• Developers Corner
• ToME 3 plot

Main Plot

Home Town

Players start at their racial home town. Each town should probably have a weak dungeon nearby/inside. The player gets recruited by Gandalf to go on a quest for Elrond. The player must find the shards of Narsil and return them to Rivendell, once he's strong enough to travel to...

Rivendell

In the course of retrieving the shards, the player sees signs of trouble brewing at Isengard, and the Council sends the player down to investigate.

Edoras

The player checks on and ultimately defeats Saruman and his army. Then Gandalf sends you up to Lothlorien and Mirkwood, to confirm his suspicions about the Necromancer.

Lothlorien

The player tracks down the Necromancer and drives him out of Dol Guldur. In the process, the player finds a prisoner held there, Gollum. He babbles about his precious and runs off.

Travelling the world

The player must make like Gandalf and Aragorn, and must find Gollum and the One Ring. When the player finds it, EVERYONE tells him to destroy it.

Minas Tirith

The player must go to Orodruin to destroy the One Ring. Then, he must storm Barad-dur and take down Sauron.

Side Quests

Rivendell

• Retrieve the shards of Narsil
• Reforge the swords that was broken
• Retrieve a gem for the King's banner
• Venture to the Paths of the Dead to gain some assistance for Aragorn
• Escort Aragorn to Minas Tirith

If the whole sequence is completed, then Aragorn should be helpful to the player at the end of the game when he's camped out at Minas Tirith.

Edoras

• Helm's deep. This battle HAS to be involved. Perhaps the reward should be Narya from Gandalf.

Lothlorien

• Something here should result in Vilya from Galadriel? Perhaps destroying the One ring?

The Shire

• Chase down Saruman, scour the shire. Reward be an 'artifact home' of Bag End (a persistent level without item stacking).

Evil Version

If the player chooses an evil race, then the plot will be different obviously:

• Check for the One Ring at the spot where Isildur died
• Follow up on a rumor and check for Baggins at the shire

• DarkGod: Kill Legolas, no particular reason, he's just a frelling sissy elf!

• Track down the escaped Gollum...

And from there you can see the plotline can join with the good version, or alternately, the good version can join with this one. It all depends on what the player does once he gets the One Ring.

Comments

Orvin: Any way the Scouring of the Shire can be worked into the plot? Perhaps, the reward from Gandalf at Helm's Deep could be Shadowfax, if there is going to be a mount system in the game.

• NeilStevens: Definitely possible.

KhymChanur: 1) Shouldn't the evil/good version depend on worshiping Melkor or not, rather than race? Why shouldn't a player of a non-evil race who worships Melkor get the good-guy's version?

• NeilStevens: My guess is we remove Melkor from the Vala following stuff in 3. DG?

  KhymChanur: So evil races would have no one to worship?

  NeilStevens: I could go with that. Melkor's in the void and can't reach arda, so they're just out of luck.

  Bandobras: They could worship Sauron or Saruman or some false gods of the East or, whatever the offspring of the bad fallen Numenoreans would worship...

  NeilStevens: It's already been confirmed: 'Evil' races will get their own module later.

2) About the racial homes: does this mean that each racial home town will have it's own version of the thieves quest? Or will the theives quest be avaiable in all the home towns, but only available to characters who start in that hometown? (Or will each game only contain one racial hometown, the one the player picked for that game?)

• NeilStevens: Not necessarily. Not sure how we should do homes in 3 actually...

  Derakon: I'd say link all of the homes together and increase their overall capacity (so your home in Bree is the same as your home in Lothlorien, but it has 8 pages). I don't see a whole lot of value in keeping the homes distinct right now, anyway, but that's a rant for later.

  NeilStevens: Not going to happen. We separate them and add quests for each separate home, in order to make the player pay a price for using that much space.

3) If Gollum has the One Ring, then wouldn't he have to be a lot more powerful than he is right now?

• NeilStevens: No. Why?

  KhymChanur: Well, by the time the player defeats the Necromancer and discovers he was actually Sauron, the current Gollum won't be any challenge. With my playing style, the current possible ring carriers aren't too much of a challenge by the time I go looking for the Ring, and if it was Gollum carrying it, I'd probably kill him with just a few whacks, before he had the chance to even touch me.

  NeilStevens: Who said killing him was supposed to be a challenge, or even the goal?

  DarkGod: Indeed, the goal is more to be a man-hunt (well, a hobbit-hunt) and a fight, you know he hides somewhere, and you MUST find him.

4) What about the ultra-ending? Will there still be a Void, Nether Realm, Ultimate Artifacts and such? An assult on Valinor, as I've seen mentioned elswhere?

• NeilStevens: Probably later. The Nether Realm is pretty out of theme though, so it's probably best to find a replacement when rewriting that stuff. Pretty hard to worry about post-victory stuff right now though I think.

KhymChanur: Another thought: force the player to go through Cirith Ungol and defeat Shelob to get to Mt Doom. With the map that's been borrowed from Theme, one can pass through the Black Gates, and can also circle around Mordor to enter it from the east where there's no mountains and approach Mt Doom from that direction, so the Mordor map will need to be changed a bit from how it is now. Hmmmm, if Shelob is changed from a possible Ring carrier to an obstacle to Mt Doom, should she be made tougher?

NeilStevens: yes, make Cirith Ungol very hard. Make it so the player wants to storm the gate. Of course, storming the gate would be very hard unless the player has completed side quests in order to earn help, such as:

• Aragorn and the oathbreaker army
• Faramir and the army of Gondor
• Éomer and the army of Rohan
• Legolas and the army of Greenwood
• Gimli and the army from Dain's kingdom

etc.

• RavenRed: Heh, you're facing the armies of Mordor alone. Maybe if you get ALL of the above, you get through without conflict. Otherwise you have a battle during which you only get as many armies as you've completed quests to gain it. Having Shelob as an awesome enemy is good, but you should still have a battle after you've gotten through her (she was defeated by Samwise Gamgee for Eru's sake!)

  • Derakon: Getting the armies to work right is going to be tricky; as I recall, balancing opposing "monster" (AI-controlled) forces is tricky, especially if they're summoners and have lots of room to work in. It's possible that certain elements of the fight should be scripted - e.g. if you have the Knights of Rohan on your side, then they periodically charge the enemy, auto-killing the enemy's flank forces.

  ElvishPillager: IIRC, Dain's army didn't come to the great battles because Sauron sent more Orcs to bebother them, so you need only defeat the orcs, and you get the army!

  • RavenRed: *coughcough-Tolkien's-bias-against-dwarves-coughcough*

  I quite like the idea of entering Mordor by the gate. Ideas:
  • If you have no armies, the gate is closed and you can't enter.
  • If you have 1-4 armies, the gate opens, Orcs and Trolls and other such ghastly things pour out, and you'd better be powerful because your armies alone would just get defeated.

  • If you have all five armies, then Sauron doesn't open the gate because he's scared of you.

    RavenRed: ... and you get an easier quest to open the gate by trickery by scaling the guard-tower or summat similar.

On the other stuff...

There's a lot of duplication in having a "local dungeon" ("this is a local dungeon for LOCAL people" ) for each race. Hsving said that, should the breakdown be something like:

Sound logical? I've left out Beornings and all the evil races, because I'm not sure whether we'll been having them in the game as playable characters.

The plot suggestions above sound good. The "searching for gollum" might be aided by some lost-temple type quests, to find his bolt-holes. Perhaps after three of them, you finally corner the snivelling wretch and intimidate the information out of him. Either that, or maybe have him hiding out in Moria, giving you a good reason to go there. The rest sounds excellent. It'll give far more structure to the game (which could be a bad thing).

• KhymChanur: Gollum could be hiding out somewhere in the wilderness, and when you receive the "find Gollum" quest, N spots on the wilderness map are randomly chosen, and you have to stumble upon one of them to find him, forcing you to do a some wilderness exploration. While doing this, there'll be a high chance of running across specialized ambush-like wilderness encounters, like orc war-parties and such.

  DarkGod: I thought if hidding him in the misty mountains, in one of the many caves, a bit like Merton in the maze but on a bigger scale, exploring the vast caves complex looking for clues of gollum

  • NeilStevens: See, I imagine the shards of Narsil quest might work similarly, except in the wilderness beside the Anduin instead of in caves.

  KhymChanur: Hmmm. So, Gollum wouldn't show up until enough clues were found? Or he'd only show up on a certain level, but not all the time, and the levels would be so big that repeatedly searching each level would take too long, so you'd need to get the clues to narrow down your search? Or maybe instead the misty mountains dungeon could have many branches, and Gollum will only appear in one of them.

  Orvin: However you eventually find Gollum, perhaps you could end up in the same open area (in the wilderness or in a dungeon room with many openings) with him and have to physically prevent him from escaping. This could be accomplished by blocking his exits with traps, created walls, glyphs. He then realizes he is caught and offers information.

  RavenRed: This would rather stuff up warriors, archers and several forms of priests, would it not?

  • Orvin: Bring scrolls? Or allow the sufficiently strong to push boulders to block the exits?

Orvin: I think it makes sense that all hobbits start in Bree, but not that they all be from Bree originally. Could there be any plot differences for hobbits originally from the Shire?

LordDimwit: Sorry to interrupt, but why would Galadriel give you Vilya? Wasn't she the caretaker of Nenya?

DarkGod: Ohh yes mixed those two Thanks. Oh and .. You are back ?!

LordDimwit: Yes, for a while at least... Just bumming around for the moment. Good to see you again, my dark lord

DarkGod: Great! And it's good to see you too Mhh with this plot we will need new towns .. feeling up to map design ?

LordDimwit: Hahaha... sure, though it might take a little while for me to get around to it... what do you still need?

DarkGod: Ahh great Well we need

• Rivendell, it is a big quest hub
• Edoras
• Maybe a reworked minas tirith, I'm not particulary fond of the current one as travelling it is most painful

Those are the most important for a start, then when I get around to making a start place per race/group of races we will need .. more

Maybe a re-reworked wilderness map, much bigger (double size in width and height) to give a sense of .. bigness to the lpayer, and give a purpose to horse travel and riding

LordDimwit: Well, gimme some time; I'll see what I can do

• DarkGod: Hullo, so any news of Imladris ?

  • LordDimwit: Just starting on it now; progress was delayed because I was running a horrible time-consuming character (http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=6078). Should have more free time now to work on it now that I'm done with that

    • DarkGod: Ahh great! Thanks

Orvin: In the evil version of the plot, perhaps checking for Baggins at the Shire should require that the player have an appropriate disguise: pipeweed buyer from Bree. To get the disguise, you first have to talk to Bill Ferny in Bree, who tells you that a pipeweed buyer will be at a certain place on the road to the Shire at such-and-such a time. You then must be at that place at about the right time to intercept the buyer and kill him. When he dies, he leaves behind an object, "pipeweed buyer's clothes," which activates to disguise you. In order to keep up the act, you must visit Longbottom in the Shire at least once every X turns while in the Shire, or else the Shirriffs notice you, sound the alarm, and attack. Checking for Baggins is complete when you have visited all of a set of randomly generated locations, such as inns, smials, bridges, etc. within the Shire. Some of the places you have to visit could be so far removed from each other than you need high speed (even if temporary), translocation, tree walking, wraithform, to visit them in time to return to Longbottom.

• ReenenLaurie: In general sounds like a great plan... but why do you not want the sheriff to attack you? Lots of players (especially those who play evil characters) would relish the oppertunity to genocide the shire. Also if we keep some of the more evil races, like trolls etc. then I struggle to see how some clothes will serve as a disguise.

  OutoLumo I think this should be a sequel of finding Golum. Assasinations of various key characters (like Legolas, Boromir, Gimli...) would be work side quests, since they are key members of the respective royal families.