Exile III: Ruined World

Exile III: Ruined World is a top-down turn-based RPG in a fantasy setting. It is the third and final chapter of the Exile trilogy.

Background Story

The surface is ruled by the mighty Empire, which maintains control by banishing criminals, malcontents, and political dissidents from society. When magical scrying revealed a system of caves deep underground and accessible only by teleportation, the Empire began teleporting its undesirables to those caves. Aided by the presence of subterranean springs, phosphorescent moss, and a rich ecosystem of flora and fauna, an underground society called Exile gradually developed and thrived.

After a powerful and vengeful Exile wizard named Erika teleported to the surface and assassinated Emperor Hawthorne, the Empire sent its army underground to destroy the people of Exile once and for all. The Empire nearly succeeded, but in Exile's darkest hour a new ally appeared: the alien Vahnatai. Hailing from deep underground, the Vahnatai's deep knowledge of crystals and magic allowed the combined Exile/Vahnatai army to drive the Empire out of the caves and back to the surface. The war culminated in an uneasy truce: The Empire would cease hostilities against the people of Exile as long as they remained underground.

Years later, with the help of their new Vahnatai friends, the people of Exile completed a tunnel back to the surface. The tunnel leads to a wild and rugged part of Valorim, the most sparsely populated continent in the Empire, where Exile hopes to claim a new home on the surface.

Exile has no intelligence on what the Empire has been up to since the war, and has therefore tasked your team of adventurers with reconnoitering the surface and determining if it is safe for the people of Exile to finally emerge into sunlight once more.

Character Creation

Players begin the game by creating party of 1-6 characters. Each character is assigned a visual avatar, traits, skills and race. Races and Traits can increase/reduce the rate of a character's exp gain depending on the significance of the benefit or handicap.

Gameplay

Exile III is non-linear turn-based roleplaying game. The game is mostly open-world, although some areas are inaccessible until the party has met certain prerequisites, and other areas may be punishingly difficult for a party that has not yet accumulated much exp and equipment.

The game is rendered using a 2-D, top-down perspective. Sprites representing items, characters, or monsters are displayed on top of textures representing different terrain. The player's characters can be moved in 8 directions using the numpad or by clicking in the desired direction.

Outside of combat, the first character's avatar represents your entire party. In combat, the party's other character avatars also appear and can move and act individually.

Characters regenerate health and mana gradually over time, but can be regenerated faster by camping or resting in a bed. The party carries a supply of food which is consumed periodically; characters will suffer damage if no food is available.

Exploring

Players are initially encouraged to explore a small subterranean open-world area to get a feel for the game, but there is nothing preventing the player from immediately heading up to the much larger surface open-world. The party can visit friendly settlements of varying sizes to obtain information, items, quests, and shelter. The game includes a robust system for interacting with NPCs and over 200,000 words of NPC dialogue. When engaged in a conversation with an NPC, the player can click on individual words to ask NPCs more about those subjects. The player can also type any word into the dialogue interface to ask NPCs about other topics.

There are more than 100 cities, caves, dungeons, and other locations that the player can explore to find treasure and unlock the game's mysteries. There are many secret areas within the game, often accessed through a visually impassable barrier such as a wall, or via a variety of different puzzles. The game measures the passage of time based on the character's steps; as time passes, the world changes depending on the player's actions (or inaction). Cities may be destroyed by monsters and NPCs may die or move to different locations.

Combat

Once combat is initiated, the player's characters always get the first turn, and act in the order they are listed in on the party screen. After the last player character acts, all of the enemy characters act; this process generally repeats until one side is defeated, although the player may also attempt to end combat and flee.

Each action (moving, attacking, casting spells, using items, or defending) depletes an individual character's "action points," which fully regenerate at the beginning of every turn. Weapon combat is straightforward: invisible dice rolls determine whether a character's swing connects with the target, and how much damage is done (within a range dictated by weapon type, character skill, and magical effects). Characters who possess skill with mage spells and/or priest spells may also choose to cast those spells in combat.

Enemies may randomly drop equipment or items when they are killed, which must be collected before leaving the combat zone.

Bestiary

As the player encounters different monsters and enemy types they can use a spell to add them to the game's bestiary. This gives the player useful information about the creature that can be accessed at any time via an in-game menu.

Plot [WARNING: Major spoilers!]

The following summary assumes the player completes the main quests in the intended order, even though they could conceivably be completed in any order.

When Exile's reconnaissance team passes through Fort Emergence and emerges on the surface, it becomes quickly apparent that something is wrong on the continent of Valorim. The team learns that the continent is plagued by monsters, a situation that should be impossible due to the Empire's past efforts to eradicate all magical and dangerous creatures.

The nearby city of Krizsan is being attacked by hordes of slimes. The team encounters and defeats a bandit clan led by Jordan, a mage who discovered the source of the slimes and was attempting to train an army of slimes for himself. The team travels to the source of the slimes--a cave in a nearby mountain--and slays the bizarre, tentacled beast that was creating the slimes. In the back of the cave, the team discovers a magical rune signifying the name "Erika."

Erika is the most powerful wizard ever banished to Exile. The Empire was so afraid of her power that when she was banished, Empire wizards placed a powerful curse on her: if sunlight touches her, she will die. In years past, it was her vengeful fury that led her to assassinate the Emperor in his throne room. The team's Exile government liaison at Fort Emergence--concerned that Erika was still pursuing schemes of vengeance against the Empire--asked the reconnaissance team to visit her tower in Exile. Erika surmised to the team that the rune in the slime pit must be part of a plot to frame her. While she retains her passionate hatred for the Empire, she loves the people of Exile and affirmed that she would never do anything that would render the surface uninhabitable to them. She gave the team magical pendants which she claimed would allow her to monitor their progress and come to their aid if they encountered trouble.

The team then traveled back to the surface and visited the city of Shayder on the nearby Isle of Bigail, home to the Anama, a fringe religious group in the Empire that forbids the use of magic among their members; only priest spells are permitted. Shayder and the surrounding towns were under assault by a plague of dog-sized, disease-ridden cockroaches. Deep in a nearby forest, the team discovered the home of a race of giant, intelligent, friendly, talking spiders. The spiders revealed the location of the Filth Factory where the cockroaches were emanating from, and a nearby mage named Purgatos provided the team with a magical egg capable of destroying the place. Despite the overwhelming stench and hordes of hostile cockroaches, the team managed to fight their way to the lowest level of the Filth Factory. There, shortly before planting the egg, they discovered several scales that could only have come from a dragon. The team made a daring escape as the Filth Factory became enveloped in the magical flames erupting from the egg.

The team consulted with Exile wizards regarding the dragon scales found at the Filth Factory. The team learned that the caves of Exile had once been home to five dragons:Motrax the kind, Sulfras the strong, Pyrog the cruel, Khoth the wise, and Athron the reclusive. After Pyrog was killed by a band of adventurers and Motrax was killed by Empire troops during the last war, the other three dragons fled to an unknown location on the surface. Sulfras and Khoth had both been enslaved by the Empire during the war and likely harbored a deep resentment towards the Empire.

The team tracked down the dragons' new home in the mountains in western Valorim. Sulfras denied that the dragons had anything to do with the plagues of monsters; more than anything else, they just wanted to live a life of solitude and be left alone by humans. They offered additional assistance in the event that the team was able to determine the true culprit behind the monster plagues.

As the team began to explore further into central Valorim, two more plagues became apparent: the cities of Sharimik and Lorelei were under siege by, respectively, troglodytes and giants, two species that were thought to have been completely eradicated by the Empire centuries ago.

After scouting the attackers' fortresses, the team learned that whoever resurrected the troglodytes and giants had not been aware of the ancient enmity between the two races and initially linked the two fortresses with a tunnel; this was a serious error, as rather than attacking human cities, the troglodytes and giants just fought each other. Whoever resurrected the two races eventually rectified the situation by creating an enormous, impenetrable magical barrier in the tunnel, which caused the troglodytes and giants to focus their efforts on Sharimik and Lorelei instead.

The team discovered a secret passage leading to the magic crystal that was sustaining the barrier and smashed it to pieces. The troglodytes and giants immediately resumed their war with each other and ceased hostilities against the nearby human cities.

Exile's Vahnatai allies maintained an embassy in one of the upper caves in Exile and the team went to consult with them, given the Vahnatai's expertise in magic crystals. The leader of the Vahnatai, the powerful mage Rentar-Ihrno, examined the crystal shards and was able to determine that the crystal had been made by a powerful magic-user, but couldn't provide any additional information before the team was urgently called back to Fort Emergence on emergency business.

Thieves from deep within Exile had teleported into a vault and stole a valuable artifact called the Orb of Thralni. The surface reconnaissance team traveled to Exile's Portal Fortress, where they were able to teleport to the cavern where the thieves made their hideout and recover a number of magical artifacts from the thieves, including the Orb. The leadership of Exile decided to let the team keep the Orb, which would grant them the ability to fly for brief periods of time, since such an ability would be more useful for a team on the surface than it would be for anyone in the caves of Exile.

The team proceeded to northwestern Valorim to assist the city of Gale, which was being assaulted by golems--animated statues capable of launching bolts of elemental magic. The team discovered that the golems were being created in a factory called the Tower of Shifting Floors--a maze of hallways and conveyor belts--and battled their way to its central control room. To their horror, they discovered that the entity controlling the tower was one of the Vahnatai's Crystal Souls: the soul of an ancient, powerful Vahnatai mage rendered immortal by encasement in crystal. The team shattered the Crystal Soul and returned to Fort Emergence to inform Exile leadership of the situation.

The Vahnatai, realizing that their plot had been uncovered, abandoned their embassy and Rentar-Ihrno left a message for the Exiles: The Empire's destruction of numerous Crystal Souls during the war had been a grave transgression, and only the complete destruction of the Empire and the surface world could repay the offense. Exile would not be harmed as long as they did not interfere.

The matter had to be postponed due to a demonic invasion at Exile's Tower of Magi. A wayward Exile mage named Linda inadvertently summoned the arch-demon Grah-Hoth, who began casting a spell that would lay waste to all of Exile. The surface reconnaissance team teleported into the Tower and managed to banish Grah-Hoth, but the Tower was destroyed, severing the link between the upper cavern where Fort Emergence was located and lower Exile. The surface team would need to deal with the Vahnatai and their monster plagues alone -- there would be no reinforcements from Exile.

Upon learning that Empress Prazac was visiting Blackcrag Fortress in northern Valorim, the team traveled there hoping to broker a peace between Exile and the Empire in the face of their new common adversary, the Vahnatai. Prazac agreed, but only upon the condition that the team could put an end to Rentar-Ihrno's machinations, who was believed to be hiding somewhere beyond the Keep of Tinraya in Footracer Province.

The Empire had constructed an enormous magical wall around the perimeter of Footracer Province in order to contain the worst monster plague: a horde of alien beasts, six-legged, muscular creatures comparable in size to wolves, who could shred human flesh in seconds due to their razor sharp teeth and the ability to spin their neck almost 360 degrees.

Using a magical sword forged by the dragons especially for the purpose of killing the alien beasts, the team fought their way through Footracer Province and discovered Rentar-Ihrno's fortress in a secret valley beyond the Keep of Tinraya. Confronting Rentar-Ihrno, the team was overwhelmed by the Vahnatai mage's extreme magical skill, but just before Rentar-Ihrno managed to land a killing blow, the archmage Erika appeared and gave the Vahnatai a bitter fight. Rentar-Ihrno, wounded and realizing that defeat was imminent, teleported away to the safety of the Vahnatai caverns deep underground, but not before she blasted the roof of the fortress, exposing Erika to sunlight and thereby killing her.

When the team informed Empress Prazac of their victory, Prazac formalized the peace between the Empire and Exile, and decreed that the Empire would cede southern Valorim to the people of Exile, so that they could finally return to the surface and live under the sun again.