Shipwrecked on an island scenario (or more minimally: option for island start)

[Modest Grouse]

I enjoy a challenge and a goal, and so one of my favorite things to do in UnReal World is a variant of the punitive island challenge by Buoidda, see https://www.unrealworld.fi/forums/index.php?topic=5841.0 and the stories page at https://www.unrealworld.fi/forums/index.php?topic=5843.30.

As written it seems a bit too punitive for my tastes (mostly having to use a stone knife makes butchering very inefficient), but especially now with pausable tasks (which allows making boards with a stone axe, and therefore a paddle) it becomes a challenging but fairly dorable long-term quest to get back to the mainland. I think of it as being shipwrecked, and I mostly now think of UnReal world as the "getting shipwrecked people back home" game. You might consider making this into one of the pre-programmed scenarios. Not everyone is going to go looking for DIY challenges in the forums, and it would all be more convenient and standardized for people to compare experiences. It could be a selling point for the game, a really difficult scenario to test one's survival abilities, a Robinson Crusoe of the north.

Starting conditions could be:

- Injuries same as hurt, helpless, and afraid (adding frostbite to the injury mix would be a nice touch, if the season is right); the player got tossed around in the storm
- No clothes, only a knife; or maybe only very (50%+) worn cloth clothes; part of the challenge is having no fur/insulation; they got washed away into the ocean
- Starting on an island - I'd define "island" as between 8 and 16 tiles, outside any cultural area, not near the mainland
- Character has a long- (a year?) or perpetual-duration quest to go back to their home village that is in their culture area, this shows up as a quest destination on the map
- Starting point (i.e., the zoomed-in starting point) is standing on the shoreline. Maybe put a raft or punt or even just a log next to them for narrative consistency, how they managed to arrive without freezing/drowning; having those is not really a major advantage
- Maybe start at "Cold" temperature for some added realism that they just washed up on shore, especially if the chosen season is not summer

The narrative would be something like that their boat was caught in a storm and sunk, and they need to get home to their village. You could make it more dramatic by giving them some reason why they have to get back to their home village by a certain point in time, before they are pronounced dead, or their beloved will marry someone else, something like that.

That is a pretty "maximal" version of the scenario. Because the scenario is location-dependent, it seems to require inverting the character creation workflow, such that scenario-selection comes before location-selection. (The necessary logic being "If Shipwrecked Scenario, then enforce that the starting location is on an island"). Maybe then location selection for this scenario is automatic (i.e., skip location-selection entirely), or maybe they can re-roll the starting location as normal but the algorithm becomes that only locations on an island are chosen.

A more "minimal" version would be to just add a menu option to the location-selection dialog (in character-creation startup) to select an island. This doesn't give all the narrative structure, but it does make it easier to DIY the scenario. As it is, one has to either use separate software (Windows only), see https://www.unrealworld.fi/forums/index.php?topic=6072.msg16429  or re-reroll many times to land on an island. Being on an island ups the difficulty level and gives a different feel to the game without villages nearby, so it seems like a good option to offer players for use in any scenario.

[Plotinus]

This is one of my favourite starting scenarios! To minimise the amount of rerolling i have to do, i pick islander and press H to roll somewhere in my home territory. I pick robber start to start injured and to get thrown to another random island.