What I did today, or, excuses for a day wasted

Hi. I sorta just lazed around all day, but in doing so, I also discovered a few awesome things.

First is the Caves of Qud, a heavily Fallout-inspired post-apocalyptic Roguelike (is Fallout-inspired and post-apocalyptic redundant?). It's currently in (hopefully open?) beta. I spent at least four hours playing it, doomed character after doomed character until I made some headway in the main 'quest line' and found my feet. It is simply amazing.

A quick few warnings; I played the game almost exclusively with the Nomad background, and probably missed a lot of character creation options (though I poked around out of curiosity), so some of the mechanical analysis may be incomplete. Also, there will be spoilers below, although I'll try to avoid them.

One of the key selling points for me is that Qud retains its Roguelike feel. The setting is apocalyptic enough that I spent a good 80% of my longest game using melee weapons exclusively (most of my characters didn't survive long enough to get a gun). Even then, the character that did luck into a "real" weapon only used her shotgun as a last resort, because she found a whole 15 shells over the course of the game (and bartered for another 20 or so). Here, we find strong parallels to more conventional Roguelikes; the guns feel wand-ish, albeit in a more conventional sense than "fireball" or "bolt of cold."

I was also tickled to discover that the 'identify' metagame is represented; everything more technologically complex than a simple melee weapon (from grenades to energy cells to rifles to folding chairs) will first show up as a "weird artifact" in your inventory. You can then examine it (supposedly with a chance of failure, though my intelligent tinker-ish character never failed) to identify what exactly it is. I'm interested in how the fail mechanic works (and how long attempts take), because neither are explicitly addressed.

The artifact/identification metagame leads into another wonderful aspect of the game: crafting. Making consumable or low quality gear requires bits you can scavenge off scraps in the waste. Crafting useful items requires rare bits that will often pressure you to cannibalize other useful gear.  I'm a sucker for good crafting systems in a post-apocalyptic world; it adds a lot to the illusion of scarcity to have to scavenge parts.

There are many, many more mechanical things I could praise about Caves of Qud (from the mutation sets, liquid mechanics, and plant life, to the currency), but, while the mechanics are solid, that's not really where Caves of Qud shines.

Caves of Qud is special because of its setting (or fluff, or description). Everything about the game world oozes personality and plot and potential stories. Even from the character generation screen, players are presented with a wealth of background options. While this goes a long way by itself, Qud takes the extra step to differentiate the backgrounds and ground them in their cultures.

Caste and Arcology selection for "true" men (non-mutant characters)

Instead of offering "genetically stable" (non-mutant) characters as a background and calling it quits, Qud instead presents four castes for each of three different arcologies. This serves (mechanically) to balance out the advantage mutations give (as they are mostly positive), but it also develops the world; the player is left to poke and prod among the various roles and figure out what they are, armed only with the perks listed on the right. Ekuemekiyye? Well, it's clearly a religious society. And it's in a toxic jungle. The All Moons priests are skilled butchers, brave, and talented with an axe; perhaps they perform sacrifices. The All Suns priests are good negotiators and healers. Slowly, a story of the culture emerges out of a few barebones character creation options. The work is done by the player to construct this story, and it has giant gaps - but it's a satisfying endeavor.

This type of 'storytelling' is really clever, and shows up all over the place in Qud. Add that to a high lethality desert wasteland with strong mechanics, and you've got one hell of an RPG, beta or not.