Celtic Minstrel
da00da261c
- This update is not comprehensive. It does not touch the appendices, and even in the parts it does touch, many details may still be out-of-date.
100 lines
5.0 KiB
HTML
100 lines
5.0 KiB
HTML
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<title>About - BoE Scenario Editor Guide</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
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<script src="nav.js"></script>
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<div class="content">
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<h1>Section 1: About the Blades of Exile Scenario Editor</h1>
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<p>OK. You've played Blades of Exile (and maybe other Exile games), and you have your own
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ideas for adventures. You'd like to come up with your own twisted ideas, and inflict them
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upon the general public. Well, now you can! Blades of Exile comes with a powerful
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elaborate scenario design kit.</p>
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<p>How powerful? Well, the three scenarios that came with Blades of Exile were created
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using the scenario editor and only the scenario editor. It can create fully detailed
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adventures, including weird special encounters, people to talk to, and a world that
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changes as time goes by.</p>
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<p>There are other great things. You can also include customized graphics. You can
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distribute scenarios you make over the Internet, so that all sorts of people can play
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them. Scenarios you make on a Macintosh will work on a PC running Windows, and vice versa.
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And, best of all, you can make basic scenarios with very little work. If you don't want to
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learn all the complicated nitty gritty, you don't have to!</p>
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<h2>How to Get Started</h2>
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<p>If you want to make scenarios, the first thing to do is play Blades of Exile. A lot.
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Much of what follows won't be the least bit clear if you aren't familiar with how the game
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works.</p>
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<p>When you're familiar with what Blades of Exile is like, read the next chapter. It gives
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a detailed, step by step description of how to make a scenario, make a new town, and
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populate it with monsters and treasure. It will tell you all you need to know to make a
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basic, fun scenario with lots of chopping and hacking.</p>
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<p>Once you have the basics down, the other chapters in this section go into a bit more
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detail on scenario basics. You will learn how to make multiple towns, create wandering
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encounters, and do other, more elaborate things.</p>
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<p>Finally, when you have a grasp of all the basics, if you are strong of heart you can
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move on to the next section: Advanced Scenario Design. There you will learn how to make
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special encounters and write dialogue, the heart of any truly good scenario.</p>
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<p>Unfortunately, while you can play all the way through Blades of Exile without ever
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cracking open the documentation, the Scenario Editor is very different. Scenario design is
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a tricky business, and printing out the documentation and keeping it handy is strongly
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recommended.</p>
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<p>In this section, you will often see (Advanced). This indicates something related to the
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advanced stuff described in the next section. Feel free to ignore these things for
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now.</p>
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<h2>The Basic Basics</h2>
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<p>Any Blades of Exile scenario is divided into two parts: the outdoors and the towns (and
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dungeons - there's no difference). The outdoors is a rectangle of sections, each 48 x 48
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spaces (for example, Valley of Dying Things is 4 sections wide and 3 sections high, each
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section a 48 x 48 grid of spots of terrain). You can have up to 100 outdoor sections
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(although 10-20 is usually plenty).</p>
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<p>Towns have 3 sizes: 32 x 32, 48 x 48, and 64 x 64. You can have at most 200 towns
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(although 20-22 is already quite a few).</p>
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<p>When a player starts your scenario, his or her party will start in one of your towns.
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From there he or she can leave the town to explore the outdoors. To design a scenario, you
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will edit towns and outdoor sections, and then make town entrances in the outdoors and
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link them with towns (this isn't hard, and is well explained in the next section). Populate
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the towns with critters, traps and puzzles, and you have a scenario!</p>
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<h2>Three Final Warnings:</h2>
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<p>Good scenario design is a time consuming thing. Each of the Blades of Exile scenarios
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involved a month of full-time work. Start small at first, such as with a small outdoors
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and 4 or 5 towns. Put the massive Exile-sized epic off for a little while, or you risk
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putting a month of work into a scenario you will never finish, and which nobody will ever
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see. There is little more satisfying than getting an E-mail saying how much fun someone
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had playing your scenario. Alas, you never get such an E-mail until your scenario is
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done.</p>
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<p>Also, ALWAYS test your scenarios. Debugging is critically important. Play through them
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yourself, and, if possible, get someone else to play them too. If you design a scenario
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which can't be finished because of a bug, nobody will appreciate it.</p>
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<p>Finally, back up your scenario file. Frequently. The designer of Blades of Exile does
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it hourly. Put a copy on a floppy, and hide the floppy in your car. Copy it onto a
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friend's computer. Put a copy in your safety deposit box. Remember, one hard drive crash
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can wipe out a month (or more) of work in a moment.</p>
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<p>But enough preamble ... let's make a scenario!</p>
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</body>
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