Spring 2024: New Beginnings

 

Welcome to the Spring 2024 Update – New Beginnings! This update brings live our new attunement system, alongside a range of new and updated content and areas. 

 

Attunement

Epic Levels

Kudos

Placeables

Updated Starting Areas

Timeline

Deity Feats

Nachtlicht Caverns

 

 

 

Attunement

Attunement is a measure of how closely your character has become tied to the island of Thain. You gain attunement in a number of ways: Completing quests, unlocking emblems, and most importantly, actively RPing with other players. Frequently during your time online throughout the day you will gain small amounts of attunement – increased for players who are actively role playing and typing around each other.

Each day a player has a cap on how much they can grow in their connection to the island through passive means- RPing and exploring – but the player can continue to gain attunement by completing quests or unlocking emblems for the first time on a per-account basis. Attunement can also be granted as a role playing bonus by DMs, can be rewarded for submitting build projects, books, and more, and can be awarded for temporary collaborators who complete stories for players.

 

Attunement is saved and stored on an account-wide basis, and can be used to unlock a wide variety of fun things – allowing players to acquire rarer items, unlock character specific perks, unlock unique accessories, unlock a huge variety of our new placeables, and most radically of all, gain epic levels. 

 

Epic Levels

This accompanies a pretty big overhaul to the epic system – a shift away from the landmark style of epic levels of 21, 23, 26 and 30 and into single epic levels. The attunement system allows a character to unlock up to three of these at any time for an increasing cost – and because the attunement is shared across an account, one character can help another to progress. It’s entirely in your hands how you use attunement to show your character’s deepening connection to the isle. In addition, the standard DM-granted epic levels will still exist, complete with staff vote, epic event, and epic item – meaning that the new maximum total number of epic levels a character can get is 7 (3 attunement, 4 staff granted).

 

It’s worth talking briefly about why we’re making this shift – in recent years we’ve pushed the epic system to uphold player eventing as a very singular method of storyteller rewards. This has succeeded in seeing an increase in player run events that tell very rewarding to watch character driven stories, but it’s also seen a decrease in players logging in without a very specific scene in mind. The reward system’s weight being entirely turned on scheduled storytelling left little incentive to log in and RP day-to-day, and it also left characters with little to do once they itemized and finished leveling. Revising the system this way is an attempt to restore this balance of playstyles and rewards.

The ability to acquire epic levels through playtime and achievements isn’t a change that we make lightly – it hasn’t been this way across all of Thain’s history – but it is something we feel is warranted given the amount of feedback we’ve received and the strong feelings we also have toward promoting spontaneous role play alongside the scheduled. Having more meaningful ways to reward players day to day for role playing both passively and actively through the staff client also plays a large part in our desire for a system that has more granular rewards than a yes-or-no epic vote. Working your way to a staff granted epic level is often a process, and it’s important to have a reward system in place that feels like it enables us to show players through something like a large attunement role play reward bonus when we think they’re on the right track. Moreover, we want players who who are unable or unwilling to run player events consistently should still feel like their role play is valued and that they have major goals they can achieve.

Kudos

When you reach your maximum roleplay-based Attunement for the day, you will gain access to the Kudos feat.  Once per day, this feat allows you to bestow some extra attunement onto another player. 

 

We heartily encourage players to use this system to reward one another for exceptional roleplay or events!  Since the Staff can’t possibly see every scene, kudos is an easy way to reward a friend for an exceptionally good roleplay moment.  Once earned, the Kudos feat will remain on your character until you use it, allowing you to save it for the correct moment.

Placeables

With Attunement allowing players to unlock hundreds of new placeable models, we’ve taken this opportunity to rework the placeable creation system.  Placeables have a brand new UI available to all players, which will show your unlocked placeables and allow you to easily create them.  While the old system of /placeables will be kept around as legacy, we’re hoping the new system will be easier to use and put less onus on players to learn an endless series of complicated chat commands.

 

Placeables are searchable, so you can quickly filter down to an unlocked placeable of choice.  At only 50 attunement each, it’s easy to purchase new placeables and really beautify your scenes.  All placeables previously available in the /placeables UI are available in this UI with no unlock required.

 

Finally, we’ve taken the opportunity to replace a lot of the existing placeable models.  Many player placeables were using old NWN models that didn’t fit in with the higher-resolution models we’ve used in more recent areas.  One less reason to have to see the old 2002 models.

Updated Starting Areas

This update will see the introduction of some beautiful Landing updates in the works for a while by Keen and Miggen.  The reworked Landing is much larger in scope, filled with unique quests and information to give new characters on Thain a stronger start.

The newly renamed Erstlicht Landing is a home for the rangers and explorers of the Brotherhood Guard, who will serve as a source of bounties and information for travelers.  Protected by the city of Steinkreis, this port is filled with character and life.  Surrounding Erstlicht are new dungeons and challenges, a rebuilt Nachtlicht caverns with an all-new look for kobolds, and a selection of new quests.  With more ways for low-level characters to find their way and learn the lore and secrets of the world, we’re hoping to make it easier to bring your friends to Thain and ease the (often difficult and thankless) starting experience.

 

In addition, the Trade and Tackle at Thain’s heart has been rebuilt in a new and beautiful style,  with a far more player-friendly interior we hope will be worth roleplaying in.  The surrounding wilderness has also been updated with improved landscaping, and we’ll be continuing to update Thain’s wilds in future updates to bring them in line with the highest level of visual fidelity we can.

Timeline

Throughout the years , Thain has built reams of unique lore – and while it’s amazing to have so many years of events, all of the lore can be intimidating for a newer player to understand.  As we’ve veered away from the familiar Forgotten Realms, we’re hoping to help alleviate this feeling with the new Timeline page on the website, a chronological list of major past events that have affected the realm.

 

The full Timeline Page renders more than twenty years of server history.  While it’s always going to be a work in progress, we hope this will give players more confidence in making characters from our world, and lower the intimidation factor for new players coming into the mix.

Deities

With Thain’s custom lore and world, players of religious characters have sometimes struggled to find information about gods or divine orders.  While divine orders and magic work a little differently on Thain than players coming out of other settings may be used to, we’ve wanted for some time to do a better job conveying these ideas.

 

Paladin, Cleric, and Favored Soul classes can now choose a Deity feat at level 1, and an Order feat at level 2.  These feats have no in-game mechanical effect, but each one offers information about the deity your character worships and the order they are part of.  Of course, for those who prefer to stay with orders from outside the island, an Other option remains available – but we’d encourage players to use these options to better personify their paladins and clerics.

 

All the information in these deity feats can also be found in our updated Religions of Thain page. 

 

Nachtlicht Caverns

The Nachtlicht Caverns (as well as the Kobold Halls) have seen a visual and narrative reimagining, with an updated story that better conveys a Thain narrative after the closing of the planar portals.  

The new Nachtlicht caverns come with brand new kobolds.  These savage reptiles hunt the caverns and hills, living in the darkness while bearing a strange obsession with their cavern’s flickering lights.  

 

We’re eager to continue improving the starting experience in future updates, with a completed main quest and a brand new story dungeon coming later this year that will push NWN storytelling to its limits.

 

Thanks for joining us through all of this process, and we’ll see you all in-game!