[rylen]

Further thoughts -- everything follows from the story. Let me sketch some increasingly big ideas.

V1: To kill a god. A Dom2 prequel. You, an asperant, climb through a series of challenges to petition the great god. A nice, linear dungeon crawl.

V2: For the greater glory. You are an assassin / army leader. At game start you pick a faction and a chasis. You pick or are assigned an opponent faction. You enter their land, avoid or defeat patrols, find the fortress, move through it, kill their Pretender, and go home.

V3: Dom2 from the ground up. Again you are an assassin / army leader. At setup you spend points on yourself, and paths and scales for your pretender. The compter does the same for other factions. Then you go to neighboring lands, find several flags, and claim the place for your faction. You may poke around heavily and find magic sites which give your pretender gems and bonuses. As you wander around, your pretender does research, recruits units to guard the places you've grabbed, and summons increasingly powerful critters. Eventually, you find a different factions land. Capture or skirt their provinces and find their keep. Enter, kill their pretender, taking the magic item that allows him to seek godhood and bring it home for your guy. Rinse and repeat.

While your doing that, your pretender is securing some lands and buying some troops. The other factions also have their Rogue-Heros and armies trying to grab and regrab lands and kill the other guys.

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What I really like about this idea:
1 -- it replaces depth based difficulty with time based difficulty. The nearby provinces are a challenge for a starting character. The first faction you fight has some basic troops and commanders. Much later you'll face experienced elite troops, equiped commanders, and strong summons. You'll also have the option of using your own nations troops.
2 -- it recreates the story from a different perspective
3 -- it has a Dom2 choice b/w short and long term power. Having a high path, good scale boss means great assistants and items, plus secure provinces in the long term but a weak chasis and equipment. Or vice versa.

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Yeah, way too complex for the start. But I think the narrative is the big thing.

Rylen