The Sadirar people are native to the ever scorching and arid deserts of the Searing Plains where their villages are located. Some of these settlements are out among the endless dunes of Arenas Vorax while others are nestled on the precarious slopes of the Mountains of Fire in the west. Built of stone mostly, these villages are protected fiercely by tribesmen and shamans of the four Great Tribes dedicated to the elements. Will you aid the Sadirar or attack their villages as a mercenary?

This is a week we have been waiting for so long. Finally we can announce some pretty cool things coming up. Well, as our most informed supporters, you have heard about some of them but probably not this one yet.

As we are cycling through and iterating the various UI elements of the game, we have now arrived to the Codex and gave it a neat little redesign. Many of you have enjoyed reading Codex entries (yay!) and we wanted to upgrade and update the experience, especially along the lines of your feedback.

A lot has happened since our last project post where we looked back on 2018 as a sort of a year assessment.

Prologue

We finished the year with releasing the Prologue section of Vagrus just around Christmas. Our hopes were high and the results were... even better! Let's delve into the details.

The Empire has been strewn with ruined fortresses and keeps since the Calamity. Additionally, the brutal wars and conflicts ever since the catastrophe have done considerable damage to the reclaimed and rebuilt forts, leaving many in disrepair or outright abandoned. Fort Larius, Fort Teltulis, Fort Tirnos, one of the Twin Towers - the list goes on and on.

Another crucial game mechanic that is being added to Vagrus as we are writing this is a system of Rumors. Rumors are short entries in your Journal that are meant to guide players to content and unlock locations on their Chart in order to help them plan journeys and find places. We have come to the conclusion during playtesting that not only do we need to differentiate these Rumor entries from your Objectives in the Journal but we also need to separate them entirely and move them to a different pane. As evident from this, Rumors have undergone quite a lot of change since their original conception.

Have you met the kingpin Skornar in the Prologue? He's quite the colorful sort. Good news is: he'll make his return in the main game as a Companion you can recruit! Ten years older and much grumpier, the warrior has a serious grudge against those who ousted him from Avernum's criminal underworld. Yet his story arc will involve much more than that, with the central theme of coping with growing old - not an easy plight for a warrior and leader such as Skornar.

The images above are from one of the starting regions of the main game, shedding some light on parts of the huge campaign map the player can traverse in Vagrus.

We can already hear you ask: 'But guys... why don't you show off the whole map?'

This time we would like to introduce a brand new game mechanic to you that you will see quite a lot in Vagrus: the acquiring and delivering of news across vast tracts of wasteland. Carrying news between settlements not only makes sense from a gameplay perspective but has its foundations in-world, too, that is, comitati are known to have a vital role in distributing news and taking messages all over the continent of Xeryn.

The wretched animated beings that plague the desolate Riven Realms have many names, even the general, rotting raised dead such as the ones on the image: shamblers, unliving, awakened, undead, corpsemen, and many more. Travelers who died on the road and came back as undead are typically referred to as 'Forsaken', however, and these unfortunate creatures are often drawn to living travelers, seeking to extinguish their lives at the command some unfathomable curse.