Current video game project and Darkest Dungeon

Niels and I have been working on our latest video game. We've successfully collaborated before: I still love Choose Your Own CaveVenture and Low Res Dungeoneer was nice considering the short time we had during that game jam. What we're currently working on still doesn't have a title (CyoCV didn't have one until rather late either). When I first made up the mechanics, I jokingly called it Martest Dungeon, because it is my own take on Darkest Dungeon's excellent design and theme. I do hope, the joke-title doesn't stick though. Red Hook Studios might have something bad or lawyery to say about that.

Anyway, some thoughts on the design. First of all, I like the feel of Darkest Dungeon a lot, specifically the cast of vaguely historic badasses. When I read that some fan at some event asked the devs, what time the game was set in, I thought "What a fool! It's The Past, obviously!" You have a crusader, a dude with a flintlock pistol, a musketeer and a beak-masked plague doctor all fighting alongside. And it works. So I made up my own cast of vaguely historic badasses (although I did copy the plague doctor – you don't get around their iconic masks when going this route).

As my dungeon project started it conceptual life as a solo card game, characters are more simple than those in Darkest Dungeon. Every one of them has a maximum of three *things* about them. As combat is done by the party as a whole (same for groups of monsters), some characters have one of their things being that they add one point to the overall attack value. Roll a D6 on or under that attack value and the enemy party receives a point of damage. Base damage for the heroes is 1.

The party always acts as one: You get a pool of attack points and you distribute damage to whoever you want. You can generally only use one special skill in an action (although there is a character who changes that). Yet, characters interact in interesting ways, a well-composed party will be able to do tremendous effects both offensively as well as defensively.

Every hero only has 1 HP - lose  that and they are wounded. That means they are still part of the group but cannot use any of their attributes. They can, however, be healed in several ways, some of them coming from other party members, some from rooms of the dungeon. Also you can heal a wounded character in the village after you return. Some characters have mana points to fuel special abilities, some have special abilities to refill those for other characters.

In Darkest Dungeon there are a lot of ressources to balance while exploring the dungeon: Health, stress, money, light, firewood, food, experience and some less essential ones as well. Thinking about a card game I simplyfied things for my game: There is health, mana and monster tokens (effectively money). Exploration is linear, there are no branches but you can go back if need be. There is no escaping the dungeon once you entered: You need to make it out on the other end of nine rooms/encounters. There you can decide to go home or go deeper. Do the latter and you get another nine rooms

We currently have a working prototype with some features active, others have yet to be implemented. I do have the problem of graphic assets to solve. If anyone is interested in drawing tons of gothic badasses and creepy locations: Feel free to contact me.

Heroica: Our Houserules

My son and I have been playing Heroica about every other evening these days. To make it more interesting and fun, I have made some minor rule changes, pretty much all of them regarding characters and boss monsters. Let's delve into them.

Play Report: Heroica with my son

My first-born and I cleaned up his little childreen's desk and assembled all of the Heroica we have into one big land full of danger and adventure. I knew that this campaign against four bosses and their minions spanning several different regions would take a long while (it wasn't our first big campaign, but the first one involving stuff we had designed and built ourselves). It would replace a chunk of goodnight-reading for a couple of evenings. What we have looks like this:

Our Heroica land is ready to be adventured in.

To the left you see the village with the graveyard. It is connected to the grassy lawn which leads into the secret tunnel (both are my son's work), the forest and the catacombs. Beyond the forest there is the goblin fortress. The four bosses are distributed over the lands, each in their own boss room and guarded by patrolling minions. Each of us got two characters, one to play and one spare. The other heroes were hanging out in the inn, with the exceptions of the king and the red mage, who were imprisoned in the cells connecting the catacombs and the goblin fortress. We play with permadeath to characters, by the way.

Expanding Heroica

My older son and I have been playing a round of Heroica every couple of nights now. We have some hous rules, such as bosses having different stats/abilities and the shop being an actual location you have to go to. I've been wanting to make that store part of a small village for a while. This would not only make the world bigger but also give the heroes a home location they need to return to every once in a while to stock up on consumables and equipment. Now I don't have the studded 2x2 plates needed for actual Heroica-style tiles yet (they should be in the mail to me) but I do have build a village:

The store, to the right, is the same one (but I added a window in order to make it more clear that this represents an actual building. The inn is in the background. The place has two tables and a bar, seating up to ten microfigures. A jug from that barrel costs a gold piece and heals one HP – it's for situations where you can't afford a health drink (or they're sold out). The village square has a nice tree in the center and to the left there is a path to the graveyard.

Speaking of the graveyard: That's the new home of the Vampire now. Lacking some parts of the desert temple set that the Golem Lord resides in, that dude needed a new home and now rules over the flooded catacombs that originally belonged to the Vampire. Also, the vampire's minions, zombies and bats, fit well with the graveyard. Naturally, my son wanted in on the construction of the village and added his own stuff. It looked like this:

A grassy area, another store and a long secret tunnel are his additions. I had to swallow my perfectionist pride once again (having sworn never to become the dad from the Lego Movie) and just let him add to the world without any regard on playability or coherent design. Let him do it, it's his Lego now. In that picture you see the bigger crypt (with the cross) that the vampire will reside in. When he dies, he turns into the giant bat, arguably the most powerful of the bosses in our Heroica-world. That means that, despite him sitting right next to the starting village, it is advisable to go after the other bosses first in order to stock up on magical and non-magical gear before facing that monster.

Our fully assembled Heroica-world now has four regions: The village with the graveyard (boss: The Vampire/Giant bat), the forest of Waldurk (boss: The Dark Druid), the catacombs of Ilrion (boss: The Golem Lord) and the Fortress of Fortraan (boss: The Goblin King). The Vampire gets replaced by the vampire bat upon his death, which has 4 HP and deals damage equal to its remaining life. The Dark Druid has no special rules yet. The Golem Lord summons a bat everytime he wounds an enemy. The Goblin King has the helmet and thus an extra HP. Each of them has a magical item that can be looted – and usually some gold stashed by their lair.

I have also made some slight changes to the character rules. As we play cooperatively, you can pass items back and forth when close to one another. The knight no longer has the jump+stab special move but can roll a save die when hit, the shield preventing damage.  The jump+stab is now the domain of the prince. The king has no special move, he is kinda old after all. Also, the archer is female in our games and I intend to buy some microfigs online to add one or two more girls to the mix. Shame that Lego didn't even have a token female among the heroes originally.

Next up: A play report of our first big campaign involving said village.

Kill Team: Re-entering a hobby

I like the basic principle of table top strategy a lot. As a youth, I had a Warhammer-army of dark elves. They sucked and I only ever played against my best friend who first had a high elf army, later an orcish one. 2000 points were our usual match size. I had spent a considerable part of my disposable money on the hobby over the course of about two years, roughly age 13-15. I was in the process of getting my troops painted so I could participate in 1500-point-tournaments at our local hobby place. Then GW decided to reboot the dark elves, making all my models worthless.

Thoughts on Heroica

My first-born and I have been playing Heroica every once in a while now. When Lego released this little board game with a dash of fantasy-rpg mixed in there, I was stoked but quickly disappointed when I actually read the rules of the one set I bought. Now, years later and as a father of two sons, I see where its target audience lies. And I know that hacking this is part of the design.

We've been lucky enough to acquire a few additional sets from a friend of mine at an okay price (the full sets have become somewhat expensive since they're out of production). We do not play in competition but in cooperation. That means, the monsters barely stand a chance. We do have permadeath for characters but each of us usually has two characters spare waiting for the first one to die.

Our current landscape. (c) 2020 Me on my Blog.

My son with his five years loves the thing. A usual run through all the lands we have usually takes us around 45 minutes, a good time for a kid his age. He generally spends the next thirty to sixty minutes after that playing with no rules and making his own stories into that world. It's really rather excellent and something I totally didn't account for when I bought the game as a university student with no offspring in sight.

Some things need to be changed about the monsters in order to make them more different from each other. The Goblin King in our game usually has that helmet-thingy and thus an additional HP. The Vampire can, of course, replace himself upon his death with the Giant Bat which has four HP and a damage rating equal to its HP – it is out of the box the most interesting beast in the game. Still trying to figure out how to make the Druid and the Golem Lord more interesting without breaking the game.

I also intend to make the game bigger and perhaps even add come characters. This will cost me some money and I need to scour BrickLink for some items but I think it could work. Perhaps a central village and one or two new landscapes with enemies like spiders and rats can be done without too much trouble. Also some female heroes are totally in order. When I get around to all that. Perhaps, when my second son becomes old enough to join us.