Finding Games, Faith & Feature Reveal
King Of The Castle News — March 1, 2023
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
Not long now - King of the Castle is out TOMORROW! Have you wishlisted yet?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1839880/King_Of_The_Castle/
Later in today’s update, we’re going to talk about the different religions of your Kingdom. But first of all, I’m aware that we’re getting a bunch of new eyeballs on this page this week, so I wanted to go through exactly how this game is played.
In King of the Castle, one player is the Monarch and multiple other players form their council of Nobles.
Monarchs host Party Games for 3-24 Nobles who join on browsers for free, or use Twitch Mode, where an unlimited number of followers play as Nobles directly in chat.
Finding Games
King of the Castle is a multiplayer game, first and foremost. It can be played by 4 to 4000 people (though realistically, there's no upper limit!).
If you want to play a game - with your D&D group, board game club, friend circle or local chapter of monks - it literally couldn’t be easier.
Only one person - the Monarch - needs to actually own the game. Everyone else can join FOR FREE via browser (so make sure there’s Wi-Fi in the monastery) at kotc.app and needs to be able to see the Monarch’s screen.
We’ve found that Discord is perfect for this, but any video call software should work! We have our very own Discord where you can use the looking-for-game channel and type @looking for game ping to find others to play with. Come join us here:
Alternatively, you can jump on Twitch and find someone streaming the game. If you own the game, you can join with your unique customised character, who will be more likely to star in ongoing storylines!
Now we’ve gone over the basics, let’s dive deeper into the lore of the Kingdom. Have you heard the good word… The word about the Ninth?
Matters of Faith
This time, we’re talking about the different religions of Celest Ath!
i. The Ninth God
The majority religion within the Kingdom is semi-monotheistic and worships the Ninth God. Their doctrine teaches that once upon a time, there were eight gods, who created a flawed world full of sinful people. Then the Ninth God willed Himself into existence and banished or destroyed the other eight, punishing them for the faults in their creation.
Now the Ninth God is striving to fix the mistakes of His predecessors, and it is only through worship that we can persuade Him not to destroy us all and start again. Those who worship Him and live a good life will be taken to the Thereafter - the world He will make after ours is destroyed, which will finally be perfect. Non-believers face oblivion, while especially evil souls will be condemned to join the other gods in one of the Seven Hells.
It is orthodoxy that the Hells are ruled by the Seventh God, who the Ninth merely banished rather than destroyed, and are populated by demons and devils who serve as the Seventh’s servants. These servile demons are believed to be fragments of the Fifth God, sprouting from cinders after the Fifth was burned.
Though the Monarch does not lead the Church of the Ninth, they are considered to have a divine right to rule, deriving their earthly power from the Ninth God Himself.
The Church of the Ninth is led by an Archbishop, who resides in the Capital City, within St. Bertrand’s Cathedral. Functionally the Archbishop’s role is similar to that of a Pope - he is considered to be a vessel for the will of the Ninth, and is hugely powerful in his own way.
The Church of the Ninth also maintains an active Inquisition, which actively roots out heresy and ‘devil-worship.’ It is led by a High Inquisitor, who is subordinate within the Church only to the Archbishop himself. The Inquisitors love to burn people alive for witchcraft or heresy, and they are (reputably) impossible to bribe. As a result, even Nobles live in fear of attracting the Inquisitors’ attention - especially the Counts of the East, who have one or two things to hide.
ii. The Old Gods of the North
The North is considered a ‘pagan’ country - they don’t deny the existence of the Ninth, only His suitability for worship. Instead, they worship a pantheon of dozens of squabbling ‘old gods’. A priest of the Northern religion is known as a ‘godspeaker’.
The Church is engaged in a perpetual campaign to introduce Ninthism to the North, sending legions of missionaries to the furthest reaches and highest mountains. Most of them end up hanging from a tree or inside a winter wolf’s stomach, but they have been having some gradual success, and more and more Northerners have begun converting thanks to the Church’s efforts. This is a great worry to the Chiefs, who have kept Ninthism at bay for centuries and sacrificed a lot to secure special protections for their faith in the laws of the Kingdom.
The foremost deity among Northerners is Morgana, the Witch of Three, the Mother of Mountains, the Ageless Crone. She appears in the form of an old woman, a young maiden, or a mother with baby, or sometimes all at once. She also often appears in the form of an owl, a raven, or a goose.
There are dozens of other gods, most notably:
- Valtor, the Lord of Battle, the Twice-Killed, the Flayer of Stars.
- Knelquiss, the Trickster King, the Dancer-in-the-Flame, the Oathbreaker.
- Odheld, the Drunken Vessel, the Honey-blooded Prince, the Hornblower.
- Chalith, the Harvester, the Flesh-Feaster, the Lady of Red Banquets.
- Grahala, the Forged Maiden, the Iron Exile, the Smithqueen.
- Skurinorn, the Locked Casket, the Poison Augur, the Guardian of Runes.
iii. The Deposed Gods
The Deposed Gods are the Eight Gods who were defeated by the Ninth in a terrible war after He willed Himself into existence to save the world from its creators. This moment was known as the Ninth’s Triumph.
Worshippers of the Ninth refer to the period of the Eight Gods’ hegemony as the Cursed Age. The game’s calendar starts at 948 - the Kingdom is counting from year 0, where the Cursed Age ended and the Ninth God was finally victorious.
The official teachings of the Ninth Church is that the Eight were each defeated in different ways:
- The First vanished upon the Ninth’s arrival, and was never seen again;
- The Second was exiled after most of his power was stolen by the Ninth, and now wanders the world as a sad and powerless creature;
- The Third was drowned in the darkest depths of the ocean, where her ghost still lingers;
- The Fourth was eaten by the Ninth and the Sixth in a grand banquet;
- The Fifth was burned to ash, which scattered across the world, causing demons to spring from the land which flocked to serve the Seventh;
- The Sixth who had thought herself allied with the Ninth in his war, helped him devour the Fourth - but the Ninth fed her a poisoned seed, causing flowers to blossom within her and kill her;
- The Seventh was banished to the Hells, along with all his demonic followers, where he still plots the Ninth’s downfall to this day;
- The Eighth was torn into eight pieces and buried deep beneath the earth.
Common folk remember the fates of the Eight with an old schoolyard rhyme -
“Eight dark Gods, lords of hellfire,
Three would live and five expire;
The First, the coward, fled and vanished,
The Seventh, the rebel, beaten and banished;
The Second wanders, now depowered;
The Third was drowned, the Fourth devoured;
The Fifth burned while the Sixth bloomed;
And the Eighth, asunder, lies entombed.”
iv. Ashmedean Religion
The Ashmedeans worship Kaldovaga, the Machine God, the Negligent One, the Worldsmith, who built the world from spare parts lying around his workshop, then put it on a high shelf and forgot about it.
They believe that the world is slowly falling apart, and Kaldovaga will only repair it if humanity worships him in a great enough quantity to attract His attention once again. In Ashmedean society, all priests double as blacksmiths and engineers, and the building of bridges or forging of swords is as much a holy ritual as it is a craft.
The Ashmedean Empire makes frequent use of golems, constructs built of clay or iron which can tirelessly perform simple tasks, manual labour, or combat. Golems are built in church-factories by priests of Kaldovaga.
Voting UI Update
Now that you're feeling suitably spiritually nourished, it's time to talk about one last feature we're introducing in v1.0: The new Voting Screen!
We've had some great feedback about readability in this screen. The text was simply too small, especially when watching someone else's screen!
This new update aims to solve this; Firstly, the Vote Setup screen now spaces out votes properly and widens them, increasing text size, and our Laws have been redesigned to better show off all the options at your disposal.
Votes themselves have a new lighter, higher contrast background, and also display any active Laws set by the Monarch, This will help unsuspecting victims of Laws like Reverse Voting or the new Call For Unity not get caught out.
We hope you're excited for this and the other features we've been previewing in our previous blog posts. Read this one for the most exciting new additions we've added in the past month or two!
Tomorrow we're finally out, and with it will come a Launch Day blog post to remember - Packed to the gills with new features, bugfixes and Events.
If you're interested in hopping on a game to check out KOTC, why not watch some of our launch day streams? See our schedule over the next few days below:
See you tomorrow for your coronation...