Dwelling Walls

As it stands, Dwelling Walls is the following:

• Talk to a guy.
• Press button twice.
• Navigate for a bit.
• Press button once.
• Complete quest.

Or, if you don't know how to solve it:

• Talk to a guy.
• Get confused by random barriers.
• Press button randomly and get lost in a bunch of empty rooms.
• Miss the second button a lot.
• Press second button randomly and get lost in a bunch of empty rooms.
• Fall through the floor.
• Complete quest.

This is not a good quest.

However, Dwelling Walls has really great potential. So I propose the following outline of the quest.

Leucsaa (or perhaps just Luke) starts the quest, as normal. He's the last scion of an old family, whose last patriarch (L's father) is the person who caused the Corkian house incident. Hired a Corkian to renovate the place, which only caused more damage to the failing foundations. This meant that the machines slowly wrecked the house, until L was forced to abandon it (and his father, who died in the mechanisms) to move to Detlas. It's now very difficult to navigate. L gives you free rein to rummage through the house and sell anything that isn't his book collection.

After entering the house, you're faced with the first floor. The first floor is a 3x3 of rooms, and its button rotates it clockwise.

[Pantry][Stairwell][Games]
[Kitchen][Navigation][Bed]
[Dining][Entryway][Storage]
(Here's a better layout link.)

In order, these are:

• Entryway: Where you come in. (There's a wardrobe which, if you rummage through it, has an old, still pretty nice cloak. You can pawn this in Nemract for some money.)
• Navigation: This room has a map of the house in it, or some other means of figuring out the current first floor layout.
• Stairwell: This gets you to the second floor. (L's books are in his bedroom, on the third.)
• Pantry: This is where the food was stored. It has a rat infestation.
• Kitchen: The kitchen.
• Dining: The dining room, where the family would eat or feed guests.
• Games: A games room. Has all of those classic games. Chess, billiards, decks of cards and poker tables, a fireplace, all sorts of stuff.
• Bed: The bedroom of L's brother and sister, two kids he didn't actually mention at all.
• Storage: A dingy room filled with boxes. (They contain ings.)

One element of this room's puzzle is the entrances of the rooms. The mechanisms caused damage to the place, so each room only has specific points with doors.

• The Entryway has an entrance at North.
• Navigation has doors at East, South, and West. It also has a book which informs the player of the positions of every room's doors.
• The Stairwell's doors are all collapsed, but West can be blown open.
• The Pantry has an entrance at West.
• The Kitchen has doors at South and East.
• Dining has doors at North and East.
• (This means that the ideal format for Pantry-Kitchen-Dining is for them to occupy the top left corner.)
• Games has doors at North and West.
• Bed has doors at South and East.
• Storage has an entrance at North.

In order to access the Stairwell, you need an Improvised Explosive. This is made with components from the Pantry and Storage, and lit in the Kitchen for use to blow open the Stairwell. A permutation to access all of those rooms without another button-press can be achieved with a single rotation, except for a rotation to move the Stairwell into position. However, you can access the other rooms, and they have fun things.

Spoiler: Secrets+Bonuses on Floor 1

• The entryway has a coat rack, which you can take a coat from. You can sell this coat to a pawnshop near the house for some money.
• The stairwell has a cupboard under the stairs with a skeleton inside (mop at its side). It has a bloody Servant's Key on it, which can be used to access the Servant's Quarters on the second floor.
• The pantry has a number of ingredients, some Salmon Meat (T1), and some Oat Grains (T1).
• The kitchen has a rotting cake on a sill.
• The dining room has a lot of the chairs overturned, and there's a bit of blood on the floor. You can also swipe the silver cutlery, which the pawnshop will give you some money for. (A Troms merchant gives around twice the value for it, though.)
• The games room has Hand Chalk (which would be a T1 ingredient), a pool pole and some card decks (which can be pawned), and 15 billiard balls (T0 ingredients) for your sticky fingers to grab. The room is very dusty and hasn't been used in a while.
• The bedroom has a journal from one of the kids inside, around 5 years before the end of the backstory plot (L gave you a year for his father's death in his dialogue at the start). It also has some kid clothes in a wardrobe, which you can sell to the Nemract pawnshop nearby (like with the coat, although it's cheaper), or you can present them to L, who'll briefly remember his siblings and then just tell you to sell the kid clothes or something. (L is determined not to remember the kids.)
• Storage has a bunch of openable boxes with ingredients inside. There's also an antique musical instrument which sells for a fair bit at the local pawnshop. (However, if you ask L about it, he says the pawnshop would scam you on it - and, true to that, a merchant in Letvus Airbase gives thrice the money if you keep the instrument until then.) And, finally, a note from the house cleaning lady. She's tallied off a number of rooms, and indicates that next, she's going to clean up the master bedroom.

Next up is the second floor. This is also a 3x3 of rooms, but one of the rooms - the Servant's Quarters - occupies two spaces, which makes it rotate oddly. The button rotates this floor counterclockwise.
[Portrait][Guest][Library]
[Lil' Bed][Navig][Stair]
[Servant Quarter][Nursery]
An explanation of the rooms:

• Navigation is the same as on the first floor, just with a new map.
• The Stairwell is once again broken. This time, it's because the chandelier fell and destroyed the stairs (like in Memory Paranoia), preventing you from getting to the third floor, where L's bedroom is. (All the rooms have visual changes to account for whether their entrances lead anywhere, but the second Stairwell has to also account for the floor below it. It spawns in at center-east, because that's the only position the first Stairwell can be used from, conveniently, but if it's rotated from that position, the stairs down become a single stair, leading into floor.)
• The Nursery is where the kids were raised when they were very young. Lotta toys.
• The Servant's Quarters is where the servants live. It also has a number of supplies.
• The Lil' Bro's Bedroom is where L's younger brother slept. It was taken by the twins later.
• The Portrait Room has many paintings, mostly of the various generations in the house.
• The Guest Bedroom is where some guests would sleep.
• The Library is a library.

Once again, the doors are a restriction.

• Navigation has doors on all four sides.
• The Servant's Quarters has doors at East and West if it's horizontal, and North and South if it's vertical. It also has a door that always faces inward.
• The Little Brother's Bedroom has an entrance at East.
• The Portrait Room has an entrance at West.
• The second Stairwell has doors at East and West.
• The Library has doors at South and West.
• The Nursery has doors at North, East, and West.
  The Guest Bedroom has an entrance at East.

To get up to the next floor, you need rope from the Guest Bedroom and some rudimentary building materials from the Servant's Quarters. These allow you to make a rickety path up the shattered stairs to the third floor. But naturally, there are some secrets as well. You can get the building supplies without a button press, one button press gets you the rope, and a couple more moves the stairwell back into position.

Spoiler: Secrets+Bonuses on Floor 2

• The chandelier that broke the stairwell has some valuable shards which you can pawn.
• The nursery has toys for children, which are ingredients.
• The servant's quarters has a ledger on the servants. It indicates a number left, and one (a cleaner) disappeared. You can probably guess where she is. It also has a ledger on repair supplies; this is how you learn what you need to fix the stairs. You also discover that the house broke down often.
• The little bedroom has a journal which is filled with mad scrawlings.
• The portrait room has so many paintings of the house masters that some are tucked away, which you can steal and pawn.
• The guest bedroom has a wallet with some money, a knife you can pawn, and some journal pages detailing a guest's apprehensiveness about the family. You can also pawn a nice cloak in the wardrobe.
• The library has books, which are pawnable T1 ings, as well as candles, also pawnable. In addition, there's a book with some details on the family history. There are some corruption textbooks as well.

The third floor is the same 3x3 grid. There are two double-rooms, though. There are two buttons; one for clockwise, and one for counterclockwise.
[Study][Master Bedroom]
[Observ][Navig][Ballroom]
[Train][L's Bed][Ballroom]
These rooms are:

• The study, where the master worked at his research. It's very off-putting and there's a lot of books filled with insanity - and corrupted paraphernalia - about.
• The master bedroom, where the house's master lived. There's a rotting corpse of a woman on the floor. A lot of her internal organs are partially removed from her body.
• The observatory, adjacent to the study. It has a telescope used for looking at the sky.
• The navigation room. Still has the buttons.
• The ballroom, where balls occurred. It also has the stairwell.
• L's training room, where he learned how to battle the corrupted. It is now somewhat corrupted itself, as L trained against real corrupted that his father brought in.
• L's bedroom. His diary is there.

Of course, the doors.

• Navigation has an entrance at East.
• The Ballroom has doors at West and North.
• The Master Bedroom has doors at West and South.
• The Study has doors at East and South.
• The Observatory has doors at North and South.
• The Training Room has doors at East and North.
• Leucsaa/Luke's Bedroom has an entrance at West.

You need to get to Leucsaa/Luke's bedroom. This, of course, can't be easy, so the bedroom's main door is irreparably caved in. It has a second door - connecting to the Training Room, where L learned how to fight - but in order to reach the Training Room, you have to go through a whole odyssey.

And by that I mean all the rooms connect so that you don't need to press any buttons at all. In fact, the button is near-useless, although it still is functional, and you don't even need to use the navigation room at all.

Spoiler: Secrets+Bonuses for Floor 3

• The Master Bedroom has L's mother's corpse, as well as her diary. You can also pilfer a wallet from the corpse, which has a good bit of money.
  
• You can acquire a Piece of Corruption, a T3 weapon ingredient, in theStudy, along with reading excerpts of the master's grimoire, which has... a lot of creepy stuff in it as the writer slowly descends into madness. (The Piece of Corruption is very powerful for its level. Of course, there's only one of it. It's mostly significant buffs to damage and even some to durability, but it has the price of -20 to Intelligence, as well as other, severe negatives that represent corruption.) There's a chestpiece with similar properties, around 10 levels above the quest, in a box.
• The Observatory has a button for rotating the house, which is broken, as well as a sheaf of papers with notes on Ancient Nemract, and an ability to modify the observatory to look at the ground instead of the stars. If you angle the observatory to the south, or whatever angle would have it face towards Ancient Nemract, you can use it to see a cutscene of some kind. (If the mansion remains in its current position, doing this is technically impossible under my current map, so you'd need to add extra doors or locate the mansion to be west of Ancient Nemract.)
• The Training Room has a number of lesser ings, mostly mob drops from the local area, as well as some indications that it's corrupted and contained corrupted, including stained cages of various sizes. You can also pilfer the stuffing of the training dummy.
• L's room has his diary, which you're allowed to read, although L tells you not to. It has more ominous indications of events before the final incident in the house.
• You can acquire T2 ings from the Ballroom, in the form of Musical Sheets. They're pretty good but you can also pawn them. The ballroom also has a mark where an explosion hit it, on a wall.

Spoiler: The Backstory In Full

So, basically, the plan is for the Dwelling Walls house/mansion to be Tragedy Mansion #1, with the others being the House of Twain, Caritat Manor, and Faltach Manor. (There might be a legendary Tragedy Mansion #5 in Gavel, but I can't think of one.) I don't think I've written it correctly, but I'm sure it can be worked out. The backstory of this house is given through hints, implication, and all sorts of atmospheric secrets in the house - and, to top it all off, you're given a Secrets notification, like in Canary Calls, on each floor.


The master of the house has four kids; Leucsaa/Luke, L's younger brother, and L's twin siblings, the youngest. He also has a wife. He does research on the side. One day, he decides to start researching the Corruption. And he falls ill. Bad stuff starts to happen.

His mental state begins to deteriorate, and he becomes more distant, focused on his research. He writes a book, a tome of eldritch lore, if you will, with all of his knowledge on the corruption. He keeps it very secret. He also manages to acquire a highly corrupted spear from Ancient Nemract, which is connected to Charon in some respect. This artifact further drives him mad.

The study is located right next to the master bedroom. This means that, over time, the master's wife is also affected by the corruption. She also starts going a bit cuckoo.

Nonetheless, they have four kids, and things are alright... for a time. The twins slowly grow from baby to toddler in the nursery, and then finally are old enough to have their own room.

Younger Bro, when he's very young, manages to find and steal the master's corrupted artifact. As a result, he's going insane too. After some time of this, he becomes possessed, or just garden-variety nuts, and at a ball, he flings a fireball in a rage, which destroys a good portion of the ballroom and breaks it up. His father beats him for it and Younger Bro flees into the basement. His room is taken by the twins, who were in their own room for less than a year.

One day, the master leaves the book out open on his study-table. And in an unfortunate coincidence, the cleaning lady comes in and sees it. Corruption-addled Dad murders the cleaning lady and hides her under the stairs, locking up the cupboard he stuffed her in, then concocts a story on what happened to her. A replacement is hired.

The master starts thinking he's haunted by ghosts, and that if he can confuse them, they won't be able to affect him. This is why he ends up installing the Corkian mechanism. However, it only causes further damage to the house (especially with the ambient Corruption), and requiring constant repairs to keep the place in working order. The old basement's entrances cave in; people don't realise Younger Bro was still down there (he'd been locked in).

Corrupted Mom and Dad get into a huge fight over everything, which ends with the dad beating his wife to death. (There's a lot of domestic abuse in the household.) The master, fully corrupted at this point, locates and kills the two toddlers, and begins to hunt down L. But as he's crashing down the stairs, L uses the Corkian mechanisms to rip him in two, and flees the house. This traumatises him bad enough that he completely blocks out all the memories associated with this event.

With the aid of a hint of corruption, L comes up with new explanations (his younger brother ran away, his dad got ill and died) for some of the events while simply ignoring others, and decides that he is now the master of the house. He also figures it isn'tt worth the trouble to manage (it's really expensive to keep up those machines, and the whole house in general), and begins liquidating his possessions and preparing to move to Detlas.

And one final note - there's a Secret Discovery near the house which takes you into the ruined basement. There's a Corruption Spike down there, along with a Twisted Ravener miniboss, who was once Younger Bro.

Spoiler: Alternate Backstory (Trapinch Suggestion)

Instead of a stabhappy murderfest that's more-or-less a carbon copy of Memory Paranoia's, Trapinch suggests the following:

The father of the household acquires the spear in his research into the corruption. The artifact still drives him mad, somewhat, but not as violently insane as in my version. The younger sibling still steals the spear, but he just dies because of it - he doesn't become Timmy Caritat. The father's paranoia still grows and results in the mechanism, and then someone else dies (one of the twins or the mother is either killed by something corruption related or gets killed by the mechanism). The survivors (the father, one twin and the mother/both twins, and Leucsaa/Luke) decide to abandon the house and move to Detlas. L either wants a few mementos, or he was the youngest and wants to know what happened in the house.

I do have one final concern.

If these changes are implemented, really, the whole quest oughta be moved somewhere, level or location or both. Because, you see.

New player retention.

I think it would be a really fun puzzle, but it's also pretty complicated, especially for a level 20 quest. So perhaps, with a full revamp of the quest, it could have its level knocked up a tier or two (so it's early 30s or 40s), or a relocate, or both. And of course it needs to have an escape hatch, which I didn't really think about. I guess I'd stick it in the nav rooms.

 

kinda good idea, +0.75

 

I really like the idea of reworking the quest while still keeping the gore gimmick intact. After all, the quest is quite old and too short for its potential imo. And I love that you gave a good reason for the shifting mechanism. Weird, but from a certain point of view completely logical.

That being said, I do have a big gripe with it - the loor. If I had a nickel for every rich family toying with dangerous forces from beyond, a child of said family getting infected by it and leading to a catastrophy with only one survivor, I would have two nickels. Which is not much, but it is weird it happened twice.

To me it looks like it is tragedy because it can be tragedy. I don't think we need another all-dead haunted place, Memory Paranoia does it well enough and more "involved" and alive than this, which puts it behind text. Also you included domestic violence and murder of two babies which... idk man.

So let me offer an alternative. It keeps the tone a bit, but is not so bloody. How about the father still gets the spear but doesn't go mad (or at least not too much, but there could be signs). The young kid steals it, but instead of going insane he messes up and ends up killing himself. Things go on, but the father is getting paranoid and gets the Corkian to do the mechanism, like in your version. Here could be another death because it to further the next point. But in the end, they decide to leave the wretched place for good and move elsewhere. Lanu could want some mementos from the house, or if he was the youngest one he could want us to discover the truth (which the family would keep secret of course). Or some kind of treasure, but that doesn't sound as good.

How about self-defenestration?


Also please add a poll.

 

Yeah, the lore is eh. I wanted to come up with something. Basic concept is that there's just a background story, I wasn't confident I did it right.

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How do I do that?

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Added

 

At the top of the page is a button called "edit thread" or something similar. When you click it, there should be an option for poll.

Because of the mechanism. The house is already falling apart and this would be the last drop.

 

Interesting Idea, the quest does seem close to memory paranoia, where a rich family whose dad works in his study doing dark things slowly getting corrupted and parts of his family as well until they all die in some violent way. Now to be fair, that does sound like a lot of wynncrafts quest in some way so I am not against this idea whatsoever, but if it was added i think it would be nice to see some other changes to the backstory. But besides that i love it!

 

Don't see it still.

 

It is probably next to "watch thread" (don't remember).

 

Ah, there. Thanku.