Everything about the hamlet of Scurries

Hello again, dear readers! After a few weeks of summer holidaying, we’ve decided to go back on track and continue the tradition of bombarding you with blogposts every Tuesday and Thursday, starting with this expansive Ark Lore Tuesday about the town of Scurries.

Scurries is a small trading town that was built on the crossroads of many important routes – to the east, there is the road to Pride (once the summer palace of kings, now the capital of the Kingdom), to the west it leads to the mining town of Burrows, and to the north the road leads to Flocks (a famous wool factory made of course by the sheep themselves).

There are different types of buildings in the Scurries – those by squirrels and birds are mostly on treetops, but those of other animals are mostly built on the ground from either fallen trees or built. The biggest and most luxorious house in the Scurries is of course the Dreyhouse, where the current dreymaster resides with his family.

The Dreymaster is something like the mayor and judge of Scurries, he is elected once every five years and has the administrative power over what will be done in the Scurries, such as repairing bridges or fixing water-pumps, as well as presiding over grievance cases.

This system is an anomaly in the Kingdom, and there is a historical mystery of when this system came to be, and why isn’t it more aligned with the caste system as in the rest of the Kingdom – with a noble family from the Steward caste presiding over administration. It was a point of great interest to young Coriolanus as he studied the bureauology of the Kingdom. The common explanation for this is that the Scurries, as a small very dynamic market-town with animals moving in and out continuously, never had the capacity to impose a noble or a heavy tax system. If this were done, the traveling merchants from Flocks and Burrows would just move elsewhere down the road.

However, as time went on, the marketplace expanded and is now a real bustling town with a newspaper printing press, and even one of Lav‘s public schools of the Kingdom.

The western-most part of the Scurries, which is closest to the Flocks-road and the northern pass which leads to the northern lands, is where the Scurries Inn is located.

This inn is also a place where royals of the north come to stay the night if they were caught by nightfall on their long trip to Pride, so it’s probably the most elegant and rich building in the Scurries.

If you liked the city, tune in on Thursday to read all about how we decided to go about naming the various toponyms of the Kingdom – Scurries, Dreymaster, Flocks, Pride, et cetera.

This most important building in the art-world of the Animal Kingdom is the hermitage of Pride. It is the gallery house where newest art exhibitions are shown, as well as the theater and opera house where the hottest hippest plays are shown to the royal and noble clique.

Today we’ll dive into its interior, as we have some sketches and we love showing off our sketches and you love checking them out!

As you can see in the picture below, the main foyer of the Hermitage consists of a hallway leading either to the gallery exhibition on the left, or upstairs to the theater balcony:

Next up is the gallery of various paintings (and sometimes even statues) for the enjoyment of the Pride populace. The theater dressing room can be accessed from the small room underneath the staircase of the gallery, as well as more balcony rooms upstairs:

The dressing room is where the actors prepare for the plays, and rehearse, and then head out to the theater stage to be seen by their fans in the audience:

This building is the center of the “culture life” in Pride, and one can often see important animals there, such as the tiger duke Nicholas or even the King himself!

That’s just one of the many buildings you’ll get to visit in Pride, and explore, once the game is up-and-running. Hopefully, you enjoyed the sketches and can’t wait for the full game, just like us!

Let us know what you thought about our article which talks about the most famous buildings in Pride; right in the comments below, or via our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram!

Exploring the wastelands of the Animal Kingdom

Even though the environments we publish on our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are often beautiful, lush, and “friendly”, some of those can be considered rather unhabitable and hostile.

We are talking about the wastelands Charles will explore in Trip the Ark Fantastic. As you may have seen in the “Mysteries of the Southern Continent”, Charles looks like he is embarking on an adventure through the jungle with his friends.

Looks pretty neat, right?

Well, this part of the game will require some navigation skills, as you’re going in an uncharted territory which is literally uncharted. There won’t be any maps guiding you to go up or down, right or left. You’re on your own.

The wastelands are a dangerous place. They used to be a lush forest, but have turned into a scorching desert in the last 1000 years. Charles, being a hedgehog, can’t survive in this blazing heat, but we’ll leave this part of the game to you, the player.

There is an interesting lore background for the wastelands.

Over 3000 years ago, the lions tried to usurp the hierarchy and failed which resulted in the usurper family being banished north over the mountains – which is considered a death sentence.

The usurper’s son Antimocles the Red was the father of Alexander the First who founded the Animal Kingdom. The split (and the harsher climate) made the lion’s rule weaker and in the following millenia they eroded from a powerful force that ruled over everyone in the southern territories to just a lion tribe in the caverns ruling over themselves with Nerva as Emperor.

After a couple of generations in the southern continent they decided to leave because they saw they could not prosper in the monkey civilisation which was thriving and they went over the land bridge to the northern continent and started subjugating the primitive cultures of smaller animals (rodents, birds et cetera).

After a few generations, they had built the Animal Kingdom that spanned the entire continent, subjugating also the great cats. Some animals were still very resistant because they weren’t used to living under the centralised rule and so after many generations, one lion family had invented the Ark myth after a failed bloody rebellion by other animals.

Following the change of the ruling branch, the myth was thought to be true even by the ruling lion family, and the way it was fabricated was lost to history.

By that time, the land bridge to the southern continent had already collapsed after centuries of diminishing because of the rising sea levels. The ice melted, which led to warming in temperature.

The warming in temperature made the barren wasteland Charles will have to pass.

What do you think, with Charles being a hedgehog, how can he pass through the wastelands? Let us know right in the comments below, or on our Facebook, Twitter, Insta, and Discord!

One of the factions (read that link first, it’s important to get it) in our game is very revolutionary – they seek to change the world radically and if necessary (and it always is necessary!) by force. So we’re in a conundrum as to which revolutionary sentiment to ascribe to this faction. The three famous modern revolutions in the west are of course possible starting points for inspirations:

1. The American Revolution – the earliest of the three. Led by puritans, scholars, and various intellectuals adored by the American masses. They waged a short and precise war followed by a long restructuring. Their goal? “A republic, if you can keep it”. Probably a bit too clean for our anarchists, though.
2. The French Revolution – very bloody, at start filled with idealists who are egalitarian in nature but in time resulting in chaos with many ill-fated experiments, very volatile and often portrayed as morally grey in subsequent mainstream history. Indeed very good for what we want.
3. The Russian (October) Revolution – the events in Petrograd had similiarities to our own factions, as Petrograd had all three factions that our game has as well: the Tzarists (our Royalists), the Cadets (our Reformists), and the Bolsheviks (our Revolutionaries).

It is also of great importance to us to clearly define the differences between the Reformists and Revolutionaries, so as not to confuse the player. Here, the Russian Revolution holds some great and easy to understand definitions, when comparing the Cadets (who wish to perform a political revolution, similar to our Reformists), and the Bolsheviks (who wish to change industrial relations in society), as seen in Ten Days That Shook the World by Herbert Reed:

“The propertied classes wanted merely a political revolution, which would take the power from the Tsar and give it to them. They wanted Russia to be a constitutional Republic, like France or the United States; or a constitutional Monarchy, like England. On the other hand, the masses of the people wanted real industrial and agrarian democracy.”

In trying to figure out the motivations and characteristics of our revolutionaries, we’ve also spent some time researching terrorist organisations (but hopefully we didn’t get on any government watchlists). These include the famous RAF, Rote Zora, Weather Underground, and so on. The common denominators are that all of them are usually a very loosely based fringe group that quickly dissipates in both their ideology (which eventually makes a sharp turn from systemic views on certain problems towards specific conspiracy theories and personal agendas). This didn’t sit well with what we wanted to achieve with our revolutionary faction (an interesting, cohesive ideology that challenges the players worldview as much as the other factions, regarding both the role of power in society and the consequences of its concentration in the elite handful).

Not to spend too much time on this today, we’d actually like to hear your opinions, so please drop us a message here or on our Discord server where we usually dwell.

Mr. Moles and the Hollow Prospect

As with many role-playing games out there, Trip the Ark Fantastic has its fair share of tales and stories that complement the game lore.

During Charles’ adventure, the player has to do research to find the location of the Ark as well as to discover the truth behind other mysteries. Charles will stumble upon both research books and lore books. Lore books are not necessary for research purposes but are nuggets of information for the player to enjoy and get a sense of the world that Charles is living in. This is one of those stories.

This lore book was written by our programmer Piet Bronders, and he hopes you enjoy it.

Continue reading “Mr. Moles and the Hollow Prospect”

Ante scriptum – this week’s lore post is about the various mysteries that Charles will encounter (and hopefully solve) in the southern continent of the Animal Kingdom while searching for the origins of the Ark Fantastic (this being the second act of the game). Since we don’t have many art assets for the southern continent yet, this blogpost will be filled with pictures of the step-by-step artwork process for our first artwork ever – the three protagonists exploring the southern jungles. This artwork was done way back in 2018 when we still had many different ideas on what exactly we want out of the game, and served as one of only a few mock-up pieces we sent to our Creative Europe application in 2019. In a way, the pictures tell their own, separate narrative from the text, and hopefully, both are equally interesting.

The Mysteries of the Southern Continent

For as long as collective memory serves, the Kingdom has been a large landmass, surrounded by sea on all sides. This is the continent we now call Kingdom Proper. However, a new southern continent was found during the recent times of King Michaël.

This caused major ontological and cosmological troubles for the scholars of the Kingdom – how to fit this new continent into the world we thought was just a single landmass surrounded by sea and nothing else? Many hermeneutical ideas about the Ark myth had to be done away with, and many more had to be re-framed to fit newfound truths – such as the existence of monkeys, crocodiles and various birds found on the southern continent, all of which bear no mention in the Ark myth. At least not in its modern form.

The Sentient Water?

While technically a part of the Kingdom in its entirety, the Colonial Continent is very different from the Kingdom Proper. The flora and fauna are very different, and even the land behaves strangely – whenever Vincent’s expeditions tried to set a foothold deeper in the continent, rivers would dry out, like they had a mind of their own, and new ones would spring from dry beds… There have been many old-wives tales and folklore pertaining to ghosts and river spirits, all scorned by serious scholars of course, but unfortunately no scientific explanation has yet to be found for this erratic and the seemingly “intelligent” and maybe even “mischievous” behaviour of the southern waters.

The Valley of Gilliam

While the river mystery has puzzled the scholars for centuries, but it is not the most interesting one, by far. No, the most alluring mystery of the colony is the myth of the “Valley of Gilliam”.

The Gilliam mountains in the deeper reaches of the continent are where many monkeys dwell in huts and villages, but there has often been talk of a secret valley hidden in the mountains, that holds the City of Gold, a city built by monkeys and hidden from the colony. Explorers have devoted their entire lives to the scouring of the mountains in an attempt to find anything of the sort, to much derisive laughter of the local monkeys, but to no avail.

Where the Money Trees Grow

The biggest mystery in relation to the Ark myth and the history of the Kingdom is the Money Forest in the newfound continent. While the Money Trees (the trees that grow the leaves used for commerce in the Kingdom) are grown only in the royal capital, and the secret to their cultivation and growth is heavily guarded, it appears that in the colony there is a forest where these trees grow completely naturally without any need for cultivation. Indeed, it would seem the colony is their domicile, and they were imported in the Kingdom Proper across the sea many years ago.

This strange discovery has changed the idea about the Kingdom – the dominant school of thought is that after the flood, the Kingdom ruled over both continents across the sea – the north as well as the south? And, as the theory goes, at some point, there was a dark age and the southern continent was cut off from the Kingdom, and all knowledge of the south was forgotten. When did this happen, and how, is still a hotly debated topic in arkology.

Solutions? Soon…

In any case, these mysteries, and many more, are what awaits Charles as he ventures to the colony in search for the elusive Ark.

While you wait for the game to be finished so you yourself can find out the answers to many of these mysteries, if you’d care to know more about the world of the Animal Kingdom, be sure to follow us on Facebook or Twitter or even talk to us developers via our official Discord.