After almost a year and a half in development we'll be launching Engines of Ascensions on the morning of Saturday, July 11th. Launch events will take place over the whole weekend and there's a great ingame prologue and tutorial for new players to hit the ground running. You can join in by connecting to engines.ddns.net, and if you want a quick way to download the required files they'll be available at engines.freeforums.net.
The Setting
The server is set in the industrial era, pulling in themes from across steampunk, noir, and fantasy settings. You can expect to see elves, dwarves, undead, giant insects, dragons, and all the usual suspects, but in this world there are no sorcerers. People travel by airship and train, fight with guns, swords, grenades, and any clockwork or steam powered contraption that can be envisioned as a weapon. The central force behind the development of the gameworld is the thrill of discovery. Not just investigating crime and politics, but pulling back the veil on the nature of the world itself: secret places, hidden treasure, rare and powerful monsters, artifacts older than civilization itself, and machines from a time beyond mortal comprehension. We begin in the metropolitan city of Calidor, but the pursuit of the unknown will drive players away from the walled districts and painstakingly mapped streets to explore what lies beyond: the deep underground, foreign cities, ancient ruins, and beyond that, the entire unmapped world. During the entirety of the launch weekend we'll be running opening plotlines and events to introduce the players to the city of Calidor and the world at large.
Server Design
The server was designed with the guiding philosophy of quality, replayable content. It's impossible to release dungeons often enough to keep fresh areas for dedicated players, so instead of churning them out we've focused on making each dungeon unique and interesting. Player race enemies draw from the entire collection of abilities and items, meaning you can see them using all of the special abilities you yourself might have access to. Monsters are never just a set of statistics, there will always be one or more special abilities that provide unique challenges to parties. Dungeon design is tailored to making areas that can be played multiple times with any party size, with encounter difficulty scaling based on party size and level. Topping it all off is the tiered boss system: beat a boss once and next time it will be more challenging, either through simple increases in stats or with the addition of new abilities and tactics. Each time you beat a boss you get access to a new level of boss loot, so there's real rewards in perfecting your tactics and taking on the toughest challenge. Finally, we adopted a minimalist set of death penalties to encourage exploration. When your party dies in a dungeon you lose a bit of gold and any loot you picked up since leaving a safe area, no lasting injuries or level loss.
The Engines System
Engines of Ascension uses a completely custom game engine. Instead of levels, classes and feats characters have skills, such as dual wielding, heavy armor, and stealth, which are progressed by performing actions related to them. Specialization comes from selecting abilities, which do everything from increasing the viability of passive skill checks to unlocking custom combat moves and new crafting options. Combat is still primarily d20, but health and damage are much higher than in dnd, and a third armor roll is made as part of a standard attack action, allowing heavily armored targets to be struck easily but damaged with difficulty. The complete lack of spellcasting in the setting necessitates the need for technological alternatives. Characters can specialize in things like first aid, grenade throwing, and using heavy equipment like rifles, tesla weapons, and flamethrowers. The engines system is explained in game through a set of tutorials during the prologue, and a full manual of abilities can be accessed through the character sheet.
The Beta
We've decided to describe this launch as a beta because it's still the case that we might need a character wipe before a full launch. Everything in beta is canon and earned experience will be credited through a bonus pool to post-wipe characters, but the official beta terminology will persist until we're sure that we'll be keeping the current server vault indefinitely. We're still looking for additional developers and DMs, so if you'd like to help please send me or any other staff member a message with what you'd like to do.
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