Is that a boat wrapped around a whale?

Pretty much. It's a ship built around a giant sea creature.

what a neat idea!

Imaginative

Wow...

While imagination can help with world building, CoC often left me confused. This is so much more interesting.

Hah :D I was frustrated with CoC interface as well. I really want to make the game more accessible by making things more visual.

Yeah. i was tired that most interactions were just "fight it. you win? rape it. you lose? get raped and game over screw you your character is ruined for all time so go back to your last save or suffer a crummy character".

Don't worry about that either. The plan is that stat changes should be rare, small and meaningful, normally only happening in events where it makes sense or after special fights. So for example, losing a fight against some random animal won't end up with your character losing or gaining stats. And most likely not even getting raped either unless it makes sense for that particular species and other circumstances.

And an example of stats being altered by an event... let's see if I can come up with something... imagine that during a dungeon crawl you find some mechanical gadget that looks like a small box glued to a pedestal and you don't know how to use or open it. And if you find enough clues while exploring the dungeon or talking with other characters (or perhaps if your character is strong enough to brute force it open), you learn how to activate it. Either way, if you manage to get it to work, it starts floating and directs a light to your character's forehead, whose mind is flooded by a million images and passes out. When the character wakes up he/she seems to know about many small things unknown to the character before that event. Congratulations, by going out of the way and finding how to operate this thing you character gained one point of Knowledge permanently.

Or you receive accept a quest to steal a magical trinket from the floating house of some factory owner. You get caught red-handed and don't manage to escape, so you are subjected to that region's law. And the crime for stealing from someone higher than you in the social chain is getting an appendage buried in hot cinders for a few seconds. So if you don't manage to avoid punishment either, the character's left foot will end up getting horribly scarred, which besides possibly changing how people in that region will react to a thief (who got caught) if they see it, makes your character lose a point of agility permanently.

It's also worth pointing out that the character is a human and won't be changing too drastically or mutating horribly so it becomes something crazy or even non-human. Nothing like suddenly growing three penises and losing a point of anal circumference, or transforming permanently into some monstrous creature. The stats in the character creation screen are what define the player character and his/her looks depend mostly on the player's imagination.

As for interactions, we're trying to give this a proper RPG feeling. Not all characters will have lots of dialogue or meaningful things to say, but you will be able to at least chat a little bit with most NPCs, who might react to you or what you have done in the past accordingly. And some of them will have their own storylines that might span an entire region. It will depend on how much the writers want to write for each sentient character, but hopefully there will be more and more detailed characters as the time passes. The game being made with the idea of expanding it infinitely over years if people keep writing characters and areas will certainly help.

That sounds a lot more tolerable and enjoyable.

My main pain with CoC was the random freak transformations. I'm glad that won't be a factor this time.

Their own dialogue trees eh? Aw man I love this fishing village right here, I can't wait to see what kinda strange and wonderful things we'll find here.