A Full Slate...

Another semester, and that means new projects to add to my list of 'things to do' on top of the work I'll be doing for Cubicle 7's Doctor Who Line this year (the programme's 50th anniversary). By the time this years is done, I'll have hopefully produced more material than in the previous two years combined.

FOR GLORY!!!
While this is from last Semester, it has always been intended to be one of the tent pole items for Jabberwocky Media, which means that prototyping and play-testing are continuing apace.  I've moved on from the vertical slice testing, which had only about 1/3rd of the cards, and have made all the corrections to the set, which is now being updated to a full prototype.  

By the end of this month, I should be able to send out a digital version for some of my game designer buddies to playtest and after that, I'll build the final design and send it off for printing and distribution, hopefully sometime in the summer before Gencon.

AAARGH!!!
My business partner Angelo came up with a brilliant little game about Pirates that is much more family friendly and easy to play than For Glory, which is by its nature as a Sword & Sorcery Role-Playing Board Game, somewhat more detailed and less appropriate for kids. It is also likely the first of our games to hit the shelves and then be converted into a fun little App for mobile devices for that reason.

The players in the game take the role of a pirate captain seeking to sink their enemy or capture their ship. Each Turn represents the ships moving towards each other, starting out at a distance, eventually closing to broadsides range and then moving off to a distance and turning around again for another pass. Each Turn a few pirates are assigned to tasks on the ship, from loading and firing cannons, to fighting fires, bailing water, forming boarding parties, etc. You'll manage a dwindling crew, dwindling resources and the results of catastrophic damage as the game moves on, trying to keep your ship afloat while sending the opponent down to Davy Jones Locker! Aaargh!!!

RAAARGH!!!
The Game Lab project I am working on for this semester is an arena style combat app for Tablets in which mad scientists create or capture giant monsters and then send them out to fight the monsters of other geniuses in a bid to take over a city, defend it or extort it to provide money for their researches.

The arena, in this case is a city or town populated by terrified citizens, soldiers and the occasional superhero, the latter two helping or hindering the monster (depending on its goals and alignment) and citizens serving as a source of renown for the owners of good monsters, money for the owners of bad monsters or food for ugly monsters.

The monsters themselves are custom built from a ‘body bank’ of parts and powers, and are indirectly controlled by ‘prodding’ them into certain actions, which may or may not be successful if the monster is tired, hurt or being made to do things against its nature.

The full project is some ways away, and we are currently working on a demo  that only includes 2 pre-built monsters, some citizens and a single city map. Hopefully that will be enough to get us Kickstarter funding for the full game.

BARBARIANS OF HEAVY METAL GAMESLATE

My second class this semester is Experimental Game Lab, and  I'm finally going to get the Gameslate fully realized (click the tag below for more info on that project) after my programmer on Barbarians of Lemuria got too busy to finish that. Fortunately, all the lessons and code from that project will be very useful for completing this one.

The truly cool thing about it is that I will finally be publishing the long-awaited Barbarians of Heavy Metal, my take on 3025 Battletech if the universe was based on Heavy Metal culture. You can find all my initial musings and design ideas on the game here. More on that in a future post.

So lot's to do, but hopefully a very productive year that will give Jabberwocky Media the attention and income it needs to go full time after I graduate...

 

For Glory!!! Combat, Abstractions and Additions...

COMBAT
Combat in For Glory!!! is intended to represent a series of engagements in which there are three distinct phases:

1. Heroic Shooting: The Hero is allowed to fire a ranged weapon.

2. Heroic Melee: The Hero is allowed to fight using weapons or their fists.

3. Heroic Escape: The Hero may try to retreat from the battle. This entails a loss of Glory, of course.

Once the Hero has gone through these three phases, and assuming both they and their opponent are alive, a new engagement starts and the battle carries on.

Striking a foe has been abstracted down a bit from the full rules in the Barbarians of Lemuria RPG. Instead of a roll to hit, a roll to damage and a roll for armor which subtracts from damage, I have combined to-hit and damage into one roll and simplified armor to a simple binary D6 roll for heroes (you ignore the hit or you don't), or include it in the defense rating of encounter.  

When combined with the reduced LB totals (the average number of hits the average Hero or opponent can take is 3), and also considering the ability to double or even triple the damage of strikes with Hero Points, this makes combat a relatively quick affair, likely to be over in the first round if not the second. Only combats with large groups or creatures of massive size (5+ LB) will take longer.

ABSTRACTIONS
Combat illustrates the challenge of taking a property like an RPG and translating it into a board game while still maintaining the feel of the original and, in my case, retaining the ability to move characters back and forth from the RPG to the Board Game. The first version of the rules had combatants with 10+ life blood (30 + for some monsters), random damage and random armor. In all, it was very swingy and it took a lot of time to finish one combat. In a board game, which forsakes the flexibility of an RPG for a quick play experience, the amount of player downtime this entails is unacceptable and I changed it almost immediately.
The combat round itself is an uber-abstraction, taking the detailed blow by blow account of a battle in an RPG and  boiling it down into phases that represent the individual result of a lot of activity, so it only makes sense to boil down the numbers for all aspects of that activity as well.

This abstraction is carried through into all other areas of the rules as well. Encounters themselves are largely abstracted down because we're trying to capture a short story and all the drama and detail it entails in a simple one roll result and lower level magic is simply an addition to that roll at the cost of 1 AP and 1 less Glory, making sorcerers flexible for a price.

In both cases we have to take an entire RPG session of activity and boil it down to something that will allow us to play the equivalent of an entire RPG campaign in the same time. How do you do this? I always keep in mind the words of Marcus Aurelius, the famous Emperor/Philosopher:

Look to the essence of a thing, whether it be a point of doctrine, of practice, or of interpretation.

In this case, the board game needs to find the essence of every aspect that makes the BoL RPG the experience that it is and boil those down to a series of rules that can reflect them in a single roll for the most part, but no more than 2 or 3 in the larger scheme of things, for the sake of speedy play. Using our examples from above:

1. The essence of an Encounter is the Hero tests some personal attribute to overcome adversity. Therefore, pick the most defining challenge, the attribute it challenges, and make that the center of the resolution.

2. The lower end Sorcery in BoL is used to 'allow the sorcerer to perform activities that anyone with the right training and equipment could manage.' Therefore, they should add to the possible success of rolls. And the best way in our current scheme is to allow them to add their Sorcerer career.
 
By reducing an activity to its base function and then 'snapshotting' an instance of that function, we manage to reduce the complexity and compress the time it takes to resolve that activity. In a way, we're taking the story of an individual Hero, as you would find in a script and turning it into a plot synopsis or treatment of the story.

At first I was hewing a bit too closely to the RPG, but as I've playtested the game, I've moved a bit farther afield from it as I've grown comfortable with the abstraction of key elements. I now think it has reached a point of balance where it is enough of its own entity, with the speed of a proper board game, while still retaining the feel of the original and allowing for cross compatibility.

ADDITIONS
By embracing abstraction and speeding up the game as a result, I've been able to add a Trade Phase into the Player Turn sequence. Now cities have a more important role in the game and destroying them actually makes a real difference. Merchant Heroes will also find a new set of activities to keep themselves occupied with and an advantage to leverage against their more muscular and sorcerous counterparts. Indeed, I'm hoping this will enhance player interactivity, as Merchants and cities become magnets for trade.


  

For Glory!!! The Game Play...

Despite the detail in the game, it is surprisingly simple in execution, with many of the rules being exception based.

THE ROUND
Game Turns take the form of Rounds, which cover roughly one lunar month of time in Lemuria during which the heroes go about their business. It has 4 phases:

TIME PASSES
 There are certain events and spells within the game that have a Duration. This is marked with Lunar Cycle Tokens placed directly on the card. During this phase, one of those counters is removed. Once all of the counters are gone, the event or spell ends.

HEROES RECOVER
 At this point heroes recover all of the Life Blood they lost in the previous Round, readying them for a new month of adventure. They also recover a single Hero Point and a Single Arcane Power Point.

ADVENTURE ARISES
One of the driving forces behind the game, adventures provide a framework for the characters' wanderings. During this phase, one adventure is added to the Adventure Track, filling in the first available empty space (each space having a corresponding difficulty modifier which rises from left to right). Gradually, six adventures will be available, allowing every Hero a chance to participate in one, although the ones on the far right end will be a bear to complete.

HEROES SEEK ADVENTURE
Once these three preliminary phases are completed, we move on to this, the Player Turn phase. Players compete for initiative and then play proceeds clockwise.

THE PLAYER TURN
 Player turns are relatively simple consisting of two phases...

HEROIC MOVEMENT
On Land, heroes move one hex in any direction. They may push their movement by rolling their STR+2D6 against the difficulty level of the terrain they are leaving (which is conveniently indicated on the board underneath the various terrain card slots). If they succeed, they move one more hex. If they roll a Mighty Success (or spend a Hero Point to make a Success into a Mighty Success) they may move two additional hexes.

To move on water, heroes must have a ship. There are six unique ships in the game, each with their own special bonus and if they don't start out with one, a hero can always exchange 5 Trade Value points worth of gear and treasure for one in any city located on a river or ocean coast. Once they have a ship, they may move down rivers and across ocean hexes at a rate of two hexes per Move Phase. They may make a MIN+2D6 roll to push their movement in the same way as land movement.

HEROIC EXPLORATION 
Once a hero has ended their move, they have an encounter. They have three choices:

1. If there is another hero in that space they may encounter that hero. Living heroes may be fought or traded with (you can trade anything, including task counters, just so long as they share a space). Dead heroes can be looted.

2. If there is a 1 task counter and you have no other task counters, or if it is a 2 or 3 and you have the proceeding task counter for that adventure, you may try and complete that task.

3. If you do niether of the above, you encounter the space, drawing one card for that Terrain type. In cases where there are multiple terrain types in the hex, you may choose which of those decks to draw from.

WRINKLES
That covers the basic gameplay, but there are a few bits and bobs that throw some variety into the mix.

HERO POINTS
It can be very easy to die in Lemuria, but Hero Points are the tool by which true heroes stave off their fate for a time. They are a dwindling resource that must be carefully managed, recovering at a rate of only 1 point per Round, but there are many ways in which they might be used:

1. Foresight of the Gods: Sometimes a hero will draw a Deodarg as soon as they step foot in the jungle and that means pretty much certain death. By using a Hero Point, however, the hero will get a 'bad feeling' about going one direction over the other and the encounter may be discarded and a new one drawn in its place.

2. Might of the Gods: Heroes can accomplish mighty by spending a Hero Point will make a regular Success into a Mighty Success. A Hero Point is also the only way to turn a Mighty Success into a Legendary Success, the benefits of which are an extra D6 Glory (and three points of damage in combat, which will fell most creates or mobs).

3. Luck of the Gods: Sometimes the gods have to intervene more directly in the lives of the heroes, changing the playing field to give the hero an advantage. By spending a Hero Point, they can reroll the dice once (the guard at the treasure room door is asleep) or totally negate a hit caused by an enemy in combat (the enemy slips on an icy patch at just the moment they were preparing a killing blow).

SORCERY
The one career that doesn't show up on any Encounter card is Sorcerer and that is because sorcery is useful in every situation. If the Sorcerer is too weak to climb the side of a mountain or too odious to appeal to anyone, they can always give themselves the ability to climb like a spider or ensorcell a lesser mortal into giving them what they want. 

Now, in the last day, I've been really thinking about this aspect of the game (it is, after all a sword & sorcery game) and how to streamline it while still retaining the BoL flavor. As such, I've gone ahead and applied the same logic to it that I did with Life Blood and reduced the Arcane Power Point total to something more manageable and less fiddly: MIN + 1. This of course changes how the mechanic operates a bit, although mainly on the low end.

There are now three distinct levels of spell in the game, to match the three levels of magic in the BoL RPG:

First Magnitude
By spending 1AP, the Sorcerer can substitute their MIN+Sorcerer for whatever attribute or careers are normally used for the task or encounter at hand. The disadvantage is that the fates tend to oppose those who try to usurp their power (you may not use Hero Points on any roll that involves Sorcery, although you can use additional AP to boost success levels) 

In addition, even though most people fear and respect a sorcery, they also despise the use of it enough that, while the mighty deeds of sorcerers are still recorded, they are not as well regarded as those of more mundane heroes (Sorcerers collect 1 less Glory if they use Sorcery to complete an Encounter or Task). In addition, some places and encounters actively resist or punish sorcerers, so it is often a good idea to use one's other abilities to accomplish certain tasks.

In combat, sorcerers can spend 1 AP to fight without weapons or resulting to brawling through the use of sorcery. By spending AP and using their MIN + (BRA, MEL or RAN) + Sorcerer, they can make sorcerous attacks.

Second Magnitude & Third Magnitude
As mentioned in this post, spells of this magnitude are represented by the Sorcery Cards. Nothing much has changed from that earlier iteration except for the cost of the spells in Arcane Power (2 and 3 respectively) and a modification to the Mortification requirement which is now 1 LB or 1 Penalty Token, to represent the physical and mental toll of Sorcery (based on a very helpful suggestion by James Hutchings over on the Boardgame Geek forums). This actually fixes my fragile sorcerers problem, where the Zalutian Sorceress with 1 LB would kill herself if she cast a spell that required Mortification, without having to artificially boost all the characters Life Blood totals.

EMERGENT PLAY
One of the major goals of this game is to ensure player interaction and have a number of side stories emerge from that. Talisman has this in the form of players jumping each other to steal their goodies or kill them when they are too close to winning the game, but there is little other reason for the players to interact. Runebound may as well be a solo game with other people playing at the same time. For Glory!!! is being designed to ensure that palyers will find it very hard to avoid each other during the course of the game, making it more than a 'pull a card, pass your turn' game. It does this in a number of ways:

Encounter Heroes
During the Encounter phase of the Player Turn, a hero entering a hex containing another hero may encounter that Hero. They may attack them, in classic Talisman 'stab your buddy and take their stuff' fashion, or they may trade with them. They can trade anything, including Task Tokens for adventures. This means that cooperating to complete adventures becomes a possibility, where one adventurer completes a task they are particularly good at and then trades it to another Hero who would never in a million years have completed that first task but is more than capable of finishing said adventure.

Even if the players aren't feeling that particularly cooperative, there are adventures with such global consequences that it will behoove them to work together to complete the adventure and avoid disaster for all.

From this dynamic, a side story evolves: will the Tyran Witch Hunter work with the Zalutian Sorceress for the greater good? Will the Valgardian Barbarian accept help from any one or are they too proud and vainglorious?

Sorcery
The Valgardian Barbarian may not want to interact with other heroes, preferring to go his own way, but what if a sorcerer casts a spell on him to make him do so? There are spells in the game that can force the reluctant hero to get involved with other heroes and side track them from important quests. And even if the spell fails, what hero worth his salt will brook such an offense and not seek revenge?

Glory Levels
If a Hero gains too great a lead in Glory, you can be assured that the others will often cooperate to take them down, in some cases they may even decide that they would rather lose than see Player A win yet again.

So there are many ways, from trading or stealing tasks or rewards, to sorcery to simply taking too wide a lead or settling old scores, that will often draw heroes to each other in the game. The emergent play that results from these interactions are what will give the game legs in the long run...

For Glory!!! The Characters...

There will be 12 characters included in the base game and each one is built using the same rules as those found in the BoL RPG with a few modifications to make them useful in a board game context. The practical upshot of this is that you can move characters from the RPG to the board game and back using a simple conversion which will be included in the For Glory!!! rulebook. So if you don't like any of the characters presented, it will be easy enough to customize one for yourself.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

The cards themselves are fairly easy to read. We have a character descriptor, which gives you a general idea of where the character comes from and what they do, going down the left side. The Origin, found in the top left corner, tells you where the character starts out on the map. This might be a very specific hex or include a large number of options based on the character in question.

To the right of the Origin, we have an indicator of the Hero's sex. Why? Because it matters in Sword & Sorcery fiction and, as a result, does so in the game as well, with a number of cards favoring one sex or the other.  

To the right of that are the Hero Resources: Life Blood, Hero Points and Arcane Power. Life Blood in particular has been reduced and abstracted in the board game to speed up play and reduce the swinginess of combat. So instead of 10+STR, For Glory!!! uses 2+STR. This means the average character will take two hits in combat before going down, but as the whole combat mechanic has been boiled down into something much simpler that will speed up play for the board game medium (combat using the base BoL rules would mean horribly unacceptable player downtime), this is actually plenty.

Hero Points and Arcane Power are built the same way as the RPG, with 5 starting Hero Points for  every character and a few characters who take a 2 point reduction in order to score extra Boons without taking an additional Flaw, and AP built on the same 10+MIN formula as the RPG. Why not abstract that down as well? We'll discuss that in a later post.

 CLICK TO ENLARGE

In the middle, we have the Heroic Stats: Attributes in column 1, Combat Abilities in Column 2 and Careers in Column 3. They work in exactly the same way as they do in their RPG counterpart: roll 2D6+ATT+Combat Ability or Career. Some of the careers are rated at 0, but they still have an affect on the game, as certain cards are useful for or can be ignored by certain careers regardless of actual score.

Below the Heroic Stats, we have the Boons & Flaws. These are advantages and disadvantages drawn from the character's land of origin as found in the RPG, but modified to make sense for the board game. There will be a conversion list in the back of the For Glory!!! rulebook  for each one, so as before, moving from the RPG to the board game will be a snap.

Finally, there are the Trappings, or equipment, that the Hero starts off with. These are drawn from the Equipment or Reward Decks as appropriate.

 CLICK TO ENLARGE

And as a fun little sneak peek at the tone of the rules, here is an excerpt from the rulebook on choosing characters, as related by the official For Glory!!! Rules-Skald...

Each player picks a hero to play. In the case of conflict over a particular hero, those involved should engage in some test of might, preferably combat (although not to the death, as this results in fewer players). The one who beats the rest into submission takes the hero card.

Alternately, those too craven to engage in true tests of a heroic caliber can simply award the hero to the player who achieves the highest result on 1 die (rerolling ties) or just randomly deal one hero card face down to each player and then wallow in timorous ignominy.

The Rules-Skald will be answering any Q&A after the game releases, so best not to annoy him with questions that are clearly meant to abuse the spirit of the rules. He will correct you in as offensive a manner as possible and then advise your friends on the best way to deal with rules weasels.

That covers the main components. Next time I'll talk a bit about how the game plays...

For Glory!!! The Cards...

After two play-tests of the demo set, I'm pretty happy with the way the game is coming together. The first test resulted in a revision of the combat system and the second went swimmingly with the players all having a good time, even though it was a limited game with only 1/3rd of the cards in play. As the rules seem to work well, I'm now working towards finishing up the remaining cards before end of term. That being the goal, I think I'll talk about the cards themselves and how they factor into the game. 

The cards for the game come in a wide variety to represent the encounters, rewards and extended quests that Heroes will come across during their travels across the map: Encounter Cards, Reward Cards and Adventure Cards. Again, these are rough prototypes to show the general direction of the design.

ENCOUNTER CARDS 

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The most common card in the game is the Encounter card, which represents a single specific heroic encounter that will be worthy of mention when the scribes and poets of the future recall the Hero's saga. The are split into six, specific terrain decks (Plains, Jungle, Swamp, Ocean, Mountain, Desert) and include three sub-types (Challenge's, Events, and Combat Encounters).

At the top of the card we have the relevant Attributes and Difficulties associated with the Encounter along with name the scribes will attribute to he event in the future. A smaller sub-heading describes the type of encounter.

In the middle we have the details of the encounter, and along the sides, all the stats needed to run a combat with opponents within the encounter, if applicable. The red text denotes the results of failing a Challenge and the Blue Text denotes the additional benefits of a Mighty Success when completing the challenge.

At the bottom, we have the rewards for successfully completing the encounter in the form of (from left to right) Glory, Treasure, Companions, and new Sorcerous knowledge. To the far right is a moon symbol, which tells the player how long the event lasts, in Lunar Cycles, if applicable.

EQUIPMENT CARDS 

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Equipment Cards are exactly what they sound like, tools to help the Hero complete Encounters and Adventures. They are pretty basic, with a title and a description as well as a Trade Value located at the bottom of the card in the Gold Coin icon. The value of objects varies from 0 (a Sling) to 5 (a ship complete with crew and supplies for months of travel).

  TREASURE CARDS 

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Treasure Cards are rewards that can be earned for the completion of Encounters or Adventures where rare items of great power and antiquity might show up. Like Equipment Cards they have a title (running down the side to help differentiate them) a description and a Trade Value.

COMPANION CARDS

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Companion Cards are another form of reward card, this time representing allies and boon companions who follow the hero for various reasons, but mainly to share in their glorious adventures (like Moonglum from the Elric series, Prospero from Conan, etc.). They give the Hero bonuses depending on their areas of expertise. There are three types, Minoer (with a single simple bonus), Major (with three bonuses) and Special (off the wall companions like the Antidjinn or the Cerulean Panther above).

SORCERY CARDS 

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In the game, there are two levels of sorcery. The first type, representing the lower level cantrips and 1st magnitude spells of the BoL RPG which represent quick off the cuff magic, is a general catch all mechanism for accomplishing challenges, tasks and combat which I will explain later. The second, representing the 2nd and 3rd magnitude spells of BoL which take massive amounts of preparation and resources, is represented by the spells on Sorcery Cards, which can be earned in the same way as Treasures and Companions.

Spells on cards are major affairs and are not only very difficult to cast (as indicated by the number in the triangle at the top) but also cause a massive drain on the sorcerer's arcane power, represented by the number on the book in the top left corner. Whereas the power used in the casting of minor spells returns almost immediately, the drain caused by the spells found on Sorcery Cards returns very slowly, over many game rounds.

In addition, these major incantations also require some form of personal sacrifice, indicated by the icons at the bottom. It might require (from left to right), self mortification (loss of Life Blood), the expenditure of valuable objects (Treasure Cards), the sacrifice of those closest to you, either figuratively or literally (Companion Cards), or the complete and absolute dedication to a ritual that takes an entire lunar month (the sorcerer misses an entire game round, not even recovering Life Blood, Arcane Power or Hero Points). 

All of these spells are powerful and most will have some permanent effect on the map, up to and including the destruction of entire spaces. They are always extremely costly, however and the results of failure can be equally catastrophic to the caster. This is intentional and highly representative of the Sword & Sorcery literature on which this game is based. Ultimate power comes at a price: treasure, time, physical well being, humanity, and ultimately, the caster's soul.

ADVENTURE CARDS 

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The final set of cards are the Adventure Cards. These represent grand quests made up of multiple tasks, smaller set Encounters, that are scattered across the map and must be completed in order. Adventures are the best and most productive way of earning glory, garnering double that of a normal encounter. Adventures are the heart and soul of For Glory and drive the Heroes towards concrete goals instead of wandering randomly across the landscape pulling Encounter cards (although they may pull plenty of these as they move from Task to Task).


Each Adventure also has a Failure Result that is triggered if the third and final  task on the card is failed or not completed within a certain amount of time ( represented by the moon symbol in the bottom right corner, if applicable). These effects can be global, and this means that certain adventures will affect every hero if failed, causing the Heroes to interact and even cooperate at times in order to complete them and stave off destruction.

In my next post, I'll talk about characters in the game, and after that, we'll look at how the game plays...