DANIEL MARTINEZ MURILLO
Game Design Portfolio
Ordell Expedition Company
What is Ordell?
Inspired by West Marches games, the Ordell Expedition Company is a large-scale Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition game that mimicks elements from MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online games). As a West Marches style of D&D, Ordell is a mostly player-driven experience. Players gather into groups on their own volition and venture out on quests, which are made, posted, and run by volunteering Dungeon Masters. These groups change on a quest by quest basis, allowing for an ever-growing community of players to join up and interact in different and interesting ways in small, intertwining games of Dungeons and Dragons.
Here, on the continent of Ordell, people can escape into a world with a life of its own, while slaying goblins, making friends, and even forming genuine relationships (one pair is known for having married their characters). Living in an imaginary but constant world where time flows differently than real life (every real day is 4 days in a 1:4 ratio), players can work jobs, role-play with fellow players and NPCs, and sign up for quests. This bustling world has an in-game economy, too, that involves NPC shops, houses, guilds, and player shops
Dungeon Masters each make their own quests to run, each, of course, with their own unique playstyles or flair. In these quests, players can fight unique monsters, explore and harvest from the continent, or make relationships with natives. Much like Monster Hunter: World, players can use materials they gather from exploring and hunting to craft various unique and powerful weapons or items to use on their quests or for role-playing purposes. When a new item has been invented, it can be recreated by anybody with the proper supplies and proficiencies, or sold for in-game currency, a system we named "Innovation".
My Role:
As a founder of this project and a Dungeon Master, it was my role to take two large sections of the map and populate them with lore, NPCs, towns, monsters, animals, vegetation, collectible materials, and more.
In taking this large task, I focused my sights on the Hills biome, which I populated with a system of human nomads split into three tribe types, collectively known as the ARK. Additionally, I wrote quests and made special items for players to find on those quests, as well as a detailed trading table that connected to the in-game economy system we had created and the relationships between players and NPCs.
I also took the far-east Volcano biome, which I once again populated with people, towns, lore, and monsters. Here, players are bound to find fire genasi Monks that praise the volcano, genasi rebels that live on the outskirts of the volcanoes, on the black beaches, and strange pink lake water with copycat properties.
Kosko Pawn Shop's shop. This is how I would keep track of items sold and bought by the shopkeeper
In addition to all of this, I also helped with conceptualization, running NPCs such as the in-town pawn shopkeeper and the baker (which required skills such as immersive writing, organization, and a sprinkle of creativity when RPing) and contributed to monthly Founders meetings where we improved and balanced the game.
Interactions between Kosko customers and Pon Pon
(music by Rain)
The Founders:
The Founders were the original group of people who worked on and conceptualized Ordell. These people included Bella Mays, Lauren D'Angelo, Trevor Miller, Raylie Hope Sherman, M.J. (Micah Johnson), Marcel Valoir, and myself. Together, we sketched out the map, split up the unique regions and biomes, conceptualized natives and interaction with the environment, and basic game systems, such as a very basic economy and crafting system.
Quests:
So far, the Dungeon Masters have run about 45 quests in total, exploring various cells of the absolutely immense continent the game takes place in.
Multiple games were run in person, but when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we began running online games using Discord and Roll20
Challenges:
Along the way, during play and out of play, we faced a variety of challenges we had to adapt to or deal with. At some points, certain players expected too much of us and challenged our authority or commitment to the game; other players expected too little and did not want us to grow the community we had built. With the occasional bad apple, however, the community we fostered stood strong, bonding throughout early February as we hosted in-person game after in-person game. However, as the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a halt, we were determined to keep the game alive. We began running quests through Roll20, using a Discord server as the hub for the game. Surprisingly, the game flourished. With little else to do, our players became very active, some even pushing for leadership positions in the server (as Advisors and Dungeon Masters) and reaching level 7 by the end of the summer. Even though the times are stressful, we were able to give our players a stable escape for a while; a pause from the scary reality we live in.
The Map:
The map for this game is HUGE. It literally spans for 3,124 miles wide and 1,878 miles from North to South. That is between 5-6 MILLION square miles of terrain to cover. Since the plan of this project is for it to continue for 4+ years, this makes sense and is suitable; however, as exploration is cell by cell, this means that the ground to cover could take far beyond that. We believe this is an advantage, as it gives Dungeon Masters a lot of freedom to play around with quests and monsters, but it can pose a challenge to players, so changes to the map's size may occur.
Currently, players, who begin on the west coast, have barely reached the ends of the Temperate Forest. The game has been active since February 2020.
