Who the hell came up with the great slot machine in the sky? This is very non Conan Exiles nor does it relate well to what should have been the inspired by the original Conan Work. It’s really lazy.
If you never read, “The Gem in the Tower.” I recommend it for reference. However, whereas the story unfolds with some basics:
Pirates on a nameless island.
A mysterious tower with a sorcerer who keeps the weather nice if sailors pay a bribe.
A dangerous bat-thing monster.
Lost treasure.
Thralls falling from the sky is not one of them. It would have made better story telling and adhered closer to the original work to arrive via longship; still poorly equipped.
For thralls, it would make more sense to have ships crash upon the reefs due to the storms at sea not being controlled by the wizard; these groups of thralls wading ashore and then making their way across land.
The tower. It works; the structure of the wizards creations spread around it… and the mystery of how to get in is great. The purpose of the devices surrounding the tower… horribly contrived, unimmersive and poorly implemented in a way that’s not fun.
There needs to be a sense of hunted at night by the bat demon; where the primary predator has the potential of flying over head; spotting you and landing forcing fight or flight. I understand and willing to bet it’s the “final boss” in the tower based upon the inspiration for this expansion. However, I would rather have skirmishes with the boss if I do not hide and it spots me; where once I damage it to a variable level it flees back to the tower.
I understand artistic license.
However, in a sandbox roll playing game… there needs to be some better storytelling and logic behind the systems than pull a lever and the song, “it’s raining men” coming on.
Under those conditions, it would make the Redwood forest a great hiding place (concealment from aerial predators).
And to take it a step further, for “endgame” – conquer the tower. There’s all kinds of scenarios that can be applied to “conquering the Dark Tower” (and unforeseen consequences of doing such).
That would pretty much put all potential thralls on the shoreline rather than scattered evenly over the island. Plus a lot of that shoreline is reserved for new characters.
Even if you had them wander inland toward the tower or something, you wouldn’t find many because they’d, you know, run into stuff that killed them off. Either that or you’d constantly be coming accross a path of carcasses. Either way, tracking them down for capture would be made significantly more problematic.
So instead they have 6 of them, T1 crafters and up to T2 fighters, land at particular picked out spots, and if you want the good ones, you have to farm and unknown element to summon a portal that drops them in 6 designated spots in the inner circle of the map.
Sounds like shipwrecks landing on a beach makes more sense lore wise.
Fine. My system is not intent to be THE solution but provide guidance in a direction. Have a certain number of fixed camps on the shoreline (think of those camps back along noob river in exile) make them represent the recently shipwrecked.
Have some others inland of survivors who trekked inland and set up a base of operations that are thrallable. It doesn’t have to be many; and it can be a periodic spawn that despawns… (perhaps they are out hunting) perhaps the camp was attacked recently and they fled or are in hiding…
Anything would be better and closer aligned to the actual Conan lore and still makes more sense than stormclouds of people rain.