Thousand Hells · published
Welcome back Hell-Farers, It's Alexandra from Kitfox with a new devlog from David! Today we'd like to show off the encounter system in the game. Your party will come across a variety of challenges including combat and non-combat encounters like crafting, dealing with the gods or David's favourite, scuttlebutt. In fact, there will be over 20 different types of encounters for you to experience. Watch the devlog to see David talk more in detail about tactical narrative encounters and demos one in-game:
You can also read David's musings on the narrative system here: In many ways Thousand Hells is a typical narrative game. You’ll make choices that direct the story or build your character. But I think the tactical narrative game that Robin Laws and I came up with is innovative. It’s “tactical” because it doesn’t deal with larger decisions like “do we persuade or attack the guardian,” but rather “what steps do we take to persuade them?” It’s a flexible system that handles many sorts of challenges. By comparison, Griftlands has a system that handles either combat or negotiation. Thousand Hells has 20 types of challenges, from crafting to negotiating to dealing with gods to scuttlebutt. Signs of the Sojourner had a narrative card game that could handle many types of challenges. Their goal was to not just be a reskinned combat system, and they came up with an abstract game using symbols. In Thousand Hells, the tactical narrative is concrete, explicitly telling you what’s going on. We assume you’ve got a team of competent characters. The actions you’ll play are drawn from the abilities and personalities of your team, as well as significant events from your quest so far. This differs from I Was A Teenage Exocolonist’s card game, which is based on life events. Robin Laws helped shape it as a narrative-focused system, which means that it doesn’t try to cover all scenarios, but is tailored to one at a time. This means we can be more colorful, and have the flexibility to deal with the specific things that are special in a scenario. The narrative focus also supports relevant character banter, instead of more generic barks (which are usually a pool of short lines of dialog). In the tactical narrative, you’re presented with three situations which relate to the challenge. This changes as you play through them, reacting to what you’ve done or providing a fleeting opportunity. You’ll pick someone to lead in the challenge, the hero who’s in charge. Their traits will go in the hero bag. Each other team member contributes a trait to the team bag. Once you’ve drawn four tiles, you’ll choose one to play to one of the situations. Whether you win or lose a play depends on how well the action tile fits the situation, whether the relevant character has consequences, and a bit of chance. The tactical narrative leverages the scripting language, so playing a tile can result in narrative decisions. Occasionally there will be a crisis, which means you have to play to a specific situation. The game is asymmetric. You need to get 4 wins before losing 3 times — hell is stacked against you. So the tactical narrative game gives us a way to resolve scenarios by letting you pick how the story goes, essentially deploying your team’s abilities. It lets us deal with all sorts of story challenges, and we can provide lots of specific color and character remarks.
What would you to see David show off next time? Join us in the Kitfox Discord to chat about this and all updates to the game.
-Alexandra and David