Inizio Per i giocatori Player Profiles The World of Layonara

The World of Layonara

Profile by Jay Watamaniuk

It has never been verified that the Dragons ever created races, but, nor can it be discounted. - Taken from 'The First Generation of Layonara'

A persistent world is a labour of love. It requires a tremendous amount of work to establish and even more work to keep it running. Pen and paper gamers often take their worlds online to open them up for everyone to play. Leanthar has taken his 10 years of campaign details and created a lush world to explore for courageous adventurers. With a special attention to detail, usability, and careful testing and implementation, Layonara has grown to become a very popular and welcoming world for new players and veterans alike. We spoke with Leanthar about some of the facets of his world.

For more information:

http://www.layonaraonline.com/

What are your responsibilities for this PW?

Leanthar: I am the world creator and manager of Layonara. I help to keep the team organized and focused on our goals over the long haul. I could not do this without a great team and great leaders on the team. They are awesome.

Can you give us a brief rundown on how Layonara got started and how it has grown?

Leanthar: Layonara started as a pen and paper world that was created over three campaigns and ten years. I then brought Layonara to the Internet using Neverwinter Nights (thank you BioWare!). From there, we have grown by leaps and bounds and anything beyond what I had hoped for when I started out. Layonara has grown for a number of reasons, one of which is the massive amount of world systems that have been instituted since version 1 of the world (version 1 had 4 betas that lasted two years - we're now on version 2). Why two years you ask? It is simple, the team and I wanted to find out what works and does not work in a PW role playing community. While we did not learn all of the answers (and never will), we did learn quite a lot, and the state of the world and community shows that.

All of the systems are engineered to build and provide for some aspect of role playing within the world itself, which in the end has only helped to bring the Layonara community closer together. Some players have stopped playing some of the most popular pay-to-play MMORPGs just so they could play Layonara and enjoy the quality role play environment that surrounds the great community we have here. Layonara has grown mostly through word of mouth, and the large community we have comes from our players enjoying their time here and talking their friends into coming here. Right now, the world has over 1100 areas and 1700 custom creatures along with many custom subraces and prestige classes. We have three game world servers as well as an SQL server for persistent storage, which means the world is run on four fully dedicated servers.

Layonara has a large list of deities with a good amount of detail. Why spend the time creating something like this? Do players use these deities in some way?

Leanthar: The pantheon started off small, when Layonara was still a pen and paper world. As the PnP campaigns grew, more places of the world were visited, more and more races were introduced. Because of this, I also had to introduce some deities for these races. I did this to allow players who want to play a cleric of a certain race to have a fitting deity to choose. To give players a solid basis to role play their clerics (or paladins, or champions), we later added dogmas, attires, and church structures for all our 28 deities. We also ask our players when submitting a religious character to provide us with that character's view on the dogma of his deity, so that solid, well-thought out characters enter the world. From our experience, putting a little thought into how somebody's character practices a deity's dogma greatly enhances the role play fun. Deities also have different feelings toward each other, which we have tried to bring into the game as well. For example, a bless spell cast by a cleric of a deity that's an enemy of the player it is cast on, will not work on that player, and raising a follower of your deity's enemy will cost you more than raising a fellow follower.

In short, it's all there to enhance the playing experience!

Speaking of playing, we saw that you cannot immediately play on Layonara, but need to submit a character first. Could you explain why you have this in place?

Leanthar: Layonara is a role play persistent world. In our opinion, role playing comes easier if you think about the character you're going to play first, so one way to do that is by submitting your character before being allowed to play. Another thing is that we want to keep the world consistent and believable, and by asking players to submit their characters for approval first, we prevent the world being overrun with superheroes and demi-gods. Finally, it is also our experience that the so-called powergamer (for lack of a better word) tends not to take the time to write a biography for a character, so requiring character bios to be submitted also keeps them away. Of course, we realize that many people have little or no experience with submitting a character bio, but we can help out with that as well. We have a Campaign Handbook describing all our subraces and custom prestige classes, as well as the vast majority of cities, forests, mountains, deities, and organizations, so new players can become familiar with the world even before actually playing in it. Also, our forum community is very helpful with answering questions about bios, so even people with no experience of coming up with a character at all are playing within no time.

We also noticed you have chosen to not allow PvP and to be restrictive on evil players in Layonara?

Leanthar: One of my main goals for Layonara is to make sure we have a great role playing environment where players can have fun and families and friends can enjoy their time together. PvP tends to cause many problems that I just do not want the players to have to deal with. Evil is possible in Layonara, but at the same time the player must have proven that they can handle this responsibility in the tight knit community that we have as well as being able to play that way in a non PvP world (PvP can happen, but it must be GM sanctioned and GM watched). Playing evil is not something that we take lightly on Layonara; with it comes a lot of responsibility.

Your promo movie ends with "Your destiny awaits." Can you explain what players should expect from this sentence? Can players have an effect on the world?

Leanthar: Yes, in Layonara players can truly affect the world. In the background, the main plot involving the campaign's bad guy, Sinthar Bloodstone, is running. There are 'main plot' quests, and the world can change depending on the outcome of these quests. In addition to that, our GM team runs over 40 quests a month for which people can sign up. These quests can also affect the world. And last, but certainly not least, are our Character Development Quests, or CDQs. Players can request CDQs from a GM of their choice. Requests can vary from "I want to find out more about my parents" for characters who may never have known their parents, to "I want to join the smuggler's guild" to "My paladin fell from grace and needs to regain the favor of his god." So, when combining the world-changing events of quests with the character-changing events of CDQs, players can truly create their own destiny in Layonara.

Who does the art found in and around your site? What's the story there?

Leanthar: The artwork was done by Chris Willis and Terry Robinson both of whom are great artists. They are game artists that I have known for quite some time and we have worked together on a few projects at a few different game studios. A lot of the artwork, like the deity symbols and the continental symbols, has also been imported into the game. For example, we have shields with the deity symbols on them so clerics can show their faith by equipping a deity shield.

Any last comments?

Leanthar: Yes, I want to take a few moments to thank my team at Layonara. They are great group of ladies and gentlemen. I am constantly amazed at what they have done and continue to do over and over every single day. Without them this world would be nothing. I want to thank the players at Layonara for caring about the community and the world. We do this all for the players and it is great to see them have fun, make new friends, and continue to get better at role playing in a large persistent world.

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