About This Game

Story

The deities have shunned the Vollings, and they have turned to paganism to survive. But Vollings are resilient and ever industrious. One lord has embarked on an enterprise to settle an island long abandoned by its dead civilization, braving a cursed land in hopes of farming a lucrative spice grown only on its hillsides.

His venture is a success, but trouble quickly presses fast upon him from many sides. As he is leaving to sail out to defend his fields from a jealous neighbor, he has received word that every inhabitant of one of his farmholds has vanished without a trace. With few options at hand, he calls on his guards for four volunteers to venture across the island to investigate this mystery.

Party-based adventure

Explore the island of Invimona in this open world adventure with four generated companions. You're assigned a pack-boro for your mission, who can carry a boat as well as extra items you pick up along the way, and together you can portage around the Invimona sea and rivers.

Visit towns for clues and to stock your party with unique items. As a guard you will be asked for assistance as you meet various farmers, scribes, artisans and even Gadaars among the holds. In the five years since the island was settled, grave robbers have flocked to Invimona like vultures, and ensuring they find their way to Exile Island is a constant battle.

Skills

Equip your four companions you've created with a variety of skills to overcome the challenges your adventure will take you through. Choose favored weapons, armor, pagan spells, animal binding, music and rogue abilities and level them up with experience or with buying training from individuals you meet around the island. Skills used most are granted bonuses to get more powerful with level ups.

Combat

Banquet for Fools features pausable real-time combat. When your action bar fills, you can pause the game by opening your combat dome, and choose an action and/or target within the dome. Play as one companion at a time, but switch between them at will. The others will press on with whatever tactics you've given to them in your formation menu.

About

This game is being created by two people. We've developed Isle of Bxnes, Serpent in the Staglands (which is set in the same world as Banquet for Fools) and under a publisher, Mechajammer.

Early Access

Banquet for Fools is feature complete, we’re working on maps and content for the game over this autumn and winter. We’re essentially done with all the hard parts and only have content to work on, and thought it would be a good time to open it up for ruleset suggestions and feedback for balancing out your gameplay. It’s a single player experience so we’re not too worried about over-balancing, but want all play styles to have challenges and areas of success.

Our plan is to do monthly integer version updates of chunks of maps, and anything between will be patched/updates from suggestions or issues.

You should be able to start a character at any point in Early Access and be able to continue seamlessly through updates to the end of the game, some songs/intercessions may change, these are hardcoded, but you’ll be able to use them regardless of updates. Due to the unique nature of creating custom spells, if spell effects have major changes you won’t be able to make a similar spell again, but your existing custom spells will still be able to be used throughout your session. We’ll let folks know if this changes in any way.

In Early Access 1.0, there are currently dozens of unique creatures implemented into the island, 5 races of Vollings to play as, and over 100 unique items. Weapon types have unique animations. Skills and abilities are all fully functional along with their adjacent support systems to play, including crafting your own spells and rune images for them, and using your field kit to crate projectiles like arrows darts and elyxers when hiking.

Completed for 1.0:

• Pagan Spells
  
• Songs
  
• Intercessions
  
• Binding
  
• Field Kit use for arrows, darts, elyxers
  
• Sneaking
  
• Lockpicking
  
• Bartering dispositions
  
• All weapon types
  
• Repairing
  
• Sleeping at garrisons and with your Boro
  
• Sailing

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

Gore is stylistic but gratuitous.