More Heroica Bosses

My older son and I made some more boss enemies for Heroica. It's basically a continuation of this post. It's easier to make boss enemies than regular foes. The regular beasties require tiny figurines and are, rules-wise, rather boring. So, here's three new bosses and their rules:

The Chained Snake: My son made this boss and its rules. It has 3 HP and can not only fight in close combat, but also attack a specific field in the corridor leading up to it by spitting acid there. If a character ends on that squre, you roll a combat die but cannot harm the snake. Shield: You deal one damage to the snake. Sword or sword/skull: You lose one HP. Skull: You lose three HP. A tough monster to fight.

The Sewer Kraken: This boss has a setpiece. You gotta get past its tentacles before attacking it from a square behind it. On the dark grey squares, it can attempt to grab you with an attack roll. If it hits, you get into the appropriate tentacle. On your next turn it hands you over to the next tentacle and you roll another combat roll. On sword or shield, you get free, on skull, you lose another HP. That way, the Kraken will make you run the parcours again. Once you're behind it, you can actually hurt it. It has 3 HP.

The Hydra: With as much as 6 HP, the Hydra is very hard to kill. For every two HP you take off of it, it loses one of its three heads. Combat rolls function normally, the Hydra deals damage equal to its remaining heads. So it's basically a more defensive version of the Giant Bat.

So our new bosses include our first experiments with bosses that have ranged attacks. Also, the Kraken can, like the Giant Spider, manipulate the heroes and their positioning. This makes for a far more dynamic battle and is balanced out with the low damage output of this boss. The Hydra is, in my opinion, the coolest looking of the trio but also mechanically the most boring one as it is just a straight-up fight.

In the future I will likely design more set-piece-fights like the one against the Kraken. That one is, by the way, ideal to be placed in the sewers, reinfocing the Monsters in the depths.

Instant Dungeon

So, these days I (and all my co-workers) work from home. The virus is threatening public life where I am, although it has yet to spread wide enough to cause panic. No one wears masks in public (yet). Because we're a society that has forgotten that threats beyond vague promises of terrorism can and do exist. And our state agencies are failing where they can. So better stay home with the family.

As I save time of my regular bycicle commute every day, I've had not just more time to spend with the family but also to do creative stuff. My older son and I have been playing a lot of Heroica and I was thinking about how to make a modular dungeony board game (once again). I have a writing block that I use to doodle during calls for work - and I decided to use said doodling for a useful cause. A new game is in the making. What's special about this one is that I am doing a lot of artwork.

16 Pages thus far, each one representing a business meeting over remote work. They can be rearranged in whatever order, most combinations allow for every part of the labyrinth to be traversed in some way.

Even if it doesn't become an actual playable game it will probably look decent enough when spread out together as a labyrinth on a table. But the idea is that everyone gets a character to play and that chests mean loot, monsters mean fighting, big monsters mean big fights. Keys open doors, obviously. Loot will come in the form of equipment cards that each have different benefits, from giving you extra HP to better fighting to lockpicking and all that. Have yet to think of actual rules but it will be a fun, kid-friendly labyrinth/dungeoncrawl once done.

The cool thing is that it inspired my older son to make his own version of the game. It's even bigger than mine.

Megaman

Lately I've been, for the first time in ever, dabbling in something one might consider to be fan fiction. I've always despised using other people's characters but my son made a wish for Easter: Dad, make me a megaman Tonie. Tonies are, for those without a young child in their life, figurines with an rfid-chip that can access cloud-based audio when placed on the appropriate speaker box. The makers offer some figures with ready-made audio plays (my son is listening the The Little Prince right now as I am typing this). And ones you can freely upload stuff for.

My son never played a Megaman game. My son never saw the 90s cartoon with its terrible soundtrack. His peers have no idea who or what Megaman is. He only knows what he heard then I explained to him that I was going to a concert by the Protomen this fall. And what he saw in fan-made music videos to their work. That was enough for him to wish for a Megaman action figure for christmas, which he likes to play with in conjunction with landscapes made out of Lego Duplo.

And now he wanted a Tonie. There is no Megaman Tonie. There isn't even an audio play I could use. And the cartoon show is terrible. I needed to improvise and create stuff myself, just like when he asked me to make a PJ Masks Tonie. At least he accepted that I'd drill into his Megaman action figure to install the chip from a butchered Tonie.

So the main reason why I haven't been blogging during the past weeks hasn't been the virus or a lack of creativity. It's rather that for three weeks, every minute of my free time was consumed by creating an audio play about Megaman. 32 Minutes of it, with music in the background, robot voices and lots of Pew-Pew-soundeffekts and explosions. One hell of a lot of work that the public will never know because I have no rights to any of the stuff in the play except my text.

It's magnificient. It's epic. It's just for one little boy who, I know that, will religiously listen to it five times back to back this Easter.