Unveiled: Camelot Unchained Newsletter #38 - City State Entertainment View this email in your browser Share Tweet +1 Team Tidings -by Max Porter Hey folks,



Happy end of September and start of October! It’s been a bangin’ month at City State Entertainment™, and we’ve got a lot to tell you. We’ve made tons of progress on Camelot Unchained™, and we’re looking forward to tons more.



Here in the East Coast office, the weather has changed from lousy to fantastic, and we’re looking at signs of autumn in the air. We’ve got a few additions to the office itself in the form of awesome gifts from Backers, which we’ll talk about below. It’s all inspiration to move ever onward to the start of Beta 1, which we’ve been talking about extensively in the periodic releases on the Beta 1 document. So many things to think about and get excited about as we approach the next phase of testing!



We’re in the midst of a “sprint” on siege gameplay, which you can read more about in the State of the Build article by Brittany below. We’re also pushing to find the right balance of awesomeness on the art side, which Tyler gets deeply into with his Artitup article. Ben talks about the importance of details in his Dose of Design, plus there’s a new lore update from myself, to round things out!



We have continued our weekly schedule of streams this month, showing you everything from impressive creative work by artists and programmers to the latest updates and news. We have fun with it, but the streams are also very important to us, as we always want to be as informative as possible for our Backers and fans. If you want to catch up on any missed streams, they can always be found on our Twitch and YouTube channels. For a good read of our news, as well as our weekly Top Tenish updates, check out the News section of our website, and our User Stories to check on our progress.



And with that, I’ll remind you again to click on the “view this email in your browser” link on the top right to see the whole newsletter. It’s been a thrill once again to put this all together for the month, and I hope you enjoy! Read on for articles, art, news, updates, lore, and so much goodness in this, the thirty-eighth issue of Unveiled. Hot Topics

The latest topics of discussion on the forums right now include opening and closing doors to Realm-mates, soloing, archers, and of course the recently released Grouping and Social Systems of the Beta 1 doc!



Join the discussion on the forums on our website to bring your thoughts and ideas to the table! The latest topics of discussion on the forums right now include opening and closing doors to Realm-mates, soloing, archers, and of course the recently released Grouping and Social Systems of the Beta 1 doc! Thank You WOW! We have a great deal to be thankful for as we close out September and head into October. In particular, the many truly amazing gifts that were sent to us by Backers brought smiles to all our faces.



Thank you to Drooge, who sent us these cold remedies to help us as “con crud” season came upon us! That’s awesome Drooge, we’ll do our best not to get sick! Thank you to Apollon, who not only heads up the volunteer German translators, but sent us this absolutely wonderful coffee, souvenir cutting board, and Bavarian hat (for Andrew), all from Germany! Thanks to the guild called The Syndicate, who sent us some of their con swag from Syndcon! Cool stuff! Now, let the halls ring with the praises of Ludovic, who sent us all this coffee candy, plus sent it to the Seattle studio too! Now CSE West can have some sweet caffeine as well! But Ludovic still wasn’t done. Oh, no. This extremely generous Backer sent CSE West a mountain of pez, or more accurately, a tower. May I present the “leaning tower of Pez-a,” courtesy of George! Now let’s talk about some very special handiwork. Specifically, the Backer Necromaniak’s handiwork, whom you may know from various streams and images of his truly astonishing work in C.U.B.E. This time, it’s a creation in the real world: A hand-sculpted, hand-painted, hand-mounted, and all-around handsome dragon skull! It’s gorgeous. You could be forgiven for thinking that our amazing Backers would stop there, but no. We received another amazing hand-made gift! A big thank-you to The Funk, who sent us this impressive and absolutely stunning shield! Apparently, it was cut out on a CNC, and than hand-painted. It matches the one in our team picture! And finally, thank you to Thadicus, who sent us this wonderful “Death Wish” coffee! It will certainly keep us awake and working hard with that powerful caffeine! Brittany says that “Seattle’s 5-pound bag just arrived, though without a water line we now have to order reusable Keurig cups to drink it. WE WILL NOT BE STOPPED!” Look What You Did Check out this awesome fan art for the “Drawing Balor” fan art contest! This piece was drawn by the Backer Necromaniak. The mighty statue will destroy you with its gaze! For our next newsletter contest, it's time for some fan fiction once again! This issue, we have a description of a horrific trap getting triggered in the Lore Corner section. Time to write up a description of a character or group of characters encountering a clever or devious trap that you could imagine getting sprung in the world of Camelot Unchained! Be sure to put on your writing cap! Make it 300 words or less, and post it in the thread you'll see popping up in the Fan Fiction section of our Forums. Winner gets posted in next month's newsletter! Dose of Design -by Ben Pielstick Focusing on The Details

For years of developing Camelot Unchained, the primary focus of development has been on technical viability. Up until recently, we’ve only ever really had to worry about making the game fun long enough to put together a limited set of tests, with very little polish and very few working mechanics, mainly for the sake of collecting performance metrics and watching for client and server crashes. Shifting our focus to delivering siege battles that are not only fully functional and performant, but fun to participate in, means putting a lot of emphasis on things we’ve never had to spend a lot of time on before in CU.



Game developers generally can’t just focus on a few big important items to make a game ‘feel’ fun. The intrinsic sense of fun in games instead tends to come from a massive number of small subtle details, which cumulatively add up to an enjoyable experience. You can’t easily point to any one thing, like the ability button art, or the heavy armor footstep sounds, or the particle effects for casting a healing spell, and say how much more fun that one feature makes the game. If enough of these small details don’t achieve the quality standard set for the game as a whole, the overall feel of the game will start to suffer. When this happens, it can be difficult to point to a specific reason the game just doesn’t ‘feel’ good. Subtle details often don’t call attention to themselves, which can often lead to a guessing game as to which specific changes will fix the general problem of the game not ‘feeling’ fun to play. That is why it is very important to keep the details in focus.



In our case with Camelot Unchained, the details we’re working on at present have to do with things like smoothness of animations for drawing arrows from quivers, the speed at which characters swing their swords, and the time it takes characters to change directions due to WASD movement input. Going through these, and the many other small features that each play a role in making the game feel like a cohesive and fun experience, isn’t easy, and takes time. Once we do reach a point where we feel we’ve achieved good all-around results internally, we will start showing our work to a wider group of testers, and watching feedback closely to see how well we did.



You may have heard the saying “Can't see the forest for the trees,” which is exactly what can happen when we as developers spend so much time looking at their own work, making tiny adjustments over and over to achieve the desired result. After all that, having players who have never seen these features before take a fresh look and voice their opinions is a great way to confirm whether we’ve achieved our quality goals, or if we still have more work to do.



Since there are so many small details to try and get right, it is likely that not all of them will be perfect on our first attempt. One of the important benefits of a long period of testing before a game is launched is having lots of time to hunt down and fix hard-to-find problems with subtle features. The start of Beta 1 testing is the first time CU is meant to come together as a fun, though limited, gameplay experience. Once Beta 1 testing starts, we will be looking very closely at the feedback on all parts of the game, to help guide where our focus needs to be in order to deliver the most intrinsically fun experience possible. Establishing a solid foundation with our base set of features will provide a strong starting point. From there, we can expand our initial Beta 1 feature set throughout the course of testing into the full game experience of Camelot Unchained.



Week by week, we continue checking off the necessary features to start Beta 1 testing, and all of us here at CSE are looking forward to getting our first phase of Beta testing started. As always, thank you for your continued support and patience as we make sure to get all these small but important pieces assembled. Keep an eye on our frequent updates to see which features are getting attention, and you’ll get an inside look at how some of these small details are shaping up. Developer Quote “It’s been a longer-than-expected road but thankfully, finally, things are moving along at the pace we expected. That makes us all very happy.” - Mark Jacobs Artitup -by Tyler Rockwell Last month, I wrote a fairly long (or so I’m told) article about our approach to the animation system in terms of asset creation. There’s even an awesome .gif created by the Backer and lead translator Apollon floating around in our Discord chat of me pantomiming the concept, clipped from our live stream--I think it’s hilarious! Let’s continue that thread a bit here, so I can fill you in on what has changed since last month in terms of animation, and we’ll also talk about what the rest of the art team has been up to.







Last month’s article focused on how we are using this really great system Andrew built, which allows us to append different body parts with their own animation data into a whole, moving character. I used our current work as an example where we may use the same core--the torso and legs--but swap out the arm animations to hold and use different weapons, such as a mace or sword. This right here is a huge time saver, which really hits that “work smart” approach we need to have as a small studio. Now, I know you have your hands on your hips and a stern look on your face right now, asking, “But what about the ‘work hard’ part, Tyler?” Let’s get to that.



Camelot Unchained is headed toward a truly old-school Beta 1. That means we’re first tackling our most difficult, most technical hurdles first, and beginning to layer in gameplay on top of them. This isn’t the typical approach for games, let alone anything else, but it’s something Mark and Andrew both hammered into the team early on, and still do: that we should work out the hard things first. The great news here, in case you’ve been hiding under a rock, is that we’ve surmounted a collection of those technical challenges with our Big Bot Battle tests (Bots now known as Autonomous Remote Clients, or ARCs) of over 2K Backers and ARCs moving around in a small space, while using abilities with lots of particles!



That “tackle the hard things first” approach permeates the art team’s strategy as well. Let’s start off with the goals of the animation system: We want the ability system to visually affect the animations in a way that add nuance to how you put together your ability, but not in a way that degrades the base assets. We also want the tech to support the scope of the game, not hinder it. We’re working on that balance, and are progressing nicely this month.



As we’ve said many times, the animation system and the animation assets will be an important focus up to launch, meaning we’ll continue trying out solutions until we really feel that it looks good and is fun. Of course, that requires lots of testing from our Backers. Until then, we’re trying out different ideas. Here’s a link to the old greatsword animations. Pay attention to the attack swing. This swing was built at a mid speed value, where the component stats on the ability you built would determine how fast and slow the prepare and recover frames would play. The swing part of the animation would remain static. While this works systemically, it wasn’t giving us the “oomph” we were looking for.



This month, both Scott and Sandra have been trying out a static timing technique with values provided by Ben that are a bit faster. These times represent a standard, slow, and fast attack. The most recent video example from Scott of the greatsword attacks can be found HERE. For several reasons (which are too lengthy to get into right now), we find these to be visually more successful, not only in their timing, but also in how they show the intent of a longer or shorter attack.



As of this writing, Ben has hooked up these animations to a set of abilities that will squash and stretch the animations’ prep and recovery times, so we can determine whether we should go in the direction of systemic timing changes, static and artist-driven timings, or a combination of both. Each experiment gets us another step closer to defining the look and feel of CU. It’s really important to us, and we know it will be to our players as well. I’m proud to work with a team that really wants to get it right, even if it takes time and elbow grease!



Now let’s look at some of the other work in progress this month. Dionne, after a brief break due to priority changes, has been auditing and uploading over 40 pieces of the mines, using a system and naming convention provided by Ben. Even beginning on the art assets that could later be used in a procedural system is a big undertaking. So, starting with hard part first, we’re trying to tackle two birds with one stone with functional arted-up assets that may also work well in a later-devised procedural system. Our first pass will certainly be hand assembled, but will help inform us of any problems now, which helps us build that tech later.







We all know Michelle is constantly churning out pretty pictures of all manner of assets and ideas. For the past several weeks, she has been working on new ideas for the character selection backgrounds, pushing her abilities a bit to try different styles and tools, and trying to come up with something that’s not only fresh for her, but fresh for our Backers as well. When we review something as important as the character creation process, we get a lot of eyes and voices on the concepts as they progress. Michelle created several different ideas for the backgrounds, using different techniques. Michelle’s drive and creativity successfully pushed more discussion about the look and feel of the backgrounds!







Just this week, we’ve handed off a .psd for James to begin ripping apart with the approved concept. James is teaching himself not only how to put the visuals into the patcher, but also how to do most of it in code, to improve performance. From a Producer’s perspective, I’m sure you can understand how great it is to work with team members who can take an idea and not only run with it, but push themselves to learn in the process!







Let’s hop on over to Jon now. For our siege battles, we wanted to take another look at not only the animations for archers, but also the components and abilities they are using, specifically to make sieges more fun. I can honestly say I’m grateful not only for Jon’s talent, but my god, his speed! Jon is practically a machine when it comes to creating content. Just today I explicitly told him to make three bows, so each Realm would now have a short and long bow. Just three. His answer: “Well I’m finishing those up on today’s stream. Can I do three more to fill the rest of the time? Hard to argue with that speed. However this has created a bit of a backlog of work for other people to do for the final import of these assets! Jon and I decided it was time for him to learn the model setup and import process so he could help out. He added to that with a request for a Maya license, so he could learn the program at the same time, which is just awesome. Not only will he learn parts of the process he didn’t know before, but he’s also taking it upon himself to learn a new product (previously, he was all 3D Studio Max).







Mike, our ever-technical visual nitpicker of VFX, has been throwing a bit of VFX magic at several things this month. The goal right now isn’t visual perfection, it’s mostly testing out a lot of different pieces of tech. Not only is he working with a very powerful and performant VFX editor, still with room to grow, but he’s also working with new systems and features.



There’s this really simple idea that you push a button and your wizard throws a fireball. Getting to that point requires a lot of work from different people, including ability design in xml, tagging and frame times from the animation system, art direction, and finally implementing the tags and assets on the VFX side. That last one, of course, is Mike’s bread and butter, a cross (Heh) between working with an easel and a giant mixing board full of buttons and dials.



Towards the end of last month, he had put several placeholder VFX on some of our healer classes to test some specific functionality with them, particularly casting an ability on a target and seeing a VFX result. This required a lot of cooperation between Mike and Ben, as well as Gabe, to make sure that new tech worked. Mike’s also working with Michelle and myself to add the VFX to the Realm portals, and experimenting with new ideas for how each Realm’s portal VFX could look different. Next up, we have some new scorpion-specific siege abilities that he and dB will begin working on, followed by some new bow abilities for archers for testing during our siege focused sprint. While Mike is definitely busy, he’s got a good support system around him...the rest of us!







That wraps up the highlights of the month from the art team. We remain in your debt, and will continue, as always, to repay your trust with hard work and enthusiasm. Speaking personally, this remains the most rewarding, certainly most educational, and most fun project I’ve been a part of since I started in this industry as an intern on a little ol’ golf game back in 2002. Thank you.



-t Tech Central -by Charles "Bull" Durham Paying the Dues

Developing a big project like this one is essentially just making many decisions every day. This is, probably, not much more different than any other activity in life, but software engineering is a bit different from most other activities I've participated in. Where I may have had to make a few decisions every day, writing software is making several important decisions every minute. It is both fun and stressful, and when we miss the target on making a good decision, it can cause more work down the line for everyone.



Sometimes, we must decide about whether to upgrade an existing system, or simply not upgrade and continue using what we have. We also run across sections of code we’ve written that, while functional, might contain a multitude of issues. For example, the code might not be very elegant or, worse, doesn’t scale well, or perhaps it might be in the process of becoming difficult to maintain, or maybe it’s just gross. There is an ephemeral calculus in the decision about whether to fix it now or press on. This judgment call is more of an art than a science. For that reason, these decisions are left to Andrew or other senior programmers before they are acted on. We call the choice to fix a problem later “technical debt,” because it behaves just like financial debt, which must be paid off someday.



Like any other debt, the longer it is put off, the harder it becomes to fix. Even a "let's wait" decision often needs to be revisited as the debt grows. One of these topics, which has been revisited recently, is the drivers we use in our C# services to add and update the database. The version we are on is single-threaded only. Single-threaded means that you would make a call, wait for the database to do its thing, and then proceed from that point. Because that was slow, we wrote a “wrapper” around those drivers to make them asynchronous and fast. Asynchronous means that you start a long-running section of code on its way, and can continue doing stuff. The solution we made worked very well, as you can see by the sheer number of entities that can exist on the server at the same time.



Of course, not very long after that, MongoDB released a set of drivers that was fully asynchronous. Unfortunately, they also made significant changes to the application programming interface (API), which would require rewriting, reworking, and testing a great deal of our core code. At the time, the correct decision was made, which was to just use what we had written and not spend the time upgrading the drivers.



Eventually the task of upgrading the drivers made it to me. It sat around in my list of things to do until two more events happened, causing it to go up in priority. We can no longer easily get the version of the drivers we are using; and we want to upgrade the version of the database server itself we use. This has finally made it time to pay the dues, and lately, I’ve been focused on paying back some of those.



The downside to all of this is, of course, that had this been done initially, it probably would have taken less time to do from a code-writing standpoint, and we may have been enjoying the features of the fully asynchronous drivers from that time until now. Making that decision is truly an art, and considering how stable our database and database operations have been, we did make the right one, despite the downside. So, as my friend Jack Burton likes to say, when someone asks if you've paid your dues, you just look them in the eye and say, "The check is in the mail."



I'll let you know how the upgrade goes in a future post or article, and I’ll tell you all about the wonderful problems I encountered along the way. Until then, keep coding! State Of The Build -by Brittany Aubert When MJ talked to us and said we were going to have a sprint focused on sieges, my first question was, “What do you mean by ‘sprint’?” Every studio builds games differently, so it’s not uncommon to hear similar terms across studios that mean different things. At CSE, we don’t necessarily use ‘sprint’ in the way it’s defined in agile development. Instead, we use it in our own way, a way that keeps to the vision of a sprint: a defined amount of time where we focus on a singular goal. So, over the next few weeks, the majority of the team is focused on making epic siege battles a reality.



This month, I’ll talk about some of the progress we’ve made on features that will directly impact these battles, as well as ancillary features that help to round out the experience. We’ve already seen some incredible progress, and I’m excited to share that with you.



Siege Battles: The first step of tackling this sprint is figuring out what it is we’re building. While Ben and MJ worked on the design side of how siege battles need to play, Caleb is taking that game design info and building a technical design. This is basically a roadmap outlining the different data structures we need to build, and how they utilize or fit into our existing tech. Taking advantage of as much of the existing code as possible saves us time, so in order to ensure we do this, there have to be a number of discussions before any code is written. “Do we have a way to do x?” or “Can I piggyback off of y to do z?” are typical questions asked during this process.



Those answers inform the technical design, which then informs the different iterations of siege battles we’re going to see, and eventually informs the order in which we have to build everything. As we’ve shown our Backers before, seeing progress and evaluating direction as early as possible is key, even if it’s just in the case of tracking and testing internally.



NPCs: Colin was already working on NPCs on our march towards Beta 1. He’s set up an NPC server that runs AI for each NPC and sends commands to the game server. The NPC server maintains the AI state and automatically assigns the new AI controller when it receives a new NPC Entity. It’s pretty spiffy!



When we got word of the sprint, we revisited the next steps for building NPCs. While we’ll need “signpost” NPC support (click on an NPC, and they display some information via text) for Beta 1 eventually, working on that now doesn’t really help us hit our sprint goal.



We decided to have Colin pivot and instead focus on building interesting behavior into our NPCs, to help the siege battles specifically. Colin gave some basic AI functionality to our NPCs, so they can walk up to an unmanned siege engine, start aiming, and fire bolts. As with many gameplay features, we’ve built a bunch of slash commands to create and destroy NPCs quickly, so we can throw a bunch out on the battlefield for testing.



Progression: When Christina first started in January, our eventual goal was to get her working on CU’s progression system. After some excellent work in items and crafting, we finally got her working on another one of the Beta 1 tentpoles.



Instead of leveling up your character, we track everything that a player does in the game and give them rewards based on their actions. This system has to be flexible to account for the many different systems in our game, allow for easy testing, and be foolproof, as we don’t want our players to ever lose their progress.



Events are how we track what a player does. Whether it’s using an ability, creating or destroying blocks, or attacking with a specific weapon (like a siege engine), we track it. And then at the end of the day, we give out rewards, like stat bonuses, leveling up ability components, or whole new items. But how long is a ‘day’? Well, that needs to be something we can easily adjust. Let’s say we’re running an impromptu test and we need to gather some data and test the loop quickly. If we set a ‘day’ to last one hour, it allows us to simulate what our players expect without needing to wait a full 24 hours for results.



In order to gather this data, we run a standalone progression “app” built to collect data from our players that we can store for future, and reward accordingly. Early testing will see us run this app on Christina’s own computer. Eventually, we could have this app run on its own server. Combining the goals of “flexibility and foolproof” have led us here!



Emotes: With a first pass of the animation tech in place, we plan to have more engineers get their fingers in it, giving us multiple resources to fix issues that arrive, and helping us address the bus factor. We threw Brad at emotes, as it seemed like a quick-ish, short-ish task that would give him a nice entry point into new code. He’s already got emotes tied to slash commands, reusing a lot of the code previously written during re-ab.



Do emotes directly help out us hit our siege sprint goal? Not necessarily, though taunting your opponents in the middle of a battle is pretty awesome. What this does give us is another brain filled with the knowledge of a major system in our game. When we want to move forward with improving our animation tech further to help combat feel and look better, we now have more flexibility to do so, as we aren’t bottlenecked by having only one programmer with the keys to the animation car.



Message of the Day: Our IT, Alpha, and Beta 1 Backers are likely familiar with the Message of the Day (MotD) that pops up as soon as the game client loads. Well, what happens if we need to tell players something, but for whatever reason, they can’t get into the game (if the servers are down, or they prefer not to launch the whole client just to read the latest news, etc.)? Sounds like we have to also push messages to the patcher.



Combine this need with the desire to quickly edit text in both the patcher and the game. In order to do this now, you’d have to know how to navigate our database, as well as use HTML to craft the actual message (spoilers: the MotD text is updated by yours truly, more often than not). This isn’t sustainable, and we may need someone who’s not technical to be able to update and push the text at a moment’s notice. So, with our eyes looking towards Beta 1, it made sense to have JB put together some web content tools to allow for this. Eventually, CSE employees will be able to access an internal web page, update the text, and BOOM. Updated. This will be extremely helpful for siege battles, as we can communicate the state of any siege-related chaos quickly and easily to players.



And because JB is the kind of guy that goes above and beyond, he’s set up this new web tool page to link to a lot of other internal pages we have (account management, server controller, and crash log search panel). It’s a little addition that made a lot of people in the studio happy, as we got to remove a bunch of different browser bookmarks. It’s the little things ;)



The Glue that Holds it All Together: Little random things come up commonly throughout development, but more so when many people are focused on a singular goal. Whether it’s a missing link between two systems or a quick addition that saves ample time, we’ve already run into a few.



Since the focus of this sprint is on gameplay, making sure we can iterate quickly is a major priority. Our programming team is super strong, but they all have different backgrounds. Our UI system is ultra powerful, but requires quite a bit of knowledge in JavaScript and React. The reality is that we have a lot of gameplay that requires a lot of UI, and despite being armed with two awesome UI programmers in JB and AJ, they aren’t always available.



JB was able to pump out something we’re calling the “DevUI” in (literally) less than an hour. This is essentially a widget that allows our gameplay guys to display some data, either from the client or server, without needing to build out a full UI first. The DevUI is constructed in such a way that we can separate the data from the markup information (the stuff that makes text on web pages pretty) so we can slot in a beautiful UI later. In the meantime, we can throw some gameplay code together, have the ability to test it out and quickly throw away what might not work, without involving a bunch of different people in the process. To quote Caleb, “It’s not pretty. It’s not intended to be. It’s intended to help us move quickly.”



That’s all for now. Let’s go make a video game! Brittany out! Lore Corner -by Max Porter Hey folks, welcome to another story in the Lore Corner! This month, allow me to present to you a rewritten, revamped, and refreshed version of part six of the epic story of the Silverhands! This sprawling chronicle was originally written by Mark Jacobs in seven parts, which were then collected into one massive Becoming™ story. Please read on for the developed version, as we call it, of this Becoming tale, which not only tells us a great adventure of the first Silverhand, but also presents some of Mark’s thoughts on The Depths™ and the beings therein. Here's parts one, two, three, four, and five, in case you want to catch up. Without further ado, I hope you enjoy! The Becoming: The Silverhands Part 6

The Tale of Nuada Part 6

Deep within a green hill, surrounded by bog and foul, rotting odors, there stood another black monolith. Dark sentinel of the passage to another place, the living Depths of horror and madness.



As Nuada stood before it, he noticed the black stone was so dark that not even his flickering torchlight reflected off of it, leaving the monolith untouched by anything. All seemed identical to the last time he had come to The Depths, so many years ago. The fallen king of the Tuatha Dé Danann turned to the healer at his side. “I suppose this is when you tell me of my destiny, and how I must venture in there alone, right?” Nuada asked, breaking into a grin despite the grim surroundings.



The Hamadryad shrugged, barely willing to return his smile. “I was thinking that it would be better if we all go in together. I can certainly talk about destiny if you wish to play the role of legendary…”



“Sword fodder,” interrupted Miach.



Her tail twitched. “…hero...and we can wait outside for you. I have no great desire to visit there again,” said the healer.



“Again? You’ve been in The Depths before?” Nuada blinked in surprise. He had thought he was the only one tainted by its power. Perhaps there was more to this healer than he’d thought…



She waved her hand dismissively. Nuada knew he was stalling the inevitable, and grunted as he adjusted his armor. “Shall we go inside and find Bres?” said Nuada.



“I’ve got first rights on any forges we find. I can’t wait to see what creates such interesting…erm, I mean, vile things!” said Miach.



Nuada shook his head and sighed. With a motion, he called the rest of the Delvers they had collected toward the black monolith. All of them had already trained their minds to blankness, and had been warned of the multitude of dangers that lay below.



Pulled by the vortex of light from the monolith just like the last time Nuada had entered, the dozen of them marched into The Depths. Whirled through the dark, they found themselves at a new entranceway, one which Nuada had never seen before.



A glossy-black set of doors rose before them, inlaid with thin strands of gold that depicted strange images. Taking a closer look, all were horrified by what they saw. The doors were carved with images of women various states of torture, slain through unspeakably vile acts. The group hesitated before the doors, revolted and enraged by the sight.



Nuada, for his part, nearly vomited. He recognized the faces of each of these women: they were all Nimue.



Trying to master himself, the Tuatha reached out a hand to push open the door, but snatched it back when he saw movement. The door came alive: Each of the women began to move, writhing in pain. Nuada choked as the tiny figures moaned his name accusingly: “Nuada.”



Along with the other Delvers, Miach gave him a strange look. “What happened here? What did you do to her?”



“Nothing! We were fighting our way out of The Depths. When she had run out of her magic resources, she sacrificed her life to save mine,” Nuada said angrily, “She left me no choice. She forced me to leave her.”



“Forced? Really? Our big, brave Tuatha was forced to leave by a naked, magically-exhausted woman?” said Miach, stony arms folded.



“She wasn’t naked at the time. And yes, she sacrificed her life for mine. I’ve had to think about it since... I wanted to go back for her, but I couldn’t,” Nuada’s face was burning as he seethed with anger and regret.



“Couldn’t...or wouldn’t, Nuada?” asked the Hamadryad quietly, staring at him while her tail twitched.



“Could…No, wouldn’t. She did plead for me to leave, but...perhaps I could have refused. Or perhaps I could have come back to The Depths before now. I should have come back before now! Instead of raising the army and marching back to Tír Na nÓg, I should have stormed this accursed place.”



Nuada dropped to his knees. Silence spread over the door as the carvings of Nimue stopped their cries of fear and pain, turning to stare at Nuada. “Forgive me, Nimue. I should have come back sooner. And if you can’t forgive me...take my life in The Depths. Just let us through, I implore you,” he begged. The other Delvers looked on in wonder at the still figures, their writhing stilled.



Nuada rose and gently pushed the doors. With the slightest hesitation, the massive stone doors swung silently open.



“The one thing certain about The Depths is that nothing is certain about them,” Nuada whispered as he led the way into the tunnel beyond.

Within, the first room they came to contained a scene of slaughter.



The walls, floor and ceiling were stained crimson with pieces of living creatures that had been dismembered and scattered. Heads were stuck to walls as macabre trophies. In some places, a jigsaw puzzle of body parts were laid together, a mockery of a whole being.



But the subtlest, most disturbing thing about the room was how its walls expanded and contracted in a rhythmic pattern. As they walked through the room, the cycle of breathing suddenly stopped.



“I don’t think this is a good sign. Keep moving,” said Nuada, resting his silver hand on the pommel of his weapon.



“I agree,” said Miach, “As one of our deepsheep herders would say, let’s get the flock out of here.” He hustled on more swiftly than his heavy stone-fused limbs would seem to allow.

Quickening their pace, the companions avoided the gore as best they could. As they approached the far end of the chamber, the breathing started again.



They were all out into the next tunnel, and Nuada was just about to congratulate his followers on passing through unscathed, when the trap sprung. It caught the final two rearguards, a pair of Tuatha from the Realm Nuada had once ruled.



“Ugh!” they both cried, as the ceiling opened above them with a sudden squelch. A tidal wave of blood and guts fell from above. Covered in gore, they shook and retched in disgust, while those nearby shook some of the spattered blood with a laugh.



Then they noticed that the welter of crimson guts contained large leeches.



The two Tuatha began plucking off the creatures, but shouted in pain. The things had barbed teeth, and they ripped out a chunk of flesh as they came away. Shuddering, the Tuathan men hesitated, looking from one to the other and over at the other Delvers.



“Get them off!” Nuada shouted too late from the other end of the hall.



The creatures had another surprise ready. After a moment, the bloated leeches rapidly shrank, expelling eggs and implanting them in their victims. Before the two Delvers could do anything more than scream and collapse to the ground, hideous larvae had burrowed deeply into their bodies. Then, the things began devouring flesh from the inside.



Helpless, the other companions looked on in horror as the hungry larvae chewed through the bodies in mere seconds. Nothing but bits of gore stuck to bones remained in empty suits of armor. Swollen and sated, the larvae rolled out. They posed no further threat as the remaining adventurers fled.



Nuada crossed a threshold and blinked in darkness. He peered around the next room, wondering how large it might be. Then a flickering light was kindled, and he recognized the shape of a building, a fire, and a mighty anvil. It was that selfsame forge he had visited with the Merchant.



Miach let out a cry of joy and ran past before Nuada could even shout a warning. However, there seemed to be no creature lying in wait. Nothing attacked the Dvergr as he examined the gleaming anvil from all angles.



Mumbling to himself, Miach began testing the forge with his instruments, both magical and mundane. “This is great! So exciting! This forge has properties I’ve never seen anywhere else in the world! I could happily spend decades studying this beauty,” he chuckled, giving the hunk of metal a hearty slap.



Nuada shook his head. “We need to move on. We’ll come back after we find Bres.”



“Nuada, I’m a crafter, not a fighter. I can train your arm, even spar with you a bit, but in a true fight, well, I am about as useful as an angry Valkyrie in a brothel. Leave me here with one of the warriors, and let me do what I do so well,” Miach held on to the anvil as if daring Nuada to drag him away.



After a moment, Nuada sighed. “I suppose you’re right.”



“Good. I’ll ask the other Dvergr to stay with me. He’s got a round shield I can work on,” said Miach.



As the rest of them continued down the path, Nuada looked over his shoulder to see Miach already laying out his equipment.



“Miach,” Nuada called out, making the other look up. “Stay safe, you maddening little man.”



“Ah, such a sweet boy,” said Miach in his mocking way. “You, too.”



Leaving the forge and the Dvergr behind, Nuada and his companions continued down a narrow path that overlooked a gigantic open mouth, filled with teeth like blades. It made him nervous: the very presence of the blade-studded mouth was menacing in a way that chilled the spine.



Almost without realizing it, the group gradually quickened the pace, until they were running across the stone shelf over the hungry chasm.



After crossing, they came to a wide, impressive hallway lined with imposing pillars. About halfway along, the stone floor was covered in a thick, purple carpet. It did very little to dampen their echoing footsteps, which bounced back and forth between the great pillared walls.



Leaving the enormous maw behind, they could see something gleaming in the distance. As they approached with torches and magelights held high, the shadows fled, and the sight became clear: It was an enormous golden throne, and a smiling king was seated upon it.



Nuada recognized Bres. Drawing his father’s sword in his strong silver hand, Nuada rushed forward, oblivious to the warning shouts from the Hamadryad as his river of hatred came to an instant boil. Nimue, John, Tír Na nÓg, his arm, Balor’s evil eye… these images flooded his brain.



Nuada swung high as he ran up the golden steps, then hesitated. Bres hadn’t reacted at all. Standing over his enemy, Nuada brought the edge of his blade to Bres’ throat. However, the traitor sat completely still, head held high under the weight of his large gold crown. Not even his eyes moved to look at Nuada.



Frowning, Nuada saw his own arm trembling slightly with excitement. “It is your time now. For all the deaths you caused,” he said loudly, as his companions came up behind him.

Still there was no reaction from Bres.



Nuada gritted his teeth and tried to hold his sword steady. “Say something!”



No reaction.



“Anything,” he whispered desperately.



Still nothing.



“Nuada, he can’t,” said the healer, touching him on the shoulder.



“Is he dead?” said Nuada without lowering his weapon.



“No. He is alive. Look at the forefinger on his right hand,” said the healer.



At first, Nuada could see nothing. After a moment, Bres’ finger twitched, almost imperceptibly.

“What is going on here?” asked Nuada. His Veilsight revealed nothing.



“I sense that Bres is here, but is also...away,” said the healer, looking from side to side with some magical vision of her own. “He’s in his own place within this place...a different bubble of existence.”



“I have no idea what you are talking about,” Nuada ground out, finally lowering his weapon.



“I’m not sure I do, either. I just know that wherever he is, he is experiencing something totally different than we are now,” said the healer, rubbing her eyes. “It is confusing.”



“Then let me clear up your confusion,” said an oily voice, far too familiar for comfort.



Turning towards the sound of the voice, the companions saw the man that Nuada had called the Merchant, strolling casually along a hidden path behind the great throne. Nuada’s blood ran hot and his fingers flexed, itching for revenge.



“Now now Nuada, calm down. I know you must have dreamt about killing me for years by now, but hear me out. I can explain everything. I can even show you where your friends John and Nimue are, and before you ask...yes, they are alive and doing quite well.” The Merchant folded his hands over his belly and beamed at them all.



“Hear him out,” said the healer, holding up her hand. Her voice was gentle, but her eyes were hard.



“Thank you. First, you were right, Bres is in a different time. He came here asking for my help. It was his truest wish to sit forever upon the throne of the Tuatha Dé Danann, and, as you see, that is what he is doing now. For as long as this world survives, Bres will sit upon this throne,” said the Merchant.



“You vile, disgusting monster...” started Nuada, beginning to raise his weapon.



“Not at all. Bres made his wish clear to me and we made it happen. The same thing applies to you, Nuada. We simply carried out your wishes.” The Merchant fixed him with a blank stare.





Fuming, Nuada shouted back, “I never said I wanted a damned spider arm! That disgusting thing sucked my own life from me!”



“That’s true, but then again, you made it clear you would stop at nothing to get what you wanted: power. I was quite proud of the work we did on your arm. It’s a shame that it isn’t still attached...you were so helpful to us,” said the Merchant.



“Us?” The Hamadryad took a step forward.



“Of course. The Depths are truly a ‘we’ not an ‘I’,” said the Merchant, “Bres is now part of us, just as Nuada was, for too short a time. The power that your arm and your sword drew from their food was wonderful! We put it to good use here. We are doing so well, now!” The Merchant raised his short arms in joy.



Not knowing how to react to the Merchant’s words, the companions simply stood there and stared at the strange servant of The Depths with his arms in the air.



“Nothing to say? Good.” The Merchant lowered his arms and gestured back the way he had come. “Let’s move on, then. I want to reunite Nuada with his brave friends. They are just down this path.” With that, he turned and walked down a tunnel that lay hidden behind the golden throne.



“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” said Nuada to the healer.



“Miach was right. You do have a tendency to state the obvious,” said the healer. “Steel yourself for the worst, Nuada.”



Following the entity called the Merchant, the Delvers felt strange air blowing across them. It smelled metallic, and felt both hot and cold at the same time, laden with a strange impersonal magic. After a moment, they came to a metal door that was plain and unadorned. The Merchant walked up to it without pausing, and the door slid silently into the roof.



In the dark room beyond, an intense feeling of wrongness filled the Delvers. The room smelled unpleasant; musky, yet somehow mechanical.



“Illuminate!” said the Merchant.



A blinding white light flashed into being. Infantile screams filled the room, as though this were a nursery full of children.



As his eyes recovered, Nuada saw that the Merchant had told part of the truth about John and Nimue: They were indeed alive. But it was not a life worth living.



Each was naked, spread-eagled upon a five-pointed star. They had monstrous tubes of living metal in their mouths, and were secured to the giant star by spiny creatures, wriggling in their flesh.



John’s skin was covered with pustules that expanded and contracted. To Nuada’s horror, one of the pustules broke open to expel a tiny, twisted abomination with Dvergr-like parts, and it fell to the ground with a thud. Like any newborn, the thing started to cry, a haunting gurgle from its pinched and misshapen throat.



The Merchant walked up to the tiny creature, took it in his arms, and rocked it gently. He crooned like a young mother, “See how cute this little fellow is? He’ll make a fine addition to our home.”



Too sickened to move, Nuada felt his eyes pulled inexorably to Nimue. Pinned to her five-pointed star, Nimue was giving birth. Her swollen belly began to contract as she screamed, muffled by a tube in her mouth. The newborn was immediately sucked out of her womb and into a pulsating glass tube attached to her body. As soon as the infant was ejected, her stomach began to swell again.



Nuada forced himself to take action. Whether it was real or illusionary, he could take no more. The Tuatha charged at the Merchant with blade held high.



“Oh dear, are you upset?” said the Merchant, watching Nuada leap over tubes and freakish machines to come at him. “Too bad. I thought you would be proud of what you helped bring about. I was just about to tell you the best part! We have decided that you will be with Nimue and John forever. After studying them, I thought it would be interesting to combine you three. Wouldn’t you like that?”



As the last word fell from the Merchant’s lips, Nuada swung his sword. His father’s reforged blade bit into the Merchant’s neck and neatly separated head from body.



“No, I wouldn’t,” Nuada answered. The Merchant’s head bounced, while his body slumped over, gushing blood. The newborn creature the Merchant had held landed on three legs, then ran off to places unknown. Nuada continued, “Now let’s free them and leave this terrible place.” Wiping the blood from his blade, he turned away.



“You didn’t really think it would be that easy, did you?” said the Merchant.



Turning back in shock, the companions found the Merchant was standing up again, walking back as a new head slowly emerged from his body. “After all, this isn’t a fairy tale or some folk story,” said the Merchant, shaking his newly formed head, “This is our world. You are fools for returning here, but we thank you for coming. I’m so glad you brought your friends, Nuada. For those that survive, we have countless decades to get to know each other. There are a lot of interesting combinations here for us to play with.”



At that, the Merchant snapped his fingers, and the pipes around the room boiled up with hungry abominations, pushing their way out to attack. They looked like deformed infants of many races, but swollen until they were almost as large as their prey. Nuada stepped back as they wailed and gnashed mismatched teeth.



“Try to keep them alive, my darlings,” said the Merchant to the creatures, “Especially the tall, stupid one.”



So began the battle. For a long moment, as the horrors gathered between them, Nuada simply stared into the Merchant’s eyes. The Tuatha’s gaze burned like the Spear of Victory that he had come here to reclaim. At last, Nuada saw a flicker of hesitation in the other’s soulless eyes.

Just before the nearest abomination struck him with its dirty fingernails, Nuada jumped. It was a huge leap across the distance between himself and the Merchant, Nuada’s face contorted in a primal scream. Astounded, the Merchant backed away, and Nuada’s blade sliced through a mass of young horrors instead, spraying dark blood.



Recovering from his surprise, the Merchant smiled, confidence returning. He raised his arms toward Nuada, and his hands shifted, cracking and changing. Grotesque tentacles grew from his fingers and shot out to entangle Nuada’s silver arm. Nuada tried to leap away, but the tentacles squeezed and twisted, seeking to wrench the arm from its socket. Miach had done his work well, for though Nuada grunted in pain, the arm stayed firmly attached. His head pushed to the side as he wrestled with the tentacles, Nuada could see his friends fighting for their lives.



No, not just for their lives. The screeching wails of the abominations echoed through The Depths as they battled Nuada’s friends for their very souls.



The Hamadryad was far more than a skilled healer. A veteran of many journeys to the Stormlands, she had proven the victor in countless battles with abominations. Her staff whipped through the air like Nuada’s sword, as she expertly cracked the skulls of those creatures foolish enough to rise against her.



As one of the deformed horrors sought to strike her unprotected back, her tail rose up like a cobra, swaying back and forth. Mesmerized by her tail’s motions, the thing lowered its hands and simply stood there, cooing to itself while she battled three others before her. Before the foul creature at her back could regain its senses, the fur on her tail receded backward to reveal a sharp set of teeth. The tail struck like a viper, attaching itself to the horror’s face and pumping in enough venom to kill it instantly. After a few more fell to her tail, the horrors seemed to decide that fighting the Hamadryad from the front was the more attractive option, despite her vicious staff. As she fought them, it became clear that these creatures possessed some degree of higher thought, which troubled her greatly.



Another of the Delvers, a HelBound Viking woman, had flung off her mask and was summoning the immense power of her ancestors to heighten the horror of her own visage. She thrust her face at the overgrown infants, and supernatural terror killed them where they stood. Meanwhile, she whirled her dual-headed staff high overhead, sending life to her companions even as she brought death to the abominations. For her, the battle was a mixture of ecstasy in life and death. Her riotous laughter echoed through the halls, sending abominations reeling in terror even as her fellow adventurers took heart at the wild sound.



Shoving off one tentacle only to be ensnared by another, Nuada added his laughter to the cacophony. All around, the chamber continued to fill with unimaginable abominations. Some were growing further, becoming older versions their fellows made up of many parts. Twisted combinations of male and female organs, teeth, feathers, claws, and tentacles made the room a living, screaming nightmare.



A Gargoyle among the Delvers proved to be a mighty mage. His blasts of magic lit enemies on fire, burning them like logs in a hearth. Somehow, their screams of pain reassured his companions. If one of the monsters got too close, the Gargoyle would transform his skin to true stone just after he was bitten, trapping them as a shield against further attacks. However, overwhelmed by the abominations, he was beginning to tire.



Kicking at abominations that tried to take advantage of his entanglement, Nuada gritted his teeth, realizing that most of the Delvers were already going down. A Stormrider warrior stripped off his armor and dared the creatures to attack him. They leaped at him with hungry glee, and he was completely covered in their bestial forms. Their combined weight brought him to his knees, clawing and biting, but the warrior fought on, his scars aglow with his efforts. He seemed able to almost ignore his physical injuries. When the Stormrider’s right hand was bitten off, he simply switched his weapon to his left. His will was indomitable, but his body eventually gave out and collapsed to the shifting metal floor.



Across the room, a pair of Luchopáns were fighting back-to-back, fiercely defending against the tidal wave of creatures that threatened to engulf them. These two weren’t great warriors, but seemed to possess a limitless bag of tricks to distract, delay, and damage the enemy creatures. Nuada watched the pair maneuver near a vat of acid and taunt the horrors to come. When the abominations charged, howling with strange cries, the two Luchorpáns vanished. Dozens of mad creatures ran headfirst into the pool, then screamed as they dissolved.



When the victorious Luchopáns reappeared, they congratulated themselves and turned to face their enemies as one. However, they could not see the vat itself coming alive behind them; it became a metal mouth, vomiting up the abominations as smoking, acid-infused things. Overwhelmed by the sudden attack, the pair of Luchorpáns were knocked to the floor and a gruesome feast began.



Fighting to get his silver arm free, Nuada felt the all-too-familiar prickling of despair. The horrors kept coming. No matter how many the companions destroyed, there were always more, a supply as infinite as the evil of The Depths. The only hopeful sights were in another part of the room, near John and Nimue, where a Valkyrie and a young Tuatha Dé Danann warrior were ripping through the abominations.



The Valkyrie was in full bloom. Her wings burned with vibrant blue fire, which ran down her arms and over each of her two spears, searing the enemy with each blow. Scores of the creatures lay burning and dying at her feet as she taunted more to come for her. Blood spattered the woman as she seemed to grow stronger with each attack, spitting them two or three at a time like skewers through meat.



The young Tuatha Dé Danann man was even more dangerous. Though his sword was not so well crafted, he tore through creatures in a great arc, slicing them in half like Balor’s eye. Through all the horror and welter of dark blood, his face remained impassive, taking no pleasure in the battle. A supernal warrior, but one controlled in his actions and choices.



Despite his youth, the man’s skill was incredible, perhaps approaching Nuada’s own. If anyone else could rescue Nimue and John from this horror, Nuada believed it would be this young Tuathan.





Thus ends the sixth part of the Silverhands Becoming story. Bonus Images -by Max Porter Of course, we can’t let you go without showing you a cool C.U.B.E. creation! Take a gander at this awesome Disney-inspired castle, created by master builder Swazi, a Backer of extraordinary talents. Swazi streams his work in C.U.B.E. regularly, and you can see that here, or on our own channel when we host it! That’s the whole shebang! Thank you so much for reading all the way to the end of this newsletter. I’m so lucky to be able to write and put it together for you folks each month! Until the next issue of Unveiled, I’ll CU later! Max out.