Ettare (Patreon)

I've been meaning to give a little update on things and the thought process behind this project. As ever, sorry for the lack of updates but work continues in my determined but crawling fashion. Having a collaborator with this has been great, and I can say we have things like a first person motion controller, so there's actual game engine shit going on and not just random assets being created. Though there are a lot of assets being created that I'll continue to spam on twitter. 

Anyhoo, here's a brief mission statement:

Ettare is a sort of medieval-ish fantasy kitchen-sink setting for me, a repository of permutations of all the historical, mythological, folklore shit I've been consuming non-stop for months now. Syncretising as many things as possible and filtering them through my own aesthetic obsessions to try and arrive at a world that has some of the richness and depth we associate with the Elder Scrolls games. 

Morrowind is the big touchstone for what we're trying to achieve with this project, Morrowind but obviously on a much smaller scare. To me the charm of Morrowind is the combination of a weird, fascinating world to explore and the "broken" magic system, potion making, and the hoarding of weird armor and items. 

Runequest is another influence, both for its lore (which was a major influence on the aforementioned Morrowind) and its rules system. One of the goals my collaborator and I have is for the PC to start in a very "realistic", mortal state. It's easy to die or get injured, to catch grotesque diseases or get torn apart by monsters. It's through leveling up, learning spells, making pacts with gods, demons, and saints that the player character begins to transcend their mundanity and become the sort of tireless combat monster we expect from a PC, both in terms of gameplay and the way the character is perceived in the world.

Character creation is something we're still discussing, but the basic idea is that it will be a classless system. There are plans for two non-human races or species so far: atavistic apes and zmeulings, who are filthy lizard people. Also maybe degenerated cave people. The human options will include a variety of cultures to pick that give access to different magic, techniques, etc. and also will affect the way some characters react to you. 

Scale is something we've been thinking about a lot. We're only two people, so something on the scale of Morrowind isn't realistic at all. For that reason we're focusing on a particular location with plans for a few town/hubs, dungeons, and a wilderness connecting it all. Disco Elysium is an inspiration for the way it creates a small but dense area for the player to explore and where the mainquests and the side quests all interlock geographically and reinforce each other thematically. 

Samurai movies and Spaghetti Westerns do a wonderful job of weaving together a few stories into one location with the protagonist as the lever that can push events in other characters favor. That story structure is something we're going to play with in crafting this RPG, where the player will be a deciding factor in a conflict between landowning families and their (ostensible) sovereign.

The location, in general, that the game will take place in is a mountain valley in a wartorn backwater. It's a place that has been occupied and conquered by empire after empire, with layers of ruins dotting the landscape and a chaotic political system that gives the player different factions to support. 

I'm keeping this post short but will post some random blurbs of story and character ideas. I've been thinking of sharing some of my raw notes as well as the screenshots of PDFs and citations I do to share some of the shit I think is cool enough to cannibalize into lore. 

Thanks so much for your patience as we trundle along, but I am convinced some cool shit will come out of all of this.