Greetings once again, brave heroes!
Our November content patch offers up three new potential menu items for your tavern, just in time for a visit from famous bard and local food critic, Szolem. Unlock a fabulous new food item, then impress the bard to earn the tavern a four-star rating and a boost in popularity!
New Grub!
Mammoth Burgers: Szolem is known to enjoy a good burger, but taking down a frost mammoth is no small feat. The heroes will have their work cut out for them in a sprawling multi-stage battle. Assemble your party carefully, as fire mages, necromancers, illusionists and nature-magic practitioners will each approach the encounter in very different ways... and having a combat healer present can mean the difference between life and death. First aid won’t save a hero impaled by a mammoth tusk.
Hellhound Ribs: Woo the visiting bard with a heaping order of Hellhound Ribs, but first you’ll need to trek into the Nethercap Mountains to find the lair of a cranky mama hellhound and her pups. Survive that multi-stage scrap and receive a tavern dish that conveniently comes pre-heated. You may want to leave the fire mage home for this one.
Murderbloom Salad: A failed magical experiment bestowed sentience to all the plants at the once-majestic Savage Gardens, now abandoned and overrun by nature. The heroes hatch a plan to humanely capture a murderbloom mother plant that can be stored at nearby Harper Farms, using its discarded leaves to add a cruelty-free new item to the menu. Szolem once wrote a sonnet about a dwarf who was swallowed whole by a murderbloom plant, so it’s known that he has a soft spot for this delicacy.
The Food Critic
There’s more to earning a four-star review than just unlocking a fancy new menu item. You’ll need to get the tavern in ship-shape, impress the bard during an interview, and then provide sterling service to earn top honors. If you make a mess of things, fear not. The publisher’s office is nearby. A late-night break-in to make a few creative changes to the review before it goes to print may be able to salvage the day!
The food critic storyline begins around turn 25. If your tavern is already past that point, it’ll pop up for you within a day or two and the quests all scale to the average level of your current roster.
Blood Magic in Beor?!?
Is one of the healers on your roster a secret practitioner of blood magic? There are now a few situations (with more to come) in the game where if a hero sustains a lethal wound in the presence of someone with the Combat Healing skill, that healer may take extraordinary measures to save them, unlocking a dark secret.
This is an example of one of our favorite new narrative toys, creating storylines that attach themselves to whichever character triggers them. We don’t know which of your healers is the blood-magic user, only that there is one and only one. Your gameplay determines who it is. That character will become a central player in our future blood-magic quests, as will the hero who was saved from a certain death. The ferryman was denied its passenger to the afterlife and will not rest until that debt is settled.
What’s Up Next?
Upon emerging from my food coma, I’ll start cranking away on the big storyline for December’s content patch. The Undermarket hires the heroes to fake a Christmas Carol-style haunting in order to con a rich old guy into giving away all his money (to them).
Have an idea for special winter loot you want to see in the next content patch? We want to hear from you!
The Epic Tavern team streams every Monday, Wednesday and Friday on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/epictavern), and we have open voice chats with players every Tuesday and Thursday on Discord (http://discord.gg/epictavern).
Mondays, 7-8 p.m. EST: Story talk with Tomo and Shawn on Twitch
Tuesdays, 1:30-2:30 p.m. EST: Dev chat with Tomo and Shawn on Discord
Wednesdays, 7-8 p.m. EST: Let’s Play Epic Tavern on Twitch
Thursdays, 1:30-2:30 p.m. EST: Dev chat with Tomo and Shawn on Discord
Fridays, 7-8 p.m. EST: Dev stream with Memige on Twitch