#rw slugcat campaign concept

[hdra77]

THE CHRONOMANCER CAMPAIGN CONCEPT

This is going to be a long post explaining about my slugcat oc's concept and their abilities!

also just a quick reminder i'm not good at explaining stuff in general so i hope an explanation with visuals is easier to understand!

the chronomancer needed 8 food pips for hibernation and extra two for storage

this slugcat doesn't have a stomach storage because it needs all the pips it can store in its stomach to compensate for its energy use.

its special ability is state binding. with this ability the slugcat is able to bind an object, leaving a golden glow in its place.

and if the ability is used again the object the slugcat is holding will teleport back to its place.

Sub ability of state binding And arguably more useful If the slugcat is standing in the afterimage when the object is teleported back The momentum 'stores' in the item itself And the yellowish glow on the object becomes intense

but the more the slugcat store its momentum it will lead to them being exhausted since it consumes so much energy and magic from the force

heres a poorly drawn demonstration how the chronomancer's general ability works

now more about their ability. they have this 'vision' ability where they are able to 'phase through walls' but heres the catch. when this ability is activated their surroundings change, which makes the slugcat get a glimpse into the past and what the place used to look back in those days. they cant always have this ability activated for a longer amount of time and it will wear out after 30 seconds

i have this idea where this ability would be very useful in puzzles and such.

this idea is still a work in progress but i wanted to share this here to hear what you guys think! ^^ and maybe if its possible the chronomancer can even become a mod of its own in the future!

also some extra bits here:

like chronomancer's vision form and present form seperatedly

any questions are welcomed!!

[flickering-nightfall]

I think it would be really interesting if in a hypothetical continuation of Rain World we explore other parts of the world or the facility grounds of other iterators in the local group or beyond. I'm just really curious about what else would be going on during the Pebbles & Moon drama, or how the others inevitably broke down, or where the heck did Rivulet come from/who bestowed the mark, or what other crazy situations unfolded elsewhere. I dunno I've always just been fond of exploring and learning more about a story's worldbuilding

Oh definitely! There's so much story/region/new mechanic potential for Rain World and it's already such a massive game. Though the limitations of what we see of RW just means all the more opportunity for people to get creative with their stories!

I think some people are interested in making mods like this (I'm saying this with cursory knowledge - I don't follow the modding community closely - correct me if I'm wrong). For a multi-region expansion, it seems very ambitious and like it'd require a lot of work from a lot of people. Downpour was already huge enough as a DLC~

I don't know if RW's going to have more stuff added in the future, but if it does I'm gonna eat it right up :)

My friend Folly and I made a new campaign concept wayyy back when I first played Downpour in January. You play as the Collector, a brown slugcat with a pearl belt. You've been sent by some unknown iterator to gather data from an experimental local group strewn across an archipelago. There were two other campaigns in this setting: The Painter who sought to capture the beauty of the world, and The Noble who leads a colony of slugcats long after Saint's era, long after the iterators have all died out, when the world is recovering from the ice age.

There were also a bunch of other slugcats who had mini-campaigns or were otherwise noncanonical playables. It was all way too huge of an undertaking to even dream about making a mod, but it's still very fun to think about stuff like that.

[kelocitta]

What if I want to hear your thoughts on the void worms and saint and how people see them? What then? Because now I'm curious ngl (no pressure tho)

Ah I certainly could try to get my thoughts in a row, and was sorta planning on it once I got a sideblog set up (I have it but its WIP at the moment) I can sorta cover what I primarily think though, a bit less properly thought out and in order. Warning for Downpour endings.

New addition made after I typed everything: I did not hold back this is so long. I went insane okay

*Small Note, I know Rain World is themed heavily around concepts of Buddhism and it's teachings, but for the most part I'm not really gonna invest much in that for my own thoughts on the things in it.

I'll start by saying I have a lot of complex thoughts on Saint, I don't dislike their campaign (It's neat!) but I do have hm… certain feelings on the what it communicates and how it communicates it, but I'll also say I think I interpret Rain World in a very different way than a lot of people do, or at least have a "second half" to the thoughts people tend to express, and the way Saint plays out gives me conflicted emotions from those feelings. That and with RW's inspirations its just… easy to be conflicted emotionally. Without going to far into things I guess you could say that in many ways I see Saint as a bad thing. Not really a villain but a… negative. It's complicated and I don't really have the words for it right now, other than I think RW does a lot with its themes of life and death and Saint complicates it as an outside force imposing a solution. And perhaps that statement there makes the caption on the art a little more clear- "Do you think yourself above it all?" as something that could be the statement of either Saint or the Worm.

Jumping from that to the "how people see them" I often see a sort of expression of surprise, mostly playfully, about how the solution turned out to be a slugcat (Saint). The idea there is a sort of novel "Ha! Its this silly little forgettable creature" but in what way is Saint any different from the worms? Are the worms not also creatures, just ones that live in an environment most cannot? They are massive and incomprehensible from our perspective, but thats hardly a new thing- there are some things just above peoples ability to understand, and that really doesn't make them abnormal or unnatural. I suppose I find the whole placement of the worms as some sort of divine creature or gods to be misplaced because even within RW the concept of a god is recontextualized- Five Pebbles gloats to the player that they are "Godlike in comparison" while rotting away from the inside and crumbling to pieces, because at the end of it all his position doesn't save him from the mechanisms of the world, even if he stands high above many of the creatures of the world and would be "incomprehensible" to a lizard or slugcat in the same way a giant space worm would be to us. Are the echos, ghosts as they are, gods? So what does it even mean to be a god, in the context of rain world?

There's another aspect, which is that ultimately the worms still lie at the heart of the solution, the final step when the survivor leaps into the void is to have themselves plucked by the worms and ascended. When artificer dives into the sea, the worms reject them for their incomplete karma (They observe them, and then leave, forcing artificer to just continue swimming), and they dissolve. They don't become an echo, they just fade away in the waves the void. Its not so much the just void sea that does the ascension- its the worms within it too. In this aspect Saint is very similar to them- but forgoes the void. To make a bit of a joke, a worm off the string.

So going back to my first statement on Saint being a bad thing… I said I wasn't going into it but damn, I am, a lot of people seem to view the void ends as some sort of "Life sucks, and then you die" kinda thing. Life sucks, you fail over and over, its unfair and horrible and then you die. And in the context of Rain World you die, and then you wake back up in a new life and start it all over again. But people tend to interpret this so… pessimistically. When actually Rain World, even the base game, actually holds a lot of love for that cycle as something worth it. Survivor wakes up after a traumatic event and they fail over and over, they exist in a frustrating environment they have no control over and no real help for- but its through those failures that they (you) get better. You fail less, you learn, you understand. And even if things stay unfair eventually you get your bearings and you can face that uncertainty with more confidence, you grow and establish yourself- you can even start going outside your safety nets and still succeed. To quote the actual achievement for survivor- "This land has become your home". The fun of Rain World, the part that sticks with people- is when it finally clicks and they start to get it, when they get just a little bit better at understanding the world they live in, the creature they are, and can find the fun in a world that is scary and unfair but something you can overcome if you just keep trying.

And that's the beauty of a life- that despite that suffering you can still get back up again and do better. You can do worse. But you still get back up. In the wide scope of Rain World's reincarnation, you can fail so badly its lethal but still, ultimately, try again. The world around you is cruel and unfair but not impossible. There can be rain and blizzards so awful that most things can't survive them but some things can, and will. Life finds a way. Even ascension, the escape- is something you can only get after you've gotten good enough to make it there. You learn how the world works, make peace with it. And at the end, if you so choose, you can take this and complete your cycle via ascension.

Downpour spins this all very differently with its endings- instead opting to give the slugcats ways to indulge in their lives- to find their homes, their families, find friends… It very much indulges in the exact opposite of ascension- a reverence for life, overcoming the suffering in return for the good. Attachment to the world. In Artificers case, they can indulge in such simpleminded lust for revenge and violence that they can lock themselves at karma one. It begs the question- is giving this up something to be desired? Is an attachment to life good or bad? If you know there is a solution to simply cease existence, what does it mean to take that choice? The Echos says as much- The Ancients understood how the aspects of how their world works. They sought such, and some failed, others didn't. Some resent their failure. Others made peace with it. Some don't understand why it was ever something anyone wanted. The rest ceased to be.

And I guess that's where Saint comes in as something I have conflict over. With the void worms there's an aspect of choice to choosing to cross yourself out. Saint acts as a solution to the fact some creatures cant possibly even know there is a way out of life to seek. The struggle for survival is, of course, a struggle after all. Death is something creatures want to escape, but failing to do so just means returning to the escape again. But what does it mean to take that choice from something that doesn't even know it has it? Will Saint take that choice from things that know it, and wouldn't want it? The iterators want it, sought it, direct those who ask to it, but that was the purpose of their whole creation. They are satisfied with Saint's choice to do so, but if the Ancient in undergrowth were still around, what of them? They seemed to not want to seek such a thing at all, moved by some unknown pressure. The world teems with life still- a harsh blizzard, a burning desert, these are not lesser ecosystems than a forest or a city. The world is not barren, not empty, and when the Ancients' towers finally crumble away into unrecognizable scrap and dirt made of rust, life will continue to pull themselves from the dust.

Its sad, its solemn to think that one day everything here and everything there will become nothing recognizable. That any link between past and future may vanish so thoroughly that no lines can be drawn between them… but it is also kinda beautiful in a way. The stubbornness of it all.

Perhaps this is just a very long way of saying I would become an echo.

[yourbuddy1984]

I saw your. Rbs on my art,, If you work more on your buddysim rw au can I be tagged?? Perhaps??? Pleamsies,,, 'w' I love. 👍 10/10

<3333!!!! ofc!!! if i make anything more for it ill @ you!!:D!! teehee.. i mostly made the au bc, at the time when i made it, rw and buddy sim were my two big interests, and Not putting buddy in rw felt like a crime ❤️i was thinking.. a lot about their potential in the game.. so im gonna talk about it under the cut, if you wanna see the insides of my sick and twisted mind (spoilers for rw)

i'm guessing buddy - boundless friendship/frustration (bff) as their iterator name - would be made with a purpose relating to friendship. i'm unsure how exactly - 'can friendship solve the great problem?' 'will friendship decrease the ammount of echoes?' 'would it be better for an iterator to be closer with their ancients' and such .. but..

a thing about buddy is that they were never meant to gain access to your computer! they were just supposed to play silly games with you. they already show signs of anxiety Before that, but there's no big glitches. i don't think anekom (the company that made buddy sim (in-universe)) Knew what they were doing when they made buddy, i don't think that they accounted for buddy gaining access to the Internet and such.. buddy was also only taught about 'the good side of friendship', as they say in one of their buddy button dialogues (they say 'so you have nothing to worry about' right after lol). that's kinda ancient-core, i think? only teaching buddy that a good buddy spends time with their friends, play games together, laugh together, etc etc. no concept of boundaries whatsoever, yea ! like "bff wont be taught about the 'bad sides of friendship' so that its a Good Friend and doesnt do Bad Friend things"... idk !!

i was thinking mostly that, during the campaign - still unsure if friendo would be a scav or slugcat? ohh owen could have been an ancient... omg... anyway the campaign would take place Ages after the ancients all ascended, and it'd take place in buddy's/bff's can. friendo would travel through it, guided by bff's overseers, maybe being talked to by bff? but it wouldnt understand ofc because no mark of communication. that would give buddy a one-sided sense of attachment to friendo!! talking to it chatting with it for cycles while friendo doesnt even know that buddy exists.

anyway some stuff would happen (maybe friendo would explore buddys ancient city? i was imagining they could construct friendo some kinds of gamerooms..) and buddy would gain this .. emotional dependance on this creature. nothing/nobody has visited their can/talked to them in so so long friendo is the first thing in so long to be near them. they cannot let this go- can't let friendo go! they'd be alone again. so they trap friendo in their can n stuff :3 and so on ...

thats it i only had a general idea of the story ✌️

[starlitmeadows]

squealing wtf /pos

look can you tell im normal about rw aus and hcs and stuff. character writing is my passion [written in bold comic sans]

I THINK ITS REALLY FUN TO PLAY AROUND WITH INV because there's not Technically a lot of canon regarding it [dating sim isn't canon and as aroace i refuse to acknowledge it tbh] there's so many concepts you can explore, especially as a glitch or something akin to it!!!

i'm so very normal about this idea lmao. i love brainstorming for concepts that are meant to be jokes.... my inv being an iterator turned slugcat was originally a joke but then oops! lore

gotta be honest i never finished Inv's campaign and i never got to the dating sim so to me they always were just a funny guy whom community loves to interpret a lot

but the interpretations are always so different and interesting i think it's very cool

ohh and i like the idea of Inv being formerly an iterator!! i think this concept should be used more bc it kinda makes sense for more rebellious iterators to try escaping their cans via organic vessels

also it just sounds incredibly badass

this reminds me of an oc of mine....maybe i should bring them in the light one day (< really bad at oc posting)

[fadebolt]

Now this is one I'm actually excited to talk about. And that's quite ironic, cus the question is incredibly easy to answer. But the topic itself is just incredibly interesting - and it's no coincidence that so many others have commented, or reblogged with tags/comments too (even though this was likely an easy one to answer for most of them, too). But what especially surprised me is how civil everything has been under this post. I don't know if the blog's owner has been moderating this post, or not - but what I do know is that I've witnessed discussions about difficulty in the LoL communities of Reddit and YouTube... and those always turn into bloody battlefields, the likes of which you've never seen before. (Speaking from experience, unfortunately. Seriously, don't ever talk about the topic of difficulty with the League community. It's not worth it.) It could just be that Reddit and YouTube are generally more toxic than Tumblr (which they absolutely are, let's be honest), but I've seen the people of this site loosing their cool a good number of times - and this absolutely includes the RW fans of Tumblr too. I guess that's just the nature of the internet, though. People overreact to everything all the fricking time. I'm just grateful that everything is chill over here.

Aaaaaanyways, let's not get too sidetracked here. What's the deal with Rain World's difficulty? Well, Rain World is known to be incredibly tough, for one simple reason: when people do their first Survivor/Monk runs, they die... a lot. And things only get more nuts once you attempt the other 6 Slugcats (we don't talk about the ninth one, they're not real). But frankly, determining the difficulty of a video game by how much you die on your first run, is like determining how smart/clever a person is by just looking at their IQ. Sure, it does show you part of the picture... but the topic is a lot more nuanced and complicated, than that. The weird thing with Rain World in particular is that the things it asks from you are just simply not hard. Neither the platforming/swimming/0G traversal, nor the Survivor/Monk creature spawns are that tough to deal with, and your second playthrough on the basic slugcats will become an absolute breeze as a result of this. Sure, subsequent playthroughs will always get easier, no matter the video game. But the difference between the first and second is substantially higher in Rain World, than in any other game I've ever played.

And that's for two simple reasons: One is that Rain World withholds a ton of information from the player. Most games don't do this, because they would become a lot less approachable as a result, but also because the 'hidden information difficulty factor' becomes completely irrelevant after the first playthrough. But now, you're stuck with the problem, that you've lightened up everything about your game, to adjust for this factor, and you've created something with basically no replayability (though Rain World solved this with colored pearls + new campaigns that are designed with the expectation that the player knows how things work, so this isn't an issue here). And the second is how quickly and easily your Slugcat can die. Sure, you have Karma Flowers, while rocks and spears can be used to escape the grasps of some creatures. But that... really isn't much, especially in a game where there's an element of randomness. A single mistake can kill you in a snap, yet the game is designed in a way where you're not just encouraged, but often forced to play risky (which gets dialed up even further on the following campaigns, so good luck). And that can make things feel quite tough and stressful, when you're not a veteran.

The combination of these two elements results in a game where even if it asks for things that aren't hard in concept, they will still feel incredibly challenging to the players. You could say that it's faking difficulty, but... the struggle experienced by the players is real. So that wouldn't really make sense, would it? It's an interesting conundrum. Rain World has to be simple, to account for its punishing and unapproachable nature, just as much as a complex game would need to be quite a bit more forgiving (hence why games like HoMM3 and Warcraft 3 allow you to save/load whenever you want, for instance). Because of these things, I'm honestly thinking that the discussions about the difficulties of single player games is actually sort of irrelevant. Telling a new player that a game is 'very hard' will never paint a clear picture. Is the game unforgiving? Does it require high APM? Do you die easily? Does it require combos of fast button presses that are difficult to pull off? Does it require a quick reaction time? Does it require tricky resource management? Does it require multi-tasking? Does it have puzzles with tricky solutions? And so on, and so on. The only things you'll know for sure, is that you'll have to be patient (cus you'll be failing a lot), and you'll likely need good quick thinking. But the fun part about all this is that different people find these elements to be challenging to different extents. So an objective difficulty rating is not even really possible. You could do a scale (something like - "at best, you'll find RW to have a 6/10 difficulty, and at worst, you'll find it to be a 9/10"), but that's basically the most you can go for.

Though let's just be honest for a moment. Did any of us answer to this poll through objective lens? A few of you may have. But most of us just thought back on which games gave us the most trouble. And let me tell ya, that really simplifies the process. One potential issue is that more often than not, players can influence the difficulty, and deliberately make things easier/harder for themselves. Rain World is no exception for this. You have lots of campaigns with different levels of difficulty. Settings and assists that can help you out. Mods that can also influence the game in a variety of ways. Challenge mode, which offers entries that are somewhat light, but also ones that are incredibly daunting. And Expedition mode, which you could set up to be a chill fetch quest, or a complete hellscape of death and agony. I've messed around with some things that are on the more extreme side of things, and many of them have indeed bested and frustrated me. Though if we look at the baseline of what Rain World considers to be 'hardmode' (so like, Hunter+DP campaigns), Warcraft 3's hard difficulty wins by a mile. Oh, sure, its normal difficulty did feel easier than Survivor, but I also happened to do challenge runs, and tough mods on hard difficulty... and I've had many horrid experiences that actually exhausted me. (In case you know WC3, and are wondering about the worst 5, it's: 5 - Second Human Book of Arkain, map4/Lord of Shadows 4 - Curse of the Forsaken, map5/A Rallying Point, hard difficulty 3 - Everything in To the Bitter End from map5, and onwards 2 - Second Human Book of Arkain, Menace Below (I don't remember the map number, it was something like 10-11) 1 - Resurrection of the Scourge, map7/Disobeying Orders, hard difficulty with 'only no upkeep challenge')

And I've had a bunch more gaming experiences that felt more rough than Rain World, so I'm going with a 'no', for sure. Maybe my opinions would be different if I did challenge runs, and played challenge 70, and did ultra tough high point Expeditions with many burdens, played Inv, and tried mods that make things crazy hard. But I didn't, so I wouldn't consider this to be one of my most difficult gaming experiences. (And I likely won't do those in the future either. RW just doesn't lend itself well to that stuff, I feel. I could change my mind on this, though)

Is Rain World one of the hardest games you've ever played?

[fadebolt]

This is an interesting question, one that I never really thought about.

The iterator option is definitely the weirdest one, as that would essentially require the devs to make an entire new game. Rain World's standard format of this action-survival-platformer kind of game simply wouldn't be doable with an iterator being the playable character (unless we're doing some weird, 'off the strings' shenanigans). I'm frankly not sure what that new game might look like, but I imagine it would be a pure strategy oriented game, with little to no reflexes or mechanical skills being required (like Plague Inc), or perhaps it would be a collection of mini games, or maybe it would be a game about investigations, or a multiplayer social deduction game, where you have to find the Sliverists that are secretly working on circumventing the self destruction taboo. There's quite a lot of potential there, and I would be interested to see what others could cook up. However, there's also a possibility that I might not enjoy the new game as much as I enjoyed Rain World. And the whole concept of 'Iterator puppets walking around with the Slugcats' is something I'd rather see in fan AUs, and not in the official material.

Another weird one is the Scavenger Chieftain, and I honestly think that one might actually work. Yeah, anyone who tried Safari knows how janky the controls can feel for non-Slugcat creatures, so the devs should probably refine the controls of the King, before releasing the campaign. And if they do that, then we're gonna find ourselves with a character that has a ton of potential. Artificer's campaign left us with many open ended questions about this guy, as the only thing we saw is them sitting on their throne, before we attacked and killed them. And Five Pebbles doesn't acknowledge their existence in any of his dialogues, even when Artificer returns with the mask. This gives the devs a boatload of freedom, when it comes to exploring the character and its journey, as the only things they have to keep in mind are the stuff the Chieftain will possess, and the fact that it'll end up in the Metropolis throne room. When it comes to the lists of 'stuff to remember while making a prequel', this is undoubtedly one of the shortest. So yeah, I'd be interested in seeing a campaign about their story, even though I know how it ends.

And as for the two Slugcats within the poll, they both sound interesting, though my opinions on them differ quite a lot.

From what I heard about Judge, they were meant to be a really powerful spear-thrower (I'm guessing their spear throwing strength would be somewhere between Hunter and non-exhausted Gourmand), that also has some kind of connection to the void, who is trying to survive in a world that is filled to the brim with Rot. And like… I'm sorry, but that just doesn't sound like a campaign I'd want to play. The Long Legs Family are honestly some of the least fun enemies to face in the entire game, with Proto DLLs being my number 1 most hated creature from every single one that was ever added to RW. They're also not really possible to fight with spears, so I really don't like the idea of having them as the main enemy for a spear-centric Slugcat (whereas The Rot region made perfect sense for Rivulet, and their campaign). Aaaaaand you also have Saint filling the role of the Slugcat that has connections to the Void. And Watcher is getting added soon-ish, who is also implied to have both Void connections, and a campaign/world with a bunch of Rot. So I really don't see what we could get out of Judge, unless the devs would decide heavily rework their concept.

The third sibling from Survivor and Monk's family, on the other hand… now that one has potential. It's implied that the Slugcats of the Outer Expanse have migrated to the west, so a campaign about them could show parts of the world we've never seen before, and maybe, we'll even get to encounter Unparalleled Innocence! One thing to note is that cool and whacky abilities wouldn't really make sense on the guy, since both of its siblings are characterized as fairly basic Slugcats, that don't really have anything special that they can do. So if this scug would have a bunch of unique powers, like the Downpour Slugcats, then it would end up feeling rather jarring. They can still have small changes, like how Monk has different stats than Survivor, as well as karma gates that put their requirement to 1/1 after the first passage. Things like that can work, but they're not as fun to use, as the craziness of the Downpour scugs - so the campaign has to be carried by its new regions, rooms, music, story, and creatures (should the devs decide to add some). Thankfully, these aspects of RW have generally been pretty amazing, both in vanilla and DP, so I have faith that this campaign would end up being pretty awesome as well.

Soooooo, what am I choosing? Well, I did a ranking on the 'upgraded creature variant' poll, so let's do that here, too! ~ On the lowest spot is Judge. While it does sound like a cool character in theory, I really don't see what it could add to the game, that hasn't already been explored - either through official material, or mods. And I'm certain this sentiment will age phenomenally, once Watcher comes out. ~ Next up are the Iterators, the ones who are the most volatile, due to their inability to function well with Rain World's general gameplay. They have potential to be great, but their campaign/game could also end up as something I'll have 0 interest in. It really just depends on the direction the devs will end up going. ~ And the next spot is… a tie! Yeah, but I unfortunately can't vote for two options, so I will stick with the Scavenger Chieftain. ~ That's mainly because it seems rather difficult to design the third sibling's campaign in a way, where it would be a new and enjoyable experience for the people who are already skilled at the game, as they wouldn't have many new things new to learn (no complex crafting, no weird movement mechanics, and no new diets to get used to). ~ The Scavenger, on the other hand, is guaranteed to feel new and refreshing, since we've never got a Scavenger campaign before! There is a sense of uncertainty to how well that could work, but I would love to play it, even if it wouldn't end up on the same level of quality as the Slugcat campaigns.

which of these characters that will likely never get a campaign would you like to play as most?

scav king

third sibling (surv/monk’s family)

any iterator

judge (cut downpour character)