Join Book of Travels and become part of a unique social roleplaying experience that doesn’t hold your hand. Inspired by genre classics, this is an online adventure that sets you adrift in an intricate fairytale world… but it’s also an invitation to roleplay without the restraints of linear quests and plotlines. Feel at liberty to travel the free wilds and vivid cities of the Braided Shore peninsula. Wander deep into the layers of this hand-drawn world, stumble upon its hidden places or unravel one of its many mysteries. There is no overarching goal, no real beginning or end, and ultimately you are in charge of shaping your own journey. It’s a land of elusive creatures, lush natural beauty and pastoral calm… but one that has known troubles and where shadows play their part.
Update #5: All about knotspells • Update #8: Go’Bad, draisine travel and healing tea • Update #9: Design an island for Book of Travels • Update #10: Sefra lore • Update #11: Game play lowdown • Update #12: Mementos and artwork revealed • Update #13: New stretch goals: Dreams + Pin-Pouch-Pebble minigame + Sharing memories + Accessories + Pets
Rachel Watts, PCgamer.com
Right from the start, our ambition was to take the conventional elements of traditional RPGs and use them to make something new – specifically, a world where players can enjoy calm exploration, discovery, and quietly forged companionships. We knew that we wanted to offer the sensation of being a wanderer in a wild, luscious, unexplored world, where you can form friendships and overcome obstacles – alone or together.
We’re pleased with what we have made so far: an online RPG that focuses more on roleplaying and personality traits than on stats and numbers. There are no linear quest lines built into the game, instead we wanted Book of Travels to be a truly living world, one where you’ll stumble across events and characters unexpectedly. It’s up to you to follow the leads you gather and piece together the stories of Braided Shore.
In making our previous games we found that there’s an appetite for games that allow players to delve deep into a world and to slowly thread together events, moments, and emotions into something that’s all their own. With Book of Travels we’re bringing the same interpretive, creative style of play to a much bigger world.
Bree Royce, Massivelyoverpowered.com
Your interactions and choices will have effects that you might not expect in traditional RPGs. Acting with curiosity and thoughtfulness will evolve your character in the same way as performing tasks or undertaking endeavours. Events that are usually trivialized in RPGs are instead made into strong emotional moments. Witnessing a death, for example, will weigh more heavily on your character for each day that passes, but by visiting the deceased’s resting place, your grief will be transformed into a new energy – one that will remove that weight and strengthen you instead.
When it comes to in-game communication, we’ve found that playing with a limited range of expression makes for more involving interaction between players – that’s why there’s no text chat in the game. In Book of Travels, you’ll communicate with other players using a unique set of emotes and symbols which are unlocked as you experience new things. This means that you’ll gain symbols to express ‘boat’ and ‘market’ once you’ve encountered them. We’ve used this bold kind of game design before, and we fell in love with how wordless communication boosted players’ creativity as they found ways to say a lot with very little. This made for a more immersive kind of roleplay and also had a very positive effect on the culture amongst our community.
Marc Marasigan, MMOS.com
Book of Travels also differs from traditional MMOs because of its multiplayer design. Instead, we’re calling it a TMO – a Tiny Multiplayer Online. That’s because there really won’t be anything ‘massive’ about the multiplayer aspect of the game. Instead we’re building a game experience where there will just be a few people on each server, and when you cross paths, we want it to be a memorable moment. Should you choose to wander alone you won’t be missing out on any of the world’s wonder and enchantment. But if you do want to form a band of Travellers, the scarcity of other folk will make your companionships special and your group’s bond that much deeper.
As you play you’ll encounter countless randomly occurring events. These can be anything from townsfolk that pass you by, a flock of deer, a travelling merchant or an event that tells a story. Some events will inspire you to seek out particular places or follow leads, others will need immediate action and decision-making from you and your group. Events have certain conditions, such as ‘can only appear during night’ or ‘only occurs in x location when raining’. This complex design is what makes the game truly unique: it will present something different each time you play, giving every player a different story to share. Beneath this structure lie multiple large and small plotlines for you to uncover and by sharing your findings (on the game’s Discord server, for example) you can start to peel back the layers of an immensely deep world of stories and secrets. We’ve worked on this part of the game more than any other – making the world ever-changing, and giving it a life of its own.
Liam Dawe, gamingonlinux.com
Book of Travels is meant to be played in many different ways. It’s a game perfect for players who want to adventure alone, because there are no typical linear quest lines, and there’s so much to experience through free exploration. But the game is also tailored to be exciting when travelling with a band of new found friends. There are events in the game that we call Endeavours. These are things that players in groups can interact with, and they can trigger a variety of outcomes. Endeavours come in four categories; Mystical, Physical, Social and Mechanical. A group might find a machine that requires them to collaborate to activate it. They might come across a boat to reach a far away island. They might simply encounter a social situation that demands more than one player. This design is a key part of our intention to create a multiplayer culture based on roleplaying, social interaction and collaboration rather than PVP.
Braided Shore is a fantasy world that blurs the lines between many things: between civilisation and nature, industrialism and magic, people and beings. It’s a culture in which honour and humanity is celebrated, but it’s not without its shadows. It’s an early industrial society that has one foot firmly rooted in tradition.
The region is inhabited by many spirit beings, but none are more prominent than the Sefra. Sefra are solitary and volatile and live in regions of the peninsula they have chosen to inhabit and protect. This doesn’t mean that they are at odds with humans – they often live peacefully alongside them, sometimes even working with their councils – but they are known for their unpredictability and their tempers can have huge consequences.
There are two common types of magic in Braided Shore, but they don’t belong to the realm of conventional wizardry. Knots are used as a means of communication but may also be magic. In Knotcraft, binding can be used to conjure magic energies – they are always potent and usually benign. One type of knot may conjure ‘light’ while another may conjure ‘smoke’ or ‘shelter’. Brewing tea isn’t always a magical ritual either (folk love to visit tea houses or sup tea together with friends) but neither is it uncommon to perform a tea ceremony wherein a special tea is brewed to endow the drinker with wondrous abilities, such as invisibility, healing and weather resistance.
The Braided Shore Lore Compendium gives much more detail on these practices, their common use and their history, as well as on all things Braided Shore.
As this campaign grows we will be populating an area in the game known as Travellers’ Meadow with Night Flowers, one for every backer. Night Flowers are a rare find on Braided Shore and the particular blue of their petals is very unusual throughout the region. What’s more, they become luminescent in warm weather, and in large clusters will illuminate any fair-weathered night.
We can’t wait to see Travellers’ Meadow fill with Night Flowers! And when you play Book of Travels, Travellers’ Meadow will be your special place – a place to rest, meet up with other Travellers. So back us and watch the empty meadow shimmer with the blue glow of Night Flowers!
Many have likened the gameview to a living picture book – a perfect summary! Technically, this is because the game uses a camera that only moves in two dimensions, creating an almost orthographic field of view, and mixing 3D spaces with flat 2D sprites. Regardless of definition, the way the game looks and is navigated is quite rare.
Our inspiration started with classic isometric RPGs, but we wanted to find a way to bring a more cinematic scope to the scenes. Using a unique mix of techniques, we’ve designed Book of Travels to make your character feel small, letting the landscape around you play a bigger role. The experience is much like walking freely inside a page in a book, taking in the richly illustrated world around you.
We’re proud to share some of the art from the development phase below! To see even more pledge for any rewarded that includes the digital sketchbook, which will be packed with lots and lots of sketches and pre-production designs.
Click on the thumbnails to open the full images
We’re a small independent game studio based in Stockholm, Sweden. Founded by artists in 2010, the studio is comprised of people from all kinds of different backgrounds. We have released seven games, all of which have a highly crafted visual style and explore emotionally engaging themes such as loss, freedom and solitude. Few of these games fit neatly into genres, but what they have in common is the way they allow players to explore, to speculate and to reflect.
This isn’t our first online game: Meadow, now in its fourth year, connected players who loved the Shelter games allowing them to explore together, communicating with emotes and unlocking magical obelisks. We had no idea that Meadow would go on to bring so much enjoyment for such a long time. We’ve been overwhelmed by the stories and artwork that Might and Delight players have made and shared – it’s really shown us how rich and deep this kind of gameplay can be! Making Meadow and getting to know its community have inspired us to make a TMO of a much different, much bigger kind.
Might & Delight games wouldn’t be what they are without the input of our community – put simply, community support and feedback help us design better games. We want to invite more people in at an earlier stage of development, so that you can help us make the game that you want to play.
We’re already funded enough to get us through production, but this campaign will mean the game can evolve and expand, because we’ll be listening to your ideas and adding them into the world… Which of course means you get to play a bigger and better game, but also that you’ll know that you helped to create it!
We’ve been working on these rewards for a long time now. developing them to help enrich your game experience and help you get to know the Braided Shore. Please take a look and see which one might suit you best!
We will release Book of Travels in 2020 and we’re also looking into offering an early access launch. When the campaign is over we’ll keep backers updated with development milestones. After release, the game will be available on Steam for $30.00 and wherever you buy Book of Travels, there will be no subscription fee.
We will continue to evolve the world, its lore and its backstory, adding events and levels for years to come. Right now we are committed to updating the project for a five year period, post-release.
Thank you so much for taking the time to learn about our work! We feel much gratitude for having this opportunity to connect with you and would love to hear your feedback and/or questions by email to kickstarter@mightanddelight.com. Or write in the comments section!
Might and Delight are experienced developers and publishers and fully aware of the demands and challenges of a busy production shedule. While we cannot rule out that minor delays may occur, we are fully confident that the project (which is part way through developement) will be successfully completed and delivered to all backers without issue.