From a message I sent to Danda:
I was taking a look at the adventure map yesterday, and it gave me the idea of quest lines and quest arcs. I blabbed on a bit about this on the quest team thread already, but I will expand more here.
To start, there are two main factions: the Risen, and the Zo. The Risen are the 'bad' guys. They are like demons, undead, etc and are the enemies of the Zo. Dreadknights, necromancers, bloodmages, and the like would start semi-affiliated with the Risen. Then there are the Zo, the 'good' guys. They are like the gods and angels of Herocraft. Paladins, clerics, and disciples would start semi-affiliated with the Zo.
Each faction will have a capital fort. The Risen's Dreadfort could be near the Volcano; the Zo's Holy Citadel could be near the snowy lands. The center area can have a neutral starting city. Depending on your class and its affiliation, you would spawn in either the Dreadfort, the Holy Citadel, or the central city. Even though you may start in a certain city, your affiliation is not set in stone; a necromancer may very well travel across the map to the Holy Citadel and fight for the Zo.
Regarding the quest arcs themselves, in the Holy Citadel and the Dreadfort, near where you spawn there is a faction NPC that will give you a simple quest like go to an enemy camp and kill them, or go gather an artifact. Once you complete the quest, you will get a small boost to your relationship with that faction, and a decay in relationship with the other faction. I was thinking that the old Karma system could be incorporated very well into this faction system. As your relationship increases with your faction, new quests can become available, and you gain special benefits. An example of the benefits would be: Increased damage at night and a becomedeath-like passive ability for the Risen and health regen during the day and extra damage towards undead for the Zo.
The quests would continue in a story, getting progressively harder the further along the story you are on (I was hoping to scale the missions based off Heroes Specializations: the first mission would be suitable for a level 1 spec, the last one suitable for a level 65 spec.) And the final quest for each arc could be the killing of the leader of the opposite faction.
To pass time between missions, you can venture through the adventure map and attack enemy mobs and camps to raise your reputation with your own faction. For this to be possible, there needs to be a way for certain mobs to spawn, and respawn (off a timer) in certain areas. An example would be Borderlands, Skyrim, Destiny, etc, how certain enemies only appear where they are meant to appear, as opposed to the random mob spawns of minecraft. Furthermore, these enemy mobs may occasionally drop loot that is redeemable to your faction for reputation or items, like the pvp badges on Aegis.
I'm not sure how PVP will work on the Adventure map, but I propose it is only enabled between rival factions. This will set the stage for a conquest-like system where there are forts and camps scattered throughout the adventure map that the rival factions can fight over. Control of a fort or camp will bring benefits to your faction, sort of like the current conquest system. This idea is very similar to GW2s WvWvW, for reference.
I also propose a third faction, something related to the End. Missions against this faction may pop up occasionally and both factions have to bind together to defeat their common enemy. This may also give a wonderful background for public events throughout all the maps.
Sorry for the flood of ideas, I'm sure that a few of the things I threw in may not be possible, but I would love for as much of this as possible to become a part of Herocraft. We claim we are an RPG server, but as far as I can see there isn't much RPG. This can be the fix to that problem.
I've also been taking a look at the Sentry plugin lately (it works off the same platform Denizen's runs off of) and it would open up the possibility of NPCs that can be damaged, killed, respawned, and easily incorporated into a quest script. These can be useful for populating a faction's camp or fort, or for using as targets or allies in a quest.
)
