High Houses.
Posted by nefchast on March 31, 2009
One of the features included in The Chronicles of Spellborn is the choice of 5 different factions called the High Houses. These five are: Maul, Shroud, Silver, Rune, and Torque. Each has it’s own ‘personality’. House Maul is more warrior oriented. Shroud is rogue-ish. Rune mageish. Torque political. And Silver mercantile. Choosing one house over the other doesn’t seem to give any obvious reward differences, at least yet. But each House does have it’s own unique quest line, and these quest lines are really good. You get to choose your House at level 9 and it opens up citizenship to allow transport to other shards, including Quarterstone — the ‘capital’ city. Since my main is a rogue I went with House Shroud.
House Shroud is located in the northern part of the Aldenvault zone, built within the walls of the carapace. It is the oldest House and is in charge of the postal services — which comes in very handy for information gathering. Spying, lying, stealing and assassination are all in a days work for Shroud members, and even as an initiate you get to experience some of these acts early on.
The storylines are very well done in this game. I didn’t really notice it early on since the newbie area isn’t that great, but once I got into the early teens they really picked up — especially in Quarterstone and the House quests. There’s not only kill and delivery quests but some puzzle types too. One of the first truly different quests you get in the game is actually in the newbie zone that involves solving six riddles in order to find a young boy’s ripped up toy wolf. These storylines tend to sway between comical and serious, even dark. Given the artistic direction of the world, cartoonish yet slightly dark/post-apocalyptic fantasy, the stories give a good bit of immersion and understanding of the world and its denizens.
*I’ll edit in some screenshots later*
