

Not even a day of warmth and comfort would save him from returning to this. Cassian shudders, another breath exuded slowly. In this place, your spirit falls the first day. You too, would rise as a soldier in the army you fight to destroy, the moment you gave up. Recruit or veteran, you fell to the cold. Certainly, when they came in on the boat, the already present took to a morale boost, and you'd find the occasional soldier who asked about the legendary 7th who'd staved off the end of the world before, assumingly. No heroes from the south as he and his friends had been told they were. There was no being exceptional in these cold wastes. That he was alive was a mere stroke of luck. This is hell, and we're not even close to any 'Gate'. New faces came every day, and vanished just as fast. The sweep of bone dragons above, and the occassional swarm of living corpses still carrying the insignias that mark them out as Cassian's old friends and companions. They're not even truly in combat, and they're facing heavy losses. The only reason to wear it was paltry shielding against the bites of the unliving, and even then you'd manage just long enough to have your face torn off instead. Glazed eyes scan over his already rising superior, stunned to see him care for anyone but himself.Ĭassian scrambles from the ground weakly, the armour offering a measly assurance of protection from the weapons of mortals only hampering him further as it had this far. It was the desert all over again, only now his friends lost themselves in the snow, and not the sand. A numb pain, almost a salvation in itself from the icy cold. ' Get your ass back down, Sergeant!' A sharp tackle of forged metal smashes into the distant man as his Captain shoulders him to the ground. Were they not careful, they'd fight their own at sunset. Each death cut into the raven-haired man's soul with biting fury, a heckling of life. Coldflame and the plague wasn't what he'd expected when he signed on for yet another tour and declined further rest as his status freely supplies him with.Īnother dragon made solely of bone and dark magic passes above, a searing wave of cold obliterating another newblood unlucky enough to hold his head up over the trench. Play through once for a single tale, then set sail again to uncover paths to new adventures.' Hold the blighted line!' The call runs through the quivering ranks bolstered only by fresh recruits and wounded men just as fresh off a stretcher. You play as storyteller and wayfinder, shaping the narrative around three ungainly heroes.
#Burly men at sea poor beastie series
Set in the waters of early 20th-century Scandinavia, the game's story branches through a series of encounters with creatures from folklore.
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We tried a lot of strange ideas that managed to bind together into an honest little tale that taught us how to both tell and live a better story.īurly Men at Sea is a title featured at IndieCade 2017.īurly Men at Sea is a folktale about a trio of large, bearded fishermen who step away from the ordinary to seek adventure. Incredibly, or maybe not, even our development process had reflected this discovered theme. It was about adventure for adventure’s sake, about following impulse down an unknown path. To my surprise and enormous relief, I found that what the game itself had to say about adventure was better than anything I had thought I wanted to say. But here we ran into a complication: how could the game present a cohesive moral tale when the tale itself is of the player’s choosing? Our solution was to structure the story in a way that both beginning and end were consistent, with the player’s influence shaping all events in the middle of the story in a way that developed a single theme.Īs I tackled these challenges over the following year and saw the narrative gradually take a final form, I took a fresh look at the design and story as a whole to see what themes had emerged. Designing for folktale tone put the player in the role of storyteller, one step removed from our protagonists. Designing for folktale length gave us a branching narrative with a short play cycle. Of the many elements of folklore that helped to establish what we describe as a “folktale adventure,” three contributed most to the design of Burly Men at Sea: length, tone, and moral. With each session, the player returns from one journey to set sail again, uncovering new paths for a series of kindred but distinct adventures. In it, branching scenes combine to form a variable tale with a single, overarching theme.

Burly Men at Sea is constructed as a story-building game.
