Recruits, friends and markets
Part of The design hub. Eric shared an earlier game concept 2026-09-01; this doc is the gap analysis + what to adopt.
Already in the current design (no action)
| Old idea | Where it lives now |
|---|---|
| City builder / RPG combo; gather → buildings | The design hub, Building ladders |
| Buildings unlock gear + skills | Blacksmith ladder; Scribe/tomes |
| Recruit people, RNG quality, they run buildings while you quest | Professions belong to the city; Apprentice/Journeyman/Master; Inn visitor pipeline |
| Class reset for a fee, keep progress | Chapel respec by ring distance; learned tomes persist (the no-XP analog of "retain experience") |
| Open-world materials (trees/ore) + caves/structures | World Structure: resource clusters + set-piece dungeons per wedge |
Deliberate divergences: no XP/levels (gear is power), no skill tree (skills are lootable tomes). A tree can return as prerequisite tiers inside a school drawn by the Scribe, if wanted — it doesn't fight the doctrine.
Adopt now (design-level, single-player)
NPC-generated quests
Recruited NPCs offer quests; better-quality NPCs give better quests.
- Posted on the Town Hall notice board (already a t1 module).
- Each profession quests in character: innkeeper wants boar meat, smith wants ore, herbalist wants a rare herb from the next wedge.
- Rewards: money + materials + the NPC's craft (a Journeyman smith rewards a socketed piece), and a morale shock on completion.
- Quest types map to existing loops: hunt N, gather N, clear a camp, rescue (raid prison), escort a recruit home.
- This is the missing direction layer: the arena today has no "why"; NPC quests turn the survival loops into errands with owners.
Built 2026-09-02 (prototype v0.1.9): two recruits by the whetstone (Marla the Innkeeper, Apprentice; Orrin the Smith, Journeyman) with two quests each — gather (stew meat, tusks) and kill (boars, camp bandits). Walk up to talk; quality scales the loot reward ×1.0/×1.5; HUD tracker shows active quests. Registry: scripts/quests.gd.
Recipe quests (decided 2026-09-02)
Profession NPCs teach recipes through quest chains of rising difficulty — see the rule in Blacksmith Ladder (building template). This is the primary recipe source; traders/loot are the secondary trickle.
Instanced "quest" runs
Dungeons/forests/abandoned cities as instanced runs = the set-piece dungeon per wedge, launched from a quest. Open world stays primary.
Adopt later (needs a backend — Cloudflare fits)
Friend cities (async social)
Cities are discoverable by friends; you visit a snapshot of their city, take quests from THEIR NPCs, and both sides gain (your hero: rewards/loot; their city: money/morale/materials). Better NPCs on their side = better quests for you.
Async PvP = ghost raids
The existing Raid System (both directions) maps 1:1 onto attacking a friend's city snapshot (Clash-of-Clans style): their walls, emplacements, guards; your siege-or-stealth choice; loot/cripple outcomes applied as a report the owner gets later. Heat between friends. Kidnap-not-kill stays: you "borrow" their NPC until ransomed or rescued — a social hook, not a griefing tool.
Player market
The Trading Post gains a player-to-player listing board: sell what your city made or your hero found. Items are already data-driven ids + counts (+ condition), so listings are trivially serializable.
Architecture principle (adopt NOW so later is cheap)
- The city is data: buildings/tiers/modules, NPC roster+quality, stockpiles, walls — one serializable blob. Same blob = save file = friend snapshot = raid target.
- Quests are generated from NPC data, never hand-authored per player → portable across cities.
- Item transfers are id/count/condition dictionaries.
- Backend: Cloudflare Workers + D1/KV (Eric's existing stack); auth via friend codes first, accounts later.
Not adopting
- Hero XP/levels (conflicts with gear-is-power; tomes + gear grid cover "progress").
- Synchronous multiplayer (scope; async covers the social value).