One Deck Dungeon: Relics of the Forge

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! 

Greetings, dungeon enthusiasts and delvers! I hope everyone's had a good end of Summer. We've been playtesting and revising, and we're going to be locking in gameplay for Relics later this week, based on all the feedback and data. I had hoped to do that a few weeks ago, but it's been a frustrating few weeks for a number of reasons.

First off, my computer died and was in for repairs for a few days, which ground pretty much everything to a halt, and I've been playing catch-up since. Everything important's backed up, but I also needed to back up all the unimportant stuff. Not fun!

Aside from that, dealing with The World (TM) and some family medical stuff that's soaked up quite a bit of time. Things turned out positively, so that is good at least. Free time is back! Hurray.

Gameplay Lock-in

This Thursday we will be locking in gameplay for Relics for final testing, including releasing a revised PnP that you all are welcome to take a look at and either print, test, or simply comment on. This will allow us to move focus to finishing work on the other remaining content (Trove game modes, campaign mode for Relics) with a stable build of all the Relics, Encounters, Dungeons, and Bosses.

With my computer back in full operation, we can stream again! We will do a stream at 3PM this Thursday, and hopefully we'll be able to do Thursday streams again every week to show off design and testing of Dungeon and the other projects we're working on.

Target Schedule:

Here is our list of target dates for things going forward as we move toward printing at the factory:

9/24 - v0.99 PnP, Stream
10/1 (and Thursdays ongoing) - Stream
10/6 - Iconography + Relic Card Layouts (This had to wait for gameplay lock)
10/29 - Gameplay Lock for Relics Campaign, Trove game modes (This will be the next Update) 
11/10 - Layouts/Art for Relics Campaign + Trove game modes
12/8 - Print Ready / Proofreads
12/15 - File Submission to Factory

Thanks again to everyone for your support and patience! It's been a hard year for a variety of reasons, and I'm very thankful to all the backers who make what we do possible, and have been okay with us taking a bit of time to get this release done right.

Greetings Dungeon Adventurers! Let us begin with the important clickable things:

Print and Play - https://onedeckdungeon.com/Relics_9Up_PnP.pdf
Twitch Stream (Today, July 10, 3PM Eastern) - https://twitch.tv/asmadigames
YouTube Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzToZYGVGZM
Asmadi Games Discord - https://discord.gg/RwRbKZ9 (#playtest-signups channel)

And now on to the update of non-clickable things!

Design News

Things have continued moving along! Dungeons and Bosses are now in good shape, the Relics continue to be a lot of fun, and we've finished rebalancing all of the skills, spells, potions, and encounters to reflect the new fuel and forge system. Previously, a lot of skills were consuming some amount of fuel as a resource for secondary effects. Instead, many now let you forge a fuel to gain a benefit.

For example, Quick Strike:


Quick Strike is a relatively simple skill, exchange a yellow die for two better dice. But now you can feed a fuel into it to do it twice - even potentially using the gained 3 to pay for it! The drawback is that one fuel's added to the forge, bringing it one step closer to a Flare.

The Forge card (still temporary graphic design as we continue to balance) now lists its flare effects (in addition to your relic):



Spoiler: they're all pretty rough! But, with the ability to influence *when* the flare happens, you have an interesting strategy lever to pull during your runs. Finessing the just correct amount of extra forged fuel will be key to success.

The Print and Play has 5 relics included at the moment, and we'll be adding more to it in the coming weeks. Here's one that we're still testing internally but will be adding soon:

The Dimensional Key is one of the weirder Relics, it plays with the concept of throwing dice into exile and then getting them back to roll them in a torrent of power! Adding up to 4 dice to an encounter is great, but it comes with a great cost of potential damage. We're still tweaking the numbers a bit.

Also, I should note what while this visual presentation of the Relic is definitely better than the spreadsheet version, it is not actually done. We're working on something very cool for the visuals, and hope to share it later this summer as we get ready to print the game.

How about a boss? The Fire Drake has beefed up a lil bit since you may have seen it in demos:


The Drake's design reflects my overall goal with Relics' bosses: interesting choices and fights! As you can see, you have a couple different ways to tackle it!


Print and Play / Playtesting
The Print and Play PDF linked up top has all the encounter cards, bosses/dungeons, heroes, and the current forge card, along with 5 of the relics that will be in the set. You'd need a normal set of Dungeon for dice and some supporting cards, and you'd need to know how to play already. It's not a full from-scratch PnP.

Playtesting discussion and feedback will be happening on the Discord, but you can always send us feedback directly if you've got it. We're excited to have more people get to try out the game!

Schedule
We're closing in on gameplay completion for balance/design, but we're still a month or two away from locking everything down. Fortunately, most of the artwork is done so we won't see much for delays there. 

We will be at Gen Con at booth #1523, and PAX Unplugged in the fall. We're also going to be streaming starting today, and we have plans to stream the next two Thursdays (7/17, 7/24) in the same 3PM slot with a mix of upcoming games alongside Dungeon. 

Greetings, friends and dungeon associates!

The World.

Before I get into gameplay things, I want to briefly touch on tariffs. The landscape in that regard has changed rapidly and repeatedly over the past few months, and I expect the next few months to probably be similar. Simply put, there isn't a lot of value in us trying to guess where it'll be when we ship until we are printing games. We will navigate it as best we can, based on the terrain that is in front of us at that moment. My hope remains that we will wind up in a place with a low, stable number that can be planned for.

The Game!

And now, the fun part of the update! Gameplay!

Over the past several months, I've been iterating on the Forge concept and the Relics concept, specifically focused on evolving the "two tier" system I referred to in the previous update.  At that time I anticipated making a set of simple relics and a set of advanced relics. But when I got down to it - the simple relics weren't particularly interesting enough to justify their existence. So instead - there will be two versions of the Forge, and the Forge will be required when playing with Relics (or a hybrid deck including Relics). One side of the Forge can be used *without* a Relic. Good for first plays, teaching plays, or hybrid games that want to stay simple. The other side will be used for normal play with Relics.

Why have a Forge without Relics? Because it allows fueling the forge to happen from skill, spell, and hero effects, dungeons, and encounters. If I were to constrict fuel generation *purely* to the Relics themselves, they wouldn't feel quite as integrated into the set as a whole. This allows for what we want - a set built around the Forge!

The Basic Forge has 4 slots, and these slots will only be filled with Fuel tokens. When it fills, there will be a Flare (negative effect), and it will empty. The Relic Forge has 9 slots, and they will be filled with a mixture of Fuel tokens and whatever your chosen Relic forges there.

For example, lets look at the current version of the Prism Talisman. Relics each have three effects. One that can be used during an encounter (color coded like normal skills), one used before an encounter (colored like a Heroic Feat), and one that happens when the Forge flares (colored red).



ABSORB lets you send 1 or 3 dice from your pool to the 9 slots by using the keyword forge. As a reward for forging 3, you get a black die equal to the highest die you sent.
REFRACT lets you use those stored dice. Returning two lets you swap those stats for an encounter or gain a heroic die - great for a Peril or Foe you're not set up to tackle! It replaces those dice with fuel tokens.
RAINBOW BURST happens immediately when the forge becomes full. It rolls all the dice stored in the forge - all 6s get exiled, but you can choose other die to keep in your pool. The rest go back, and fuel tokens are removed.

This trio of effects give you a little puzzle as to how to approach the game. You might build your hero out with one dominant stat and try to swap it often, or maybe focus on storing dice individually to gain the heroic die from Refract instead. Maybe you try and trigger Rainbow Burst at opportune times to get an extra die. Overall, you'll need to decide each game how to use your chosen Relic to best exploit its abilities, and that (we hope!) is fun to figure out :)

One other thing you may notice is that the 2P version of the Prism Talisman is designed to be used by both players together. Having two different "mini-relics" operating on the small dice pools of 2 players was not working at all, and so we decided to go with a shared relic model instead. 4P games will have two relics, each shared between a pair of players.

Here's the Ancient Tome, which operates in a wildly different fashion - you can use it to gain blue dice each encounter, but if you don't spend time studying, you'll be in trouble! If you do study, though, the rewards are significant...
 


We have working prototypes for 11 Relics, and we're testing and balancing them right now. We expect that testing to continue through June - and ideally we'll get to stream some of those tests now that things are coming together. This concept and flow for Relics is one we're getting more confident in by the way, and once we lock in the rules, layout of the cards will begin. The Relics cards will be text-dense and not require a lot in the ways of art, just templating to make it all clean and easy to read.

Schedule

So, given all that, where are we? We're much closer than our last update, but not quite done yet. Playtesting and balance are crucial to this game and set working properly. Our goal is to go to print this summer, and right now that seems pretty attainable. We will of course monitor the continuing tariff shenanigans, and plan accordingly when the time comes.

A big Thank You all for your patience and the many kind words shared in public and in private with us. It has been an extremely difficult year for the entire games industry (and frankly the world). Supporting the people you care about and/or the people who make the things you care about goes a long way. We want to make cool things for you, and the more we can focus on that, the better!

Next Update

Aside from streams, which we really want to resume in June, my plan is to move to Monthly updates at this point. Expect one in late June. Hopefully the Relic cards will look a bit nicer than what's above by then :) 

Hey friends, I'm sorry it's been a while since we updated, it has been an eventful couple months both in the real world, and in the game world. Before I get into specifics, which I will below, I'm going to share the date news - we're not ready for print yet, and my estimate is that we'll go to print (meaning everything is approved/we press "print button" at factory) in late June.

This is obviously not where I planned to be! We wanted to go to print in December, to be ready for a summer 2025 release. Here's where we're at with parts of the game:

Art

Art is going very well! Almost all illustration for the game is complete, and what's left is iconography updates and small pictures for the Relics cards. Here's three more baddies that'll be standing in the way of your dungeon crawling adventures:


We've also got many more new unseen foes + perils, but we'll leave some of them to your future imagination and discovery. Overall, we're super excited about how all the art came out! Relics of the Forge is going to be a very cool looking set. The bosses in particular are fantastic.

Game Design

So here's where the trouble comes in, and sadly, this falls squarely upon me (Chris). We've now tested Relics at Gen Con, a lot of in person and streamed games, and at PAX Unplugged. It works okay, but it's not as good as it could be, and we're over our complexity budget for first plays. I took a few weeks after PAX U to digest how demos there had gone - PAX has many more casual gamers + demo-seekers than we saw at Gen Con, and it became very clear to me that we need a better onboarding system/set of mechanics for Relics of the Forge both as an expansion, and as a stand-alone product. Simply put, new players were going to have trouble.

This does not mean that we're going to strip down the fun complexities that make using relics interesting. Instead, what I've been working on for the past month+, and what I'm hoping will be ready to show in a couple weeks, is a two-tier system for Relics and for the Forge. The large Forge card will be double-sided, and the relic you choose will dictate which side of the Forge you use (in a 2P game - you'll need to pick relics for the same side). The version of the Forge you've all seen in demos and streams will be the "advanced" (it won't be called that) side, and the other side will be more streamlined, with less bookkeeping and upfront rules complexity.

The goal of the two-tier system is to get new players on the ground rolling (dice) as quickly as possible, while preserving the wild relics fun that we built last year. I'm pretty confident in the solution I've got cooking, and hope to show it to you all in a stream in a couple weeks! 

I was hoping to have the system ready to show before making this update, but enough time has passed that I just needed to share where're at now. Again, sorry for the slowness, and I'm very sorry the game isn't ready when I wanted it to be, and when you all wanted it to be. It's been a pretty garbage time to get creative work done, but I'm pushing through as best i can. I thank all of you for your patience - and if this timeline isn't something you're interested in waiting for, we always give full refunds to anyone who asks. Just send an email to [email protected] and we'll process it promptly.

Tarriffs

We'll deal with whatever chaos comes as it comes. It's a shameful situation that we've all been put in, and that's really all there is to say.

Production

We've got good quotes for production, and anticipate no issues with getting the game made once we have files ready.