Here lately I have had some time to work on Arthur’s Grove (I’m still note 100% sold on the name, but we’ll see!). I have started to add a few basic “quests.” These mostly involve item fetching – for example, before you acquire a weapon you must fetch an item for a NPC. Even from these very basic quests characteristics of an NPC start to emerge. With the fetch quests, the player learns a lot about what the NPC desires. Some game characters might strive for coins or treasure, while others ask for family trinkets which have been recently lost or misplaced. These characteristics are nice because they are simple and easy to identify but also help the player start to build expectations for how a particular NPC will act when placed in a certain situation.

From these very simple to build quests the player starts to associate with each of these characters. Aligning with those they favor and disliking those characters they find it hard to identify with. Next task for me will be to start using these characters and what the play learns about them to start building elements of lore which persist throughout the game!