Roguelike: Achaea Style

Hi folks!

Grudgingly impressed by adventurers’ toil in feeding the Mnemosynian whirlpool, the Jade Empress has begun to unlock some of its potential in the form of The Trials of the Mnemosyne!

HELP MNEMOSYNE has everything you need to know, but I’ll cover the main highlights below.

The Mnemosyne Trials are a roguelike dungeon mode reimagined in the Achaea style. Denizens within are drawn from all over the game and its history, both living and dead, and may feature many blasts from the past for those old enough to remember!

WADE MNEMOSYNE
– Commence a Mnemosynian Trial. This requires you to be beside the whirlpool in ancient Seleucar.
– You must be on full health and mana to initiate the channel to begin.
– Beginning a run incurs a 10 minute cooldown before you can start another should you abandon or die.

At present this is intended to be a fully single-player experience (other than invasions, see below), and each instance of the dungeon is independent from all the others, meaning many adventurers can wade at the same time and have entirely separate experiences.

The dungeon scales infinitely and each new floor (known as a “ripple”) becomes more difficult than the last in various ways including more complex enemies, faster and stronger denizens, or new affixes that add extra rules or obstacles to the environment. Advancing to a new ripple will require you fully clear all denizens on your current ripple, defeat a boss, or overcome some other objective set to test you!

WADE STATUS
– View information about your current run, including any ongoing affixes, progress through the current wave, your current objective, current ripple, and number of lives remaining.

Dying within a ripple reduces your lives and when you reach 0 lives, you will be forced to embrace death and your run is over. Starburst effects and similar do not work within the Mnemosyne and staying alive is likely to be a chief concern for those aiming to go deepest!

Note: Wading the Mnemosyne is NOT an open PK activity, but should adventurers have sufficient reasoning to attack you, they may invade your ripple! See the HELP MNEMOSYNE section on invasions!

BOON [ARGUMENTS] – Interact with boons in various ways

In order to combat this increasing difficulty, each floor also offers a choice of boons to select from as you wade deeper. In total these number in the hundreds and range from simple increases to damage or resistances to enabling entirely new build concepts and transforming mundane abilities into brand new effects. Some are naturally rarer than others. Some are wildly powerful. And some come with significant drawbacks as the price for their power.

Once again, HELP MNEMOSYNE has much more detail than I have room for in this post and I’d advise giving it a thorough read through!

In terms of rewards, defeating denizens in the Mnemosyne does grant experience and renown (more renown if you do more ripples) but not gold. There are also honours lines available for reaching certain ripple thresholds and a unique honours line that can be held only by the current adventurer with the record for deepest ripples waded, as shown on RANKINGS MNEMOSYNE.

RANKINGS MNEMOSYNE [PLAYER] – View the rankings for Mnemosyne Trials.
– Specifying an adventurer will show you the boons they had on their best recorded run in addition to which denizens brought their run to an end.

MEMORYSHOP [ARGUMENTS] – Interact with the Mnemosyne’s reward shop

In addition, completing a run will award renown as well as one or more shimmering threads. This is a new currency that can be spent in the MEMORYSHOP for a slew of different rewards: talisman caches, gear crates, a dozen unique mounts, various miscellaneous items, battle figurines, old bazaar items, forging descriptors, and brand new ways to apply a customised flair to your description, shout, dragon description, tells, entry, and deathsight.

MNEMOSYNEON
– Activate the Mnemosyne channel for some notifications.

Needless to say, this is one of the most absurdly ambitious projects we have ever undertaken in Achaea. Makarios and Edra have put in an overwhelming amount of work to make this a truly unique experience and form the pillars of a brand new meta-game within the game itself. I’d also like to shout out Seia, Ethaerla, and Thraa for an absolute mountain of help in getting the rewards and denizens set up for this project, and to Ecokin and Coelano for contributing a ton of quotes and lore snippets on the boons! They have all been absolutely indispensable.

In the coming days and weeks we will be making additions and tweaks to boons and various other aspects of the system to continuously improve it, so please report any bugs immediately (use DUNGEONBUG please!) and feel free to use the newly created Dungeon Feedback thread in the official Discord for comments!

Last but not least, I would also like to thank all of our player testers for putting in time to test, find bugs and offer feedback to inform the best of this first phase release. You were all invaluable!

Enjoy!

Penned by My hand on the 18th of Phaestian, in the year 1007 AF.