Nameless Voice on 12/1/2011 at 04:05

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Working for opposing factions also affected their dispositions. Doing too many quests for the Mages Guild made the Telvani and the Temple despise you, IIRC.

The main guilds shouldn't necessarily be mutually exclusive, but it's rather stupid that the Fighter's Guild will gladly accept a mage with almost no fighting ability as a member.

I'm also reminded of an obscure cool old game called Legends of Valour. It was a very early sandbox game, in a way. You were in a city with lots of guilds, shops and inns. You could make money by doing random delivery jobs, gambling, buying from cheap shops and carting the goods to more expensive shops, and of course join the guilds. But many (not all) of the guilds were mutually exclusive. All the temples wouldn't do business with a member of any of the other temples, but you could quit one and join another. The main quest, such little as it was, involved becoming the head of one of each type of guild (one of the four temples, one of the two mages guilds, one of the two combat guilds, and the thieves guild), but you couldn't be a member of all of them at once. The best you could manage was the Mercenaries, the Fellowship of Asegir (one of the mages guilds) and the Thieves Guild, IIRC.

One of the Fellowship of Asegir quests also involved doing some rather nasty stuff to the Brotherhood of Loki, the other mages guild, though I'm fairly sure that didn't stop you from later quitting the one and joining the other. I don't think you could re-join a faction once you left, though. Which would potentially make the game unwinnable if you quit one before becoming its head and getting the required quest item!

There was also one temple which wouldn't let you join if you were playing a male character.


And how could you not love a game where the guards would randomly arrest you for such great crimes as "Acting suspiciously", and "excessive snooping"? A game where people would sometimes start conversations with you on the street in order to hurly randomly generated insults at you? ("You are a diseased boil on a degenerate ogre!"); a city where some people were infected with lycanthropy and would turn into werewolves on certain nights, at which point they would just respond with "grrrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrr rrrr rr rrr r" if you tried to talk to them?

Malf on 12/1/2011 at 10:17

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I've played that, but I also recently bought Din's Curse from Soldak, which takes the Depths Of Peril world, and adds a new twist, where dungeons fight back. The longer a quest is left, the more powerful the monsters will become, eventually attacking the town itself.
Pretty damn cool.

Malf on 12/1/2011 at 14:42

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As far as I can tell, it's the main feature of Din's Curse. I haven't played enough to see it fully in action yet, but I have had a main quest complete itself because one monster killed the main boss monster before I could get to him!
On the surface, it's a streamlined DoP, without the inter-guild competition or NPC henchmen, but it's definitely more accessible than DoP initially is.