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From publisher blurb:
This is our 38th installment of the one-page dungeon series. The objective is to create self-contained adventures/dungeons with all things necessary to spawn fun adventures on a single page. It is system-neutral so it can be easily ported to any system. It shouldn't be much trouble to include it in any medieval setting.
In The Bands of Power, hundreds of years ago, a master forger created a powerful pair of armbands. The Bands of Power earned their name for obvious reasons. The king, for whom the bands were forged, became the most powerful and feared dwarf of the northern territories. But he gained many enemies and soon, he was murdered. The bands got lost in history, hidden, and never found. But that is about to change.
This is an adventure where a group of villagers, dreaming of better lives and glory, accept to be hired as dungeon explorers. They are supposed to retrieve a pair of armbands for their employer, a man named Hartvigg. If they succeed, what will they do with such power?
- Immersive world and accessible setup
- Strong world-building and quest structure
- Can lean into storytelling over deep mechanics
- politics, history, and relationships in a lived-in world
- open-world world of animal folk
- story-driven with app-assisted storytelling
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- App Assisted — App handles story and quest flow
- app-driven story — App handles story and quest flow
- dice-based skill checks — Skill checks resolve actions
- Open-world exploration — Persistent world with quests
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- This War of Mine is brutal and depressing and sometimes disturbing because the stories presented are based on real events from real wars.
- Being themed around Lord of the Rings helps, of course. It's so easy to visualize all the locations and the characters as this alternative narrative plays out.
- Card games rarely feel this thematic.
- Lands of Gowser features many streamlined mechanisms for making the game simple to set up, to play, and to put away.
- Sleeping Gods has everything that I want in an adventure game.