Motivation

Chris Wild has long been a boon to fans of Lords of Midnight. Not only did he convert Lords of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge to DOS games, but he began a very ambitious project to make an extendable Windows version, The Midnight Engine, with pluggable interfaces. What with increasing demands on his time, the project stalled for a few months.

Long before I discovered the existence of these games, I'd had a couple of cracks at writing a board game based around LOM, which wasn't too bad. But it lacked the atmosphere and the tension of the original because you could see the whole of the map. So, it just became a race between the players to recruit as many lords as you could and pile into the enemy. Adding victory conditions made the game more interesting. From this work, two things emerged: a burning desire to write scenarios for a similar game and the idea of randomising some aspects of the map to make the game more interesting.

Shortly after I finished my MSc, I grew restive and looked at Icemark again. To my horror, I discovered that additions to The Midnight Engine would have to be written in C, a language I knew nothing of. That and the lack of progress for a while on TME drove me to embark on my own version.

Shortly after I'd done the first stage of the work, Chris asked for volunteers to help with TME and suddenly writers of different front-ends and different versions came out of the woodwork.

Marshall Lords is only one of many things out there. Go see the e-group.