Roll 3d6 - RPG Resources

Introduction

As happens now and then, I had a desire to play multi-handed solo a game that would take a little effort. I started relearning the rules to Oath but then I got sidetracked by chasing down what's going on with the upcoming New Foundations, [1] so I didn't make any progress on playing that game. However, I do still remember the rules to Arcs and even its expansion The Blighted Reach, so I opted to play that again. [2]

In the past weeks, I've spent most of my game time apart from this (and inching forward on The Drowned City campaign for Arkham trying out a new design based on my resent design inspiration blog entry about I, Napoleon: Taking Design Inspiration #7: The Spine of I, Napoleon

Back to the Reach

This time I wanted to fit within two requirements:
:star: Play the A-fates I haven't used yet - The FOUNDER and The CARETAKER
:star: Play them really really aggressively.

Unlike previously, I'll aim to keep this short...

Arcs - Act I

So the FOUNDER really wants to break away from the empire and start a new empire but one with blackjack and so on, and the CARETAKER has some sort of space-balls he is looking for. Yeah, yeah, whatever. Oh, the FOUNDER broke away immediately and the slugfest began. Lots of red and blue dice flying about and no one concerned with the blight at all. Needless to say, neither of these A-fates lasted, even if the CARETAKER did manage to collect all his space-balls. The CARETAKER was way ahead on points. I think the FOUNDER ended with 0?

Arcs - Act II

In Act II, the CARETAKER became the BLIGHT SPEAKER, a good call since there was a ton of blight everywhere, right? Meanwhile the FOUNDER became the PATHFINDER who had the right idea: get out of this galaxy! They still traded blows, but I kind of got invested in their objectives and both of them ended up succeeding although the presence of civilization on the map was pretty thin.

I had to invent a different minigame to handle the "where's the portal?" problem, but some random dice rolls did this well enough as a simulation.

Arcs - Act III

In Act III, the hands drawn were extremely lame. There was a lot of moving and application of Survival Overrides (think: suicide ships) by the BLIGHT SPEAKER against the PATHFINDER but the PATHFINDER was able to get all his pilgrims out of there and continually make and pump ships to a different galaxy, so by the end what was a massive distance from the lead became a victory for the PATHFINDER! But really, everyone's a winner since the BLIGHT SPEAKER got to stay in a galaxy of happy blight!

An enjoyable epic. As before, ya gotta work a bit to make this game play multihanded. The trick-taking cards aren't so much the issue if you have a memory like a sieve or can occupy another player's perspective well enough, but genuine mind-games fall apart, and Arcs has them here and there with certain fates.

I'd love to play the campaign with a group again but right now I don't relish the multi-game teach just to get them there. But maybe I'll gradually nudge my current regular group into a mindset where they are ready for it and it'll make it worth the effort on my part.

We, Mythic Bastionlanders

Having recently played I, Napoleon again, I started thinking if I could use its biography simulation flip/play deck mechanic in a game where you make cards as you go. I decided to use the prompts and world set dressing in Mythic Bastionland as a framework for this so I didn't have to make up everything and it would let me play with one of my usually languishing RPG books.

For those not in the know, Mythic Bastionland is a Arthurian-esque game of knights going on quests and encountering often very elemental and ... mythic things. Naturally, it being an RPG, I am never going to play it with a group. But I like the prompts in it, and I thought they might translate nicely into cards and make a playable and replayable card game.

And it does!

But to be honest... it's not quite fun enough, and that's kind of the big problem with it. While this prototype design I had in mind works and I did enjoy playing it, my goal is to have a replayable deck that I'd want to return to, and while I did win the campaign after 16 games, I don't think I'd want to play this again without some major revisions.

I wanted to get that out up front so when I describe the game, you don't think I am building up to releasing rules for it or recommending my idea.

Starting Out

Some of the design principles:

:nostar: Each "game" you flip cards from the deck and do what is on them. Very simple!
:nostar: The deck ultimately (when totally finished) has 100 cards (so you can just buy a pack of index cards to play it).
:nostar: There are ten different sets (A-J) of 10 cards each (A0-A9) and the deck starts with A0 - J0 and the others are added during play.
:nostar: Games end when you have drawn A0-D0, which I'll describe below.
:nostar: Campaigns end when every possible knight (you get knights!) is dead (a loss) or when you complete one of the six quest lines in the deck.

A-D sets are a mix of knights and random encounters. The A0-D0 cards are hubs that when played you roll 2D6 and from you add one of nine cards based on the roll

A1 for 2 to 3

A2 for 4

...

A8 for 10

A9 for 11 to 12

Y'all get the idea.

The Knights

So each game will see stuff get added to the deck. The A3 - A7 cards are knights. And when you roll them they are added to the deck. Kind of like the generals in I, Napoleon you commit them to encounters or quests and unlike I, Napoleon they die A LOT.

A knight consists of an index (letter + digit), a name, four "stats", and a text blurb for flavor. These knights are kinda dead-lifted from Mythic Bastionland but with me riffing on them.

The stats... oh, buddy. You know what they are:

These have some rough correspondences to skills, but we'll get into that a little lower down.

But wait... I said four, not six, right?

Well, a given knight has four of the six. Two he's good at. Two he is extremely bad at. Four random suits are picked and assigned such that the knight gets:
:nostar: +1 STAT
:nostar: -1 STAT
:nostar: A. STAT
:nostar: D. STAT

Where A means "advantage" (roll twice, take higher) like in D&D and D is "disadvantage" (roll twice, take lower). Every encounter has a test that will use two stats, so sometimes you get lucky and a knight is perfect for it and you can assign him. More often, a knight be kinda good and even sometimes a knight might be good and bad at a thing.

Let's have an example card...


D4 - The Bloody Knight

+1 HEART

-1 SUN

A. HAND

D. MOON

There's a lot of room for flavor text on a regular index card, and I did write full descriptions for several of the knights, but it's not always necessary. Plus many died early. However, because it is replayable from the start of a campaign, I can always come back and write in descriptions for underspecified knights!

The Random Encounters

The 1, 2, 8, and 9 cards for A-D are random encounters. [3] A random encounter is quite simple. It consists of an index (letter + digit), an encounter name, some description of the encounter, and the test with three tiers of outcome.

Obviously, the test and outcomes probably will influence the name and the text, right? What are those?

Well, a "test" is a pair of two different suits. There are fifteen of them and they all have thematic names. Yes, so not every pair is present. I tried to stick to actions a knight might take that would involve some risk if failed, so they are things like HEART + HAND = BRAWL or MOON + FOOT = SNEAK. There's a sense that the suits are a stat (e.g., HEART is constitution and HAND is strength) so they pair to a thing you do with them. Some are fighting focused but many are social or some other action. Not a big fan of making STEAL for the knights, but they gotta do what they gotta do...

By the way, our Bloody Knight, well... SUN + MOON = BEFRIEND, so he's not going to be Mister Popular. Pretty good at BRAWLing though...

Anyway, the outcomes are swingy, very swingy. You roll two dice and reroll doubles and the values determine the tiers for fail/pass/win at card creation.

The lower tier outcome? The knight dies. The card is then removed from the deck.

The mid tier outcome? You just discard the card and it'll make like Frosty the Snowman and come back again someday.

The upper tier outcome? You win and score points (yes, you track a score) equal to the tier value. The card is then removed.

So if at creation, you roll a 1 and 6, the lose tier is only if a knight rolls a 1 but the score tier requires a 7! So only +1 STAT knights can get it.

As I said, this is very swingy and it really needs to be reined in. I don't know how best to do it yet, but I know it needs it but without being totally boring.

In play, when the card is revealed later from the deck you assign a knight in play to face it and see what happens. [4] If there's no knight in play, then you ignore the card and keep drawing. This can sometimes mean an early knight to show up faces an encounter that's really bad for him and he croaks. No judgments. That's just what happens in this game. It happens a lot.

The Quest Lines

Card sets E-J are six "quest-lines" which basically work like the random encounters, except...

:nostaR: I based mine on six random quests in Mythic Bastionland
:nostar: Mid-tier points to a path forward
:nostar: Upper-tier points to a path forward (sometimes an alternate one) and you score the card
:nostar: Naturally lower tier outcomes still kill the knight. Oh, but if you lose one of these encounters, then the quest line is lost. So yeah, you also lose if all six quest lines end...

The last card in the quest line (after you beat six encounters), if beaten at the upper tier, wins you the game.

Playing This Game - Notes on a Campaign

I probably populated about 50 of the 100 cards in the sample game I played. That's great because it means there's still things to discover if I play it again.

The scoring is really uninteresting but I usually score at least one card per game. Maybe over a campaign it'll look meaningful if i track them against each other. It's hard to know. I don't think scoring is that important but it'd be good to have a way of gauging how well you did and to make the upper tiers for random encounters do something.

The deck never gets too big. In my game, it was always around 10-15 cards. The A0-D0 never leave and constantly push new knights into the company of bumbling do-gooders. Random encounters come and go, and quests will dwindle but never too much.

The quest my company won by the end of the campaign was "THE GOBLIN" which was a fun one. There's 72 of these in Mythic Bastionland and each has minimum enough prompts to support six encounters and questlines are six deep with a few alternate paths so this works out well. I didn't get too far in several of the other quests. The opening card for the quests begin with the little poem Chris McDowall put on each of the quests, which I enjoyed reading and transcribing on my cards. It made each of them very exciting initially to get into.

The campaign did drag and I was ready for it to be over by game 10 even if it ran to game 16. This is probably an artifact of you have to get to that last quest and hope you win it and if you don't back to the drawing board if you got mid-tier. So this probably needs some changing up.

Anyway, the final deck consisted of the following once the goblin was defeated by the company of knights:

:star: A0-D0 (always in there)
:star: C7 - THE FOX KNIGHT
:star: D7 - THE BARBED KNIGHT
:star: D8 - THE DUST KNIGHT
:star: B7 - THE MASK KNIGHT
:star: C8 - THE IRON KNIGHT
:star: D4 - THE BLOODY KNIGHT (the best knight, who's with me??)

I think with a little space, I can return to this and flesh it out some more. The cards are simple enough I can tweak them if I choose. I think there's potential here even if it's super rough right now and not something I'd recommend over A) finding friends and B) playing Mythic Bastionland with them. [5]

If you are interested in hearing more details about how this works or what the deck looks like, let me know in a comment and I’ll describe it further. I figure anyone who actually makes it to this paragraph might be interested.

Or... OR(!) maybe making a different game based around the content I like most in Mythic Bastionland. I have a game framework I have been sitting on that this might be a better thematic fit for than the both rickety and rigid flip/play RPG design I described here.

The East Path Through the Drowned City [6]

I got through two more scenarios of The Drowned City for AH:TCG. This involved wind blowing between spires, a confusing level, but despite some early difficulty comprehending how it worked, Lucius and Michael survived. Then they had to deal with an elevator to move on further. Neither of these were real stand out scenarios.

I enjoyed them well enough, but I think I was more focused on trying to do my task (I picked a rough one, I think...it's the one where you have to reveal locations, ugh) than the game mechanisms. I did like how Michael was basically able to kill anything he wanted. I also finally upgraded Michael with this first "action distortion" exceptional card. Just in time for the campaign to be half over. Thankfully he starts out strong.

I'm not really getting into this campaign as I used to do, but to be fair I also didn't much like Feast of Hemlock Vale on the first play and I enjoyed it much more the second time, [7] so I don't trust first impressions too much on the campaigns.

It's been a while since I talked about all the previews for the "chapter two" stuff. I really appreciate the steady stream of getting all those out there by FFG. It does underscore this is more of a second edition that's sufficiently backward compatible you can play the old campaigns, but I really think there should be a hard line between the player cards since there are so many slight changes and cards that are functionally the same as the original, sometimes with new art and sometimes with old art, among the many reprints. Not surprising there are so many reprints in the core, but I hope that won't be so common in the investigator content going forward.

It's hard to say much of it is interesting in the new core (except for Isabelle Barnes) since it is building out a "new foundation" for the game, but I hope the scenarios and encounter sets are strong and distinct from the old Umhordoth story. Even still it's going to be the campaign stuff that makes or breaks this. I hope they aren't ditching long campaigns entirely. There was some chatter about that, but it's hard to know if people are over-interpreting every little word out of FFG. I mean, I have done that too. [8]

Anyway, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, all! I hope you enjoyed some part of this long all-over-the-place post.

Endnotes

[1] OK, so I can't easily tell what the current state of New Foundations is now, other than it looks like a lot of Oath is removed & replaced. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place. I'm still really interested in this but I think I'd need a lot more clarity about what it'll be like in the end. Oath, as is, is so strong, I don't know if the do-over is needed for me. Especially, since one thing I do know about the current version is you have to start over the chronicle to play it.

[2] My first playthrough using 4-players is written up at greater length here: Trying out Arcs (the Blighted Reach) Multihanded Solo

[3] OK, actually, I changed this partway through so the index numbers don't have to line up with the dice distribution (basically you instead increment a number as you add cards randomly at creation), but it's easier to explain like this and functionally the same.

[4] By the way, when you first make it you just discard it, which I probably should've said earlier, but I didn't.

[5] Micro-Review: Mythic Bastionland is a great book, fun to read, through, and really sparks my imagination. The only reason I didn't say it was the best RPG of 2025 on the other blog is I feel I should play it to state that. But here's a read-through-based recommendation in an endnote for you.

[6] Or maybe west? I don't remember actually.

[7] Except the last scenario which is way WAY too long. It's also super hard, but that's fine.

[8] Maybe they'll still surprise us with a "timejump to modern" at some point! Probably not in the offing anytime soon, thankfully.

WWR BONUS ☉ Perfect Ten x Why We Roll: Elden Ring
Posted: Tue, 23 Dec 12:09:31

A new episode has been added to the database: WWR BONUS ☉ Perfect Ten x Why We Roll: Elden Ring