Today we have everyone's favorite sort of update, one with pretty pictures! Up until now, all of the images we've shown of relics and the forge itself are my own very professional photoshop chop jobs. But perhaps you'd like to see a couple Relics laid out by professional artists:
The Ancient Tome (1P)
Bloodstone (1P)
We're still tweaking a few things, but this is close to the final presentation. As you can see, this is an entirely new template - we've added a little icon to visually distinguish each relic, and different backgrounds for the Relic abilities. No more scrolls, but with the colors matching skills and feats. Each relic has 3 abilities, always in the same order. The top one can be used during an encounter like a skill, the second before an encounter like a feat, and the third is the flare effect that happens when the forge is full.
The Relic card is designed to sit atop the Forge, which is also much shinier than before:
The two artworks are connected to show the flow of fiery lava fuel from the Relic to the Forge. The nine slots for fuel are now along the bottom edge of the card, much like the Fiends from Abyssal Depths. The text layout on the Forge card is still going through some revisions, we'll be tailoring the embers and sparks in the background so that they don't interfere with the words once that part is finalized.
What's up next? The rulebook! We'll be working on that over the next couple weeks now that things are finalized, rules-wise. We've been using the alpha implementation of Relics in the digital version of One Deck Dungeon to do lots of bonus rapid playtesting and that's allowed us to make some of the gameplay and balance tweaks with more confidence. That's our last major piece of layout work to be done before being ready to hit the factory.
Overall progress in March was slower than hoped, I was sick for most of the month but we managed to get as much as we could done, and fingers crossed that's the end of the illness for the season. Let the spring and warmth begin!
It has been a wild few weeks up here in the northeast. Can I see the ground outside yet? No, haha. 17" of snow here last week (36" in some spots near us!), but amidst that all, progress!
We initially planned for 8 Relics to be included with Relics of the Forge. Stretch goals unlocked another 3, and due to me forgetting that 8+3 = 11 shocking generosity, we've completed design work on 12 Relics! I'm really excited about how differently the game plays with each of these, ranging from the comfy defensive Safety Pin to the wildly aggressive Emerald Blade. Let's take a look at two of the new ones:
The Luminous Chime (seen before in a different, early concept) gives you an interesting mix of rerolling capabilities and bonus heroic dice - but fuel can stack up in a hurry!
The Emerald Blade absorbs loot opportunities to give you powerful blasts of dice! It's power won't last forever though, so use it sparingly...
All 12 relics, along with some other balance, wording, and clarity changes are available in the PnP PDF.
As you may have noticed, the Relic cards and the Forge are functional but a little messy. That's because they're still on my (not artist) template while we figured out the quantity of text and iconography each would need. The iterations over the last 3 months have reduced the wordiness significantly, and pulled away some from some over-complexity issues. Now that these are locked in aside from small balance tweaks, our next task is to create the Actual Print Files. It will look nicer :) We're also making a unique icon for each of the relics, so they have a little more visual separation from one another!
Schedule
We have two games in the print queue with our factory right now (Mystic Curling Club & Chess Joker), and our aim is to have Relics + the Vault ready to follow once those are complete.
Next tasks are laying out the Relics changes to the rulebook, finishing the card layouts as mentioned above, and tackling production plans with the factory about the precise shape + size of the Vault box, so as best to house the games.
I will be at PAX East at the end of March, hope to see some of you there if you're around!
The PnP that was posted Friday had a couple errors - the Large cards were from a previous version, apologies for that (it was corrected later Friday). Escape The Dungeon! / Bonus Dungeons PnP: https://www.onedeckdungeon.com/Escape_BonusDungeons_9Up_PnP.pdf
In the second PDF we have the new Escape The Dungeon! mode and the alternate challenge bosses (This PDF contains all 6 Forest of Shadows dungeons/bosses). Here's a meaner Poison Elemental:
Each alternate boss/dungeon places a new twist on their idea. The Poison Elemental now restricts dice during the boss fight instead of exiling poison tokens. They're hard! Good luck :)
Greetings adventurers. I want to apologize again for the delay in this update, which was planned for the end of December. "The first few days of January will be fine, not too late," I said to myself, before encountering the January card. (And as a bonus, we're about to get steamrolled by 2 feet of snow Sunday night!)
A second computer catastrophe arrived, with a friend's ransomware infection spreading to my machine - thankfully only partially! My Discord account was briefly the victim of a session hijack, but I got it quickly under control before any significant damage was done. I got disconnected from a few servers and lost my friends list - annoying, but not the end of the world. To be safe, did a full wipe, format + reinstall of everything on my main computer, along with updating every single password I use just in case they were exposed. Its taken a week+ to get everything back in operation, but I'm now 99% there! Woo.
For Dungeon, nothing in our Google Drive was compromised (Art, older games, etc), but I did lose some local/temporary work files that were just on my machine, which unfortunately included the Print + Play stuff. I've finished rebuilding most of that, and you can find the updated PnP at:
This contains a number of wording fixes + other small typo changes since the last PnP. In terms of balance changes, there are a few, but mostly things are okay!
Heroes Shade: Changed Smokescreen to be more interesting and flow better. More door-opening! Smith: Made Tinker slightly better (can return 1 or 2 forged fuel now)
Skills Cunning Blow: A little too strong, now gives a boost instead of agi-5 Infusion: Reduced to increase four dice from five
Dungeons Arena of Fire: 3rd floor Peril box 4->2 (look how nice we are!) The Obsidiarmy: Changed one box from 5-6 (nevermind) Tropic of Lava (Floor 2): Changed from exact match to within-1.
Next up are the Escape Mode and Alternate Dungeon changes. We'll be showing those Sunday at 1PM Eastern on Twitch (twitch.tv/asmadigames/ ) - I'll be streaming my InDesign adventures re-building those parts of the file and then putting out the PDF file for you all. If you've got any design questions or just want to hang out and hear more, come join!
Escape the Dungeon! (Formerly "Escape Mode")
The "Escape the Dungeon!" game module allows you to risk some of the campaign mode checkmarks you've earned at the conclusion of a successful dungeon run. You will face three Escape Challenges - each success will earn you checkmarks, each failure will cost them. Here's how it works:
1) Plan Your Route Flip the top three cards of the Escape Deck face-up, in a line. You may discard and replace an Escape Card by discarding one of your Skills or Potion Tokens, as many times as you want (until you're out of them!). Each discard represents finding an alternate route out of the dungeon!
2) Assign Dice Gather your full pool of dice (including items and your encounter bonus) and divide them among the three Escape Cards.
3) Escape! Encounter each of the three Escape Cards, in order. For each card, roll all the dice you placed on that card, and attempt to fill all its boxes. During the escape, you don't use your relics, feats, or skills. Instead, you can discard one of your earned items to increase a matching die by 2, or discard a skill to reroll any die. If you fill in the entire card, success! (Escape Cards tuck under your hero card to track checkmarks earned/lost)
Escape the Dungeon! only takes a few minutes to play after an ODD game, and we hope it adds a bit of extra spice to your experience. We'll be showing off the module on Sunday on Twitch as mentioned above, and its PnP will be available later that day.
Timeline Updates
Our plan is to complete file work on the game this Winter, for a late Spring/early Summer release. The last two months have been unkind, and we hope to regain the momentum and get this all finished! We're nearly done, and the game is feeling in a pretty good place balance-wise. With work ongoing on the digital version, we'll likely get to do a bit of testing there as well before we lock in files.
If any backer wants a refund for any reason, just shoot us an email at [email protected] and we'll take care of it for you.
Again, sorry for the delays and slowness of updates, looking forward to a February of Better Times!
Hello dungeon friends! Apologies that this update wasn't right after Turkey time, as planned. I got sick, and have been off and on for the last couple weeks. It's the annoying fatigue sick without all the exciting other symptoms, but I don't recommend it regardless. The key takeaway: don't forget to bring a healer in your adventuring party!
Stretch Goals: Escape Mode, Alternate Dungeons
The good news is that we've locked in the gameplay updates for Escape Mode, which is a bit later than I'd hoped, but it's proven to be a really fun addition. Both of these stretch-goal additions to the Trove are aiming to make Campaign Mode play more varied. Escape mode provides a quick 5-minute cap to a successful dungeon run. How you do during the escape will affect how many checkmarks your game was worth - you can't lose outright, but if you come out of the dungeon charred and full of muck, maybe your adventure wasn't quite as impressive as it looked!
Work on the Alternate Dungeons is nearly complete also. These are exactly what they sound like - an alternate version of each dungeon in ODD, ODD: Forest, and ODD: Relics. Different floor abilities, and a modified boss fight for each one. Some are harder, some are easier (and have their difficulty rating set as such).
We will be releasing a print and play of the Alternate Dungeons and Escape Mode later in December for final external testing.
Art Complete (again)
Thanks to a miscount by yours truly, we did not in fact have all the enemy art done! This meanie here is a 4-EXP foe you'll be facing in Relics: the Prism Elemental.
It looks forward to ending some percentage of your dungeon runs in bright, colorful fashion.
Updated Schedule
Work this fall got bogged down more than planned due to sick, conventions, and by some other things we needed to do to deal with the state of the World, so we're 8-ish weeks behind the schedule I laid out in the last update. Our next update will be the PnP release later in December of the Trove materials.
Happy holiday times to all, of the variety of holidays you may celebrate or not celebrate!
