What’s funny is that both your requests came in right after another, @catapples and anon! Thank you so much for your nice words, too ❤ Don’t worry, I’ll be writing more Bandit/Jäger in the future :) I hope this is to both your liking!! (Rating T, angst/comfort, ~1.3k words)
Over the past few months, maybe even the past year, I've occasionally mentioned an idea for a second big Griftlands mod, one last hurrah to cap off my time with the game after Arint's Last Day and Grift the Spire. But I haven't gone into great detail about what this mod idea actually is, have I? I've been doing so much pre-production planning that I haven't really had the time to go into the basics. Let's fix that!
The Grifters Join Forces!
Anyone remember the cinematic early access trailer for Griftlands? How it greatly implies there's a story where the three grifters are brought together by chance and team up? And that didn't really end up anywhere in the game because it was just to show off how the main characters operate?
Let's make this tantalizing concept a reality!
The story of Three For All picks up where the trailer leaves off. All three grifters - Sal, Rook, and Smith, some time after the events of their main stories - are in Pearl-on-the-Foam, figuring out what these strange devices they've all collected are and why every faction in Havaria seems to be after them. In order to survive, collect the rest of the devices, and get paid, they'll have to team up, utilize their connections and skills, and watch each other's backs. If they can trust each other.
Choose Your Character and Party Up!
Three For All is a story about all three grifters working together. But, you get to decide who's taking the lead. You can start the campaign as any of the three grifters and the other two will be your NPC party members. Instead of being three separate campaigns, it's one campaign that can handle multiple playable characters, plus different routes when the grifters must sometimes split up, and even altered dialogue in many conversations!
This extends to battle and negotiation as well! You can play through many of the same conflicts as any of the grifters and the other two will back you up! You're a proper party now!
Of course, this means that battles and negotiations will be a bit harder on balance. Many factions are after the same things you are!
("But what if the other two grifters die in battle?" You might ask. You're right, that would get very complicated very fast, and be anxiety-inducing to manage. So instead, they are what certain games would call "Essential" - they won't die, but reducing them to 1 HP will make them Panic indefinitely until healed. So if you want to make the most of their help, keep them defended and alive! But if they get knocked down, it won't be the end of the world.)
While not much has been implemented or locked down yet, there will most likely be special cards or mechanics for controlling your fellow grifters in battle and receiving help from them in negotiation!
As a bonus, there will also be a special "All For One" solo route with its own dialogue that any modded character can add to their list of campaigns! (Or you could even use the Cross Character Campaign mod to replace one of the grifters in the trio routes, who knows?)
What's Done and The Road Ahead
The reason I'm making this big announcement post now is that a lot of the quest planning work is finally done. The structure of the main quest is locked in, and I've got enough concepts for new side quests and random events to justify making a campaign where you're expected to play through it a minimum of three times, once for each character, while maintaining a high level of variety.
(That means something like 25 side quests so far, 20 opportunity events, and 50 random travel events! I've been trying to frontload as much brainstorming as I can, and I'm still not done!)
Now I can really start getting into code and scripts and start making the content that goes into the mod.
The plan is to create a Day One Demo, with all the content that could appear on the first day of the five-day campaign, and push that onto the Steam Workshop for testing and tantalization. Then it'll be on to finalizing the rest of the days and their special quests and routes.
Oh, did I mention that this mod will be adding 10 new bosses to the game? Yep. And the Day One Demo will also include a special Brawl mode for previewing and testing all of those bosses!
That's a Whole Lotta Content!
Welp, my big mouth has written a whole lotta checks that I'm gonna have to start cashing. But Griftlands is a very special and important game to me. Working on Arint's Last Day, my first mod ever, really kind of saved me and restored a lot of my working confidence, and I want to give back to the game with one last hurrah, one last injection of raw content.
The goal is to make this an intricate, extremely replayable campaign where there's always something new you haven't seen, while enjoying the indulgence of the gimmicks of partying up and swappable main characters.
I roughly expect the Day One Demo to drop sometime in 2025, and the full mod will come later, either very late 2025 or more likely sometime in 2026. I may also run a private playtest group as the mod approaches completion, no solid plans there yet.
If this sounds great and you want to support my work - none of which will be paywalled in any way - consider donating to my Patreon. It keeps me alive, and you get access to my quiet little Discord server, which is probably the best way to find out what I'm working on day-to-day. Otherwise, follow me here or on Mastodon and I'll post infrequently about my progress, though most days it'll probably just be "yep, wrote a lot until my brain fried today."
So that's Three For All, an ambitious plan to create what's essentially another free DLC pack for Griftlands and write some gloriously indulgent fanfic at the same time. Wish me luck!
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