High Level Breakdown
Objectives:
Get to the Shrine to:
Kill Harrow or
Save the Cultists
Links (opens a new tab)
Let’s Play #1 (Vengeance Path)
Let’s Play #2 (Healing Path)
We had an overall vision of what we wanted, what would be included and our overall themes of revenge, healing and confronting uncomfortable, but ultimately empowering, truths.
The encounters detailed below continually ask you to make the same choice. Do you push through apprehension and confront whatever you may find or not?
I established the theme for these encounters and Andrew, our main writer, and I worked together to determine what form they should take.
Exterior
Previous to arriving at Feuerstelle Glory asks you why ultimately you have come here. Is it to kill Harrow, the cult leader, and stop his evil once and for all and gain revenge? Or is it to save the cultists that have yet to be fully corrupted perhaps at the cost of killing Harrow?
Nothing is set in stone until the choice actually arrives but on arrival here as well as later we keep asking the player to re-affirm why they are here, kill Harrow or save the Cultists?
We set it up this way to allow the player to question or affirm their choice (whatever it may be) and continually consider why based on their discoveries along the way. This is truly a dark place and what seems abstract before a quest can take on new meanings as things move along.
We also spend time here to get on tone for this mission, there is a lot of variety in the quests of Dragonfall and we needed to put you in the right and intentionally apprehensive state.
Player Exit
Player Start
Player Exit
Interior Cult Compound
All of these rooms, excluding the Shrine, can be encountered in any order. No matter what the player chooses they must confront Glory’s former girlfriend Marta to proceed along the critical path to the Shrine.
The initial communication around discovery of these rooms reinforces apprehension with the tone of the presentation. Glory herself warns you to stay clear of foreboding things and keep moving forward to the Shrine.
Someone is being held and will meet a bad end in the Rec Room.
Harrow’s acolytes, dangerous foes lie in wait in the lounge.
The book in Harrow’s magical library seems to contain dark forces.
Marta herself is present initially in the Dorms.
Study
Rec Room
Kitchen
“Lounge”
Bathroom
Dorm
Marta’s Room
Garage
Player Start
Warded Door
Simplified Flow
At some point during your initial exploration you see that a confrontation with Marta is inevitable because she holds the key to the warded door. Now you must make the choice how much to press into foreboding encounters should you have bypassed them initially. You can see this set up playing out, as a version did for most players, in this clip from Let’s Play #2 from “Wretch Plays” (opens a new tab).
One thing I’m comfortable with is giving players the agency to take a sub optimum path but provide prompts and clues about a more successful path. Decisions lose their meaning without consequence but you can still set up things to give players a sense of control and so that things mostly feel fair. I qualify that with “mostly” because some aspects of quests are, as in life, not fair due to their nature.
Good story driven quests strike a balance to allow enough agency to make the story your own but ensure that the experience is a good one by designers keeping control of the overall direction.
Confronting the acolytes as foreshadowed, is a tougher fight. Afterwards you can share more memories of Marta with Glory and find a ring from happier times. Gaining the ring enables a Marta Point in her confrontation conversation. Note that discoveries that enable conversation options to gain Marta Points are not communicated to you when found.
Should you choose to enter the Rec Room you encounter a park ranger that had the misfortune to run across some cultists. It's actually a quick fight once you build up the courage to kick the door in. The Ranger will provide you the location of a gear stash and, after being patched up, escapes. What’s material here looking at the tv set which provides more backstory and enables a conversation option for another Marta Point in the confrontation.
This is a straight forward easy encounter, designed to show you that while not without challenge, you can likely handle the evil in this place if you have the courage to confront it. Wretch picked up on this prompt (open link in a new tab) in his playthrough and decided to go back to the library and face the evil in Harrow’s book, by far the creepiest encounter in this part of the quest.
With the right clues and design, you can steer players in the right direction while ultimately leaving decisions in their hands.
If you can’t tell already, I have a lot of respect for Andrew and his work and he really out did himself with Harrow’s book. Its details, a combination of actual satanic values and liberal art student bar stool philosophy shifting into creeping horror was really first class. Slug it out through the creep factor and you fight it out with a spirit who was summoned by poking around where you were not welcome. This enables another option for a Marta Point in the confrontation.
In the Kitchen there are some very grisly discoveries to be made, body parts. The body parts are labeled, organized and “aged” the way The Adversary likes it. Other than being disturbing this is essentially a free enabling of a Marta Point in the confrontation with her.
Additional supplies and dialogue with Glory can be discovered in the Bathroom and the Garage but they are there to provide some incidental space and fill out the location.
The Dorms house fresh Initiates, yet to be fully twisted by Harrow. You can talk with them and you enable a Marta point if you hear the full story of the girl by the door and learn more about the dark plans for the Initiates.
Through the door is the confrontation with Marta.
Despite setting things up to encourage players along an uncomfortable journey into aspects of Glory's past and to confront menacing encounters I set things up with degrees of success so you were not likely to get the worst outcome with Marta, that of being forced to kill her. On the flipside I wanted you to really have to work to get the best outcome which is having her join you in the final confrontation against Harrow.
Even with all the variability with Marta even the most negative outcome only results in combat being a bit challenging at worst. It does not affect the ability to succeed in the quest or impact your ability to ultimately choose vengeance or healing. It does lead to very different narrative outcomes however.
While the responses that give you Marta Points in the dialogue are enabled by certain actions prior you still need to be reading the flow of the conversation as well have been paying attention when things are first discovered. So there is gameplay in the conversation itself.
It is a mechanic we used in only a handful of places in the Shadowrun games (with foundations being laid “Bloodline” when confronting the Blood Mages) and usually only for key moments like this. It is not the easiest thing to do but was always worth the investment.
Having gained the key to the Warded Door, an amulet, from killing Marta, by having her give it to you or having her join your party you can pass the Warded Door and enter the Shrine Room.
Once in the Shrine Room a powerful corrupted spirit, The Heart of Feuerstelle, reaches out and pulls you into its realm.
The Realm of the Adversary
Boss Fight VS The Heart and Harrow
Spirit Fight
This alternate plane of reality and its boss fight are there to provide something different and memorable. Everything about it is strange and menacing.
For the beats in between the entrance and confrontation with the Heart and Harrow I wanted enough to make this feel like a place that you adventure through but respect pacing. I asked for two unique enemies (in addition to Harrow and Heart) and a small but new and bespoke tile set for this space.
You move through these first two fights in a straightforward manner and arrive at the Boss Fight. It was a decent amount of resources for a small section of gameplay. It’s reasonable to ask, why not do more in this area to get more out of the assets created? Or alternately why have them at all? Why not go directly to the boss fight?
The goal was to show that realm by highlighting the dark forces of Glory’s past but keeping up the pace. You quickly explore it, battle its unique enemies, and move on to the confrontation that the whole quest has been building toward rather than slow things down with extra content.
After exploring dark corners of the compound and of Glory’s past it's time for a final reckoning with the evil behind it all. You face off against an ancient spirit corrupted by The Adversary by way of Harrow.
The boss features unique mechanics found nowhere else in Shadowrun series. At this point the series development beyond quest design duties I was also the AI Designer for Shadowrun as well. This gave me the ability to get exactly what I wanted for the quest by using both AI scripting, with an in house scripting language, and quest trigger scripting together to create a unique experience in the series.
Here is the final place for you to choose your path of either healing or vengeance. We ask this question a few times as the quest progresses and even before it starts but this is where the choice is locked in.
We repeated the choice a few times to reflect on what you saw and did and decide on the way forward. We also did this because in our research on other interactive narrative games we discovered that asking someone to reaffirm or change a choice a few times increases their investment in it. It's a good technique and worked well here.
If Marta is with you must choose to purify the spirit and save Initiates, the motivation for getting her to join you, if you choose otherwise, you must fight her.
Player Start
Simplified Flow
Spirit Fight
This Boss features two layered mechanics that once discovered and understood take the fight from challenging to manageable.
Firstly, the Heart splits into three. Two are less powerful fakes while the real one has the most strength. Every turn the three scramble their positions but you can use both the strength of their attacks and how they take damage to narrow down which is the real Heart and which are the fakes.
Secondly is the eventual appearance of Harrow. Harrow has a very powerful buff that buffs the real spirit and must become the priority target while managing the rest of the fight.
After defeating the spirit your decision for Glory to follow a path of vengeance or healing plays out.
These decisions are not right or wrong per se. Both choices lead to quest completion. Your choice does, however, determine the nature of Glory’s permanent new ability, how the rest of the mission plays out and where we leave Glory at the Director’s Cut’s conclusion.
The approach I took in this quest, as did Harebrained in general in the series, is that we don’t judge the player for their choices and aim to build a satisfying experience whatever path they choose.
There is a lot of context to be aware of to take this stance but I think the best interactive narratives have this lack of judgment of the player. If we, as creators, choose to share stories with players that sharing needs to be done with integrity. It's disingenuous for a game to pretend to share something with players when behind the scenes it's really only the game’s story all along.
Burning Compound
Harrow (Vengeance Path)
[Blocking Debris]
Trapped Initiates (Healing Path)
[Blocking Debris]
Player Start
Player Exit
Simplified Flow
After this climatic battle you return to a burning and quaking compound. With the pillar of the twisted spirit removed the entire place is going to come down. Burning debris blocks access from most of the Compound.
If you have chosen vengeance, you confront Harrow for the final time and end him in a short game controlled vignette.
If you have chosen healing you clear some burning wreckage, rescue the Initiates and make good your escape.