Recent content by Gurkhal

I didn't know that. Thank you for the information, @Alyss .

Given the lack of responses to the thread I would think this mod is indeed dead.

I've been away from the forums far too long...anyway, I feel a need to post this mod idea and so get it out of my mind and share it with the world. I am in no way a Dark Souls scholar or pro-gamer on these games who has explored every last inch and tried every single combination possible to play. Just an enthusiastic player of Dark Souls and Mount&Blade.

Dark Souls for Bannerlord (I haven't played Elden Ring yet but presumably one could make a mod out of that one as well)

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Dark Souls to Bannerlord

Presumably one could set the game during, almost any point in the timeline but here I'll assume its placed during an unspecificed point between start of the first and conclusion of the third game. The main difference is that the Chosen Undead/Ashen One is not a loner but a leader who leads an army to, well, do her thing. And same with her enemies. They are also bringing a bunch of their friends to the fight.

Main features making this mod different from other bannerlord mods

A dying world
Perhaps one of the greatest differences would be that the world in this mod would not be a thriving one with trade caravanns, village life and so on going on but a world dying and the light is fading into darkness. Now this will not be implemented to an extreme which would risk leaving the player character to find no one to fight as everyone has been killed off in AI-vs-AI fights. However it would mean that the "economy" and recruitment would work in a different way. Mostly notably in that Souls gained from battles and quests, not "money", would be used as currency and for other purposes but more on that further down.

A greater world of Dark Souls
Only a few places in the Dark Souls world are visited in the game and a few more are mentioned. Hence beyond these parts the developers would probably have a pretty wide freedom to add lore friendly additions to the game to fill out the blanks and so on. This might be a boon or a drawback, depending on personal preference.

The Undead
The player would, naturally, be an undead and according to lore essentially impossible to permanently kill off. This might be a bad thing for some and so offer an option to follow the TT Dark Souls rpg in that every time that the character gets killed there's a chance he'll go permanently off. If one would do such then its curtains as the personality, consciousness and thinking would not survive and the player would be reduced to a murderous undead who attacks any and everything close which is "alive" and isn't also hollow. Failing to have anything to attack will mean the hollow just kind of stands around and waits for something to show up. It will exist as such to the end of time, and possibly beyond that.

Ideally one could do something with Humanity as well but that could be beyond the engine so one might need to skip that. Or one could use the humanity one has gathered in order to make troops go from weak hollows to more powerful, and human looking, undead versions of themselves. But again, I don't think the engine could facilitate this part.

Undead troops, there would be no living humans around, would never, or seldom, be permanently destroyed but either captured or reduced to hollows and then either recruited or taken, depending on the faction, to permanent capture in Undead Asylums and other horrific places where the undead are to wait for the end of the world.

One thing one could run with is that also undead troops are limited in number. Still numbering in the thousands but not spawning new ones and so it would make troop management very different as sooner or later new undead soldiers would only be found as recruited from prisoners or from capturing enemy strongholds. And other forms of troops won't be growing on trees either given the state of the world. I'm open to if this should be included or not as it could be lore friendly but also very annoying to in late game discover that the game can't be continued due to no troops being recruitable. Still it would make the mod very different from other Bannerlord mods and campaigns.

Bonfires
Whenever a character is killed, they return to a bonfire rather than risk getting captured and returns with all their gear intact. A pretty forgiving part but can be made more hazardous as suggested above.

The Abyss
The threat from the Abyss would exist and if it overtakes, or say a Darkwraiths faction captures, a settlement then that places becomes off-limited to everyone else as the Abyss messes with it beyond saving. One could fight or embrace the Abyss but there likely won't be a neutral option in regards to it.

Souls for Profit
I would think that Souls replace money and that souls are gained from fighting and then used to get stuff from merchants, upgrade troops and ideally to upgrade the character although I would think that the game engine would prevent this. But also that killing special enemies empowered by specially strong souls would give the player special weapons to be equipped or given to companions to create killing machines with iconic weapons.

But one cool option could also be that the player can imbue a soul like this and "force" the player to wear a special armour set which grants some significent boons in addition to looking the part. If you imbue Ornstein's soul for instance you get the look of the Old Dragonslayer Armour along with nice boons to your stats. It would get even more wild if you got your hands on a Lord Soul.

Sorcery, Pyromancy and Miracles
Magical would naturally be present in the three main forms across the three games. I left out hexes as that only, to my knowledge shows up in Dark Souls 2, but I understand that other mods have found ways to include magic in the game so this shouldn't be a big problem.

Dragons, demons and more
There are many non-humanoid creatures so this might force some work but to my knowledge it should be doable. Even if I could be wrong here.

Many creatures are fougth 1-vs-1 in Dark Souls but in this mod they would naturally brings friends to the fight. Thus facing down, for example, Ornstein and Smough would mean fighting them and their army of Silver Knights in or outside of Anor Londo. Same with seeking out the Gravelord for the Death Soul as that would mean an army of skeleton warriors, skeleton creatures and necromancers and so on in addition to Nito himself.

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I could write and write on this topic but I want the post to be readable and will thus stop here.

Rungsted93 said:

But they already had the combat more or less working back in 2016, heck they even had banners! additionally I doubt every single developer was working on the combat aspects, but given the long development time that might have actually been the case.

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I suppose it means how you define "more or less". The core gameplay elements must of course be more than passable or good enough so maybe there's looking for that?

dirtshrimp said:

I don't necessarily mind the fact that the game is based in history, although I prefer a more low fantasy setting. I would however like to see more unique factions, that aren't just their historical counterpart in everything but name. I guess fleshing out characters/backstories would help remedy this.

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I just want to say that I essentially agree with you. But until TW can flesh out that lore in the game even more, a historical grinding can give some free immersion to players for the different factions.

I have no problem with a focus on the fighting. The game is a sandbox, not an RPG, and the combat system is the core part of the game. RPG elements are auxiliary aspects to that. Thus I see no problem in getting the game's basic elements fixed before moving on to supporting features.

And as has been said above. Warband's greatest strength was its numberless mods. So I think it will be with Bannerlord to fix various itches for RPG, other time periods etc. that people might want.

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@dirtshrimp I actually feel the opposite. The fact that things are grounded in a history and not in random fantasy elements makes the game more immersive to me. And there's plenty of stuff in common with Calradia, its just that Calradia in Warbands has seen he empire collapse and 200 years of change affect it.

Looks interesting and I'll follow the development.

Looks interesting and I'll be looking forward to play as a Dwarf Lord.

Here's a dwarf fan waiting to cut evil down at the knees, waiting for this mod.

I just went with one in the game; Sable, a lion rampagent, Or.

Jarl Malcolm said:

I like the idea of tying it to the hiring Faction, but I would still make the recruitment through Bartering, like how we can already Barter for the other party horses, etc. Minor Faction could have some recruits up for bartering but only available to the Faction presently hiring them!

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Yeah that makes sense to me.

My idea was that minor factions would not only be mercenaries for hire but that first a faction need to make them their feoderati, and then we can start getting their troops, and perhaps that each minor faction can only be feoderati to a single major faction?

Or if we should get really complicated, then it could be that the hiring faction spawn a number of recruits from the feoderati faction for hire in their cities at a regular interval in exchange for a solid set of money from the hiring faction to the minor faction.

Perhaps a "feoderati" mechanic could be introduced to the minor factions? They get money from one of the main factions in exhange for allowing that faction to recruit troops from them, and perhaps join the patron's wars with their own parties?

Good luck, it will be a pleasure to see the different takes on Westeros that different modders have.

Good suggestion above. Especially with allowing bandits to merge as that would remove the parties with 1 or 4 members who run around and can't be caught by, and to weak to catch, anyone.

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Manhunters

What I suggest that is added to the game are the classic Manhunter faction, the ability to join the Manhunters and an addition of bandit characters as well as some new bandit types.

In regards to Manhunters they could spawn parties that goes after various bandits, give the player the ability to join them and thus recruit Manhunter troops in taverns as well as get easy access to warrents to capture or kill either a specific number of bandits or to capture bandit characters named as Bandit Cheiftains or the more powerful Bandit Kings. Which leads me to the next part.

Bandit Characters

Right now the bandits are kind of annoymous and I think the best way may be to do it through bandit characters. The idea here is that there can be spawned named characters with a big and a heavy hitting bands of bandits that torments certain regions of the map. And as these disrupts trade there comes warrents for everyone, but presumably faster for players who have joined the Manhunter faction where there's a big nice purse to collect if you bring a certain bandit character to justice. Medium difficulty bandit characters would be Bandit Cheiftains and high end difficult opponents would be Bandit Kings.

More bandit types

And to further expand the rooster of bandits I propose the following kinds of bandit types. Note that this is not a final list but since I feel that I have the best grasp on what could be added for the Imperials and Vlandians I'll limit myself to this and let more learned people decide what could be added to the cultural Sturgian, Aserai, Khurgits and Battanian areas.

In the case of Imperial stuff I've gone heavily on Greek mythology because there's just so much good inspiration and ideas in it.

Anyway.

Imperial cultural bandits

Centaurs - Naming themselves after wild and violent creatures of myth, these mounted bandits have embraced a debauched life style of immediete gratification and violence.

Laestrogynians - Also them taking a cue from mythology they are bandits on foot who causes destruction for the joy of wrecking and with a cruel practice of roasting captives as if to eat them, although this is a terror tactic and they are not cannibals for real. Probably...

Vlandia

Robber/Predator Knights - Essentially better armed bandits on horse who mocks the chivalrous tradition of the Vlandians, and are not seldom knights or pretty nobles who have fallen on hard times. The English term for this is robber knights but a translation from my native language is "Predator Knights" which seems more aggressive to me and so I thought that I would suggest it as an alternative term for these bandits.

Just want to add that the game works for me now and I'm having a blast. Thank you, Taleworlds!