Tomb of Xinroch

So, Tomb of Xinroch. I kind of imagine fighting various incarnations of Xinroch, with ever increasing difficulty along the way. It'd be cool to try to re-unite his bones with his ghost, and then resurrect him to be able to fight him in the flesh. Then he dies and his corpse comes back to life, and you have to fight him as a zombie. Then you have to fight him as a levelled-up version of a skeleton (just give him another config, with a stats boost?). Need to code-in the main characters (Xinroch), but it'd be a doddle.

Reference material for study.

Some ideas:
* Dwarven gas chambers
* Maze rooms (needs coding)
* Paradise room (nice room to be in, featuring palm trees and a sandy beach with water, and an island)
* Penguins who perform anti-sci-talk
* Ice side-level
* Bone floor types
* Tactical level - high visibility, dark knights in the front room, casters in remote but still accessible corridors
* Xinroch's Gravekeeper
* 2-stage Xinroch fight; skeletal form and then ghost form
* Not much food
* Most enemies necromancers, undead and dark knights
* Kitchen somewhere (to feed chaos-god worshippers during their pilgrimage)
* Training cage with bears in it (maybe like an experimental necro-chamber where necromancers try to create undead animals)

Difficulty curve: follows GC, but starts a little lower and finishes steeper?

Jobs:
* Coding maze rooms DONE
* Adding Xinroch's gravekeeper
* Adding Xinroch ghost-form
* A terrain picture of the tomb for on the world map
* Color schemes and what sort of materials to use to change the look of the dungeon
* Tactical level layout. This is one screen, 42x26 tiles big.
* Layout of the tomb entry, probably like a temple structure with guards etc, and an inner chamber with the dungeon entrance

With a capitalist snowman friend?

you fool, I am not even in my final form yet

Would joining him to his flesh and fighting him in all 3 forms be an alternative way to defeat him for more points? vs. just fighting him as skeleton

I love most of the ideas, but the penguins seems kinda cheesy

The penguins could be useful if you want to get your intelligence down to 4 and become invisible to ESP. That might be more trouble than it's worth, though...

Never thought I'd become reference material. I'm honoured!

Seems you already have ideas for the tomb, and I don't know a lick about balancing, I'll just make a few suggestions and leave the final design to you.

I feel there should be at least one "tactical" level, small enough that someone with high perception and/or high intelligence with ESP should be able to see the entire floor. Casters in the back/rooms whose corridors loop around so you can't walk up to them easily, dark knights in the front/open room that lets them surround you. Basically, you need to plan your moves ahead or get bogged down in a slog-fest that'll get you killed. This is a holy site for worshippers of chaotic gods, it's well defended.

You could have Xinroch's Gravekeeper as a sub-boss instead of the third form (in the flesh) 'cus he's already all rotted away. Rather, I think Xinroch himself would work better as a 2-stage fight, his skeletal form then his ghost form.

Little food! Following the theme, most enemies should be necromancers/undead/dark knights, no random animals. If you're not a follower of Mellis, you better hope one of two random rooms spawn; the kitchen or the training cage with bear(s) in it.

Similarly, since it's a tomb and not a mine, I feel it should be shorter than GC. To compensate for reduced loot, more chests spawn. Perhaps chance of a single storage room with numerous chests?

Ok so I'll de-emphasise the penguins.


Legendary suggestions, as always! I like the tactical room, and the kitchen and training cage in particular
How long should the dungeon be? Elpuri length? That's about 9 levels.

9 levels is fine I think. For additional length we can have an optional dungeon, like Oree is optional. Perhaps the story can be that Petrus wants to test your worth by having you clear out this "heretic's tomb", and once you've proved yourself successful, he gives you the choice to go take on a chaotic stronghold. Perhaps the game can randomly generate from the Dark Fortress (with Golgor Dhan as the boss), the Dungeon of Pain and Pleasure (with Sherarax as the boss) or the Twisted Tower (with Ischaldirh as the boss) or something like that.

I thought it would be best to make a feature branch off attnam/master to be able to merge into. So, for reference I have made a little change to show how just by using the script files, you can make a new world map location. The diff is here: https://github.com/Attnam/ivan/compare/XinrochTomb...fejoa:X... This works along the lines of what is written in the wiki, though I still haven't found the time to finish that article.

If you have an IVAN fork to work on this dungeon, you can merge changes into the XinrochTomb branch. Once it is more or less complete, we can deploy it on the main branch. You can pull the branch and pop the IVAN.exe in the folder on your own system, and pull changes in to stay up to date.

Nothing to stop you from downloading and changing the .dat files by hand, if the git method is at first a little overwhelming

If I may put my two cents in - maze level would be great for breaking the rooms-and-corridors feel of the whole game, or maybe even cavern-type floors? As in actual caves, irregular interconnected rooms of rough stone, as opposed to the current straight coridors and square rooms preset elsewhere.

Xinroch should wield his two flaming swords, as per the History of Dark Knighthood, rather than one sword and a shield. Skeleton dual-wielding flaming swords? So cool.

I was thinking about a dungeon where you would be locked in until you complete some kind of quest - smilarly as you cannot leave Oree's lair, but with larger dungeon. Maybe the Tomb is Xinroch's prison and no one can leave without finding a key to the door? You can enter but before you can get out again, you have to find a key somewhere deeper in the dungeon.

This is cool. I agree we can change the straight rooms and corridors preset for a different look to the dungeon. Also for consideration would be the wall materials and earth materials, and what colours we would like. Probably could try for a black and white theme? Octiron and bone?

There are a lot of animals cropping up, which is normal, but we may need dungeon tags after all, to enable us to ring-fence the types of monsters we need.
Victory conditions will need to be worked out, but I like the idea of retrieving a key to get out.
I'm thinking of a dual-enner beast level, about Level 7 (that's level index 6). Do you think this is a good idea, or just too crazy?

There's a little list in the first post about jobs to be done. Feel free to chip in if you like, or post some more suggestions to go on the list.

As regards to balancing, see attached IVAN_balance.doc (which you have to change to IVAN_balance.xlsx) file for a short analysis. First tab is graphs, and second tab is the data. Give me your thoughts.

Latest changes here: https://github.com/Attnam/ivan/compare/XinrochTomb

Similar to how the portal to Oree's place works as discussed in the thread, we could go with something a little simpler for the Tomb of Xinroch.

On the "ground floor" or level you enter from the world map, there could be only one way in, which just so happens to be a hole in the floor that works the same way as a downward staircase. Difference is there's no upward staircase on level 1 of the dungeon.

When you beat Xinroch at the bottom there could be some sort of magical item that just calls the wizard mode level teleport code to return you to the ground floor when used.
You COULD make it break afterward, but an item that returns you to the first floor of the dungeon would be a pretty damn cool reward for fighting your way through an optional dungeon.


I've had this idea in my head of a dungeon level where some smaller enner-beast-like creatures are hidden around the map locked into little cells, and the objective of that level is to find and kill them so that they stop breaking your stuff and inflicting minor damage.
Could work here too? Maybe you could put them inside the walls and eventually their cries might break them out?

Horn of recall? Returns you to the first floor/worldmap tile of the dungeon you are in. However, works after a short delay, so that you cannot easily escape a deadly fight, so it's a convenience item?

As far as rewards for side-dungeons go, I also had as idea of an artifact cloak Shadow Veil - made of air/ghost/smoke, so weight nothing and has no AV, but grants ETHEREAL flag while worn, so you can walk through walls. Should be hidden and heavily guarded, but even then it might be way too powerful, what do you think?


Enner children! Yay!

You might even make the level a prison with the enner children locked in cells and friendly, while several hostile goblin jailors around. The enner childern are just scared, but their screams will kill you if you don't kill them, or all hostiles quickly enough.

So if Xinroch has his own place, and Sherry and Golgor Dhan might eventually too, does that mean you would never run into them randomly in GC anymore?

Nah, that'd take the fun out of it Cap. Let 'em spawn randomly everywhere unless they're the boss of the dungeon.

I never thought of making them enner children... twins I could easily make another config for the enner beast.


I want to be able to swap the encrypted scroll for the tomb's location, which would lock out gloomy caves. The NPCs would still appear in the tomb as per GC. There would need to be a check to see if Xinroch has spawned yet, and by the time you reach a certain level in the tomb, then he would make a guaranteed appearance. After that, his ghost shows up... This is all coded behaviour, but will be like icing on the cake. First, the nuts and bolts of the dungeon, like color, texture and layout.

I checked out the XinrochTomb branch from git so that I can play it as the updates come along. What's the current status - is there a way to get there yet? I didn't see it on the map after delivering the encrypted scroll yet.

It should automatically come up on the world map without needing to deliver the scroll. It will be set on a snow tile near to Attnam. If the continent is too small then it will appear on another continent. The picture resembles a small gray brick. Let me know if you find it

What about giving a use to all the cells in Attnam Cellar and putting a friendly necromancer there, imprisoned by the Attnamese but ready to reveal a hidden location to the player for a scroll easily used in blackmail?

Firstly, is there a need to swap out the encrypted scroll? Is it not enough to have Petrus give you a different mission?

Secondly, that friendly necromancer idea above is giving me ideas about recruiting the chaos forces instead and marching in on Attnam at the head of an army.

This was my go-to idea for determining how the player can gain access to the Tomb, seeing as the encrypted scroll is the item that causes GC to be revealed on the world map. The reason for swapping the scroll is that in CLIVAN you could reach all the locations and get access to loads of loot, and so players would much more easily end up with a stacked character and the opportunity to kill a lot more monsters than in vanilla IVAN, which posed less of a challenge for power players. If GC and the tomb are mutually exclusive, then the player has a choice to make about which dungeon she would like to pursue.
I haven't got my heart set on a particular control flow or victory conditions just yet, so I'm open to ideas and suggestions, like this one below:


I like this because it is likely that the chaos guys would be interested in getting any intel on Attnam and its military movements, so giving the scroll to the necromancer in the dungeon would make sense (albeit he's locked in a dungeon). Maybe he offers some reward (higher victory condition) for recruiting the chaos army and busting him out?

EDIT: Not being able to resist a challenge, I thought I would go about making a generic maze creation algorithm. I've got something that works, but it's pretty scrappy, but now that I have it going, I can make it less experimental and more robust. See attached image for in-game results.

I must agree that allowing access to both locations would result in large loot spike, which while nice for players, greatly affects game balance. It might be possible to balance it by creating more OP monsters. However, I personally like the idea of swapping the encrypted scroll.

On the other hand, I would like to see some more locations accessible to everyone. Maybe if a new town or two were added (Mondedr, anyone?), balance would not suffer much (you still have to earn gold to buy in the new shops) and players would have more incentive to explore more than a single path from New Attnam to Attnam and GC/ToX.


Well, we have four victories so far - freedom, knighthood, chaos and high priest.

Chaos can remain the same even with ToX as your dungeon.

For an easier victory (freedom-tier), maybe slay several Xinrochs and escape with some kind of treasure, living for the rest of your life in riches, out of reach of the Attnamese?

Knighthood-tier could use the avatar of Valpurus laying on the other throne in the Cathedral (I admit, I hate it laying there looking important, but with no use). You would need to steal it (angering Attnam) and offer it at a High Altar of Mortifer deep within ToX, to receive a blessing of Mortifer. Your team would swap to monster team, meaning you can amass a huge army to lead against Attnam. Maybe offering the avatar on the High Altar would result in "corrupted avatar of Vapurus" and you would win by using/placing it upon the altar in the Cathedral converting it to Mortifer, who would promptly rain death and sorrow upon all surviving Attnamese?

At least one of the victories possible, however, should make you return to good grace of Attnam, so that you don't need to become all evil to win with ToX, just as you can win both allied to or enemy to Attnam with GC. (I know that using "evil" to describe character going against Attnamese tyranny is ironic. )

Speaking about victories (and sorry about derailing this a bit), what if another low-tier victory akin to Freedom for Tweraif from CLIVAN was added to vanilla? I would like to do more for my village than simply slaying Decos. Maybe make it somehow tied to the UT:4-5 and Lobh-Se? Restoring Silva to power in New Attnam after the revolution, so that she may ward off Attnamese?




Now I'm thinking about about a labyrinthine Pyramid dungeon with mummified Lenin at the very end...

If we're going to include the Tweraif liberation stuff, I personally think it'd make for a better big sidequest than an actual ending to pursue.
That would mean lining up a decent reward for doing so.

We can explain away Petrus (and by extension Attnam) not getting mad as a result of this because it takes forever for messages to get to Attnam anyway and he already thinks Decos is a lazy bastard who may or may not be embezzling some of the banana profits.
By the time he thinks to investigate why he isn't getting progress reports the player may already have beaten the game, and Silva's protection would be in place.

I didn't mean allow access to both GC and ToX, I meant have Petrus give one or the other after you deliver the scroll. Or would that actually be harder to implement?

This is an important point chao now that you mention it, I hadn't thought of it in any depth yet. That would be straightforward to implement, plus it would make sense because the player is specifically instructed to deliver the scroll to Petrus. If there was a rumour system in which the player could stumble upon engravings or get the info by talking with plebs, then the player could learn about going to the Attnamese catacomb and talking to the prisoner there. Otherwise the player would need to learn this by some other means. With the status quo, the player would be unable to learn how to get to the Tomb without reading the wiki, which is bad design. So we will have to think of a way to introduce this into the game.
I'm a fan of simple, and getting the option from Petrus would be the more straightforward way, but it wouldn't preclude finding another way, or changing it later, because we are devs