SKALD: Against the Black Priory News

Greetings one and all!

Below is a short summary of pricing and versions for Skald once it launches on May 30th. Note that changes may occur before launch.

Also, see the end of the devlog for some info about the incredible people who made our live-action trailer for us!

[h3]PRICING AND PLATFORMS[/h3]

“Skald: Against the Black Priory” will launch on Steam on 30th May 2024 and will be available for PC and Mac upon launch.

The Standard version of the game will be priced around 15 USD and the Deluxe version will be priced at around 25 USD.



[h3]DELUXE EDITION CONTENT[/h3]

We intend to offer a Deluxe edition of the game that will provide you with a bundle of extra content giving you the option of having a slightly different game experience mechanically speaking. It also comes with the OST and a good handful of cosmetic items.

The Deluxe edition will contain the following items (amongst others):

• The Base Game
  
• A pack of extra character portraits
  
• Unique Dice animations
  
• 3 extra character backgrounds to choose from during character creation.
  
• Malachai, the Magical items merchant: A vendor that is available from the mid game and onward that sells a handful of unique magical items.
  
• Two wallpapers from the game
  
• The OST with 38 (!) tracks
  

We’re constantly looking into more cool stuff to add into the Deluxe edition whilst still making sure it does not detract from the main game. The idea is that it should be a value-packed way of supporting the developer (which buying the deluxe edition greatly does).



[h3]Skald at WASD Live 2024[/h3]

The game is being presented at a WASD Live 2024 in London 25th-27th of April along with a collection of other awesome Raw Fury titles! If you’re in the area and you feel like checking out Skald and its awesome siblings, be sure to visit WASD.



[h3]Trailer Credits[/h3]

Our “Release-Date Announcement Trailer” has been getting amazing feedback from the community and beyond. I’m just so grateful for getting to play a part in making such a cool little piece of retro-inspired media.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The credit for the main action scenes of the trailer however, goes to Swedish media production company NAIVE. What you see here is the result of their incredible craftsmanship and attention to detail.

You’ve blown me away with your amazing work and I can’t thank you enough! Now go give these amazing people all the likes and follows!

NAIVE
Web: naive.se
Instagram: @naive.society

Directed by:
Robin Jonsson, @robijons ( instagram )
Oskar Gullstrand, @o.gullstrand (instagram)

Cinematography:
Simon Rudholm, @simon.rudholm (instagram)

Sound Design:
Jakob Oldenburg @oldenburgsound ( instagram)

VFX:
Oskar Gullstrand
Cecilia Azout

Editing:
Robin Jonsson

To stay posted, be sure to follow the Skald Twitter and Discord and wishlist if you haven’t already!

Cheers


AL

The time is upon us, the Dragon has awoken and the LAUNCH DATE IS REVEALED: “Skald: Against the Black Priory” is launching on May 30th 2024!

Check out our AMAZING Launch Reveal Trailer now!

https://youtu.be/PjVrwMYpejM?si=BxIuFudR536UoysE

Did you see all the amazing hidden references?

Once you're done rewatching, head on over to Steam where Skald is participating in the Lovecraftian Days 2024 Steam event and the #TurnbasedThursday Fest.

We've even UPDATED THE DEMO so you can play the latest iteration of the game TODAY!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1069160/SKALD_Against_the_Black_Priory/

It feels amazing to be this close to sharing Skald with you all! Keep your eyes peeled as we go forwards: We'll be posting frequent updates over the next weeks!

To stay posted, be sure to follow the Skald Twitter and Discord and wishlist on Steam if you haven’t already!

Cheers,

AL

Hi there traveler!

It’s time for another feature highlight! This time, talking about combat rules! This is a big subject but I have to start somewhere, so today we’ll have a look at a few core concepts. Forgive me if this reads a bit like a chapter out of the D&D Player’s Handbook (though I suspect quite a few of you like that).

Some dungeoneering motifs by John Henderson!


In case you’re reading this and don’t know what game we’re talking about, you can start by checking out the SKALD demo on Steam (and don’t forget to wishlist):

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1069160/SKALD_Against_the_Black_Priory/




Combat in Skald is turn-based and takes place on a tile grid. I’m a huge tabletop RPG nerd and there is a strong influence from 3rd edition D&D and beyond (including games like Pathfinder and, of course, 5th edition D&D).

At its core, this means that combat in Skald cares a lot about proper positioning and synergies between party members and their different skill-sets.




Once a combat is triggered, you get to deploy your party. Use this phase to make a plan: Set up charges and flanking. Make sure your spellcasters have good angles of attack and take advantage of the terrain when possible (there’s nothing wrong with a good choke-point).



Characters act in descending order of initiative. Agile, lightly armored characters tend to act earlier in the initiative order. You can view the initiative order using the initiative widget on the left side of the screen at any time.



Note how you can also toggle the “tactical overlay” to superimpose a grid over the battlefield. This makes the characters’ exact position more easy to spot.

Also, you should always try to pay attention to the statistics of your opponents and party members (things like damage resistance are great to know about). Thankfully this is really easy with the popup tooltip system!






A character can move a number of tiles each turn equal to their Combat Moves. These are indicated by the yellow pips on the side of the combat map:



The purple pip(s) indicate the number of attacks a character has. A character can forgo attacking and instead spend their attack action to move one extra tile.

Once a character has attacked, it is no longer possible for them to move (in other words, their turn typically ends after attacking).

Some characters have multiple attacks. You cannot move and attack more than once each turn. So to take advantage of your multiple attacks you must dedicate your entire round to attacking.

Moving out of melee (Disengaging) or swapping places with an ally, consumes all your remaining movement and attacks.





At a very basic level, hitting an opponent comes down to the following:

Attacker rolls 2d6 + relevant skill (Melee Attack or ranged Attack) vs 2d6 + defender’s Dodge skill.

If the attacker rolls equal to or above the defender’s roll, a hit is scored and damage is rolled equal to the weapon’s damage score + relevant modifiers (such as a Strength bonus for Melee Attacks) .

If the defender is wearing armor, part of the incoming damage is absorbed by the armor (a random amount from 0 to the armor’s Soak value).




There are hundreds of spells and abilities that can be used in combat depending on your class and build. Today however, I’ll give a very short overview of some of the basic general tactics that help setting up the game’s positional gameplay.

[h3]CHARGING[/h3]

A charge is executed by moving at least 2 tiles in a straight line before executing a melee attack.



A charge attack gets a bonus on the to-hit roll and the damage roll. This bonus increases the longer you move in a straight line before attacking (Momentum builds up).



Classes of the Warrior archetype tend to have feats that improve their charge attacks.

[h3]FLANKING[/h3]

A flanking attack is performed whenever two attackers stand on opposite sides of the same defender.



Flanked opponents are much easier to hit. They also lose the Dodge bonus derived from using a shield. You can spot a flanked target by looking out for the Flanking icon:



Flanking also ties in to one of the Rogue’s special abilities: Backstabbing. I’ll talk more about backstabbing in a later post, but in short, whenever a Rogue attacks a character that is either defenseless (Paralyzed etc.) or flanked, they automatically perform a Backstabbing attack that deals a lot of extra damage.

So for any party with a Rogue in it, setting up and taking advantage of flanking can result in very rewarding tactical play.


[h3]HOLD ACTION[/h3]

Another easily overlooked but vital feature is the “Hold Action” command. This basically moves the current character to the end of the initiative queue (meaning they act last in the turn order).



This is a lot more powerful than it seems as it allows your characters to act with more synergy. Perhaps your rogue would rather wait to attack until after the magos has blinded their target for them, setting up a sweet Backstab attack?


[h3]PASS AND DEFEND[/h3]

No very exciting but also worth a mention. A character may choose to pass their turn without acting. Typically this is done if a character has no relevant action to take. However, this also gives them a substantial bonus to their Dodge score until their next round.

Consider using this tactically to increase the staying-power of your front line fighters whilst your ranged strikers wear down your foes from the back ranks.




Characters in Skald have two “hit point” reserves: Vitality and Wounds.

Vitality is represented by the green bar under the character portrait. Vitality points are numerous, easily lost and easily regained.



They can be restored using healing potions and spells and losing Vitality has no immediate negative consequences. The problems begin once you lose all your vitality points!

Once all your Vitality is gone, damage is dealt to your Wound points. This represents actual, severe physical damage being done to your character. You have few Wound points and they are much harder to recover. Wounds are represented by the purple bar under your character portrait.



When you take wound damage two things happen:

First you sustain an injury. Injuries (represented by red circles in the character portrait) give severe penalties to your character. They can only be removed by resting fully in a camp.

Secondly, the wounded character must make a Will save or begin to Panic and flee.

Unlike Vitality, lost Wounds can only be recovered by resting. In other words, once you start to get party members with lost Wound points and lots of injuries, it’s time to start looking for a camp site (see last month’s devlog).




[h3]GETTING KNOCKED OUT[/h3]

So what happens when you’re out of both Vitality and Wounds? Well, if you’re a player character you’re lucky: You’re Knocked Out until end of combat. Once combat ends, if at least one character is left standing in the party, all Knocked Out characters wake up with 1 Wound point restored.

The only real downside of getting knocked out in combat is that knocked out characters don’t get their XP share after the fight. This may seem harsh and it might change down the line but I do like a bit of stakes in my combat and I think it works well all in all.


[h3]MORAL[/h3]

Finally, I also alluded to the Panic condition above. This is worth a mention as well as it plays a large part in combat. Whenever something traumatic happens, a character must make a moral check (2d6 + Willpower vs a difficulty number). This can be triggered by:

• Seeing an ally get killed / knocked out
  
• Taking Wound damage
  
• Certain spells and abilities
  

A character who fails their moral check will no longer act during their turn and instead try to flee. There is a chance each subsequent turn that they may regain their composure but needless to say, having your party members rout is VERY dangerous.

Thankfully, Priests and Officers excel at boosting your party’s moral. Also actively trying to erode your opponents will to fight through clever use of spells and maneuvers is an excellent tactic.




I think I’ll leave it here for today. This is such an extensive subject and I’ve only just scratched the surface in this post. Hopefully it gives you a bit of an initial impression though. For a lot of you TTRPG fans out there, you can probably start seeing some of the lineage of the system.

I’ll go more in depth on spellcasting and special abilities etc. at a later point (there’s A LOT to talk about) so stay posted!

Be sure to follow the Skald Twitter and Discord and wishlist on Steam if you haven’t already done so!

Much love,


AL

Greetings one and all! I hope this finds all you fellow RPG nerds well! I think it’s about time for me to emerge from my developer’s cave and write a little bit of a project update!


Art by Gustav Samuelson / @MechaBarbarian

In case you’re reading this and don’t know what we’re talking about, you can start out by checking out the SKALD demo on Steam (and don’t forget to wishlist):

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1069160/SKALD_Against_the_Black_Priory/

[h2]News[/h2]

Skald has been making the news! We’ve gotten a round of some fantastic, organic coverage in the last few weeks and truly there is no better feeling for a solo-developer than to have people talk about your project in such glowing terms! A few of the bigger ones are PC-Gamer, Eurogamer and CRPG YouTuber Mortismal Gaming.



And best of all: These are just the biggest ones! There’s been a score of other content creators and gaming-sites talking about the game lately and I truly couldn’t be happier.

In a world where discoverability is likely the largest hurdle to indie success, word of mouth has once again become tremendously important.

[h2]Feature Highlight[/h2]

There are so many things I could (and probably should) be talking about that it’s hard to choose. True to form I picked some of the things that are at the top of my head and those are some of the secondary systems in the game. For today I chose camp mechanics, crafting and magic items.

[h3]CAMPING[/h3]

The idea of your party sitting around a warm campfire with a belly full of stew and a pipe stuffed with fine pipe-weed sharing stories of battles past is just so appealing to me.



Beyond that, camping also serves as a way of reinforcing the game-loop that is essential to RPGs: You occasionally need to take a break from adventuring to rest, recover and restock!

Camping in Skald serves as a way to recover lost resources and clear the injury conditions that accumulate during combat: You can recover lost vitality easily enough (by using spells) but if you get hit hard enough you may end up with injuries. These make adventuring harder and eventually you’ll need to make camp to recover!

You can either pay to sleep at an inn or, more commonly, you’ll be resting in the wild! Most surface areas are usable for resting (no sleeping in dungeons).



During rest, you need to feed the party. If you have less than the required food available, the party will not recover fully (providing only 50% of the food will only restore 50% lost Vitality etc). This means that gathering and crafting food is a good idea (more on that later).

In addition to eating, your party can also be put to work with camp activities! Activities like foraging for supplies, fletching arrows and training or entertaining other party members makes different classes and skills shine.

Camp logistics not your jam? Well, the game comes with a powerful set of difficulty settings allowing you to disable the food requirement so you can get the exact RPG experience YOU want!



[h3]CRAFTING[/h3]

As it’s already been featured in the demo, the crafting system is not really “new”. However this system has been recontextualized a bit with the introduction of camping because it influences the use of food in the game.

A character needs to eat 10 “points” of food per night. Eating a raw potato might give 1 point of food. Eating a bowl of vegetable stew might offer 10 points. So in other words, even though you can chomp down on raw ingredients, your characters’ lives become A LOT easier if you cook for them. Also, I’m making no promises here but I would just LOVE to give party members favorite foods. I’m trying to decide what Roland would like. Perhaps something sweet? Or sausage?

Oh and I also added alchemy to the game! Gather ingredients like flowers, monster parts and fungi and use them to create potions!



So how does it work?

Gather ingredients and examine them to learn which go together to craft new items! You can experiment with combining ingredients and you don’t lose them if you fail so there’s no reason to not play around. It’s a bit of a mini game and I find it to be a lot of fun. You can also find scrolls with recipes on them that automatically unlocks the recipe.

As it currently works, you always succeed at crafting if you attempt a valid recipe. However depending on your crafting skill and the item’s complexity there is also a chance that you get a superior result (more than one new item for instance ).

All in all, I’m happy with the system. It doesn’t take up much space and if you don’t want to deal with it you don’t have to. But if you do chose to interact with it, it adds a layer of logistics that I personally enjoy a lot in games like this. Actually having to plan out the expedition to the nearby dungeon adding in stops for resting and making sure you’re carrying enough raw materials to craft the consumables you need as you delve into the darkness is my jam.


[h3]MAGIC ITEMS[/h3]

I’ve also been giving a lot of love to magic items lately. This one might be a bit divisive: There will be a lot of procedurally created and semi-randomly placed magic items in the game.

I know a lot of you don’t like this and I can certainly sympathize. In an ideal world, every item would be lovingly hand-crafted and placed in the world. The problem with this is that it takes a lot of time. As in A LOT a lot.

The result would be much fewer items to be found and after testing this game for hours on end my conclusion is that the game works better with more items even if that means they are procedurally created and placed.



Just to be clear: The fact that most items are procedural in the game does not mean there isn’t also the occasional hand crafted item to be found. Also, magic items are not dropped from random encounters. Once the game starts a set number of items are placed in the world and these remain static. The game does NOT feature Diablo-style grinding for loot-drops and there is no way to save-scum the system.

I’m going to make every effort to keep a close eye on the system here to make for a balanced and interesting distribution of magic items and I feel pretty certain that it will work out for the best in the end.


And there we go! A summary of three fairly nerdy subjects that I’m sure will be of interest to at least three of you!

To stay posted, be sure to follow the Skald Twitter and Discord and wishlist on Steam if you haven’t already!

Much love,

AL