(NOTE: These devlogs usually lag behind our official updates. The latest up-to-date information about the game can be found on our team's Patreon page!)

Hey everyone, we're back with another dev blog! :)

We're continuing our series on ToLLA's gameplay mechanics, and this time we'll talk about Karma and Renown!

Throughout your adventures in the game, you'll be offered many choices on how to proceed with quests, events, and dialogues. Some of these will reward you, others will punish you, but all of them will update how the rest of the world perceives you!

Captain Hale is a person of merit and accomplishment - when he does things, people take notice! Karma and Renown are two ways of letting you interact with the world, leaving your mark upon it while having it push back on you in turn! There will be others covered in future blogs, but this week we'll focus on these two...

Renown...

Roughly put, Renown is the measure of your party's accomplishments in the wider world. It starts at 0 because, while locals know of Captain Hale and his exploits (him being a minor local celebrity and war hero), the party he assembles and leaves the Fort with is an unknown and untested entity. This means most NPCs will view your group as just another adventuring company... but with a somewhat famous Captain leading it.

In-game, Renown is a value which climbs as you play through area content. Whatever you do, whoever you talk to, whichever quest options you choose, and wherever you may roam, your Renown will follow closely behind, impacting your actions and decisions.

Renown can only be a positive value and will never drop below 0, because it tracks how (in)famous your Captain and his party are - committing atrocities still raises it, as does helping people and selflessly serving them. In fact, the deeper an imprint you leave on a person, event, or area, the more Renown your party will gain! This makes sense, because people tend to remember outliers who make an impact on them and their lives.

Furthermore, the most frequent Renown gains come from completing the game's quests (Primary, Secondary, Tertiary). Solving quests in any manner increases Renown, but the more spectacular the quest resolution, the more Renown you'll gain! Renown is also farmed from winning combat engagements with your core party, and solving text adventures via your Retinue (Troops/Materiel/Supplies).

It has many uses in the game (outlined below), but its most important one is allowing you to get your way through diplomacy without having to resort to violence.

Renown info-list:

• begins at 0 at game start, and will be displayed on the main HUD/UI once the graphics for it have been completed
• completing quests and tasks adds points to it (+3 for critpath quests, +2 for secondaries, +1 for simple or trivial tasks)
• defeating foes in combat awards it as well (between +1 to +5, depending on the enemies' difficulty/importance/numbers)
• finishing Text Adventures and Perilous Undertakings awards large amounts of Renown (+5 and +4, respectively)
• items will also temporarily boost it while worn by partymembers, depending on how (in)famous the magical gear itself is
• some exotic merchants, quests, and NPCs will remain locked until the party's Renown is high enough to unlock them
• is one of the ways that can be used to bypass conversation difficulty checks, and solve quests in your favor
• will boost the amount of gold rewards the party gains from NPCs upon solving their problem(s)

Karma...

Karma in ToLLA is the measure of consequences.

It's basically Captain Hale's personal record of (mis)deeds, accrued over the course of his adventures throughout the game. Whereas Renown tracks the party's actions and decisions, Karma is Hale's private judge!

Similar to Renown, Karma starts at 0, allowing you to take your Captain either way as you play through the game's content. And while Renown can only ever be a positive value, Karma can go both ways: positive Karma is indicative of the actions of a helpful and benevolent Captain, while negative one points to a cruel, avaricious one.

Karma is automatically updated as you decide how you want to handle the game's quests, events, conversations, enemies, allies, neutral NPCs, and storybook dilemmas. Simply put, it's gained for helping people (usually at your own expense), and is lost lost for being a selfish jackass, taking advantage of folks, lying/stealing/cheating, and/or causing harm to others.     

Some quests and NPCs will be locked behind a Karma value, and you'll only be able to access them once your Karma gets high/low enough to meet their demands! These will usually lead to powerful rewards for commensurately dangerous and risky work!

From a design perspective, Karma is interesting because it allows us, the developers, to decouple the protagonist's fame from his alignment (something many games tend to struggle with). As in real life, people can be both famous and evil, or benevolent and unknown, or any other combination of the two!

In ToLLA, doing good deeds is difficult, because it entails self-sacrifice in various ways! Being selfish is an easy shortcut to power, and is a materially rewarding path! Evil choices tempt the Player as much as possible with various tangible rewards. Good choices, while materially lacking, are emotionally fulfilling (or at least should be). Regardless, it's up to the Player to choose which path they'll walk. Generally speaking, evil is quick and seductive, while good is slow and self-sacrificing. As in real life, those who abuse and exploit others get ahead quicker... but their actions usually catch up to them with interest!

To balance out the fact that evil enriches and good impoverishes, opting to pursue a path of selfish self-aggrandizement and cruelty is counter-balanced by various negative events that'll hit the Player! This is most obvious while the party is traveling across the World Map, and triggers random storybook events! Good karma will skew the probably rolls to beneficial events, and bad karma toward harmful events! These events can be anything from finding/spoiling field rations, to joining/deserting soldiers, to acquisition/misplacement of loot, and so on...

All in all, acting good and helping others brings positive karma, while being a selfish/cruel abuser brings negative karma. As mentioned above, Karma has no upper or lower bounds, and never resets! The amount of Karma gained/lost is tied to the deeds themselves (ex: threatening a widow will get you -1 Karma, while beating a merchant to find his hidden stash will get you -5).

Karma is also used as a loose alignment-indicator for Captain Hale. Various partymembers will react differently depending on the Captain's Karma, especially during convos with them while resting/camping. Some of them will refuse to be romantically involved with a good/evil Captain, depending on their personal proclivities and character. Others might even quit the party if the Captain's Karma rises/falls past a certain threshold!

One thing Karma is not used for, however, is to have NPCs react differently to Captain Hale! Because how the hell would they know what the Captain's been up to in towns/villages/areas far removed from where they live and work?! This 'feature' is a staple in some other famous RPGs, where every guard in the entire world shares an internal wi-fi, and they all know about that fork you stole last week from Tom's Tavern!

Jokes aside, the only NPCs in ToLLA who do react differently to the Captain based on his Karma are specific and rare questgivers who are either thoroughly good or thoroughly evil, and look for a certain Karma threshold... These special, karmically-aligned NPC questgivers are always men and women of means/power/wealth/influence/station, because they have their fingers on the heartbeat of events, and know of Captain Hale! They're looking for competent and accomplished individuals to help them with sensitive or dangerous tasks, and will only offer their quests to the Player if Hale's Karma matches their own...

The more good/evil the NPC questgiver, and the more dangerous/lucrative their quest, the higher the Karmic requirements will be required (this goes for both positive and negative Karma scores!).

Players can expect to see the content of only one karmic side during a single playthrough, depending if they stack good Karma, bad Karma, or try to hover around neutral by doing a bit of both. This is by design, because we want to make the Player's choices matter while playing through the game. After all, a 'good' Captain wouldn't travel with or romance or take quests from 'evil' individuals. Vice versa for an 'evil' Captain and 'good' NPCs.

And that brings us to the end of this devlog!

Hope you had fun reading; come back next time for more!

'Till then...

~ Crimson Delight Games