Hello everyone, this is an update on the upcoming expansion to Dawnsbury Days, The Four-Leaf Clover.
This expansion takes places over 6 character levels (level 10–15), and is a high-level world-spanning adventure where our heroes take the fight to the enemy in the hope of ending the demonic invasion once and for all.
The expansion Is longer than all existing content combined, and I'm becoming comfortable calling it a true full cRPG:
Grand scope: It has an involved storyline with 80+ characters, 3000+ spoken lines (compared to 660 lines in the base game), and 70+ encounters, many of which are actually multi-encounter exploration maps
Nonlinearity: While there is still a largely linear main storyline, you now have a much larger number of optional sidequests. You can also sometimes choose between various ways of accomplishing your mission, do it with various degrees of completion/success, or do them in different order, and sometimes, at different levels.
Character development: Through slice-of-life scenes, sidequests, and cutscenes in the main adventure, you see even more of our characters than before and how they get stronger, both in power and in will.
Rules fidelity. We've tightened rules fidelity even further, and continue keeping a close correspondence to tabletop rules even at higher levels.
We're missing two important aspects of a cRPG — a primary "player character" who whose personality would be fully under the control of the player as opposed to the predefined Annacoesta; and an open world. I acknowledge that traditionally cRPGs have these two features, but with Dawnsbury Days, I wanted to do something different and so needed to sacrifice these, and the Four-Leaf Clover won't have these either.
I want to really set it out that the upcoming expansion is really epic in scope, and more than doubles the content in the game, and is — in my opinion — of Good Little Children quality. I expect to offer the expansion at a commensurate price to its length, thus you can expect it to cost more than the base game. I recognize that it is rare for a DLC to cost more than the base game, but I hope the reasoning above justifies such pricing.
The target release date for the expansion remains Q4 2026. I am not ready to give a more specific date yet.
I can, however, give the following table of remaining work. You'll note that we are now at the "MVP 1 — Patreon general playtest" stage. When all the tasks listed in the first two columns of the second row in the following table are done, we'll begin a general playtest to which also you will be invited:
After the feedback from the general playtest is resolved, we will have a release.
Dawnsbury Days will soon receive new achievements that you can only accomplish by playing the Four-Leaf Clover. This will happen soon so that playtesters can verify that they unlock properly.
Unfortunately, due to how Steam achievements work, it is not possible to section these off only to players who own the expansion. As a result, for the period of time between adding these new achievements and the release of the Four-Leaf Clover, you will see some achievements that you're unable to complete and you will be unable to get the blue ribbon.
If this is of concern to you, I would welcome your participation in the playtest — if you say in the playtest registration form that you had all the achievements and would like to try and get all achievements from the expansion again, I am likely to give you priority in playtesting, both so you can keep the ribbon and because you're likely to discover and report more issues with such a completionist run :)
As a teaser, here's some achievements you will be able to unlock with the upcoming expansion:
Complete an expedition through the dragon memory portal.
Insert all four algollthu memory crystals into the block in Tomb of Memories.
Allow the drow siblings to continue their Shadow Plane experiments.
Shut down all five energy gates without breaking any aquarium.
Enjoy a rest in the hot springs.
As you can perhaps divine from these teasers, there will be a lot of things you'll be able to do in the expansion.
While I have you here, I wanted to highlight Psi Prime Productions's video "Prepping for Dawnsbury Days DLC | The story so far" which summarizes the story of Dawnsbury Days up to level 9 and is really well-written, I think, and can help you refresh your memory on lore before getting to the expansion — though of course, it's completely okay to choose to simply start a new run from level 1 :)