Eric: 00:03 Welcome atavians, grecht, kelki, grooks one and all to the Titans of Text podcast. We are your hosts, Eric Oestrich. Eric: 00:18 And Danny "Austerity" Nissenfeld. Eric: 00:21 And we have with us today, Adam, the lead producer of Aetolia. We're going to slink into the shadows and go through Aetolia's history and its future. Welcome Adam. Adam: 00:31 Thank you. Eric: 00:32 So sell us as a brand new player on joining Aetolia. Adam: 00:36 Aetolia being an Iron Realms Entertainment MUD has a full paid staff with somebody 24/7 looking for stories to make. We have a lead PVP designer to make sure everything's balanced on the level of something like league of legends, tweaking little things here and there to make sure it's perfect. But most of all, it's the best gothic horror MUD with a wonderful community and in depth the systems for everything we can find from an actual economy based on what players do and made to wars that changed the landscape of the world. You c an Find pretty much anything you're looking for as long as you ultimately know that it is gothic horror and that things will go wrong. Danny: 01:20 So how did you yourself get into mudding? What is your history with muds overall and how did you come about joining IRE? Adam: 01:31 Oh, I grew up in the middle of nowhere, Texas. So when the internet came, it was like I suddenly discovered there are more people in the world. From roleplaying chat rooms I moved onto MUDs when I was say 13 which is, goodness, 22 years ago now. And from there it was Achaea a once it opened. And so I've been with IRE from really their start through my college years. I helped design and make Imperian and I worked there for a little bit. Then I joined the world of oil and chemistry, which is pretty corporate. So when oil's price dropped and I was no longer needed, I came back to what I had missed and they needed a producer. And I'm a project manager so we thought we'd see if it fits. Two and a half years later, I really do not miss oil. And ah, I still love muds. Danny: 02:25 So was that mud that you came on as a producer? Was that Aetolia? Adam: 02:29 That is Aetolia, that's the first time they decided to give me money for my advice. Danny: 02:34 So you had played Aetolia before this point then? Adam: 02:36 Oh, certainly. I played it. I was part of the event that created Aetolia from Achaea's standpoint and I was some of Aetolia's early players. And of course I come back, you know, constantly I've played on every IRE MUD in some form or fashion over that 22 year period. Eric: 02:52 So you sort of, I think, did I hear correctly that Aetolia's spawned from Achaea? I'm not sure I knew that. Adam: 02:59 Oh yeah. So Achaea is of course these days built on a custom code base and it was custom back then too, but we were getting to where we had 300 players online at a time. It was too big for its popularity. So there was an event with Varian who was our head God in Aetolia and Aetolia actually split off as his darker copy because he has a recurring role as a wanting to be a creator deity and he who isn't quite the best at getting the creation right. So Aetolia actually began as a straight Achaea clone with a new staff and freedom to do whatever they wanted to do to it. Danny: 03:44 So how do we get from Achaea to a sort of this dark gothic horror like dark sun type stuff. Adam: 03:53 So it started with a god who was known for errors in his creation. So they knew they wanted this Gothic, this more horror, bad things can happen cause you know your standard fantasy is: good things happen until the bad things come. And here we were just going to go ahead and start with stuff broken. And then, you know, vampires were the first big thing and then werewolves and it's grown a whole lot from that kind of vampire versus werewolves White Wolf thing. But we've kept in that realm of everything always gets a little bit worse. And of course since then we've had, Oh you know, that was 2001. So we've had 18 years of storytellers, we had writers on staff and we look nothing alike anymore other than a few little nods to one another that we keep just for tongue-in-cheek fun. Danny: 04:44 So at this point in Aetolia's lifetime, what are the things besides the theme? I mean, gothic is not a wide theme. It's, you know, usually we have swords and sorcery or we have space. What are the more interesting systems, mechanics, you know, game play type stuff that sets Aetolia apart? Adam: 05:05 Most recently, at least for me, we released a full farming systems so as to replace our wood and cloth and produce for crafting. And it's a fully pixelated map with, we hired a spriter, so it's, it's almost Harvest Moon in super Nintendo era. We've released a revamp of a multiple classes recently. Even, I just, I can't think of anywhere other than talking like Eve online where you really do have the economy. The world is in the player's hands. You can now go decide that someone in a city wants a batch of tomatoes and you're going to go grow them and sell them to them. And in the Gothic sense almost everybody has managed to find some curse of a "were" now it's not just wolves anymore. Danny: 05:56 Does the NPC system aid in, in any of this type of, like you said farming like goods requests or is this like fully player driven of players wanting, you know, needing goods or services? Adam: 06:09 It is fully player driven. We're testing out a system where the NPCs make requests. You know, a tavern keeper wants bread. So he's asking for wheat. It's, it's still kind of an, it's testing things. Not many people are playing with it cause it's expensive and difficult. That's funny. It's a Gothic mud and I'm rambling about the farming system because it's the most fun we've had in a few months. We only released it in August, so everybody's still crazy about planting things. Eric: 06:37 What do you do to keep the game interesting for veterans that have been around for a decade or more I guess besides the farming simulator? Adam: 06:46 Yeah. so we don't let anything stay stagnant. Every class that's been here since the start has gone through multiple iterations and maybe it's good enough that it doesn't change externally very much, but everything is always growing. Just recently went over a couple of classes, like I said, the story, it just continues to get more and more expansive that you may have been playing here since the start 18 years ago, but the villains continue to change and pop up and some of those players have gone on to be those villains. Danny: 07:24 Players go on to be the villains. That sounds like end game content of a sort. Is that what the end game is? Do players ascend to, you know an area boss essentially? Or do you have regular releases of, you know, like you said NPCs come in and they're, they're big and bad. Adam: 07:44 So IRE basic rapture game design. We don't focus on levels as much or gear. It's almost everything you have that's of any power is social credit. You know, you're the Guild master of a guild, you're the head of an order for a God. So you make the rules that this divine being has passed down to you which you filtered through. So a lot of times becoming the villain is just simply you took the reins of power and decided to go some other way with it. And we as a staff exists to make that happen. Recently we had an event with it just had some small underpinnings with the chaos plane. Nothing big, but the players decided to portray most of the world and go talk to the chaos plane and tell on everyone. And so our next event ended up with the destruction of a Guild for betraying its ultimate creators and they're all moving on to something new now. That was player headed and quite a headache, but it ended up being quite nice. Danny: 08:44 How does that work internally? Not from a a story perspective, but how do you guys coordinate with the players like that? Is there kind of like a like an out of character meeting and you're like, hey you guys are doing this. This is how this can play out. Like what do you need us to do? Is it like that? Adam: 09:03 It's gone through a lot of forms. There used to be player meetings like that. They tend to not be the most productive in my tenure. As one of the first producers I'm a totally, I'm completely out of character. If I'm on the game and you need to ask someone how to do something, I'm there but if you want to just throw me a question about how you would go about, I don't know, committing genocide and I'm sitting there talk to me, we'll see what happens. And then the staff has varied means of communication for what our next story will be. So in that case we did bring them up. The person who started it, we chatted with them but I don't believe they expected the fallout that came. Danny: 09:44 And speaking of fallout, how does this style of game direction of design direction play out with you know the entirety of the player base. You can only please half of the people half of the time it goes. So what, what happens to the other half of the half? Adam: 10:01 So I have to say by and large I have been blown away by how well our players respond to this kind of thing. They recognize that not everyone can have the spotlight as long as we do our best to maintain a balance, make sure everybody's getting some attention and we don't just focus on one side entirely. They've actually been very cool about something being almost entirely based on shadow over being based on spirit or vice versa. There's a bit of a cyclical system to it that maybe we get carried away on one side and the other side has to speak up, but it's rarely angry there. They're just happy people are having fun. Eric: 10:37 So one of the, I dunno, usual struggles thata game will face is dealing with incoming players and them integrating with the older ones. How do you guys handle that? Adam: 10:47 So typically there's a guide system in an IRE game and we actually turned it off because our players are so, they're so excited to have someone new that's going to come and play and roleplay with them. And we just leave our newbie channel fully accessible. There are newbie areas, there's a walkthrough when you join, there's academies to teach you how to cure and do other things. But largely the players are so happy to see someone else that they help one another. And of course, you know, I'm always there. Some of my volunteers are always there. My two associate producers, Mike and Luke are, well, they're in Australia's version of always there. Danny: 11:27 Okay. So I think most people, you know, I did some White Wolf back in my time and the vampires and the, and I didn't do vampires and I wasn't doing werewolves. I was doing the, the lesser, the lesser stuff, the Mage the zombies, not zombies, the ghouls which is a, I forget the name of that, but that's a very obscure White Wolf book. And I know we went over the race list, I tried to pick the non vampires and the non werewolf names for the intro. Is there a big population imbalance of people that want to play vampires and werewolves since it's so prescient in popular media or is there a good actual balance of, of races among the players? Adam: 12:07 I would say when it totally started out, it was pretty heavily imbalanced. I think White Wolf had the same problem. No one wanted to play a world of human. They all wanted to be a vampire or a werewolf or a geist. But we actually do have a pretty good split in our population. I think the last time I checked our metrics, we skirt that 51 49 of the spirit side players, the people who are actually trying not to embrace the darkness and instead bring light and make things better. And they actually have an equal number of races and classes. There's a counterpoint to vampires in the spirit that there, there's a lot of fire. You know, you do have the tendency to kill it with fire. But we have our, our naturalists as well. We're trying to get the world back in balance. Danny: 12:51 How did, I know that you can be a human. Does anyone choose to be a human? I mean, I guess, you know, there's magic lines for, for potential for humans and gothic for witches, warlocks, druid type things, you know, Wiccans that kind of thing. Do people really, is there a good number of people playing human? Adam: 13:09 So human, the race has an experienced bonus. So you'll see people who use that to just race to our, we don't really have a max level, but it really slows down after about a hundred. That's when people call it end game and they just don't bother anymore. We always have at least one person who they want to just make a go at it without any of that fancy stuff. We did release a class for them. We have wayfarers, they're not tied to either side. They don't have any of the super crazy magic going on. We even have people who don't want to go that far and they just want to take a little short sword and chop their way through life. Danny: 13:45 How does that work out for the, the overarching storylines you know, with the vampires then you said the storylines bounced between the spirit world, the vampire world, like how to, how do those in-betweeners essentially fare? Adam: 13:59 I have to be a little pragmatic when I have a a hundred players online and one of them is neutral, you might not get the attention he wants. Hopefully he at least chooses a God and has, you know, volunteer attention there. But we do try to do as much quality of life stuff for them. But it is, it's hard to change the world when everyone around you is throwing fire or opening up portals to other worlds and you're throwing rocks. Danny: 14:25 We don't get someone running a Gothic mud on very often. So what happened when Twilight came out, the very un-gothic vampire sparkly type wave of awful fanfiction too. Did you get any sparkly vampires in Aetolia? Adam: 14:43 So I have to say most of this third hand, because I avoided that like the plague, but apparently riots in the streets. We ended up that the vampires had houses, bloodlines, and they tended to organize amongst the way people wanted to see the vampires. You had very militaristic ones. You had those that wanted to be the, the very old vampires of society. And there was a house that was a little bit more accepting of that style thing and so they got their small playground while everyone else carried torches at the gate. Eventually it evened out. I suppose that the fan base of Twilight didn't overlap too much with mud players in the end, but that that did kind of continue a trend. Even to this day. There will always be a house that collects the people who don't want to do with the others do Danny: 15:36 Are they like just running their own thing. You know, like you're in a an RP Guild and you've always got some people that are running their own storyline and never really show up to the big events or they just kind of hemmed and hawed during them in the background. Do they just do their own thing all the time and they're just kind of like, Oh yeah, we're outcasts. That's fine. Adam: 15:55 There's, there's a bit of a social rule that I've noticed since now I'm an outsider. I don't get to be one of those vampires anymore. You can have whatever off brand RP you want, but when we're in public, we're all going by what the admin has laid down, so they do fracture out and maybe they don't play together, but when an event comes for all the empires, all vampires are there. Danny: 16:18 That sounds pretty good. I know, you know, there's a lot of 'em and I, I dunno, I've been talking about this for a while, but you know, when graphics came, and we're not talking EverQuest or UO, we're talking like these days there's RP. You can find RP, I was in an RP guild in World of Warcraft. I was one of the admins. You can do RP in World of Warcraft, but I mean, you're in a massively multiplayer online game, right? But the massive is irrelevant because you're only playing with yourself or you're playing with, you know, the select 10 or 12 people that are in your RP guild or at best you have two or three that are actually active. Having a population and I'm sure Aetolia has a healthy enough population that makes it feel like a multiplayer game as opposed to a, my group that I have a discord for that we just kinda hang around together and do our few with each other. That sounds brilliant to me. Like so then I mean that really, it's amazing that that really plays out on a day to day basis in Aetolia, Adam: 17:15 I'm always amazed by how great our players are and that's not just saying stuff. The way they'll help each other out. So you see two people who were on the opposite sides hate one another, always go immediately to the bloodshed and, but as producer, I, I can hear them talk to each other afterwards where they're critiquing and giving advice. Eric: 17:35 Aetolia has been around for almost two decades now. Is there anything that you have wanted to change for awhile but just kind of seems impossible at this point? Mechanics or whatever? Adam: 17:48 So everyone would immediately expect me to, to say vampires because in my two and a half years running the place, I've tried I think three times to try to, to try to get them to quite, I don't want to say, not that they don't work, but I've tried so many times to make it more newbie friendly. It's been a constant struggle. If I had my druthers, honestly, we have a huge continent that is separate from sapients where most of the players are. There is a ton of content there that we haven't been able to release yet because the story hasn't caught up. If I could change something, it would be, I wish I had enough people to ram story every month so we could just tell tale after tale after tale and go to this content that we have. Oh gosh, we have years ready. Just waiting. Danny: 18:42 You mentioned that you have, I mean, you have content that you've already built with the stories. How paced out is the story. Is it like once a month there's some kind of event or, or how do you guys handle that pacing? Adam: 18:56 I have to walk a very strange balance. It can be very exhausting for players and admin both to run these events that take part in the whole world with, you know, four main cities, two main tethers. Things get very complicated quickly and we tend to try to run them in about a month. Now. I made the mistake of deciding on a summer event last year and I think I burnt everybody out. So we tried to focus on about a month and maybe two big story beats a year and two small ones. That would be the ideal. Sometimes timing is a little off when everybody's off courting the next big thing. Danny: 19:37 The system like that is kind of to give everyone a chance essentially to participate is there, I know I've played I played some table top in my time and I played tabletop via email on occasion and you always have at least one person that's like, I made my move, I want to go now, you know, I'm a teenager, I'm in college and I have all this free time and you know, screw you people that have kids, I just want to make my move right now. Just go now. Is there, is there that frustration for some people? Adam: 20:07 I think so. I think there are a few things that have had dangling in this long enough that they've really wished they could get on. But we're, we're heavily reliant on our awesome volunteers. So sometimes it has to wait till somebody is inspired and ready to go with that. I don't hear too many complaints there. There's some that are still on me to get finished. So yeah, that does happen. Eric: 20:29 Looking forward into the future what's in the horizon for Aetolia? Is there anything interesting happening? Adam: 20:36 Well, I'm not allowed to go give story spoilers or my volunteers will hit me. But code wise, the next big major of our shift in the economy is mining. And my first thought looking at it was how did we accidentally add Dwarf Fortress in Aetolia? So we're looking at huge underground caverns and biomes and digging too deep to find monsters and things of that nature. I think we actually just put a teaser, a picture on our forums. It is a significant task. I mean, we have a paid coder that is just, he's working, working, working, and it's still gonna take a while. It's, it will be a very, very big system followed, of course by airships. Danny: 21:19 So final fantasy essentially: Suddenly Airship? Adam: 21:24 Well the villains, one of the mini villains, they've had airships for goodness knows. And those airships have come in to attack sapiens and we haven't gotten a strike back or get up in the air yet. Danny: 21:36 So is that, is that going to be like a Starmourn has the the space navigation thing where you know, you direct your little spaceship in, in the direction to get to planets and stuff as it, is it actually going to be that involved something like of that level? Adam: 21:50 It already looks like that in the sense that we have a beta version that works and it does look similar to that we have being a world, so it does have friction and some other math that makes that kind of a thing a little more difficult. But yes, ultimately it does kind of end up looking a little similar. I hope they don't come after us. Danny: 22:11 That would be interesting if they did, but that would, that would be a news item right there. All right. I think that about brings us to the end. So thank you for joining us on Titans of Text, Adam, Adam: 22:24 Well, thank you for having me.