The Ermarian Network

Express Delivery

Come rain or sleet or gloom of night, the Post must be Delivered.

Basic Information

  • Content Rating: Everyone
  • Recommended Level Range: 5-15>
  • Outdoor map: 1x1 sections
  • Friendly towns: 1 (medium)
  • Hostile dungeons: 2 (medium)

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Description

The Imperial Express Courier service has broken down on the grand north-south route in Valorim, between Fort Blackcrag and Krizsan. You have taken on the job of an express delivery: A message bearing the Imperial Seal and addressed to Mayor Linden, regional governor of Midori Province must reach Lorelei within five days. But on the way, it is stolen.

Credits

Inspiration

The idea for the plot in the first place was my own, but in the most recent stage of development (in the last month), I found the story increasinly influenced by my reading of Terry Pratchett's Going Postal. Some very blatant examples, though there are no verbatim quotes, are the tagline ("[...] the Post must be Delivered") and part of the final dialogue: "it is a Letter, and you Delivered it."

Lazarus provided several brilliant ideas, which I am eternally grateful for (and all players would too, if they saw the older versions). Among them was the idea of the Projector Room in the lower caves (it was merely a cave with a few undead and an unexplained mysterious cutscene first).

The starting town, Backus, is named after John Backus, the creator of the Fortran language. This town follows a computer science / math theme: All characters are named after famous computer scientists or mathematicians, such as Kernighan and Ritchie, authors of Programming in C, and Grace Hopper, who created the first compiler.

Design

The outdoor map of Express Delivery is positioned roughly west of Lake Tomor in Valorim. This area is designed in detail in Spiderweb's own Avernum 3: Ruined World, and Express Delivery is based on this design (albeit roughly, and with significant modifications).

Graphics

The first introduction illustration of the scenario introduction (a message scroll lying on a wooden table) is a still shot of a video sequence from the game Caesar III by Impressions Games™.

The second introduction graphic is a map of Midori Province from Avernum 3, positioned on a wooden table texture from a free collection of textured backgrounds.

One of the two winning conclusions of the game displays a distorted version of a Blades of Avernum scenario icon, positioned on top of a piece of parchment, also from this collection.

Beta Testing and Support

Lazarus, Nikki, Blake and Riibu were helpful in testing Express Delivery and finding bugs in the dialogue, scripting and map design. The Blades of Avernum community (notably Dikiyoba, Lazarus, Nikki, Thralni, Ephesos, Kelandon, Dintiradan and Dintiradan) helped me solve a lot of problems with my scripts as I began to learn Avernumscript. Tyranicus converted my custom graphics for Macintosh and compressed it as a .sit file. Thanks all!