Birthright “Adventures”

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The Roleplaying Game (aka «Go on Adventure», aka. the Doom clone)

I’ve already mentioned the problem of integrating this section with the other two. On the plus side, adventures can provide the strategy game player with items that confer very powerful abilities, such as more resources (regency) per turn, doing more actions per turn, or simply, but powerfully, the ability to see all hidden army units on the map. On the downside, however, you can kill people in this section only to see them alive and kicking in the strategy game, or kill them in the strategy game and still meet them in adventures. Either way, this kills some of the immersiveness.

Secondly, despite the roleplaying game ancestry, the adventuring part of the game isn’t really a roleplaying game at all. For one thing, you need a character editor (a second-party program) to be able to create your character from scratch – otherwise, you are forced to play one of the premade regents. For another, it feels very little like going on an adventure in the Dungeons & Dragons sense – sometimes, paradoxically, because the game designers have stuck too close to D & D the board game. The game as well as the graphics engine is essentially a pure clone of Doom. This was the grandfather of most 1^st person shoot-em-ups, but very limiting when it comes to what you can actually roleplay. The one difference (and this is not a redeeming feature) is that fighting monsters, which was of course all the fun of Doom in the first place, is handled entirely in the way of D&D – by the endless random rolling and re-rolling of dice, completely outside-of-the-player’s-control (except for the decision to cast spells, use weapons, or try to run away). Bo-ring!

Worst of all, however, are the serious technical issues with this section, most notably the grievous absence of a way to save your game in the midst of an adventure. Though this may have been implemented to avoid load/save abuse, it is quite unforgivable when adventures can take a long time, sometimes hours, to complete. Add to this the fact that the game tends to crash at the most inconvenient moment of adventuring, and you get a part of the game that, unlike the strategy part, I really don’t like at all.

I do, however, like the powerful effects of some items you can get while adventuring. Note that you can often get those items (and thus usually complete the adventure) very quickly, avoiding all the frustration of protracted adventuring and likely game crashes, if you have a way of casting the following spells:

• Locate Object (to mark the Quest Object on the automap)
• Teleport (to the marked point on the automap)

(If the object doesn’t turn up on the map once Detect is cast, note that some adventures involve several maps, so you probably need to get from where you currently are and into an area covered by the same map as the object. And then possibly re-cast the spell. However, although I have, stubbornly, played my way through every adventure in the game (I think), personally I no longer bother with the adventures I can’t immediately complete with the two spells above.)

If you don’t want to use the character editor (found in the downloads section) to make a regent that knows those spells, the following premade characters in the game world have the spells immediately available:

Both Detect Object and Teleport

• Isaelie (regent of Sielwode)
• The Wizard (regent of the Five Peaks)

Only Locate Object

• Laela Flaertes (lieutenant of Tuornen)
• Torele Anviras (lieutenant of Talinie)
• Caine (lieutenant of Endier)
• High Mage Aelies (hireable non-landed regent)
• Wizard Hermedhie (hireable non-landed regent)
• The Swamp Mage (hireable non-landed regent)
• Moerde Ranael (hireable lieutenant)
• Cheassal Brodic (hireable lieutenant)

Only Teleport

• Danita (regent of Chimaeron)

• Llytha Damaan (lieutenant of Tuarhievel; blood ability that only works once per adventure)
• Eluvie Cariele (lieutenant of Coeranys; blood ability that only works once per adventure)
• Hyde Termonie (lieutenant of Brosengae; blood ability that only works once per adventure)
• Sword Mage (lieutenant of Ghoere; blood ability that only works once per adventure)

It is also possible to learn the spells from Tomes in the game, but finding Tomes requires extensive adventuring (which is kind of beside the point).

So is it worth playing?