I kept her stats mostly as-is, though a little more evenly spread around. I picked the tall Amazonian in case I needed to pick up something from a high shelf. You could make Brian Blessed in the middle there a bookish mage, if you wanted. However! In Anvil of Dawn, you can pick any of these five goobers and redistribute their stats yourself. Like Lands of Lore, you only have the one character, and you have to choose from a group of pre-sets with different stat distributions. Which are us! Well, one of these chucklefucks.
The two belong to one of the last holdouts of the above warlord, and are debating the last resorts available to them. He's actually a good guy! We think!Ĭonversing with him is the Lady of the land of Tempest, and was presumably meant to be attractive at one point during development. This guy, Master Azariah the Sage, looks particularly gnarly. The game has plenty of ugly polygonal art, but I didn't want to sleep on its equally hideous 2D art for its characters. The Lord Humongous here is the antagonist of the game, and the avowed enemy of the elusive King Nair. When I Said That Hangover Cure Thing Earlier, I Think I Meant "Advil of Dawn" Anvil of Dawn's sort of going for a Hyborian Age angle for its setting, with a lot of well-armored barbarians walking around deserts and some vaguely Asian magic users. I'd be curious to see more of it, but first: a proper introduction. Anvil does deal in rudimentary pre-rendered polygonal graphics, as you'll see below, and its strict adherence to the four-directional format belies a lot of mechanical evolutions to the format that has, surprisingly enough, allowed it to age far more gracefully than its graphics have. Like the first Lands of Lore and Stonekeep, I kind of see Anvil of Dawn as being this last hurrah for an aging sub-genre format, one that wants to promote some smart ideas and level design over breaking the bank to produce a state-of-the-art 3D visual extravaganza. That meant it was probably a harder game to pitch, especially as the stringent four-directional grid format of first-person dungeon crawlers had already begun to lose their luster after the genre-evolving, panoramic movement of the Ultima Underworld spin-offs and DreamForge's own games named above. DreamForge had previously made games in the Ravenloft universe, which was a gothic horror inspired table-top setting that existed long before their game adaptations, and likewise the Menzoberranzan game was based on the Forgotten Realms and of R. I suspect the reason I've not heard of the game is because it isn't beholden to any existing license.
Anvil of Dawn is instead a 1995 RPG developed by DreamForge Intertainment - a developer we encountered last year with Menzoberranzan, and was also behind the Ravenloft games and the War Wind series, the latter of which is still to this day the only RTS series I have any affection for - and published by none other than New World Computing, they of the enormous Might and Magic franchise prior to its sale to Ubisoft. If you told me its name I'd have figured it was one of those noxious balms you mix together to appease a hangover in the morning. Prior to a few months ago, I'd never heard of Anvil of Dawn, the fifth (and almost certainly final) game of this year's May Maturity feature.