TL;DR: Gullet Stretch Goal ends on October 16th; Adam on character advancement; Colin on Ossiphagan lore; please claim your pledges and choose your add-ons by the end of the month.

Hi,

Kevin here. By now I hope you’ve all seen the recent Torment video, which revealed the first glimpses of the game.

We’ve made good progress on our The Gullet stretch goal. As Thomas mentioned in update 32, the Gullet is an area in the Bloom that is currently not planned to happen, but which we feel would add a lot to the flavor and pacing of the location.

You can read George’s description of the area in update 32, but maybe it’s good to explain a bit more what we feel it would add to the Bloom. As you would expect from a Torment area, the Bloom is heavily focused on dialog and narrative choices, as well as offering opportunities for exploration and discovery. The Gullet by comparison is closer to a puzzle in the sense that it offers a specific problem you have to overcome, with multiple solutions to success. Once in there’s no way back and it’s about using the tools at your disposal to get through. Exploring the location in more detail will allow you to find (the remains of) previous victims of the Bloom that were trapped in the Gullet, and scavenge for tools and knowledge that will aid in the challenges ahead. (The Gullet isn’t a Crisis per se, but is relevant to one.)

A small subsection of the Gullet sketched out (artist Daniel Kim)

We have less than one more week left to the October 16th deadline. If you’ve been wondering why we feel tied to deadlines, it is because it’s necessary for us to lock in each Zone’s area design as we move into full production for it. We’re working on the Bloom currently and can only devote a certain amount of time/resources to it before we have to move on to ensure that other Zones get the attention they need. Currently we’re 73% of the way to reaching our funding target, which will allow us to take on the Gullet. You can find our current funding total as well as top and newest contributors on our website. Just for clarity: all raised funds still go into Torment’s development, even if we do not hit the goal by the end of October 16th. But reaching this goal allows us to commit to including the Gullet. George would love to see his complete design realized (which is rarer than you might think), but we need your help to do it!

Speaking of the site, we recommend everyone to head over there and register on our website if you haven’t already. Please specify your add-ons by Tuesday, October 31, 2014 and contact us immediately if you have any questions or difficulties. At that time, we will be closing off the add-ons that were available during the Kickstarter. Other offerings may become available, but they may not be the same values. (For example, during the Kickstarter, we made Wasteland 2 available as a $25 add-on. As the game’s retail price is currently $40, we will be closing that option out. But if you gave us $25 during the Kickstarter to get Wasteland 2, we want you to be able to get it for the value we promised to you as a TTON backer.)

We’ve gotten great feedback on the website and Jason has been outstanding in quick turnarounds on improving it. One request from many backers was the ability to add a custom pledge amount to purchase add-ons or upgrade to available tiers, so we added this feature on the Pledges page. If you’d been meaning to upgrade or were looking at some add-ons, now’s your chance. Any pledge will be registered instantly – verify your PayPal email and press “claim transactions” on the Email Addresses page if it does not. Check the Rewards page to see what add-ons and tiers are available to you. Not all rewards are available indefinitely, some tiers or add-ons become closed as rewards already shipped or due to limited availability.

Kevin out (for now).

Character Advancement

Adam here. I’m going to talk about how character advancement will work in Tides of Numenera.

Before that, I should tell you how it works in Numenera tabletop, because it’s not a strictly traditional advancement system. First, as we’ve often said, you get XP when you solve problems, complete quests, and make discoveries—not for individual kills. Second, XP is spent, not accumulated – like cyphers, XP are a resource not intended for hoarding. Most of the time, you’ll have less than 4 XP, because that’s how much most character advancement steps cost. Third, you can also spend XP on short-term benefits—on things other than character advancement.

That last one raises a couple of obvious questions. Why would you spend XP on short-term benefits when you can give your characters lasting benefits like new abilities (or flipped around: what happens if you spend all your XP on short-term benefits and get to the final confrontation with a 1st-Tier character)? Also, if the game has enough XP such that players can spend some on short-term benefits and max their Tier by the end, what’s to stop them from spending all their XP on advancement up front, basically maxing out their Tier halfway through the game? How could we balance the game like that without scaling?

Our answer to these questions is what we are, in Torment, calling Discovery Points (DP). Throughout the game, you will gain both XP (per character) and DP (for the party).

Experience Points are gained primarily by accomplishing critical path tasks: progressing quests and solving Crises and other major encounters. Each character gains their own XP individually, though usually if the party completes a Crisis or a quest, all party members will gain the XP. (SIDEBAR: Sometimes you can leave a Companion behind and pick them up again later in the game. In these cases, they will gain their own XP outside of your influence (they don’t just sit around waiting for you, after all). So if you pick them up again, you will find them close to your level.)

Each character spends their own XP on character advancement steps, each of which cost 4 XP. These advancement steps include:

1) Increased Stat Pool

2) Increased Stat Edge

3) Increased Maximum Effort Level

4) Additional Skill Training

5) Improved paincasting ability (Last Castoff only)

6) Additional Class Abilities (beyond what you get for your Tier)

7) Reduced Armor Penalties

Every four advancement steps, the character will advance to the next Tier. The first five can only be advanced once per Tier, and #5-7 are really optional steps (the Last Castoff’s paincasting ability will be improved in other ways in the course of the game).

Typical character advancement might look like this: (gain 4 XP) add a new Skill, (gain 4 XP) increase Might Edge, (gain 4 XP) increase Maximum Effort Level, (gain 4 XP) distribute 6 new Stat Pool points. Then as soon as the fourth one is done, that character advances to the next Tier—they gain new abilities from their Focus and choose new abilities and Skills from their Type (glaive, jack, or nano). They can also then use XP to purchase any of the advancement steps again toward the next Tier.

We’re planning on balancing the game out to 6th Tier (the maximum Tier in the Corebook), though completionists may still be able to purchase certain advancement steps beyond that if they collect enough XP.

Discovery Points are primarily gained through (wait for it) discovery: figure out how to communicate with an ancient (and alien) intelligence, access a memory abandoned by the Changing God in your brain, or decipher the tale told by an ancient set of moving cave drawings.

DP can also be gained by accepting Intrusions. These are opportunities to make an easy encounter more interesting, rewarding the player for dealing with an added complication. For example, say you’re taking on the Sorrow directly (it’s not a good idea, but let’s say that you are). You discover it’s weak against fire damage and, with the help of a flamethrowing artifact you found, are actually doing pretty well against it.

Then an Intrusion occurs. The Sorrow begins to shifts its own molecular make-up so that it’s weak against something else but fire barely hurts it. This Intrusion won’t always happen: most Intrusions will only trigger when an encounter is already proving easy for you, and many of them have additional conditionals that must be met. Now that this one has triggered, you have a choice: you can spend 1 DP to stop the Intrusion (how that works out narratively depends on each Intrusion, for example maybe you strike a lucky blow, doing little or no damage, but disorienting the Sorrow long enough that it can’t finish the shift), or you can let it happen to gain 2 DP.

DP is gained and used by the whole party, and it is spent on short-term benefits. We haven’t finalized what all those benefits will be, but some examples might include:

• Refusing an Intrusion

• Making a recovery roll without needing to rest

• Gaining an extra level of Effort on a task for free

• Taking extra movement during a Crisis

• Performing an extra action during a Crisis

• Retrying a failed action during a Crisis

• Crafting special items that require a crafting cost

The goal here is to maintain the mechanics that make Numenera fun, to keep Torment balanced (so we can estimate approximately what power level characters will be in a given Zone), all while doling out frequent and exciting rewards.

Adam out.

Lore Update: Ossiphagan

Colin here.

Far to the southeast of the Sagus Protectorate, a ring of mountains stand, carven alien faces adorning their peaks. Fires erupt within this ring, rivers of magma pouring down the inner faces of the mountains to create vast pools of constantly churning molten rock and metal.

Few, if any, natural volcanoes remain extant on the planet today. So then how is it that Ossiphagan’s ring of fire continues to bubble, boil, and erupt in a never-ending cycle?

Based on the best guesses of the Aeon Priests who have ventured here, the Lava Fields of Ossiphagan seem to have gone through at least three major shifts. Before the volcanoes erupted, the plains were home to enormous beasts covered in spines and claws, larger than almost any beast known to the Ninth World. None alive in the Ninth World know how they came here, whether they were created or grew, or whether they were one of the civilizations that dominated the planet in epochs past. Neither does anyone know why so many of these behemoths died on these plains – whether they chose this place or were slain here, destroyed by some power of untold magnitude. But die they did, in staggering profusion, and their steel-hard bones stood testament to their passing in the eons that followed.

An illustration from Adam Heine’s upcoming From the Depths novella, set in Ossiphagan (artist: Rebecca On) An illustration from Adam Heine’s upcoming From the Depths novella, set in Ossiphagan (artist: Rebecca On)

In later ages – how much later, none can say – the terraformers came. At least one civilization among the prior worlds had the ability to engage in terraforming and large-scale geological reshaping. We know this because someone hurried along the process of continental drift to join the continents into a supercontinent, created impossible landscapes, thrust crystalline spires into the sky, and re-routed the entire continental subduction process to channel a good portion of the Earth’s magmatic flow to this single point, where they carved alien faces high on their artificial mountains, from which the lava spilled. Why? None know. Some suggest that the fire wights that prowl the constantly bubbling magma may be the descendants of the original builders – they have certainly bedeviled Ossiphagan’s visitors throughout living memory.

It is believed that yet another civilization made use of these planetary forces for their own ends. Visitant legends suggest these planetary forces were used as a massive, interstellar forge, and that Earth was an important stop for the ships that plied the interstellar winds.

So Ossiphagan was born. The bones that littered the landscape provide excellent natural insulation against the flame, the fractures and striations within the basis for an intricate network of tunnels and walkways, and so seem to have been repurposed into towers filled with incomprehensible machinery. Force screens that still (largely) function might have shielded those who ventured into the super-heated air. Within the towers, alien and almost-incomprehensible control panels seem to direct the flow of magma from one holding pen to another – perhaps to purifiers or waiting vessels? The academics are uncertain on this point. Some of the bone-towers appear to be designed to signal through the air, for they emit non-lethal (to humans, at least) pulses of energy into the sky – perhaps to direct vessels, or as a lighthouse of some sort for the planet. Other towers seem to have played a part in guiding the molten metals to ruined buildings ringing the great furnace, for great sweeps rotate and direct the churn. Aeon Priests believe that for uncounted years the Forge of the Night Sky played a vital role in interstellar and intergalactic trade.

But as is so often the case in the Ninth World, those who might have shed light on the truth seem to have disappeared, and with them the history of Ossiphagan. All that remains is guesswork: perhaps the trade route died or the galaxies spun apart or a war swept the shipping lanes. Whatever the truth, the great vessels stopped coming. The control towers went unmanned. Time worked its insidious ruin on the structures, and the faces on the peaks eroded with the centuries.

A black-and-white version of the cover illustration from Adam Heine’s upcoming From the Depths novella, set in Ossiphagan (artist: Rebecca On) A black-and-white version of the cover illustration from Adam Heine’s upcoming From the Depths novella, set in Ossiphagan (artist: Rebecca On)

Yet the constant churn continues. The old machines in the heart of the mountains still push the molten rock and metal through the mouths of the mountains. Those who have come to Ossiphagan—whether driven to a last refuge by the forces of the Tabaht or exploring the fires that erupt to the southeast of the Sagus Protectorate—report that the force-screens still hold against the fire wights that roam the channels. The controls still function, if anyone alive can puzzle them out. Other secrets may lie hidden as well.

The name of the Forge of the Night Sky still conjures wonders. But as far as anyone can tell, nothing from it has reached the sky for years.

History of the Lore

In July 2013, we revealed an image from Chang Yuan. My original title for it was “The Ruins of Ossiphagan”, but Kevin thought we ought to have something more evocative (personally, I thought it was plenty evocative, but that’s because I knew what the whole picture was about when I requested it; in retrospect, Kevin was right – as usual).

The three options I provided all still work:

- The Dwellers in the Magma Fields

- The Bonedancers of Ossiphagan

- The Forge of the Night Sky

It was the latter that won out. Just as well, because Adam got to write about the first two for his novella, telling us about the bridges and bones and the strange lights at the heart of the picture. But we’ve got more secrets for the place, and you’ll uncover those as you play Torment.

Colin out.

Torment Team Together

Wasteland 2’s release saw a few developers that worked on both that title and on Torment visit inXile offices. Here’s a snapshot from Brian Fargo’s twitter:

From left to right: Chris Avellone, me, Colin McComb, Brian Fargo, Steve Dobos, George Ziets From left to right: Chris Avellone, me, Colin McComb, Brian Fargo, Steve Dobos, George Ziets

This led to our fans on the Codex to ask the astute question “what does one haircut matter?” The answer, it turns out, is a lot:

Adam Heine is missing from the picture, but we are planning on another team meeting in the near future. Whether we’ll all be sporting the Colin look by then is to be determined.

Kevin Saunders

Project Lead