Now we can choose what benefit the quest shall bring. Cows important, so I'll let her raise their health. Always keep in mind though that your hero may die during her quest.
Now the quest has started. Our hero will encounter different situations. The best way to react to those situations can be read in the sagas. The best way here would be to just suffer Daga's blows and survive them without mourning.
So, she survived, which is good. I had heroes die at that point already. This is where the stats come into play. Heroes with good stats have higher chances to survive than those with low ones, obviously. So, not only choosing the right action but also the strength of your hero is needed to get successfully through a heroquest. I'll just show the whole quest in screenshots, but without the solutions, as this would be kinda spoilery, and the solutions don't always work.
I managed to convince the elves to give me the seed, but if your hero isn't good enough in diplomacy she can't convince them and you must offer them a gift, which is taken from your clan then. In this case it's magic, but later it can even be the lives of a few of your tribe.
So, she's made it successfully through the Quest! This not only gives the reward, but also happiness among the people over the successful heroquest.
Heroquests are usually quite diverse and very intersting, and some have multiple solutions to them.
So, well, that's it. Most of the game's fun lies in the heroquests and especially in the events, which can lead to almost everything. I played the game for quite a long time already, and there's still a lot of stuff that I've never encountered before. Exploration also brings up a LOT of interesting situations, so explore much! Also, the choices you make in events als ohave their consequences which can be quite long-term. Once a warrior wanted to be taken into my clan, and I accepted. Later someone else came and wanted to challenge my guest to a fight, but he didn't tell me the reason. My guest wouldn't tell, either. So I refused and sent the guy back home. Later someone in my clan was killed, and through a divination I saw that it was the guy who wanted to fight my guest! Choice and Consequence en masse in this game, and lots of different events that are just fun. This is one of the most innovative games ever made in my opinion, and its unique gameplay grants fun for many months, especially since the events with their choices and consequences get deeper and more involved the longer you play.
Conclusion? Go and get this game. You can torrent it without guilt, as it isn't really sold anymore. You can also buy it off ebay. The company who made it still exists, but they don't seem to sell it anymore. Maybe you can try emailing them, and then they sent you a CD with the game on it, but don't count on it. Just get the game somehow, it's fucking great and refreshingly different, so it would be a shame if you didn't play it.
This is the starting screen. A nice hint on the graphics of the game, already. And some wonderful music playing there. The music will be wonderful throughout the game, and really set the mood. It changes in every season and during some special events, of which there are plenty. Well, so let's start a new game, shall we?
Now we'll have to create our clan. The clan creation process is very interesting and nicely made. It's made up like a story about the old times when the gods walked together with man on the earth, and you gotta choose your clan's decisions it made back then. This will determine things like who your main deity is, what race is your arch enemy, and so on.
Those decisions are made by getting questions like this and having to choose one of the answers, much like character creation in ADOM or Elder Scrolls. The effects of the answer you choose are obvious, of course, and determine some basic things of your clan, as I said. Also, before each decision appears a picture depicting the scene, which is painted in a bit blurry and mystical way to show its mythical character.
There are several decisions to be made, and after that you'll be presented with a screen showing you what your clan is like.
Here you see the overview of what your clan has done. Especially the choice of accepting the strangers as Thralls is an important one, as it determines if you can have slaves or not. Take them as Thralls, you can have slaves; adopt them as family, you can't. Clicking on any of those decisions lets you change them again. Then you finally type in a name for your clan and choose a difficulty and the game length, where in a short game you must only be the king of a small clan alliance for a few years, and in a long game you must become king of whole Dragon Pass. So, let's start!
Now we're greeted by the new year screen, as I call it. You'll see this screen at the beginning of every year. While now it doesn't show any real information, later it will be quite important as it shows you the important facts of your clan economy and development.
Basically, you see how many more people, goods and animals you clan has gained. Cattle is the most important resource in the game, as it is used for sacrifices and as a kind of money, and if you're low on food it can provide you with meat.
Now, after continuing from the New Year screen, you can allocate your clan magic to certain things like farming or hunting, which makes those more successful. Then you'll be greeted by the population screen, showing you info about your population. You can also assign people to different professions here, like hunters and crafters, you can hold a feast or give gifts to your farmers or weaponthanes. Feasting and giving gifts increases the happiness of your population and your reputation among them. At the top of the screen you can select the different screens and skip the current turn by clicking on the sunwheel between the date. At the bottom you see your council. You can change the councilmen by reorganizing your clan. The councilmen will give you info, tell you their opinion or give you hints on what to do. Those hints aren't always the right thing to do, though, they just reflect their opinion. To hear their opinion, just click on their portrait any time. Now, let's look on the other screens.
That's the screen where you manage war things. You can build fortifications, train your people to be weaponthanes, assign your weaponthanes to patrol your lands and make raids against other clans. Raids will make you lead a war party and have the possibility of killing as many of them as possible, taking prisoners or just skirmish. Cattle raids will send a small group of soldiers to capture some cattle. So, let us make a raid on the Konthasos clan with whom we have a feud...
On this screen you can choose the clan which you want to assault and how many soldiers you want to send. Let's attack the Konthasos clan, then!
This screen appears after attacking a clan [or after being attacked by someone], and you can choose the basic tactics, the goal of your warriors and how much magic to use during the fight. After choosing all of that, the battle results are calculated.
Sometimes, though, something special happens and one of your leaders has to react to it. You can choose how he should react to the threat. There is no best choice in those situations, but I usually let him lead the soldiers to victory [then a description how he collects some warriors and leads them into the fight shows] or let him fight hard [which shows a description of how he fights]. Either he's successful, and beats the enemies, or fails, and either has to retreat or might even die. Once I won a battle but my hero was still slain, which was a sad moment. Well, in the end I won this battle and took a few prisoners who now serve as my thralls.
Now we shall look at the trade screen. The black lines connecting our clan name with others shows that we have a trade agreement with them and constantly trade goods with them, which gives us a profit of a few goods each year. You can also send one of your nobles to trade with some clan [give them some goods in exchange of other goods] or to start a trade agreement with them.
Here you can see the diplomacy screen, where you can send one of your nobles to make an alliance with one of the other clans, and also select to see only those clans with which you have a certain relation, or all clans.
Here you see the Farming Screen, showing how much food you're expected to harvest till next year, and how much land you have assigned to farming, cattle and wilderness. You can also set how much of which kind of crops you plant, while some give more food than others but are less reliable to grow well. Farming land is needed to plant crops, pasture for feeding your cows and sheep, and wilderness to feed your swine and let your hunters hunt some game.
Here's the Religion Screen, where you can sacrifice cows and goods and even slaves to your gods to either get a bonus or to learn new secrets [new blessings that you can choose when building a temple, or a new legend], build temples to get permanent blessings [requiring yearly sacrifices] or go on a heroquest, which I will talk about later.
Here you can see the Exploration Screen, where you can basically send a small adventuring party to explore the lands. I'll talk about exploration more in depth later on, but first let's look at the...
...Saga Screen! Here you can see the different sagas that you know, and those with a small circle besides them mean that you know their details. Knowing the details of a Saga iis required to go on a heroquest. But more on that later.
This is one of the Sagas we know in detail, the Sword Story. You can see a pic showing a scene from the Saga, and you can read through the whole saga. Not every saga has a heroquest associated with it, but if you want to go on such a quest you should read the saga that it's about before going on the quest. It is important to know the details of what the gods did on that quest, so your hero can do the same and succeed.
Now here's the Clan History. On that screen you see what your clan has done and what the prophets have said for the coming year. Not much to see here yet, as we've just started the game. Let's go exploring, then.
Now we're going to assign a small adventuring group to explore our own Tula, and guess what they found? Yay, some Ivory which we can use to craft things out of! Those goods we can use for trading, then. Nice find!
Let's go on exploration in our Tula again, shall we?
Now our explorers have found a rock where a spirit resides in! I chose to give it annual sacrifices, and the spirit promised to aid me with his blessings in return. The spirit stone will appear in your shrine list from now on. Well, let's go on then... but wait, something is happening now!
And now we're talking about the real thing. The core feature of the game. Random [or not-so-random] events! Here's some warriors of the god Humakt wanting some help from us. We can get the advice of our councilmen by clicking on their portraits at the bottom, but the one councilman who is specialized on the nature of the event [in this case war] always gives us advice automatically. The blue choices are the ones that he would suggest, while the others might also be good choices. Usually you should help priests or warriors who visit you, as it raises your reputation with the god they worship, and you can get a reward, even, like your warriors bringing back some loot with them.
Another event, now some priestesses of Uralda offering to make a ritual for us.
And another one, this time a bit more severe and where the choice is more important. Choosing a divination is almost always a good idea, as your ancestors saw who did it. I conducted a divination, and was told that people of our enemy clan did it! Then I chose to raid them as a punishment, and my people were happy that we punished them. Yay!
Another exploration event after exploring my Tula. I conducted a divination again, and my ancestors told me that the spirits in there are benevolent and I should send for some shamans to raise them. The shamans want a few cows as payment, and then they raised the spirits, and they promised to help me.
Now for the other unique and interesting feature of the game: Heroquests. I'll load a savegame of my other clan here, because our new clan doesn't know a lot of sagas yet.
Let's start the Quest "Ernalda feeds the tribe". Jenesta is the best of my nobles for this quest, so I'll take her. Every noble has different attributes like Strength and Wisdom, and also different wisdom in different skills like farming or war. So, let's send her on the quest!
Now we can choose what benefit the quest shall bring. Cows important, so I'll let her raise their health. Always keep in mind though that your hero may die during her quest.
Now the quest has started. Our hero will encounter different situations. The best way to react to those situations can be read in the sagas. The best way here would be to just suffer Daga's blows and survive them without mourning.
So, she survived, which is good. I had heroes die at that point already. This is where the stats come into play. Heroes with good stats have higher chances to survive than those with low ones, obviously. So, not only choosing the right action but also the strength of your hero is needed to get successfully through a heroquest. I'll just show the whole quest in screenshots, but without the solutions, as this would be kinda spoilery, and the solutions don't always work.
I managed to convince the elves to give me the seed, but if your hero isn't good enough in diplomacy she can't convince them and you must offer them a gift, which is taken from your clan then. In this case it's magic, but later it can even be the lives of a few of your tribe.
So, she's made it successfully through the Quest! This not only gives the reward, but also happiness among the people over the successful heroquest.
Heroquests are usually quite diverse and very intersting, and some have multiple solutions to them.
So, well, that's it. Most of the game's fun lies in the heroquests and especially in the events, which can lead to almost everything. I played the game for quite a long time already, and there's still a lot of stuff that I've never encountered before. Exploration also brings up a LOT of interesting situations, so explore much! Also, the choices you make in events als ohave their consequences which can be quite long-term. Once a warrior wanted to be taken into my clan, and I accepted. Later someone else came and wanted to challenge my guest to a fight, but he didn't tell me the reason. My guest wouldn't tell, either. So I refused and sent the guy back home. Later someone in my clan was killed, and through a divination I saw that it was the guy who wanted to fight my guest! Choice and Consequence en masse in this game, and lots of different events that are just fun. This is one of the most innovative games ever made in my opinion, and its unique gameplay grants fun for many months, especially since the events with their choices and consequences get deeper and more involved the longer you play.
Conclusion? Go and get this game. You can torrent it without guilt, as it isn't really sold anymore. You can also buy it off ebay. The company who made it still exists, but they don't seem to sell it anymore. Maybe you can try emailing them, and then they sent you a CD with the game on it, but don't count on it. Just get the game somehow, it's fucking great and refreshingly different, so it would be a shame if you didn't play it.
