Upon a Throne of Bone - taking shape.

So Friday morning – me and SH (if he's got a blog I don't know about it) sat down and talk over 'Upon A Throne Of Bone'. It was nice to have somebody to talk to and bounce ideas off – you can roughly outline stuff, check what the other person meant, and explore why you might want certain things. It also let me talk about 'Aye Dark Overlord' and it's clear that story telling game is a major inspiration to me. In fact what I'm trying to do is create little mini rounds of Aye Dark Overlord but ones in which you've not automatically failed and are in fact defending how well you actually did.....

This is me trying to get as much of that down in one place as possible – if for no other reason then it lets SH point out stuff I'd completely forgotten.

I think most of the structure from the previous posts can stay.

But I shared the background that had been rattling around in my head for a while – which made some of the rest of the game decisions lock into place so that's worth sharing....

It is the time of the great conjunction – for a brief while the dark forces can escape there prisons and threaten the lands of men - but soon enough the conjunction will end and the dark forces will once more me pulled back. Each overlord wishes to be remembered as they greatest force of terror once the conjunction is over while your minions wish to ensure they go back into the prison as your most favoured minion. Because if it's bad enough being trapped in the prison with a bored and angry overlord – now imagine how much worse it is if your trapped in a supernatural prison with a bored and angry overlord who does not hold a grudge against you......

Game wise this means the basic structure is - Overlords want to gain terror but have few ways of gaining terror directly. They do control resources that minions can use to gain terror – and they control the distribution of favour to minions.

Two special case for that however....

Minions will have a little mission card (whim cards) which if they complete will gain them a minor amount of favour directly – filling whims the overlord player has no idea he has. This is to give a minion a reason to go slightly off mission in an effort to fullfill a whim.

Also the overlord during the resolution phase will be able to be involved in some sort of puzzle game – seeking to unlock powerful bonus resources and also obtaining terror directly. This is currently a bit mastermind based more details to follow however the tokens for use in the game are obtained via actions in the world (ie raiding, destroying locations).

One key aspect is that we are giving the overlord player some tools to help them manage there minions but the managerial style they adopt is entirely there choice.

There was also a lot of discussion about the conflict resolution system – it's still a work in progress but there was a lot going on there.

There are kingdoms – kingdoms are a collection of 'things' that are held together by a single central strong location. Destroying that strong location destroys the kingdom and all associated things giving a really large amount of terror (and brings a new, stronger kingdom into play).....

Destroying locations within that kingdom give you terror and weakens the central location making it easier to destroy.

You can also choose to raid a kingdom – which gathers you resources and/or terror and weakens the kingdom as well.

The full conflict resolution is used when trying to destroying a location or when fighting another overlords forces.

Locations and monsters have four statistics. These are guile, magic, strength, and swords. A location can also have requirements – for example at least 3 magic, or other keyword requirements. For example the location 'the lonely crag' requires 'flying'.

Combat does not involve any dice – this is because we wanted to remove the 'I rolled badly' excuse for minions. However some randomness was felt to be good – so each location will be dealt a card that changes it's values in some way. That card will remain in effect for the whole turn – so every person interacting against the same strength.

The intent is that a combat will take place in 4 stages – a guile stage, a magic (magic could be called ranged) stage, a strength stage, and a casualties stage. The strength stage decides the winner of the combat – while the guile and magic stage have an impact on the up and coming conflict.

The intent of the combat system is to limit casualties so nobody will ever lose to much in a single go; that a weaker attacker can have an impact on a stronger force allowing 'spoiler attacks'.

The current rough idea is that the winner of the guile contest sends a monster home (back to the overlords base) with a strength no greater then the amount they won by; the winner of the magic contest kills a monster with a strength no greater then the amount they won by; the highest strength wins the contest; the loser takes a casualty with a strength no greater then the amount they lost by as does the person with the least swords (you guessed it) with a strength no greater then they amount they lost by. Person inflicting the casualty choices – if no player is present to decide the lose then the strongest possible is removed – with a dice roll breaking ties. This may well need some sort of tweaking for balance but that is the current idea.

Spells are carried by minions – and if a minion is present at a battle they can play a spell (powered by mana) to effect the battle. Minions get spells and mana of the Overlord - but once they've got them they are there's to use or not use.  Some sort of spell hard limit is required I think.....

 A minion may also decide to count themselves as having single point of any characteristic (including swords) for the duration of a contest.

Not all contests use the full method – a number of them are simple auction contests. In those cases a minion counts as the resource – and then also wins ties (if your still tied then it's coin flip time).

Raiding is a bidding system based around guile – the amount of guile you have sent is your bid and highest bid takes the first pile of resources (gold and terror).

Obtaining plans is a bidding system based around gold – the highest amount of gold gets first pick of available plans. This means that players are setting the prices of rooms.....

Controlling hero's is a bidding system – currently based around the magic statistic (corruption).
A hero remains stationary unless somebody bids for control of that hero. The evil overlord at the bottom of the terror track will gain bonus biding that can only be used when bidding for control of a hero – because hero's will tend towards fighting the biggest and meanest hero.

A hero placed on a location will add there statistics to that locations difficulty.  So a hero does not affect raiding, obtaining building plans, or obtaining hero's.

A hero placed upon an overlords base will attack that base – causing damage and costing terror. How a base defends itself is not clear – it wants to be a slow grind through the base destroying things until the heroes are worn down. But not sure how to make that happen.

We are currently missing a quest mechanic – allowing minions and overlords to pursue particular goals. One end of this is simple enough – completing a quest opens up a new location that has a token based requirement to attack it while giving you the token. The other end of the process and making that interesting and unique is not yet clear although it may involve using tokens obtained from activities such as raiding that are also useful in the overlord puzzle game.


Overall a very useful meeting – getting even a skeleton of a system agreed is a fantastic step forwards.