Lionheart
- September 06, 2002 00:00 AM PST
Fantasy-based role-playing in an alternate-history England, using the character-development system from Fallout? Sign me up.
You may or may not remember Fallout, but it�s usually respected as one of the best PC RPGs of all time. In Fallout, you could create a character using the skills and perks you wanted and play him (or her) however you desired. Fallout was one of the first games ever to give players a reason to have high Charisma or Luck (Charisma got you through conflicts without having to fight, while Lucky characters found themselves stumbling upon random excellent items, like an alien blaster at a UFO wreckage site). Every stat and skill had value, and you could be anything from an honorable heavy machine gunner to a bad-to-the-bone evil assassin and still win the game. People played Fallout for years, restarting with new characters over and over for a whole new experience.I told you that story to tell you this one.
Lionheart, Black Isle�s latest announcement, will be an alternate-history version of medieval Europe. Up through the Crusades, everything will be the same, but at the end of the Third Crusade, things will start to get weird. A tear in reality introduced magic into our cozy, filth-encrusted civilization, and suddenly there were monsters and demons running about everywhere. Four hundred years later, you, a descendant of King Richard the Lionhearted (Sean Connery in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves), will find yourself embroiled in the dangers and rewards of living in such a world.
Lionheart will be based around the SPECIAL system (�SPECIAL� stands for Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck, the main attributes for characters in the system), which will enable you to customize your character with skills, attributes, and even traits and perks that round out your character�s unique abilities and personality. This system is the exact one used for Fallout. See how it all comes full circle?
Lionheart will feature four races, each an offshoot of the human race we know and love. The pureblooded humans are normal folks with no magical taint in their blood. The Sylvant are descended from humans bound with good-aligned spirits and resemble traditional fantasy elves. The Demokin come from humans bound with fiends or imps and are generally taller and more adept at magic than purebloods. The often-persecuted Feralkin are the children of humans bound with beast spirits and are generally stronger and more skillful than purebloods. These four human races will live in a world filled with historical figures we know from History class as well as also mythological creatures and powerful magic.
Speaking of magic, characters in Lionheart will be able to wield spells from three different types of magic: Thought, Tribal, and Divine. To use magic, a character will have to bind with spirits and command their power to do his bidding. Strong-willed humans who bind with benevolent spirits will find a symbiosis in which both the mage and the spirit benefit. Powerful mages who bind with evil spirits will find themselves slowly drifting toward wickedness and depravity. Weak-willed humans who bind with evil spirits� well, guess where all the monsters are coming from.
Everything in Lionheart will take place in real time, which has required some changes to the SPECIAL system that was created for the turn-based Fallout. The system will also have to take into account the use of magic as opposed to guns and science. Otherwise, at least at this early state, the system looks to be intact, though we�ll get a better feeling of the system when we get our hands on the playable version of the game.
With a strong ancestor like Fallout, Lionheart would have to work hard to be disappointing. Like your character in the game, who is a descendent of a powerful king, Lionheart will have a lot to live up to and likely have the skill to impress us all.
