With the Myths & Outcasts DLC currently available, and the Legends & Pariahs DLC on the way, I thought it'd be a good time to tell you where a lot of these monsters come from.

If you're a Barony fan, you probably already know that all the DLC races are enemies or NPCs in the game. But did you know that many of them weren't always part of Barony's world?

Editions and Additions

Several months after Barony's launch, we shipped the "Cursed Edition". A complete art overhaul of Barony's base content. We started planning our next game (which is still in the works), but it required a substantial technology upgrade, which takes time!

Several months go by, with a lot of work completed on the new engine, and design / art planning, but there was a long way to go. We considered it might be a good time to do a quick little content update for Barony while a new engine remained in development. You know, just a little update that an artist / designer guy like me can throw together with a tiny bit of code support.

Shouldn't be too big of a deal right?

We had just brought WallofJustice onto the team and, in addition to our existing group of Turning Wheel rad dudes, we were confident it wouldn't be a huge investment.

My first goal was simple - Take the existing monsters, use them as a template for similar monsters with bigger, badder stats and new art. That's it. Like a palette swap, but a little more effort to help them feel fresh. Add a couple more tilesets that are pretty straightforward to make in our level editor, and boom! It'll be an awesome expansion. Many players were hungry for more content, and this seemed like a fast and effective way to provide it.

Oops

From that simple idea, ultimately came what you now know as the Blessed Addition. A massive upgrade with 50% more monsters, classes, items, a new end boss, new story, new books, achievements... --Ahem-- and it took a year to ship.

Yeah, we get excited sometimes and overdo it. Our feature-creep is your gain. If you're patient anyway.

Oh right. The monsters.

So that was the premise I started from when I put together quick drawings of new monsters. I threw these together in a night, basing each one on existing monsters to make implementation as quick and painless as possible.

Scarab The scarab was to be a swap for the rat using the same methods for animation.

Crystal Golem We had decided that one of the additional tilesets should be the Crystal Caves, so this guy fit right in as a replacement for the troll.

Cockatrice Believe it or not, this danger-chicken shares animations with the Imp.

Kobold Swapped out assets from the Gnome to create these guys.

Humanoids

The remaining characters were to be based roughly on Humans, Skeletons and Goblins, as these characters can wield equipment properly, and we would use gear and varied allegiances to make these new races interesting, all while being able to share similar animations.

Automaton

Insectoid

Vampire

Incubus

Goatman

In case you weren't keeping count, that's 5 of the 8 races represented in the Myths & Outcasts + Legends & Pariahs DLC packs coming straight out of the Blessed Addition monsters! Goblins, Skeletons and Succubi are the remaining monster races in the DLC which were included in Barony's original release.

The game sure has grown!

More Than a Palette Swap

Each of these monsters (plus the Shadow we haven't mentioned yet; also based on humanoids originally) had a lot more work put into them than originally expected. This included new animations, powers and behaviors not found in other creatures in the base game. We probably could've shipped them with that minimal amount of work and it would've been pretty good. But the team, especially Wall of Justice, took the time to make each monster much more robust.

The unique gameplay found in the new humanoid monsters has gone on to inspire how each monster race should play as we developed the DLC packs.

I hope you enjoyed this tidbit of Barony development history! While these quick concept sketches aren't exactly fit for promotional material, we felt you might enjoy this glimpse behind the curtain.

A quick story on how the Conjurer and Accursed DLC classes came together.

Since we originally started planning our original Myths and Outcasts DLC, our feature set changed a lot during development. I'm looking back through old documents now, and we never had new classes on the table when we first talked about it - just races!

The Conjurer Class

Some people might recall a Magicstaff of Conjure Familiar in the game files when Barony: Blessed Addition was released in 2018, accessible only via the /spawnitem console command. When I added new magicstaffs for Bloodletting and Stoneblood, I also kept Conjure Familiar in as a placeholder to maybe one day mimic the effects of a Scroll of Summon. I loved the idea of summoning monsters - but the follower AI at the time couldn't be controlled at all by the player and we already had the Scroll of Summon in the game to suit this purpose. By the end, its only use was to be a stick for debugging particle effects as I worked on Blessed Addition, kept in as a personal TODO item.

In June 2018 - three months after Blessed Addition came out, I added the follower menu so you could order your companions around and actually have a chance at keeping them alive in the dungeon. Finally - a use for my staff! When talk started around DLC I wanted to get at least 1 new Conjurer class in alongside the playable races since we were back to adding new content into the game.

As we talked about new class archetypes, the idea of linking classes with races came up and the Skeleton Conjurer seemed like a perfect fit! You needed mana to resurrect yourself, and if you had excess mana you could summon allies and store your magic power inside them!

The Accursed Class

For the Accursed Vampire, the complement of a class/race pairing gave us a lot more freedom to create a new "hard" game option which might not have happened otherwise.

I wanted a new hard mode character and initially designed the Vampire to be just that - a stealth killing machine where every run was a race against time. However it didn't feel right to commit a quarter of our DLC to be extremely difficult, so the Accursed class was created with the "cursed" hunger mechanics and the OG Vampire race was toned down to be easier.

Splitting the DLC into classes and races turned out to be a much better solution since we could provide a new hard mode AND also let you play as a more casual Vampire! It felt great to come to an accessible design that let everyone use the cool Vampire blood mechanics and HP-as-mana system.

Remember the Stick

So there you have it - we only planned for races at the start and maybe an extra class. Eventually 1 class became 2, 2 then became 4 and suddenly we knew what Myths and Outcasts was going to look like!

Sadly in the end, the Magicstaff of Conjure Familiar never got added to the level drop lists. The spell was balanced to be castable from the start of the game and your skeleton buddies would level up with you. A magicstaff version ended up being found too late or not have enough charges to make your allies strong enough to match your level progression. Nevertheless, you can still play around with it in-game currently using the console command "/spawnitem magicstaff of conjure familiar". Hold it, and remember the history behind the stick.

Initial Conjure Familiar particle effect testing. Would you believe this clip is from 2 years ago?

In the next content update, you'll be able to equip a castable spellbook into your off-hand equipment slot while also keeping another spell equipped. This is part of the free update that will be available to all owners of Barony when the Legends and Pariahs DLC drops!

So how does it work? Read on to find out!

Revisiting Spellbooks

The idea to hold spellbooks started with our upcoming Goblin race.

Goblins are great fighters; versatile, adaptable, green, but magically inept (staffs don't count!). When playing as a Goblin, all of your equipment lasts longer and raising one weapon skill will raise every weapon skill at the same time! The catch - you are unable to memorize spells from books and must cast directly by reading from them each time.

This spellbook hook ended up becoming a feature for any race, as from a development perspective changing the HUD and in-game player model is more or less the same shared code for any humanoid monster. Also since this mechanic uses a finite spellbook resource - let's add some bonuses to your spells cast through the book!

Here's the list of effects when casting from a spellbook:

• Spellbooks are equipped in your off-hand equipment slot. Casting is done via the block/sneak key.
• You are able to have a selected spell ready via the normal casting key [F], so you can ready a support and offensive spell at the same time or double down and have fire/cold at the ready!
• Casting from a blessed spellbook increases the damage/heal of a spell by varying amounts per blessing!
• Casting a learnt spell from a spellbook improves cast times for spells that cost over 10 MP.
• Casting an unknown spell from a spellbook can let you use a spell you normally wouldn't have access to - though based on your Spellcasting skill you may have a longer cast time and a chance to fumble the spell.
• Spellbooks degrade on use, but Goblins keep their books in better shape for longer!

Fire and Cold make a great offensive pairing.

Revisiting the Intelligence stat

For the longest time spell damage values were fixed and did not scale during the game. Fantastic in the early game, but could become a harsh experience for spellcasters during the later portions of the game where monsters have higher HP pools.

So looking back at the Intelligence stat, its uses currently are:

• Providing passive mana regeneration up to a hard limit of 1 MP per 3 seconds.
• Letting you learn higher level spells without needing the specific Magic skill (INT + Magic skill is used for the skill check)

So to give Intelligence a little more utility - INT now will provide +1% spell damage/heal to the same areas that blessed spellbooks would. Since our damage system works in whole numbers, high INT characters and high damage spells (e.g. bloodletting/magic missile) are what you want to use to get the most damage output!

Finally, I also adjusted the hard MP regeneration cap from 1 MP every 3 seconds to 1 MP every 2 seconds to give spellcasters a little more mana to play with in the late game.

What's next?

My next upcoming DLC blog update: I'll share some details about the Goblin Shaman from the Legends and Pariahs DLC. I gave a little peek into the Goblin race mechanics in this post, but next time we'll get to see what unique magic powers the Shaman class has to play with!

Until next time!

-wallofjustice