TIGSource Forums

Hi guys, I am working on adding some small snippets of flavor text to my game Microgue (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=35261.0). As the player goes through the game they get artifacts. My goal in the artifacts is to build on the world and also for artifacts to have story connections, making the world feel larger and fleshed out. I don't have much room for writing. so the text needs to be short and get to the point.

I am going to be typing up some stuff here and would love some feedback.

Item: Scale of Syrreth the DragonLord
A scale from the fabled dragon Syrreth, slain by the warrior, Toilar. In it's death throes the body was consumed by black fire and all that remained was this scale.

Item: Sword of Toilar
A mighty warrior from the North. Tales say he was a slayer of monsters, demons, and tyrants.

First off, both of those items are proper nouns because they're named items.  You don't need to describe Syrreth's Scale as "A scale from the dragon Syrreth".  It's redundant.

Second, you indicate the need for brevity, but don't follow through.

I'd rewrite them as such:  "The sole remains of the legendary dragon, blackened by fire." and "Well worn blade of the North's bloodthirsty warrior.", etc.

 

didn't fix the typo yet. I will correct the redundant parts. This was the room I had to work with. So I wanted the story to fit within the space. Think I should remove the references and just go with the short description?

(http://i44.tinypic.com/jb1rpy.png)

you are using it's and its incorrectly

yeah that's fixed in the new version.

trying some shorter descriptions, which means I can make smaller treasure cards.

Scale of Syrreth - The sole remains of the legendary dragon, blackened by fire.
Toilar's Sword - Well worn blade of the bloodthirsty northman.
Word of Alrin - The sacred writings by the noble cleric.
Ward of Faith - The Shield held by the Sir Relaren, protector of the abbey. 

I think they can be a bit longer though, to allow for some crossover between the stories.

i'd suggest getting ideas from games that are particularly good at this. i remember that the mmorpg 'dofus' had absurdly great descriptions of each of its items. another great one was the disgaea series

Thanks. I am an artist not a wordsmith, so this has been the hardest part so far. I bet I can find Wikis for both those games. I want all treasures to sound like something you are after in a D&D game. so its never a basic item its always something special.

I have been reading a lot of game wikis I found that WoW has been a good inspiration. a lot of their items are named in a way that they imply some kind of back story. Here are a few more items.

Scale of Syrreth: The sole remains of the legendary dragon, blackened by fire.
Toilar's Sword: Well worn blade of the bloodthirsty northman.
Word of Alrin: The sacred writings of the noble cleric.
Ward of Faith: The shield held by Sir Relaren, protector of the abbey.
Skull of Thynlnys: The defeated necromancer, still imbued with his magical powers.

I think Dragon Age is an excellent example of good flavor text.  It was a little wordy at times, and it seems like space may be at a premium for you, but it would still be worth checking out.  There's a wiki at http://dragonage.wikia.com.

Your items descriptions are quite nice, you can expand the story of the fallen heroes through sets, getting more back story with new items

Skull of Thynlnys: The defeated necromancer, still imbued with his magical powers.
Cape of Thynlnys: The dark mantle has been slashed through and hardly hold together
Crown of Thynlnys: The deep purple jewels are still pulsing with dark power
...

This sounds like a cool little project! I'm a huge fan of magic items, and of flavour text. This is relevant to my interests!

I did some little edity stuff to your entries to make it a little tighter.

For the Sword of Syrreth, I think it's a great idea to mention Toilar. Right now you have some cosmetic information about the item that we can see.
I added that the dragon was 'red'. Then, by leaving out 'blackened by fire' you're suggesting that it was darkened, either in a fiery explosion or by the aeons that have passed. The player's imagination is left to ponder... which is always nice :)

Is every item going to have been used by a fabled legend? If so, that's totally cool.

If you're not married to that idea, I would suggest adding some slightly more mundane magic items. As in D&D, the normal magic items I would get would be like a Circlet of Intellect, which just gives me +2 Int. You can also add some fun backstory to these descriptions, or maybe some humour!