What is Untold Lore?

What is Untold Lore?

Imagine if your favorite tabletop RPG campaign was a living world.

As a player, you can live out your character's life between adventures. Farm, craft, study, and explore in a persistent, open-world that remembers who you are and what you've done. NPCs live their own lives alongside you. Your choices leave permanent marks on the world: when you build a settlement, trade routes form. When you conquer a neighboring kingdom, the political landscape shifts. And when you form relationships with other characters, they might come to your aid when you need them most — or betray you when you expect it least.

The world has been there since before you arrived. It will continue after you log off.

As a game master, you can build your world out beyond just creating a map for players to inhabit. Use visual scripting tools to choreograph deeply narrative experiences in isolated adventure modules, then watch your friends experience the story while you subtly pull on the strings attached to the characters and scenery. Assume control of NPCs, add items and monsters on the fly to enhance the plot, and track the players' progress through story beats set up ahead of time.

The game provides the tools; you provide the imagination.

Who am I?

Rowan.

How far into development is the game?

Substantially, but still very early. Many subsystems for both players and game masters are already in place, albeit not fully wired up in some cases.

• Basic movement.
• Networking.
• Node-based backstory system.
• Node graph editing for procedural maps.
• The bones of item/crafting/skill systems.
• Partial implementation of a needs-based survival system.
• The most bare-bones NPC AI you've ever seen.
• Editors for rulesets, campaigns, backstory trees, maps, and more.

With much of the substrate in-place, the current focus of development is getting an MVP up and running end-to-end with just enough polish to be considered playable. I'm likely around a month away from being able to set up a persistent world, script a simple adventure module, and run the module for a group of play testers. The criteria I'm targeting for the play test is roughly as follows.

1. A game master must be able to create a custom map outside of the persistent world.
2. The adventure must have clear start and end states (e.g. “the adventure starts in town A and is formally completed when the players reach town B”).
3. The players must be able to customize their characters. This will be severely limited initially, but we need to ensure the foundation is there for future development.
4. The adventure must use survival needs (food and warmth) as a constraint.
5. The players must be able to purchase and use items to meet those needs.
6. The players must be able to use their characters' skills to meet those needs.
7. There must be scripted encounters, with triggers (“player enters sacred grove”), actions (“a guardian spirit spawns”), and reactions (“the players drive off the spirit/run away to save their skins”).
8. The game master must be able to spectate on players as they progress through the adventure.
9. The game master must be able to interfere with players by causing environmental effects, spawning enemies, and possessing friendly/neutral NPCs (limited to just locomotion and speaking as the character).

Stay tuned to see if it all goes horribly wrong. You can keep up with Untold Lore's development by subscribing to the newsletter or joining the Discord community.