The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Like a lot of dungeon crawl-esque games, this game isn’t going to have one central board that you go around. In fact my current thought process is that you will have no central board that you play off of. Instead, we’re going to use what something that I’ve seen in games like Forgotten Waters, Stuffed Fables and Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, which is a book.

There are a few reasons for the book, but the biggest is that we want the different levels to feel varied. The amount of tile pieces would be epically high to make a completely varied board. There are a lot in Gloomhaven, and those can seem somewhat limited at times, so to make something feel truly unique for different levels, you’d need a ton of pieces of terrain, and map tiles, and more to really keep it varied, but in this, I want to make it so that each level can be unique. Especially for the boss battle, I want to work with the idea of space in the game. I think that the new Descent game does an interesting thing with that where you build up vertically at times and can push people off of towers and things like that, I want to be able to do that. And some of that can be done with negative space on a map that’s drawn easier than map tiles that just create more random empty space on the table.

Besides the boss battle, it’ll help me be able to change up the level part of the floor, where players can go on quests, fight monsters, shop, and recruit to their guild. I could completely drop off one of them if I wanted, or I could add in additional spots where players can send people to go questing. This will allow each level to again feel different than the previous ones and give hints as to what might be more important for a level, or I really like the idea that some levels might not allow you to do things, maybe like recruit, so you need to plan accordingly, and you might not get that researched or figured out, but you need to have that in your mind that the next level might not have everything you want, or it might mean you can all go questing and pick up story and lore of the world.

But there are going to be a few actual boards in the game. The first will be the player boards. Each character is going to have their own board. This will have their stats as to what they are good at on it. Those stats are going to then influence how good they are at other things. Someone who is average at everything might do okay on all the tasks and tests, but they aren’t going to get the best outcome and I’ll be talking more about that in the future. But players will have ways to keep track of their stats, but along with that, this is where you’ll keep track of skills and equipment, conditions, and things like that which are common for dungeon crawlers. In my mind I want something closer to the Neoprene mats from Midarra versus something like the paper board from Sword & Sorcery. Gloomhaven does it a little bit better, but I want to build even upon that, because I’ve seen some nice custom ones for Gloomhaven that would hold things better. Also, with cool down and tracking skills, I feel like that’s something that Sword & Sorcery tries to do decently well, but ends up not really doing that well, so I’m curious to see how I can improve upon that.

The other board is going to be the guild board, and this one I have more of an idea of what I want on the board. This board is going to be fairly simple. You are going to keep track of a very few things on here. The two primary ones are going to be guild members and morale. Morale is going to be important for a few things, it’ll be about the attrition that you have with the guild or maybe how it’ll grow naturally. The better your morale the more that you’ll also be able to recruit on a floor. The other big thing, as I said, is guild members. Tracking them will be important because as you hit numerical points, that’ll give you more groups of guild members to use on levels. So if you have a ton of them, you’ll be able to cover a lot of ground, but you’ll also be sacrificing opportunities to level up by doing that. Again, building that tension, but also we’re on boards here, so that’s going to be important to track for that reason. Finally you’ll be tracking a few other things, gear level of the guild, statuses that you’ve found, deaths in the guild, and population left in the world. The statuses that you have found as a guild pertaining to the game can influence your options going forward. Gear will make a difference in battle, deaths in the guild will influence left total in the game, so important things, but will be less often you’re checking those things.

For a game this large there was always going to be a bunch of things to keep track of, but I want, with the book for the board, to make it so that part of the game is an easy flip out and play because that’s going to make the game way more accessible to players if they only have to keep track of their own stuff instead of helping set everything else out. I do think that there’ll be some tokens for the boss battle, such as placing on terrain, though I’d love to be able to make as much of that 3D terrain as possible, either 3D molded terrain, but that might be an add-on if it goes to KS or carboard pieces that can be put together to create height and visual appeal. I might pull a bit from what Oathsworn is doing where you can either get minis for the bosses or you can standees as well, but keep the bosses, and any terrain items, hidden away in either envelops with punch out stuff, or something like that, but ways to bring more surprises to the game. But that’s probably something for another time to talk about.

What do you think of the game thus far, definitely still in concept phase with this one, but I’m going to try and tackle some more specifics this week.

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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

So, I’ve talked about how on a level you have a big boss battle, but that isn’t the only thing on the level, in fact, while the boss battles are probably going to be the most tactical part of the game, I want to really focus on story as much as I can, and that’s where the other part of the level comes in to play.

On a level, there are going to be a number of locations or things that you can do as heroes, and you can decide how long you want to take doing them. I want this part to really feel like it’s fairly open to what you can do, though, you’ll probably want to do everything. With the levels I’m hoping to create a tension of not being able to do it all and having to make the choices on how your character levels and develops. Let’s take a look at some of the things that you can do.

• Quest
• Deal with a Level event
• Fight Monsters (aka Level Grind)
• Shop
• Recruit to Guild
• Interact with NPC’s
• Interact with PC’s
• Research Level Boss

That’s a lot of things that you can do. Now, you don’t always have all of the choices though, maybe there aren’t any quests or NPC’s on a level, but there are a lot of monsters to fight, it’ll depend on the design of the floor. Let’s take a look at all of these (order of me taking a look at them not guaranteed) to see what they all do.

Research Level Boss

So what do this get you, it helps you be able to know what sort of combat the boss is going to throw at you. What sort of weapon it has, what sort of minions it has, those are going to be the easy things to get that you can get from just a quick glance. Spend some minions or your hero here once and you get that, but the more time you spend, the more information that you can get, including knowing specific attacks. All of this is going to make it easier to solve the puzzle of the boss battle.

Shop

It is what it says it is, there will be a few different store options that you can go to, though. There will be an apothecary for your healing items. An armorer will be where you buy armor, and a blacksmith or weapons dealer will get your weapons. There will also be information brokers. This is going to be somewhere that you can information, it might be about quests for the floor, it might be information about other guilds in the world, about the boss of the level, but there’s going to be some information and it’ll depend on the level that you are on. Also, not all shops will be available on all floors. Finally, with the shops, there are going to be things to buy for the heroes, for sure, but there will be also group buys or group upgrades for the guild itself, these will be more generalized things that you keep track of on your guild board.

Fight a Monster

This is something that is going to be very different than your big boss battles which will use tactile grid movement. Instead, this is going to be much simpler, and the reason that you’d do it is for XP, money, or loot. This one is going to be simple, whether it is guild members or the heroes fighting.

Recruit to the Guild

Recruit to the Guild, this is fairly simple as well, not much risk in it either, so no worries about losing anyone. What you’re looking at here is going to be some things like the guild morale and how many times you’ve been there and recruited. It’ll be a simple matrix that you won’t know the first time you do it, but after that on each floor you’ll know how many you’ll get next time.

Interact with NPC’s

Interacting with NPC’s is going to be useful for a number of reasons. They are going to be a bit like the information brokers in that you might get a lot of things from them. It might be a quest, it might be world lore, it might be about the floor boss, or what sort of monsters there are on the floor, it might be information that’ll be useful about levels coming up, or hints to what sort of events might be coming up. The difference between an NPC and an information broker is that an information broker is going to have specific information, versus an NPC, which you might not know what information you’ll end up with. I also want to introduce an idea here with quests that might be added to upcoming floors, or the information that’ll be useful in the future. If it’s a quest, it’ll add in a card to that upcoming floors quest deck.

Interact with PC’s

This one is going to be trickier, but I want this to be where a fair amount of emotional weight from the story comes in. It is going to be dealing with the PC’s and their personal problems, and just some of the problems that would exist because of being stuck in a game. This is also going to be a story element that I want to be able to tie through multiple levels. It’ll be story elements that get added as things you can do on multiple floors and might even lock you into an action because a PC might come back and seek you out again on another floor as part of the emerging storyline.

Quest

Going on a quest is going to be interesting because there are going to be some small quests and some big quests, a big quest might use up multiple rounds to complete as you push forward and through it. A quest might have some monster fights, it’ll have some other challenges, but it’ll be about using resources, actions, cards, and what not so that they can complete them. Generally you’re going to be pushing forward on these as a hero, but you can send guild members. Guild members won’t be able to unlock a skill for a hero to use later, but completing them will improve morale for the guild.

Level Events

Level events are going to be interesting and also another spot for story to start to develop because a level event could be the MMORPG saying, hey, the first guild to do this gets a bonus or a hero gets a bonus. Or it could be something between PC’s that had ramifications on the world. So I’ve talked about the guild board, but we’re also going to leverage a status board, so if you have a given status, that might be something happens for sure and you have to send someone to do something, or it might mean that something is now closed off, and Level Events, if they are done, are going to be handing out a lot of those, same with the PC and NPC interactions. But generally a Level Event, compared to a quest, is only going to take one round to complete, unless it’s a persistent level event. And level events will be a kind of timer for how long you should stay on a floor, but any repeatable or non-event events will get added back to the event deck, so that you never run out of events to do.

Those are my current ideas for what can be done on a floor. There might also just be a rest action. This would be less for the heroes, unless there is some condition that has been applied by the boss from a previous floor that you need to shake, but generally going to an apothecary would do the same thing and give you more options as well. The reason for having a lot of actions to be done is for the action economy and replayability of the game. The fact you won’t see everything and that you won’t talk to all the NPC’s or PC’s, that’ll mean that there will be new things you can do every time, if you decide to play it again. Now, it won’t be limitless, but most likely if you come back to it, you’ll have forgotten most of what might be coming.

So, what else would you want to do on a floor? Obviously, some of the actions are built more for the guild members to do than the heroes, so how should I balance it out so that the choice is still difficult as to who to send to that location? Those are questions that I’m still asking myself and that I’d be interested to know what people think on them.

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