Post by MothMath in The Archives of Trevosa comments

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Very enjoyable! Naturally very Obra Dinn/Golden Idol-esque, but I found the conclusions here generally more intuitive, only making a single mistake (I didn't realize that Taal died before the war, implying that she couldn't be the vaiteth, it had to be Lemal)

The choice of pure HTML/JS is excellent, as it leads to very fast load times here and nice quality-of-life features like copy-paste for free.

Some nitpicks that are understandable for a jam game:

(1) Having two different search functions, where one is limited to only three results, but the other can't discover new documents, gets awkward at the end of the game when you have almost every document, so you can't safely switch to the other search function with all results.

(2) As far as I read the rules of succession, an heir must have a beirvet or be betrothed at the point of the current cyne's death to be considered a 'suitable heir'. It seems to me that the 'true' line of succession is technically broken: Lemot's last words implies that Sartina doesn't have a beirvet, and by omission probably isn't betrothed; her obituary also seems to confirm that her tabeir is after Nolveth's cynvei, that is, after Lemot's death. Is the implication that even Lemot was kept in the dark about Sartina's betrothal?

Celia13 days ago

Thank you! Good thoughts.

Totally agree on 1, that’s been one of our top priorities to redesign for the expanded Steam version. Now there’s a single search field that shows both the up-to-three new results and filters what you already have.

Point 2

I see, you’re totally right that the timing conflicts - her obituary says Lemot was exiled before her marriage, but his last words think she’s unmarried - tbh it was an oversight on our part, but I suppose being exiled and the marriage being secret could explain it. It’s not ideal you don’t see Sartina’s spouse on the tree, and we’re working to avoid those gray areas in the expanded version.

I’d say the timing matter doesn’t matter for succession, though. To be crowned ruler, you need to be married - the idea being a ruler should have the support of a consort, and they should be on the road to having kids to pass the crown down - but Sartina was never given the chance to be crowned ruler. She just passed on the royal bloodline to the current candidates.

tuckerkratt13 days ago

If it helps, I didn't even register the Lemot being exiled thing, I just knew Taal died right before he was crowned, so it wasn't going to be her that would be the issue.

MothMath12 days ago (1 edit)

Okay, that makes sense – spiritually, Sartina was the heir even if the timing was a few years off, it just snagged me since the framing of the game is explicitly that I’m consulted to do rules-lawyering.

Rules lawyering (nice spoiler trick btw)

Originally, I was double-checking that Morfal was actually married when Sartina died, since I was worried that the game would pull out a twist of “actually, Soleel was the true heir because Morfal wasn’t married yet”. Before I figured that out, I concluded that the succession rules don’t really cover the case where none of the heirs are deemed suitable, and so I went double-checking all the marriage/olesata timings. Ultimately, I couldn’t determine suitability for either Sartina nor Ervala, and Lonara was definitely neither married nor olesata’d by her mother’s death, and had to headcanon that the succession rules allow for cyne-less ‘gaps’ where there are heir(s) who are not yet suitable, but whichever heir wins the suitability race can get crowned later.

Now that I look back at it, since I can’t confirm that Ervala was suitable by Morfal’s death, it’s possible that Soleel would inherit the claim to the throne after Morfal rather than Ervala, making Ludir the rightful heir-in-waiting, but then, that might be me overlooking some evidence.

Celia12 days ago (2 edits)

100%, we’re asking the player to rules lawyer and then these areas are unclear. In the expanded version it’s a very different puzzle since we’ve reshuffled stuff, and we’ll make sure there aren’t any question marks.

Spoilers

To share way I see it working in the Itch version, we’re not answering “would the crown have passed this way in a hypothetical world where Norveth had never invaded”. We’re answering, “who has both the true bloodline and also meets the requirements to become ruler right now, after Oreleth’s death”. There is some overlap though since the bloodline prioritizes the younger child, Morfal’s, line over Soleel’s due to the ultimogeniture rule.

However, it would be better if it was just a single question of applying the rules at every step. We just need to make sure that’s clear and not annoyingly fiddly to sort out.

Thank you for asking about this, it helped clarify for me what we need to clarify in the Steam version! 😁

itch.io

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