Introduction
Albion LP
Welcome to Albion! It's a 1995 PC-DOS game released by Blue Byte, who are probably better known for their Settlers and Battle Isle strategy game. Blue Byte used to be an independent German studio/publisher, but these days they're a Ubisoft subsidiary and Settlers and Anno XXXX games are their main products.
Albion has been attempted LP'd on the forums once or twice before, but never been completed(and frankly never getting particularly far either), so rather than complaining and begging other people to LP it, I went: "Heck, I'll LP it myself! How hard can it be? It's just some screenshots and text! Maybe a bit of video!" And I'll tell you right now, just doing the first post, I learned a lot of respect for the people who do big LP's, just getting everything sorted and ready to produce content for this first post almost made me give up until I got the hang of it.
Why Albion, though? It's not exactly a classic, or a cult classic even, I feel like few people remember it, but I played it as a kid/early teenager and got really drawn in by it. It has a decent combat system, okay RPG mechanics, alright writing and demands some amount of thinking from the player. In traditional 90's Eurojank style, it's also perfectly possible to paint yourself into a corner at several stages of the game, not technically being unable to progress but in practice having softlocked yourself out of progress, since the game features semi-limited resources.
Albion? What the Hell is Albion?
As mentioned, a 1995 PC-DOS RPG. The concept is that we are in the future aboard the Toronto, a massive factory space-ship that has travelled by FTL speeds to a distant planet, nicknamed "Nugget"(as in a gold nugget), which promises to be extremely rich in valuable ores as well as completely void of life. Our main character is Tom, one of the ship's pilots, who is tasked with making an exploratory flight down to the surface of Nugget with a scientist in tow to confirm that all the remotely gathered info is actually correct before the Toronto itself touches down and becomes a permanent ore mining/refining facility on the planet's surface.
Even the back of the box, and let's be frank, even the front of the box, spoils that things won't go quite to plan. That's definitely not what a Mars-like planet looks like...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt4blwPKr7o
Cast of Player Characters
Tom - A pilot aboard the Toronto factory spaceship. He's generically heroic and will do a lot of things just because they seem interesting. In other words, he's an RPG protagonist.
Rainer Hofstedt - A government xenobiologist and scientist aboard the Toronto, one of two government officials intended to keep an eye on the DDT's activities away from Earth. Tends to get very excited about science.
Drirr - A "Stiriik" or police officer among the Iskai. Despite his job, Drirr most definitely isn't a bastard. A genuinely nice and helpful native, only slightly sabotaged by being more enthusiastic and occasionally naive than is good for him. Probably too nice a person for this adventure.
Sira - A "Dji-Kas" mage, the youngest and least experienced member of the party. She's 12 years old, which in Iskai age is something like early 20's. Somehow more fragile than Rainer, but also more useful. Is in love with Mellthas after he fingered her frontal lobe without asking.
Mellthas - A literal mysterious druid. Deaf and mute, can banish demons to heaven with a magic ion cannon. Is in love with Sira after having touched her brain inappropriately.
Siobhan - Completely unrelated to the plot, entirely in this for the violence and money, has amazing hair and is probably the only party member more bloodthirsty than Tom. Her abilities involve being swole and being swole.
Khunag - A mysterious wizard who has parted ways with a cult of assassin-sorcerers under circumstances he doesn't wish to reveal. Enjoys blowing things up with magic and almost certainly will not cause any future complications for the party thanks to his background.
Audience Participation
Albion is relatively linear and doesn't afford us a lot of meaningful choices, but there are a couple of points in the game where we get to choose part of our party composition or make some minor choices, and since I'm not hard-set one way or the other and those minor choices won't cause massive changes to the way I play, I'll probably ask for a vote on how to handle them.
Upload Schedule
I'm hoping for a post a week.
Spoiler Policy
Albion doesn't have an awful lot of amazing twists, but I'd still prefer it if people kept from talking about stuff that either hasn't come up or can't be easily extrapolated from what we've seen so far.
LP Format
I'm planning to do a hybrid format since some sections(especially dungeons) lend themselves better to video, while many of the non-dungeon areas have a lot of text-based conversations that I feel would be easier to handle as screenshots. But if people have a strong preference for either pure screenshots or pure video, please let me know and I can make the change. All video will be subtitled, not voiced. I also apologize in advance for the number of images, but Albion has, as far as I am aware, no script dump, and tons of text, so rather than annihilating my own brain and hands by transcribing it all, I decided to just screenshot away.
With regards to the video content, please let me know if I should click past text prompts slower or faster(I went on the side of faster for now, assuming that anyone who read slower than I did could pause the video to take it all in), what the subtitle timing is like, whether the audio is deafening, too low, etc. this is literally my first time doing any sort of video LP content, so I'm happy to take critique.