Dynasty Roguelike

Introduction

Dynasty Roguelike is an ambitious idea for a new roguelike game that will try to greatly expand upon the idea of random world building present in current roguelikes. Instead of simply generating random locations, DynastyRL will attempt, through simulation in which the player character partakes, to generate:

• diverse cultures
• unique geo-political landscapes
• towns and cities, based on the above

Also unlike most roguelikes, the victory condition changes from the usual get to level 100 and kill the boss monster,

to helping your tribe and later civilization to achieve a dominant position in the world. This can be achieved through:

• Diplomacy
• Conquest
• Winning the favor of the gods

From Tribes To Civilizations

The way in which DynastyRL aims to achieve it's lofty goals, are by making a roguelike where the player character starts as a member of a stone-age tribe and helps this tribe to grow more powerful, eventually usurping neigbouring tribes through conquest or diplomacy to form a civilization.

The player's contributions to the tribe can take various forms:

• Harvesting raw materials and contributing them to the tribe (food, wood, hides, stone, copper, iron, silver, gold, etc).
• Producing useful items from raw materials and contributing them back to the tribe.
• Building useful buildings for the tribe.
• Perform quests for the gods to discover new technologies.
• Perform quests for the gods to gain their exclusive favour.
• Performing diplopmatic quests for the tribal leaders.
• Performing military quests for the tribale leaders.
• Leading the tribe.
• Teaching skills to other members of the tribe.

Selective Reincarnation

The obvious problem is that a player character would die, long before his tribe achieves a victory condition - this is addressed through what I call, selective reincarnation.

The concept is simple, retain the normal perma-death from roguelikes, but allow the dead player character's ghost to reincarnate in one of his offspring (children, grand-children, etc). This means a player needs to spend some time in the game attempting to get a wife and to produce some children, to ensure that they will be able to continue the game when their current character dies.

Technology Trees And Skills

The game will incorporate the concept of technology trees from real-time and turn-based strategy games. The interesting point is that a tribe's knowledge of technology, will be embedded in the tribe members. So say for example that the tribe starts with the technologies of:

• Club
• Flint & Stone
• Hides

Then some of the tribe members will have those skills:

• Club: Allows a character to create a club from sticks found on forest floors and to use the club as a weapon.
• Flint & Stone: Allows a character to start a fire with the necessary materials.
• Hides: Allows a character to skin killed animals and to create basic clothing and armour from those hides.

Now suppose the player character goes to do a quest for the gods, in which he is taught the technology of fishing, the PC then gains the skill:

• Fishing: Which allows the character to create some fishing tools and use them to catch fish.

The tribe now has the technology of fishing, but should the PC die, the tribe loses that ability - so it's important for the PC to teach that skill to other members of tribe, to increase the chances that the fishing technology will be retained by the tribe.

This means that technology can travel between tribes through:

• Diplomacy: ally with a tribe that has a technology and get them to teach you.
• Conquest: kill the men and capture the women as slaves and concubines - then get them to teach you.
• Marriage: marrying across tribal lines can bring new technologies into the tribe.