Malhya: Lands of Legends - Campaign Playthrough Episode 1
Transcript
Heat. Heat.
Heat. Heat.
Hello everyone. Welcome to Rob's Gaming Table. I'm Rob.
I'm Mel.
And today we're going to be playing Malia: Lands of Legends. Uh we're starting a new campaign series. For those new to the channel, we play board games live on YouTube. Um, you know that cuz you clicked on it. But, uh, we sometimes play giant campaign games like this one.
Mhm.
And sometimes we play them all the way through. Sometimes we don't. Sometimes we get bored and we quit. Sometimes the game sucks and uh we just don't want to play it anymore. So, full disclosure, uh, we purchased this game with our own funds four years ago. Uh, I expected to play this on the channel like two years ago. Um, but we just got the game five months ago or something, maybe less in Canada, but um, Mel has painted most of it, so we are able to play it for you. But this was purchased with our own funds, not we're not being paid by the publisher to play it. They did not send us a review copy. Uh, this is fully supported by these folks scrolling by right here and others that uh, support the channel. Uh, also, uh, Segway Solo Side Quest, thank you for becoming a producer again and clicking the join button down below. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for the support. Um, so yeah, we're just going to play this. Uh, I'm not here to play this to make you buy it or not buy it. That just sometimes happens um in both cases. So don't have your lawyers call me or your angry wives or husbands about buying the game or anything like that or not buying it or whatever. But uh I'm playing this cuz I want to play it. We backed this live on stream four years ago. Did you do it live?
I did it live. Yeah. Yeah. I was live doing one of my old um coffee crowdfunding and coffee chats where we were just going through crowdfunding campaigns.
Yeah.
Uh and a little story, this one popped out to me because it's fantasy. It's a giant box. Uh and it has a bunch of miniatures in it. So, and it's on crowdfunding. So, I backed it
just instinctively, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Like no thought. Anything that's a big box, has a ton of content in it, like paper and cardboard and plastic,
uh, costs a bunch of money, and, uh, is on crowdfunding, I just buy them all. No, I'm just kidding. I don't do that or I'd be broke.
Um, cuz that that describes every single crowdfunding campaign ever for board games. Um,
yeah. Anyways, uh, so I back this for science. Uh, I remember people in the live chat, uh, of our community saying, "Do not back this." Uh, they were not interested in backing it. It looked like a past and I remember overriding that and spending their money on it. Suckers.
Yeah, you got to find
these guys money suckers. Uh I spent your money on it. Thank you for supporting the channel by the way. Uh on this game uh for science and because it looked really cool uh because it had one thing I remember that was different. And I went back and watched the the preview videos or whatever for the the the crowdfunding campaign and it not was just the normal dungeon crawler and not a bunch of story books. Like we played games like this before on the channel. Uh the ones that I can say are most closely to this game that we've streamed and I think both of them we stream like a lot of if not the whole games kind of thing. I know one of them we definitely didn't do all the content for because there's way too much. Um but the game that this most closely reminds me of is Folklore the Affliction. Mhm.
And a close second, I would say the more recent one that we played. This definitely gives me vibes of Aridia. And I know why that is. Uh because these are both described as RPGs in a box. They are meant to be board games trying to take an RPG, you know, that's like a book, paper, your imagination, some dice, and then give you a ton of components and charge you a ton of money and put it all in a big box so you can play it like a board game. and you don't need a a DM, you know, game master, you know, dungeon master, whatever. Um, and yeah, that's what this is like. Um, so if you're interested in those or you liked our Aridia series or you liked us playing Focal or the Affliction in the past, this is similar, but I didn't back it just cuz like those games. I don't even know if I played those games at that time.
Definitely not Aridia,
but it's fantasy. It looked like dungeon crawlery, but it had a stealth mode. And the stealth mode is what most interested me because most of the games we play that are like this campaign, dungeon crawl, fantasy games don't have a stealth mechanism, set of rules, mode, whatever you want to call it. Uh, and this did. And that was the one thing that stuck in my head is like, okay, they're trying something different compared to like all the other games like this we played. I will try it. I will back it and try it. And full disclosure, all we've played so far is there's a tutorial that we found later after trying to play the recommended book you learn the rules with, which sucked ass and didn't teach us any rules. Uh, it's horrible, but it's uh they then based on community backlash uh released a proper tutorial to walk you through the rules. Mel and I have played through that. Uh, we've also we played through a little bit of the book we're going to play today, which is the introductory book to get you started on a campaign to show you a bit of everything in the game a little bit. So, um, we're not super rules experts, but we're going to try to figure it out as we do normally. Uh, if you notice any rules, mistakes, leave them in the comments below. Time stamp it if you can. Uh, not just to help us in the future in future episodes, but also maybe help other people who are watching this might be trying to figure out the game and learn it. Um, to learn from our mistakes. But if you catch anything live, yell it in the chat, bring up questions. We don't mind. Uh we can figure it out. This is all live. For those watching later and are going to complain that the video is very long. Uh
it's because we're playing this live, so we can't predict the future. We're going to look up rules. We're going to stumble through stuff. We're going to have to use the FAQ or maybe look up some if we need to um and try to figure it out as we do with all these big games, right? especially these monpod design games that are on crowdfunding that maybe didn't put all the money in the right places like quality assurance, proofreading, translation, that kind of stuff. Uh, this is one of those crowdfunding games where it's like, yeah, they kind of they put a lot of paper and cardboard and plastic in the box, but they didn't spend the money on the quality assurance, play testing, translation, that kind of stuff. So, they're playing catch-up later. There's a lot of um documents released online to explain stuff where the rule book falls short. Um, but some of that stuff is even like not fully translated from French. Uh, where you'll find like lines of French just in the documents and even their latest rule book they released that has all the corrections still doesn't have all the corrections and the index that they made after the fact and stuff like that. So, this game's like a quite a hard game to learn. And why I'm telling you all this is just you understand why we might stumble a bit and have a little trouble getting into the game. It's one of those games for those that have been around the channel who know and anyone who backs a lot of crowdfunding games over the last, you know, 15 years or so like we have. Um, yeah, this is one of those games. This is not like the most polished. This is more of like a I backed it based on like I gambled knowing that there was some cool ideas. It looked like they had some love put into the project, but I backed it fully knowing this might be one of those crowdfunding games that just, you know, it's a crowdfunding game, not a retail
game. You know what I mean? like a not a fancy flight games polished, you know, has a department of rules lawyers kind of play testers kind of, you know, board game. It's one of those like couple dudes in a garage designed it and, you know, in another language and then, you know, paid some high school student to translate it and proofread it and that kind of stuff. So,
I'm excited to see.
Yeah. So, keep that in mind. Keep that in mind. I'm just doing that because like yes, I wear my heart on my sleeve. That's the right thing to say or I have no filter some people say.
So sometimes I like saying things that I like and don't like just as we play through live. I'll try to keep most of my thoughts to the end. But just when I put that up front as that's why we might struggle a little bit just cuz it's like one of those games. Tons of symbols. Uh it reminds me of like a Garfield game if that if that's right. That's a publisher that makes all those Euro games
um that all just have symbols on everything. Oh yeah,
there just like all symbols on every card, everything. This is like that. Just tons of symbols. So there's like 10 pages in the rule book that are all just like a glossery of symbols to learn.
Um again, I assume that's to save on translation cost so they don't have to translate all the cards and components, just the books. But um yeah,
so uh yeah, we're going to play through. Everyone knows what a Rob rant is who's been here a while. Yes, I might bust out into random Rob Rants. I just want to keep that in mind. Um, if we're still playing the game on the channel, just this is one thing to know. If we're still playing this game and you see on the playlist down below that we're on episode like 15, that means I'm having a good time, we're having fun and we're playing it and I like the game. Uh, again, we bought this with our money and I don't even care if I spent like $500 on the game. If I play it once or twice on stream and we're just not having fun and you guys aren't watching and we just we just think the game sucks or is boring, I will just stop and get rid of the game or throw it in the garbage. I don't even care what I do with it, whatever. But you know what I mean? Just so you guys understand. Um yeah, I'm playing I'm just a gamer like you and we're just playing it. So like anyone who comes and complains like I always get complaints that like we're playing a game that they are pissed off at the publisher or there's something wrong with the game and they're like yelling at me for playing it because they think I'm like working for the publisher or something. Um that's not the case. We just bought this game ourselves. We're just playing it for it on YouTube. Um the difference between me and you is I'm just streaming it live, not just playing it on my table or letting it collect dust or whatever on my shelf. But yeah, just just all I just want to put all that up front. I always forget to mention that stuff early in the playthroughs and then I get like the comments later.
Yeah.
So, it's like just trying to think of that stuff.
Yeah, I know. Velco, I know. I know. Uh
that's hilarious.
So, how do we pronounce the game title? Uh, Malia. Mal.
That's how I thought it was. Malia.
Yeah, Malia. And I think the only reason I know this cuz I watched a bunch of videos from the publisher back from the crowdfunding days. I went and found the playlist um where they just are going over like the stealth mode, the combat mode, the overworld mode, all these modes. They just have little like fiveminute videos and they they always keep saying Malia. Malia over again. Malia. Malia Lands of Legends. The most forgettable title you've ever read. So
you can say however you want if you
Yeah. Yeah. They made like a title that's like no one's googling that correctly to find what the game is if you forget it later. It's like Yeah. It's weird. But anyways, um so yeah, big campaign game. Um again, this is like an RPG in a box. Uh also some things I've learned uh when we're in the learning process over the last two weeks of like learning this game, getting this game ready to play. Um and and preparing for the stream. There is uh so I mentioned learn to play guide. So, if you have this game or getting this game or something, uh, just pro tip, I have a link in the video description to a Dropbox link from the publishers that has the tutorial translated from French into English and it also has the French obviously is there. Um, so if you're learning this game, don't learn with the book that comes with the game. They made a whole scenario you can print out or use on a computer or tablet or whatever.
Um, and you can play through that and learn the game. It's a better way to learn the game and see the systems and it reinforces some of the stuff from the poorly organized rule book. Um, so that is linked down below in the video description. So, start with that. We're not going to play that on stream cuz it's like very much like do the following 10 steps. This is how it works. It's like got lots of description of like and it links it or tells you which pages in the rule book if you want to read more about what you're learning right now. It's very very thorough, very well done. It just doesn't have anything on the um the travel phase which is kind of lame.
Oh, yeah. So that was the one thing. We've done it once just playing it on the table, but we didn't have like a learn to play to do it with. So we might struggle in the in the travel phase, like the overworld map phase a little bit as we like basically doing it live on stream for the first time. But um yeah, so that tutorial is pretty good. It's in the video description. Uh use it. It's way better than starting with what we're going to start with today. And what we're starting with today is not required to start a campaign, but it is recommended to play on your first time before starting a campaign. So you can like read the rules. It's supposed to be a little easier, but then they even added a ratta which will follow that makes it so you don't just get wiped and die right off the start. But this game I learned um from playing it and from researching online. It is very hard, very unforgiving, but it does have fail forward. It is meant to be like an RPG in the box. And what the publishers described it as is like you are expected um to play it like an RPG where like you will roll skill checks and obviously you can't pass everything and sometimes you will just die cuz you wandered into something kind of randomly that you shouldn't have and you can't handle it and you will just die and lose all your weapons and armor and yeah that would make me rage quit. You've seen that happen before. I get pissed at stuff like that. But I know this going in because I've been warned. I I read quite a bit on the game to understand it and was like not getting why all the complaints were about difficulty and stuff and why there's a ton of documents made after the game got out to the public that's like making optional easy modes and even easier easy modes and
easy easy super easy modes and stuff like that. And I was like I what is happening here? But the game is meant to play it through and just kind of go on the journey. You will always make it through to the end. like a fail forward um system and sometimes and we had this happen off stream where we just wandered like something happened a bad roll boom a monster like this was literally in like tutorial not the tutorial but the intro book
for your first time playing and we I'm not going to spoil what we ran into but it was some kind of beast monster thing and it was some crazy cool miniame but like we were literally have starter equipment and we there's No way we can beat it. We are going to die no matter what. And we died and we lost our weapons and armor down to bare hands.
Suppose we don't know for sure, but supposedly with fail forward and everything, the game is built to handle that. So yes, it feels super bad. You built up your character for a certain weapon and then you lose that weapon and now you get a new weapon maybe later and you're not stated for that weapon so that weapon kind of sucks for you. Whatever. It's that kind of game. or you'll lose some of the cool loot you have and you'll just get crappy loot or good loot later and the game will just rip it away and that's just how it is. It's just like your journey through the game will be different than someone else's just based on like random card draws, random rolls. Uh yeah, I'll show you. It's it's it's very if as long as you know that going in, it's going to be a roller coaster and it all those things that kind of piss me off in other games. I know it going in so hopefully it doesn't bother me. But
I think it'll still piss us off in the moment because who won't get mad when your armor and weapons are ripped away? But we're going to try really hard to not let it stop the campaign.
Yeah. Yeah. Uh so we're going in knowing this that it's it's got that stuff in it and we were warned about it. So I'm just kind of putting that out there up front in the video. So like you know that this is expected um that it's in the game cuz it's it wasn't something like I knew when I was backing it. But I knew based on once people got it in their hands, there was a lot of backlash about different aspects of the game, mainly the rule book and the difficulty.
Mhm. But um so we'll talk about the optional difficulty changes and we'll probably apply a few of them at least for this intro book just so we can play it kind of smoothly, show you the aspects of the game as minimal spoilers as possible. I'm going to consider this first intro book that you play on your first time as like there are spoilers in it. There are puzzles in it. We saw some of them. Um but we're going to play through them again. You guys can play along if you want. But spoilers spoilers. If you're going to play this, you already have an order. It's on your shelf and you haven't got to it yet. Um, yeah, you as long as you're okay the spoilers in the first little intro book. Um, but obviously heavy spoilers beyond that as we get into the other books of the campaign. This game is hund 100 hours or so is supposedly how long it takes to play through if if my understanding is correct. Um, because there's like 10 books to play through and each book's going to take like 10 hours or something like that of gameplay or some something like that. Um,
yeah, we didn't hear. Why is my notifications not playing out of my speaker? Uh, Adam or no, Mark, sorry, Mark, thank you for being a member for 43 months.
Thank you.
So, good chance of a rob. Yes. Uh, always ready for one of those. Maybe a table flip.
I'm getting older and the table's getting heavier. Uh, so I I don't know if I can still do those table flips.
There's also a lot of books and cards and minis and stuff on the table. Yeah, it's like that funny meme where it's like Friday, f this, and it shows an office worker like throwing paper in the air and then it's like Monday shows them on the ground crawling and picking it all off the floor. That would be me. Like I'm I'm picturing picking up all these there's like 100 decks of cards it feels like and tons of books and and and cubes and tokens. Tons of tokens. We'll show you. I do not want to clean all that stuff up off the floor. So yeah.
Yeah, I got to buy a lighter table.
Uh Adam, thank you for being a member for 45 months. Two more months than Mark. Just kidding. Uh Rob is playing a game where you lose loot. I'm I know. I know. When I When I read that I was like, "Oh man, Mel's already started painting this. Like I can't back out now. We got to at least play it a bit." Um so yeah, I am a little worried. I am a little worried. We're going to try it. I'm going to have faith in the designers. This game is supposedly pretty fun once you get through like the rough rules and some of the weird design choices and the difficulty in it. But um we'll adjust the difficulty just at the beginning and to get get into it a little smoother. But uh yeah, feel like you should be allowed to loot your own body both for the frustration but mostly the amusing meta of it all. So
this is one thing I want to say before I forget. Yeah, go ahead. um is one of the easy easy super easy modes they added after the fact from all the complaints is called explore mode where if you fail anything, die in a combat scenario, whatever, get wiped, party wiped, whatever, and you go to an entry where you're going to lose armor, um weapons, items, whatever, the explorer rules are forget anything negative you lose and just continue on up until you get to level five. then you're not allowed to use explore mode at all. But that is one. This is why this is what warden like I'm not sure it gets that bad. But there are some people probably just like I'm selling my game. I hate this game. Screw you. And like reviews online or something that the designers came up with that as a modification of the game. So that that warns me right there that like this is going to happen.
I just need to breathe deeply five or six times and continue on. It'll be fine. But yes, I'm a loot goblin in game. So like knowing you can just get all the stuff you built up just like completely wiped away. um you can ignore it up to level five. We might do some of that. I don't know if I want to go that like we play games like this all the time. So like maybe we're not the players that that rule or that modification is like targeted at. But like if you're buying this giant box game like I would assume you're like into games like Gloom Haven and stuff that like you will lose and you'll have to replay scenarios and sometimes you lose stuff. But I mean that one's not that harsh with that stuff. But um there are other ones that we've had like that. it.
Yogi, thank you so much for for 43 months. Thank you. Thank you.
Are our memberships not enough for the gym membership so you can do more deadlifts
so you can flip the table?
No. No, I don't lift, bro.
I just lift. I just lift boxes. I guess this game is
I lift too many bones in Cloudspire and Malia for like and and and uh
what's it? What's another huge heavy one? Youthia. These are what I This is my exercise. Moving those from one Kax cube to a table, maybe to a shelf, back to a Kax cube.
Sometimes up and down the stairs.
Oh, some Yes, this one's been up and down the stairs a few times.
Yeah. Yeah. I have I have a medical alert bracelet, too, just for these kind of games in case I fall down the stairs. Yep.
I've fallen and I can't get up. I'm underneath a board game box on the bottom step. Someone get me.
Oh, that's funny.
Uh, Adam, thank you for the $5 super chat. Thank you so much.
This is for the lighter table to flip Rob.
Thank you so much.
You guys are funny. Haha. Dust thou even hoist? Hey, Mike. Okay, Janice here says, "I've played through the first four books. Played the modified explore mode. Much nicer." So, Janet, would you recommend we just do that for the first bit at least of the stream just to
we don't lose anything?
Yeah. Yeah, you just kind of like if all of a sudden we we run into something that we can't handle cuz we're like way too low level. We shouldn't be fighting this thing. Um I think I also read wasn't one of the the modifications like you can just run from things, but I don't think that was a thing or like you just select the defeat defeated mode and then ignore all the defeats. I forget what it is. I should probably Google it cuz I looked at it like a few days ago. But do you recommend we should probably just do that for the first bit? I was definitely going to try some of the easy mode stuff. um which we can talk about um when I go down the table here. But yeah, sorry I got to go back up in the chat. I saw there was some questions and I was like, okay, do they at least have a glossery on the back page rule book? No, they made one later that's available online, but they didn't put it in the updated rule book that they've released online. It's a separate PDF that I have open that we'll use to then go back to the rule book to look things up. Um and they also didn't make the rule book they released a searchable PDF. So, there's actually a fan or a user player, whatever that on PG that made a searchable version and fixed it, did some whatever to fix it to make it searchable. So, I have that. I have a version that I've taken of the printable one and then I merged and split another one to add stuff in that I like and and made it so it's like more viewable on stream. So, yeah, it took me some work.
Um Yeah. Yeah. And I printed out all the corrections. They actually released all the corrections in a printable document um which I printed and I was I was going to print on sticker sheets but there's so many and it was expensive. So I was just like I've printed them on nice paper and color that I've been working slowly cutting them out and glue sticking them into the different books and there's a lot but they rank some of them as critical some of them as like medium and some as like eh it's just like a color is wrong not a big deal. Um, but there's quite a bit of correction. So, I'll show you that, but as we as we play through, yeah, and I've heard of the rule book falling apart because the bad glue job. It reminds me kind of like the Hexlorit um books that had the same problem. It's that the stupid like I don't know. I'll show you. It's a sp the weird spines that they should never use for a big thick book um that cracks and then the pages fall out. It's got like shitty glue in the spine.
Mhm.
Yeah, they have that for this game. How much is this game on eBay? I have no idea. again. We just backed it on crowdfunding like so many years ago. I don't even know what I spent. And and with inflation, what I spent back then is like three times the price now. So I I don't really because it was like 15 years ago. I backed it. So
yes, we got a deal. Sorry.
Yeah. Yeah. Uh okay. Going through here. Yeah. I'm going to try to stay positive. Going to try to have fun with the game. Uh, we're just going on a roller coaster ride through an adventure and we'll see see what happens. Lots of lots of RNG, lots of different dice to roll, lots of skill checks. It's like that kind of stuff. Um, but it looks neat and has some interesting stuff in it, so hopefully it's fun. Rule books falling apart when the game is still new. Never come across that before. Yeah, that happens in Hexlorit. At least the older printings of Hexlor It, the first one I remember that was an issue. There is one other game I remember it happening, but I don't remember the game. And then this one, but it hasn't happened to us yet, but I saw online people are complaining. 300 Canadian on eBay, says Yoki.
Interesting. Okay. Um, all right. So, this is what we're playing. Malia Lands of Legends came out last year technically, uh, 2025, late in the year. Um, people started getting their copies. Oh, the other thing I want to mention, it is recommended best with three. And it's not just because of like it feels more fun at three. this like the one I remember Mansion Madness second edition. It's literally more difficult with not like three is a sweet spot.
Oh
yeah. So I forgot to mention that to you. Um this game is you can play it one player but that means you have to play with at least two heroes. So two-handed so it's not true solo. Um and then again even solo players recommend playing with three characters because the difficulty is balanced best around the three hero mark. it can be played from two heroes to five heroes. Um, and we're only playing with two. So, that's another reason that is recommended. We probably should play with some of the easy rules modifications because it's just like the way group skill checks work and stuff like that. It's really silly. It's not It doesn't scale properly. It's just like um yeah, math thing. Uh Mike's asking why no Kyle. Uh we don't usually get Kyle in these like um games that take longer. Like we can save at any time in this game and a hero can jump in and out. Uh this game was just a [ __ ] to learn and I would not want to try to teach Kyle this game and have him figure it out and if he only came once every two weeks to play it and stuff like that. Like um this game is going to need us to play it like I plan on playing it like we're going to stream it twice this weekend. We'll probably play it in like two days. We'll play the other half of this intro book. Um, but we're gonna play it quite a bit for the first couple weeks and probably the onlyish game we might be playing just to kind of lock the rules in, get a good foundation of the system.
Um, and Kyle can't dedicate that kind of time to even come on a weekend usually and play for like, you know, a couple days on the same weekend for like many hours possibly. So, we're going to try to keep this first stream to like 3 to four hours max. Um, and whatever is left in this book, we'll just play the rest of it in the next stream. Um, you'll find that in the playlist down below if you're watching later. Um, and I'll schedule that after this stream. But yeah, that's our plan. So, just the whole scheduling is like the way it works. Um, and the the learning process, it's just not very friendly to like someone who might casually play it every now and then, if that makes sense.
Or even for us. Imagine having to like relearn it every two weeks if he doesn't come for a week.
It's just the way all the symbols in the game are and like um no ref no good references and stuff like that also hurt it. Yeah.
Um, yeah, it's very like um, yeah, not I don't know how to say it. This game is very like MPA, you know, like amateurish kind of a lot of aspects to it. So, like I like to play more polished games with Kyle so he's like doesn't get scared away from the hobby, you know what I mean? Um, so yeah. All right, if that makes sense. Okay, so the weight's a 3.63.
Okay.
60 to 180 minutes. But again, like you, they say it's better to stop playing at the start of a book, like each book. But each book like could take hours, especially streaming, we always it adds extra time. Of course, we're not even started and we're like 30 minutes in. I haven't even shown you the game on the table yet. Um, but yeah, it's uh it's going to take a bit. So I you can save any time. So literally, you could play for 20 minutes and you can save at any moment in the game. They have a quite a robust save sheet. You could save the state of anything. And they give you so many save sheets. You can actually, there's a bunch of standalone scenarios, uh, standalone missions you can play. There's a bunch of them. There's a separate book you can play through that is not connected to the campaign. And you could actually have multiple campaigns going, be playing separate missions, all of that, while you're still playing through one giant campaign or two giant campaigns, whatever. Just the way the save sheets work. You can literally put the whole game away, fully disassemble everything and sit down and take any save sheet and reset every every deck, every loot deck back up from scratch, everything based on your save sheet, which is very weird and cool that they did that. Um, but like I don't know how many people are like getting in a big campaign game and like, "Oh, this week I feel like playing with a whole bunch of different people on a standalone mission and I want to play with the same characters and the same decks and all that stuff." You got to like you got to disassemble everything at that point. But the save sheet lets you record everything.
Everything. Um, yeah, which is nuts. So again, your play time can be 10 minutes, it can be 10 hours. Like it's the save sheet works for it. The game handles it, which is very uh interesting. And the player jumping in and jumping out is like fully flexible. You can add heroes, change your heroes, change your player count, all that stuff. No problem. It's all there, which is very clever, very neat. I like that stuff. I like the flexibility. even if I don't use it all the time. I just like when games put that kind of in into the design. So there you go. All right. Uh so we are playing through uh here's the books. I just want to show you. So it's like this is insane. So do not expect us to play all this stuff, but if we do, this game has to be like amazing for us to be if we're like in book nine or whatever. Um this is the event booklet. Uh this is literally just the random and kind of events that can pop up.
um different skill checks, mini games, things that just show up, whatever. Tons of There's like so many pages. Okay. There's just events you look up that may or may not happen every now and then. Okay. So, there's a ton. All right. Uh what's what else do I have? I have Oh, this this is the exploration booklet. So, when you go in exploration mode, which could be uh dungeons, combat scenarios, stealth scenarios, uh even mini games that fully have their own sets of little rules that you play. And I think like um Aridia did that and a folklore I think did that kind of stuff where all of a sudden like you're going through the story, you do some skill checks, and then boom, set up this little map, and now you're playing through this mini game with special rules, and it's not just a normal fight, trying to keep it spicy and interesting. Um, Aridia did that kind of stuff too where we're like in little mini games.
We're playing like all of a sudden we're like
murder mystery would pop out and we're playing this little mini game. Um, this has that kind of stuff too in here.
Uh, and I just want to show you how it's doublesided. This is like all the different little scenarios, stealth, combat, um, that could show up in your campaign based on things happening. And then there's like a ton of little mini games and stuff, all these weird pages that don't look like tiles. Um, yeah, there is a ton of crap in this game. And I don't think you see it all when you play through, but like it's it's this gets called on by like all these books. These are all the different um like chapters to the story. And like you're you're always pulling from these books as you go through which like tons of stuff. Um which is neat. And it'll kind of show that off in these like this stream and the next stream will kind of like you'll see some of that stuff all get get touched on. And then in here are all the books. So we're going to start with the introduction booklet. This is what we'll play today on stream and the next stream. I'm assuming we don't get through it all today. Um, and this is going to give us like a way to see every kind of all the stuff from the rule book. So, like the travel phase, we'll get to see like the overworld phase, we'll get to see a stealth, we'll get to see a combat, we'll get to see some skill checks, we'll get to see a miniame of some kind, I assume. Um, all the different aspects of the game should be touched on here to basically apply your rules, your rule book knowledge. But you're supposed to fully understand the 84page rule book before you open this.
But again, there is that tutorial scenario that they've made after the game came out because of complaints is linked below in the video description in the Dropbox link. Go check out that if you're going to learn. We're not going to play on stream cuz boring, but this is what we're going to start with. And then when you're actually ready to start the full campaign, this does set you up and lead directly into the campaign, but you do not need to use this book if you don't want to or if you played it a bunch before. This book is just there to like kind of teach you stuff. Then you get into the main campaign, which is I think like nine books or something. And these books are much thicker than this intro book, but this intro book is like quite a bit of stuff in it.
Um, and you can play through all of these in a campaign. So, there's like tons of cool stuff as you go through. Again, I don't know if we'll make it all the way through. Do not hold us to it, but we have played certain campaign games on the channel for lit literally over like a year. So, I don't know if we'll do that with this game. Um, but it has the content there if we are having a good time. and you guys are liking it and want to watch it. Um, we will continue. So, yeah, I just want to show you that is nuts. Uh, so now now you know why the game took four years to come out. It's literally based on all the updates I was seeing. It was just them designing these books. They already had all the game mechanics done and all this stuff. The game mechanics never changed from the crowdfunding till now. You can go back watch those old tutorial videos they made on the crowdfunding. They're all 100% still accurate. They did not change any of the gameplay mechanisms. They only were working on these books the whole time and then getting them translated and that's what took so long um was them going through all creating all these books. Uh they ended up taking like twice as long as expected.
Um so yeah. Okay. All right. I don't know. Oh yeah. The the mode. Okay. So there is this little card here. This is like the difficulty mode card in the game that already came with the game. is if you want to drop the difficulty, you can apply any of these things or all of these things.
Well, that's the if we want to make it harder, right?
Uh oh, yeah.
Yeah,
there we go.
If we want to make it easier, we're not interested right now making it harder. We don't even we don't even feel like we have understanding fully of the rules. So, we're not we don't we're not going to go hardcore into it. But,
easy mode, uh so they have a modification for stealth mode. Uh, you basically pull one fewer upgrade tokens for enemies during combat. Those tokens basically change the enemy behavior. We play a lot of games like this. They usually have enemy behavior cards. In this game, they're like this. Um, and they have like static stuff. So, every time you might get three of these enemies on the board, they're all going to act the exact same way. But every time you run into them, they're the exact same. What this does, this system draws a token from this bag for each enemy group on the board and they get some random buff and that buff applies to them each round. It makes them much harder. So, you play with one few some enemies pull more tokens of these for the group. Um, but it just spices up the enemies every round. So, you can't just predict what they're going to do every single round. And it kind of spices up, makes the combat interesting. So, I'm not sure if we'll apply that.
Oh, actually I think this Yeah,
upgrade tokens or those. Yeah.
Yeah, that one. First one's for combat.
Oh, combat. Sorry, I said stealth. I meant combat. This is stealth, obviously. Shh. Um, stealth mode is draw one fewer action card to move enemies. So, normally the enemies will work on like a randomly card drawn little system. They they're like programmed, but it's random. Uh, and they will get like two sets of instructions or more depending on how much noise you've made, how much you've alerted them, how many guys have gone missing that you've murdered in the stealth scenario. And this kind of makes them so they don't get as aggressive and don't move as much and are less unpredictable. So, we could do that, but I don't know.
I don't think we need to do that one.
I don't know. But these are there.
Yeah. Um, and then in the skill checks, when you perform a check, uh, there's a special side on the die, which I'm assuming as you get later in the game, you get more items, these special sides go will get become more successes than one. Um, as we've seen, some items and some talents will buff that one symbol on a D12, I think it is.
Um, but normally that symbol is just blank unless you have items and stuff. And there's tons of different types of skill checks. So, you might have a climbing skill check that you roll this symbol, it'll be blank, but you might have two guys in your party or you have an a couple items and talents and stuff that help you in climbing skill checks and that will turn those into successes and they stack. So, you could in theory have like a couple items in a talent that might give you three successes every time this symbol shows up on a die, or it could be none. But this is just allowing you to basically say it's always at least one success and that's how you can tweak it. so that you kind of don't fail as much and don't have bad things happen. But again, the game is supposed to be help you with that and fail forward. So like we could apply some of these as they were intended. Um we could we'll play with the exploration mode, I guess.
Yeah, that one I I'm
also Yeah, cuz we had that experience happen. We played it off stream and we're like boom, we lost all of our stuff and Mel was like really? I'm like, "Yeah, this is what's supposed to happen in the game, and it's like supposed to take it into account, and this is why they made exploration mode."
Um,
oh, roleplayer adventure. Yes, that is another one that reminds me of that game, too. I even said it to Mel when I first got out all the books. I was like, "This reminds me of Role Player Adventure."
Yes, that is another game. Yes. Yes. Yes. Uh, it definitely has some aspects of that and gives that kind of vibe, too. And that game's supposed to be like RPG in a box, the same thing
where you're just like going through the stories and there is some branching paths within each book,
but you always kind of meet back up at the same spot and then start the next book, you know, and that kind of stuff. So, yes, good call on that one.
Um, and yes, we play through that one on the channel, too.
Shameless plug. Uh, if you want to check out that game, you're interested in that, too. We've played through a bunch of that. I think we played the whole thing in that, too.
So, we had some good times with that one. Um
yeah, I think if we play with exploration mode, I don't know if we need to play with any of those other ones and we can do they can be added or like we can pick one of these any time in the campaign, right? Like if we're playing and we're like this is too hard, we can then incorporate one of those and then if we're like, oh, okay, actually we are kind of crushing now that we've done that, we can put it back.
Or do we have to set it from the beginning?
Sorry, start again. I was zoned out.
That's okay. For this,
I was I was thinking of something was said in the chat, but yeah, sorry.
No worries. No worries. for this. Can we like throughout the campaign, can we add and bring them back?
Yes.
Yeah. Yeah. That's what I said.
So, we don't have to do it static at the end.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
You can literally in the in the rules it says you can apply any of these all these whenever you want. Take them away as long as you're not in the middle of an action or a skill check or whatever. You can't just like roll your dice and be like,
"Oh, now I want
you know what? On this skill check, I think I want to apply the easy rules all of a sudden."
Okay. But you could just be like after you fail a skill check, be like, "All right, this that's the final time I'm going to see eight helmets come up in a skill check. I'm applying the rule on the next one and forward." You could do that totally fine.
Um, yeah. So, we can adjust this. So, I'm keeping this card out and ready nearby just in case we want to mess around with it.
Um, and then I'm going to look up explore mode right now.
Okay.
And see if I can find it.
Yeah, cuz I don't think we need any of those other ones yet. As long as I don't lose
exploration mode. As
long as I don't lose my items, that's
Well, I'm okay losing like an item here and there, especially if the game's going to throw them at you all the time. That's fine. But I don't know if that's how the game works.
I don't know if they expect you to like you lost all your weapons. Now you got to crawl your ass to a shop at a town. If you can find one.
Oh my god.
And then use gold you hopefully have not lost and then buy yourself a basic ass item to keep going. I don't know.
Oh, Jana wants to see some painted minis. just hold up our heroes at least.
Okay,
we can show the enemies and stuff as we go. Or Mel can hold up the tray.
I'll hold up the tray.
All the big ones are still upstairs. We haven't brought down any of the bosses.
These are painted just using speed paints.
Um, and I'll
Oh, not exploration mode. What am I calling?
I'll hold up the tray in a sec.
What is it called again?
I thought it was exploration mode.
No, that's that's like the mode in the actual game where you go down to like the combats and stealths.
Oh, what is it called? I just brain farted.
Janet, help us.
Hold on. I'm scrolling back. Janet, call this something.
Is it like excav exhibition mode or something? I forget. I swear it started with an E
and it was the other day. Again, it was the other day I read about it. Um,
some of the enemies.
Oh, you know where it can be.
Additional characters in the middle there.
Probably in the rules for him.
Explorer mode.
Explorer. Well, that's what Ron says with a question mark.
No, Ron's probably right. Ron's probably right. Yeah. Yeah. Explore mode. That's the e word I'm looking for.
Thank you all very much for your kind words. Um, again, I use speed uh Army Painter speed paints paint these up. The big ones are all upstairs. So, okay, I think I found it.
So, based on reading these forums a lot, looking up rules over the last couple weeks, learning this game, Pixel Boy works for them or is a Oh,
okay.
translator, publisher, something on the English side, I think, because he's got decent English. Uh, reminder that when facing early events, which can sometimes be frustrating due to their difficulty for a group of heroes who are still relatively inexperienced, you can activate explore mode. Explorer mode on.
Oh, so we can activate it when we're going to lose an item. We can be like, uh, I'm activating explorer mode.
Yeah. you just have to chant the the following statement. Uh up to and including level four. So basically once we hit level five, so we've leveled up a fifth time instantly, we're never allowed to do this again.
Okay,
which I'm assuming is after that they account for you to get wiped and they probably give you tons of stuff and it's like not as bad or you figured out the game enough now that like you don't need training wheels. Stop.
Yeah. you'll like ruin the game maybe because they want you to see some of the things that happen when you fail checks and when you lose stuff. It's like part of the part of the adventure, part of the story, part of the fun. And they've worked it all in to like 10 different scenario books. So like I'm okay with that. But yes, I do want to get through the first first book or two and make it nice and smooth so we can have people can watch it, kind of see what's involved. But I like talking about this up front so people know going in. They don't buy this game and not know this stuff like I did back when I backed on crowdfunding. Like that's the advantage sometimes of waiting until the game comes out and everyone gets their hands on it. You get to learn about this stuff and then if you like it or don't like it, you can then buy it secondhand or get it on the next crowdfunding campaign or buy it at retail or whatever and you can deal with it or not.
Um so you can to flee from a battle in the event book which is what wiped us. I remember it was in the event book. We should not have been dealing with what we're dealing with or to surrender depending on the outcome of the confrontation. Oh no. Is a thunderstorm today? I hope our power doesn't go out. That was loud. Uh oh my god. All right. To flee from a battle event book or to surrender depending on the outcome of a confrontation. In that case, yeah, the translation is not the greatest here. um go to the paragraph indicated for a defeat cuz obviously they don't have you're not going to just pick the I want to win the scenario. But if you want to run from it, just go to the same um entry in the book that you would if you got wiped and defeated and all died or knocked out. Um but don't apply any negative effects, loss of equipment, gold, hit points, etc. Uh you may then continue your adventure normally from level five onward. Explorer mode is no longer available. Well, you know, once you're a true hero, there's no running away.
Okay, so this is what we're going to try then for the first I don't know, maybe we do it for the first few I don't know how many levels we go up even in the first book. Maybe we go up like four levels. I have no idea, but uh we'll find out. Um but we're going to just take a quick little break.
Yeah, I just want to close I
cuz we have all the windows open upstairs and I hear it is freaking pouring. She's not checking
and uh yeah, we're going to close the windows. Be right back.
Hallelujah.
All right, we're back. Yogi says, "If I left my windows open in my house, it would be full of snakes."
Oh, jeez.
And drop bears.
You don't have um uh what's it called?
Screens.
Brain fern. Yeah, screens.
Okay. Uh, I'm like I I've kind of described some of the overview of stuff in the game, but there's some questions about the components and what's going on here. Um, we'll go over the more in-depth stuff of each area as this book will kind of show it off. So, you'll see how a stealth mode works. You'll see how a combat works. We'll see how traveling on the overland map all works, the travel phase or whatever works. Um, and yeah, we'll get set up. We'll describe what these decks are as we play through. But yes, the boards are dual layer, which is sweet. They are pretty nice. They are ones, too, that aren't full of glue, so they're not curling. They're ones you have to punch out and they're kind of like, you know, the new way of doing them, which is a smart way where you just fold them and there's no gluing involved. I guess you could use a sticker if you want. Um, but that means the glue is not going to then warp and make them all curl and stuff like that.
So, this is your backpack. Uh on here's your health. This is my health points. Uh you can get shocked in combat, which are kind of like health points you can't heal until the combat's over. Uh you can get damaged, so just like it takes one point of heal to heal back damage, or you can have injuries applied, which are like take two healing points, which are these symbols to get back up into your health. So I'm starting out as a five health character, which it doesn't take many hits before I'm knocked out. Um, but that's your health little area here. Um, this down here is your potion. The first row is potions. There's five colored cubes in the game. Um, here, maybe I can zoom in a bit more. There we go. Um, on here it tells me yellow cubes are in the potion row.
Uh, I can drink one, aka discard a yellow cube, to heal two points of healing. And I can choose where what they heal and how how many how to spend my points. Uh, a red one will heal for four and a green potion uh will let me refresh two aura tokens. Aura tokens are like a clever little limited resource you can spend to buff up skill checks, combat, attack, defense, whatever, whenever you want to use them, but they are a finite resource, but this is one way you can recover them is by drinking green potions. Uh, and yes, you can craft potions in this game. Uh, you can craft keys and keys are used for the lockpicking mechanism in the game. This is all the stuff I remember like seeing when I was going to back it and I was like, man, all this stuff sounds awesome. And the cool part about it is it's not complicated. It is doesn't take a lot of time to gather materials to do a crafting of whatever you want. It's all very simple, not too deep, but it's just it's nice it's included in the game to add some variety. Um, it's not like as crazy as like the Frost Haven crafting decks and all that, sitting there for 20 minutes trying to figure out what I'm going to craft and what resource I have and all that stuff. It's just very quick and easy. Um, but that's just the lockpicking. I'll leave the lockpicking until we run into it. But yes, you can create keys. Blue keys will basically help you a little bit in lockpicking. Purple keys are twice as good in lockpicking.
Over here is the materials that can be used to craft potions, keys, or arrows. So, I guess I should talk about arrows. Uh, arrows are similar to like these three things. So, we got keys, potions, and arrows. They're all things that are like crafted or given to you in the game that can all be spent for things. Um, so green arrows can help me like negate an opponent's dodge dice so they don't dodge me as much. This reminds me like Dark Souls dodge dice. Um, this uh red cube can be uh red arrow, sorry, red arrow can be used to uh reduce the cost action point cost of an attack. Obviously range attacks only. Um, and then the yellow arrow gives you an extra power die, which in this game, the power die is a very similar. I think Dark Souls is like this. A lot of these games are like this, where like there's a red combat die that's like always hits pretty much, but it doesn't hit as hard.
A yellow die is the other offensive die. It has some blanks on it, but has more hits on it. And then there's a defensive blue dice, which is just more about blocking. And then the black dye is more about dodging the complete attack, but lots of blanks. Um, so that kind of changes the combat by using arrows, which I think is a cool little extra layer. It's not too complex, just extra little layer to spice things up. And that's the reason like another thing, I'm a range character player. I like always playing range characters to start in games, and I'm doing that here. And the whole crafting arrows and spending arrows kind of like is something I don't ever get to do in in games playing as a ranger. Um, so I thought that was extra clever and and neat. So hopefully it's fun. I don't know why the camera is not focusing. Um, and then over here. So, the materials, there's two types of materials, or not two types, sorry.
Two categories of things you need to craft. So, materials go here, and you can only carry as many as your carrying limit. This is your carrying limit. That goes from 1 to six, I guess. And this tells you how many heavy items you can carry based on your carrying limit. And it also, this is your item slot here to put cards in. And you can only carry up to your carrying limit. So, I can only hold one item card in my knapsack right now. I can only hold one material, which could be uh like hide, metal, or wood. Um, and that's just based on a color of a cube going in there. I can spend this, and I can spend plants, which also you can have all different colors of plants um to craft based on. Do
you want this?
Yes. Yes. Based on this crafting table and you can craft when you're traveling in the overworld phase, but I don't think usually any other time. I don't think
maybe unless it gives us an option in the
Oh, no. I think you could do this anytime. You only gather resources usually um in the overworld phase, but I could be wrong. Um but yeah, that just shows you how you can craft all the different stuff. So that's what all this is your knapsack. All just shows you crafting. Another thing it shows here is uh you can hold a spare weapon in your backpack here. And it cost you one action to switch it with the weapon that's in your hands. Um and here is a example weapon. And you just slide it underneath here and that just holds your spare weapon. So you can switch that. So that's a knapsack. It's the same for every hero. And then the other board is actually Let's do this. The other board is like your class. No, your race. Your race. Yes, it's like your race. Um or your hero. I just opened it by accident and now the cubes are
Son of a
All right, we're doing this live. We're doing this live.
I shouldn't have picked this up. I should not have picked this up off the table. Now I just have to dump everything off of it because I accidentally picked it up and grabbed the bottom where it opened. I need to just put stickers in here. Like some games come with the stickers that keep this closed or just glue it. Like I don't need to open this ever again. I should have glued them. My bad. Um but anyways, I should never pick it up off the board unless I'm saving again. But um come on. Okay, so on here uh these like you there's five that come in the main game. We also have a stretch coal box that gave us five more. So, there's 10 total you can pick from if you have like the crowdfunding version or whatever. Um, so this comes with the ancient. This is like I believe the ranger character. It's I mean it's literally got a bow, so I just picked it. Um, and they will come with different stats here. This is like what you level up in the game. So, you have a strength stat. This is used for skill checks and for fighting and stuff like that. Um, and also like based on weapon requirements and stuff. So like this weapon for example, uh if I had two knowledge, I would also get to do all the cool stuff on this if I wanted. Or if I or sorry, yeah, knowledge and then intelligence. If I had four intelligence, I could also do whatever this line is. And which also helps me on defense. Uh don't worry about all the symbols. Um but just get that idea that uh this is what will be leveling up. And based on the character you select, like I start at two perception,
um Mel starts at one for example. So, they have different numbers based on the class you pick. Also, they have a special ability. So, during climbing tests, I turn those shields on the dice to successes. Uh, you might have different movement costs that can uh you can spend an action point to like increase your free movement points and you might even have different movement points based on the class you're playing or the the race you're playing or whatever. Um, and then this is your initiative. So, I start out the game with three initiative, but I could temporarily increase it on a round of combat or something um by spending one point, but some other uh race in the game might take two to increase it, and they might start at five or something, you know, like it's all different. This is the board that's different. The knapsack is like the same for everybody. Um, and then down here's my action points. I think every character has six action points, but they might have a different cost to go into waiting, and that's for stealth mode where you can go into waiting and like wait for the enemies to act, and you can interrupt the enemies or other players to like,
you know, jump out of the shadows to stab an enemy in the back or before they cry out for help or whatever. Um, so that's your actions. And then on this board, you hold your weapon up in the top says there, you hold your um kind of like your your aura points uh or those green discs I was talking about before, these aura points. you spend them and you can spend them based on your character or your class race, whatever this is, ancient. So, the ancient also comes with this card that gives them their starting aura points, their starting health and their starting carrying limit. And then it also gives you a table for every time you level up. So, if I increase my strength, uh, I go up to two in strength, I would get an extra health point. Or if I go to three, I get an extra talent. There's just like different things, and this this card is different based on the race you're playing.
So, you can get different bonuses as we go through the campaign. Uh, but on the bottom is the actions for the aura points you spend. So, I can spend one aura point for my character here to get an extra. So, there's always a combat ability like an offensive ability. A defensive ability usually. In my case, it's just healing. A stealth ability. Uh, I think Oh, no. You have a different Yeah. Yeah, yours are different. So, this one's a stealth ability for my character. And then this one every character has uh that gives them temporarily you can increase your stat for like a skill check. So if I'm doing like a knowledge test and I would rather roll two dice instead of one, I can temporarily increase it before I roll by spending an aura point.
I believe once cuz I think it's like one time per action. Yeah, it's one time per action. You can't
you can't just spend I don't think like four tokens to go up four in a stat for one check. Um, so just like little bumps, little little little bumps to help you if you're willing to spend these tokens. Um, and yeah, so it's like picking to do them at the right time, but you're spending them before you do any rolls. So it might they might be wasted. You might get the put your all eggs in one basket kind of scenario that we see in like Gloom Haven where you get all this extra attack dice, you roll them, amazing, got 100 damage, and then the enemy rolls a black dice, gets an X on it, and they negate the entire attack. So you can pull those kind of like the idea of pulling the card that just nulls the whole attack. It exists in this game. Serenity now. Uh so yeah. So I'll try to put my character back down here. Put the weapon underneath. So I start with claws. I mean we will get some starting weapons in a sec once we set up. But my character is the only character in the game starts with claws.
Has my symbol there. Um so this just tells me that I can spend action points to do these attack dice. I get a free hit. That kind of stuff. So this just slides under here. And then it also has a slot on the right to slide armor in. And you'll see that eventually. Um, and then this I will just slide under because I already set up my stuff. And that just sits there. We're going to get some talents in a minute to put here that give us some extra stuff. And then when you find artifacts, you slide them in under here. That could change things, too. So, lots of lots of different categories of loot to get to modify stuff, which is nice. Uh, okay. So, put my action cube back in there. I'll put my uh initiative queue back in there. Aura points back up here. My strength, my dexterity, my intelligence, my perception, my knowledge. I'm missing one white cube somewhere. Oh, right here.
Oh, yeah. They have uh this is annoying. I have to say it. So, this game comes with the super smallest, tiniest stickers that you have to put on these cubes yourself.
Really?
Yeah. I had to put these on. It's frustrating as hell, but they give you tons of extras in case you mess it up and you got to reapply and they fall off. Um, so this is on the bottom of each of these white cubes here on these tracks, and you only have to put them for each player. You just sticker three cubes. So, if you're playing with five players, you have to sticker like 15 cubes. Um, but this one just has a red X on the bottom. So, if you ever lost your movement, like an enemy shot you in the arrow with in the knee with an arrow and you couldn't move, um you would just flip this over to an X temporarily to remind yourself you have no movement right now or lost your free movement.
Um and then you can flip it back. And then if you ever down to zero initiative, obviously this can't go down to zero, right?
Um but there is points in the game where you'll go to zero initiative. Um you would just switch that to an X to remind you, which is kind of clever. I just crazy that you didn't get cubes that already have it on there. And then on your action points, because you can be in spending action points, you sticker on this action sticker. And then on the opposite side, you sticker on a hourglass to show you you're in waiting mode if you're ever waiting. So you know when you look down that you're in waiting. Um it was strange that they weren't stickered already or whatever or screen print.
I'm surprised you did that by yourself.
Yeah, I know. I was like, I'm just gonna do it and like see how one works and if it doesn't, I'm gonna like give them to our daughter or you to like, can you do this for me, please, with your magnifying glass and little painting tweezers and tools and stuff.
Um, but I figured it out. It worked. Okay. They might come off, though. And if they come off, there's a whole sticker sheet of extras. So, uh, yeah, you don't have to stick your own dice, just cubes. The dice come screen printed. So, that's a good segue. Thank you, uh, Minion. Um, no, no, you're going to show them all. This is one of those token salad games.
Okay,
so Mel is just going to show us.
Excuse me.
These these are our own trays, but the game does come with its own trays. They're just really big. Uh and I need more table space. This game is a table hog as you as you can tell.
Um but there's tons of tokens that are off to the side. We'll pull them out as needed. Um but there's four of those kind of trays. Uh and if anyone knows these game trays, they're
cubes.
Yeah. So, there's like tons of dice, tokens, tons of it off this off to the side there. Um, and yeah, so that's just going to stay off off screen, but just to show you there's there's a bunch of junk in this game, of course, as expected. And then a bunch of card decks that are here and here. I'll put some of them off to the side. Tons of enemies that come in the game. And these are dualsided. Tons, tons, tons, tons of enemies. And you saw the tray of enemy miniatures already. There are more miniatures that we don't have here that are upstairs either being painted or I don't think we'll need them yet because they're like bosses and stuff.
But yeah. All right. So, uh that's kind of component review the card decks we'll get through now. So, we're going to start um playing or setting up I guess still. Uh
but this is the fun part I think.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is fun to do like live with people. It's fun. Uh even if you don't know the game that well, feel free to chime in recommendations. We'll figure things out. We'll do this together. the fun of doing it live with an audience. Um, which uh is what we're doing. So, so on the right here we have assembling equipment. So, whenever you're starting creating a new character, and this includes when you're jumping into a campaign or you're switching out your hero, you want to try something new, you will always uh randomly draw some talent cards. So, this game has tons of talents. You don't get to just pick. I want to be a ranger and I want to have good movement or I want to have some cool thing to help me in stealth mode or I rather have something that helps me on skill checks. It's random. You will draw either uh from the spell class deck, a magic user basically, which we're not going to play with magic stuff. It says you shouldn't need to use it in a campaign. It has its own separate rules. It's not that complicated the spell stuff, but they do say you can ignore it. It's quite a quite a bit extra stuff, but it's about all the random dice rolling on spells. I kind of looked at some of them and they're all just like roll roll and if you succeed, your spell hits. If not, you look like an idiot. Like I guess that's the same with attacking. But it's like you're limited in this game to only having up to two magic users in a party.
Can't be more cuz I think it's like a little um powerful or maybe they only have so many components for it. But we're not really going to play the spell side of the game. But there are certain times we might get an item that lets you fire off a random spell. So, you'll see that then if that happens. Uh or you can draw three talent cards from uh one or more of the ranger, warrior, scholar, or rogue decks. So, I could choose one warrior card, two scholar cards, look at all three of them, and go, I like this one, and take it. You are not locked in. Even though I'm playing a character that probably wants to use bow weapons and maybe is a bit more of a ranger character, I could just start drawing scholar cards and or rogue cards and only drawing rogue cards and never touch anything else for the rest of the campaign. Or I can switch and mix and match. Like it's just so like random and whatever. So, I'm not sure how much I like that, but we're just going to go with it.
Um, and yeah, they each have a normal level and like an advanced level. So, you can level up these talents later to get an even better effect. And then after we're going to get our starting weapon card and then you have a choice of like, which is neat, you can take a higher level weapon randomly. You can take some kind of like consumable items, maybe get some armor if you're lucky, drawing out of like the the regular item deck. Um, you could get some gold. They you can get some plants and gold if you'd rather instead of taking another item like you feel like your starting weapon is okay. You don't want to just grab a random weapon. I don't know what the right play is. It's interesting they give you these options and there's no recommendations on your first play. Um
maybe there's no wrong answer
that. Yeah, then maybe that is. But it's kind of neat. It's like very weird like Yeah, I don't know. Um, but yeah, I guess based on the type of player you're playing. Like if you're playing a scholar, you might want those plant resources to kind of like craft some stuff because you might have a talent that lets you every time you craft a potion, you get another potion for free.
There's stuff like that I've seen. Or um you might want to take a spare weapon cuz you get a talent that lets you every time you sell weapons or items, you get extra gold.
Stuff like that. Like so we're going to do the talent first, which might influence the second option. Yeah, there's like there's a little meta to it. I think after I looked at some of the talents, I was like, "Oh, okay." Um, so yeah, we'll do it random live on stream. So we're not going to just build our best characters that we prefer to play with. Um, which is weird, but so Mel, you go first. Um,
I would like to pick from the rogue deck.
The rogue.
All three cards from the rogue deck.
All three from the rogue the rogues gallery.
Yes.
Okay. So we'll look through them here. You guys can help chime in in the chat. Influence what Mel is choosing. Mel might just see something and say, "Screw you guys. I'm picking it. I don't care what you say." She has that right. Uh yeah. So,
but I listen.
Okay. Yeah. Yes.
If you if you know what you guys are talking about,
but even if they don't know this game,
I know
anyone who's been here long enough, you know, these kind of games, you know, RPG-ish, fantasy, adventuring, dungeon crawling, whatever games, you know.
Mhm.
It's like generic stuff.
Okay. So, I put this upside down by accident. Uh this is the advanced side. This is the basic side.
I love this card. So, this one says it's a rogue card. I know by that symbol. Uh, if you're in stealth or in combat mode only, if you are beside an enemy, you can still spend your free movement. Normally in this game, once you become engaged, even at the start of your turn, if you start your turn engaged in combat, you cannot use your free movement to move away, but you can spend action points to move away, which is way more annoying. And free movement, they give you so much free movement, but it can only be used like at once. And if you ever stop to do anything else, you lose the rest of it. Um, this is crazy, actually.
This is a phenomenal card.
Yeah, I think this is really flexible, really cool. You're probably taking this
likely.
Um, but we're going to keep drawing. This one is in stealth mode. You can spend six action points to ignore one of the like alert dice or alarm dice.
Oh, interesting.
That could increase the awareness dice, maybe I'm going to call them. I don't remember what they're called, but uh these little stealth dice get rolled and this will increase the awareness of the enemies to make them maybe move more, see more, uh that kind of stuff. Um so you can kind of just spend six points just negate one arrow on one of those to kind of keep the enemy from getting more aggressive or more aware. Uh, and then in stealth or in skill checks, you can ignore one of your heavy items because sometimes in a skill check based on your heavy items, it'll make the skill check harder, especially one where you dodge out of the way or run out of the way of a falling boulder, for example, obviously if you have more heavy items, you're not going to run as quickly. So, you will get punished on the skill check a little bit. And that's what that helps you with.
And then this. And again, I might be wrong on some of these. I'm literally going I'm literally going based on what I understand so far of the game. This is just me off the top of my head trying to use the two weeks of the university course I took to learn all the symbols in this game. Um, I got like a 72 on the exam. And hopefully I can translate this stuff. this kind of like um if what is that called like when someone learns like hero heroglyphics or whatever like uh you know cave paintings and like pyramid Egyptian drawings like that's the kind of course you need to take to understand this game uh cuz there's so many symbols. Um, this one I'm assuming for lockpicking on a purple die is spent instead of just giving you uh two fail points like or two like
basically on a skill check every time you roll these hands there might be a different fail condition. This basically increases the fail condition making it less likely to fail
by three instead of two which normally does. And this on skill checks, whatever type of skill check this is, gear symbol, uh they all there's tons of them, like 20 different symbols for skill checks, but whenever you see this symbol, you don't need to know what it's called. You just need to know what it looks like. Um it will just give you one success on every shield rolled and it stacks with anything else. So if we're playing on the easy mode, uh you would automatically get one success on on any skill check and then you would get an extra on this type of skill check.
So those are your three. Yeah. Based on this, I think the decision is easy that I'll take the movement.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, Mel's deciding to buff up combat
only based on that talent she took. She is saying, "I don't care about making stealth mode better." And she says, "I don't care about lockpick checking, and I don't care about whatever hell these skill checks are, and I don't care about my heavy equipment. I'm going to be carrying."
I'm just want to state that clear. So, when we fail on those aspects of the game, it's because Mel chose those things.
No symbology. Yeah. Maybe
those are great as well. However, I think those are situational.
Flexible.
They're all situational, but yes.
Yeah, but there's
I know what you mean.
Let's say
more likely.
Yeah, more likely. I'm going to probably run into more combat than I am going to roll or run into having a purple key and using the purple key.
But maybe that purple key leads to the most amazing set of armor and weapons hiding hiding in some castle in the bottom. If you just had the purple key and could pass the skill check
and unpick this lock, you could get into the super treasure room
where you automatically get to get
plus three strength and get to take the best weapon in the game, the best armor in the game. That would all be way better in combat than this one.
But you know what? I'll never know.
I know. I'm just fine.
I'm just trying to play devil's advocate.
No, I get I get it. But that I think of those cards, that one's the best one.
Okay.
I think
Yeah, we'll be just keep that. Yeah, just keep Screw you, Janet.
One,
who made that emoji? Uh, anyways, so yeah, just remember when we're like at death's door, the lava is flooding, you know, the basement of of the dungeon we're in, and then all of a sudden it's like we reach
key breaks.
Yeah. Yeah. No, we reach a point where it's like, oh, you can get up these stairs, but there's a gate in front and you have to pick the lock. And then we're rolling skill checks, and we're like, damn, if we just had a purple key, we could have lockpick this easier and get out. Yep.
Yep. Just remember that. No, I'm just kidding. Uh, okay. So, I'm going to go for Ranger, which I think I'm I I like playing rangers in games, so we'll just go that route.
I'll just draw all three from the Ranger deck. I think I'm just messing around.
Yeah, you'll get 100%. But Mel can use her free movement in combat to get to the lock treasure chest.
Well, Rob is stuck and can't move because level one rat is next to him.
Exactly. Exactly. With his bow that he can't
Yeah. Yeah. It's the rat's destroying me because I can't shoot him because he's too close to me.
He keeps dodging my arrows.
Okay, here we go. First one is Oh, yeah. We didn't even look at the advanced side of that what it could get to, but whatever. I know.
Okay, so
I got a movement one. This one turns movement. So, okay, in when you're moving around in stealth, like exploration mode, basically stealth, combat, whatever. Mini games will sometimes use regular movement rules. This turns, I believe, all my movement points into light movement points. All that means is kind of like in other games, I kind of have flying, so I don't get I don't have to spend extra action points to move through water, to jump over rift, like open chasms basically. I can spend less movement points to jump them. And there's one other thing. Uh oh, the yellow like jump jumping up on tables and stuff. Um that would normally cost you an extra movement point to enter a hazardous terrain or whatever. I just ignore the extra movement points.
Yes, roller skates. Exactly.
Roller Yes. Basically roller skates. Yes. Yeah,
kid Icorus roller skates.
Uh,
that's a cool card.
Yeah. Yeah, I would probably just take that one like just again the same thing you're doing, the movement, but it just like
But again, this game I don't know how much we're actually going to be in
stealth and combat scenarios versus like mini games and travel phases and all this kind of stuff like
and skill checks.
Yeah, skill checks. Yeah, like this doesn't help me on a skill check at all. Uh, okay. This is for the travel phase. It says, I think if there is bad weather, normally on bad weather on a travel phase, you'd have to spend three movement tokens to move one hex to the next hex on the overworld map. This says if it's bad weather, I can spend two travel tokens and one aura point to still move one hex,
which might help us get somewhere quicker before nightfall happens or too many days pass or whatever and might get punished. So, it just lets us travel a little quicker even if things are going bad. I don't like I don't know enough about the travel phase like if we need this kind of thing and how powerful it is, but I'm assuming it's pretty like on the same power level as this. Um, I'm just curious. So, if I ever upgrade this one eventually, it still is the same buff. Then I think it says in combat mode, if I'm using a ranged weapon and I shoot my range weapon through hazardous terrain, which normally doesn't block your shooting, it just modifies it and kind of makes it more difficult to hit your target because it would allow your target to get an extra dodge die. This is basically saying don't give them that dodge die. So I do like that a lot. That just makes it so I can shoot guys more flexibly in certain scenarios. And then the other one here.
Oh, this is a skill check one. So, basically on these two types of skill checks of the like 20 different types in the game, uh I would get extra successes if I rolled that helmet. I don't know what those types are, but you could learn those types and start thinking like, you know, just like RPG, like you're in certain situations like on a crafting skill check or a dodge skill check, a climbing skill check, a swimming skill check, or whatever. I want to be better at that stuff. and you want to get into the flavor of it, you might take this because you're like, I want to be the guy that's good at that stuff. But I don't care about that. But keep that in mind when I fail skill checks later. This happened. Uh I'm just going to take this movement one. And I like this upgrade thing, too, to help me later. Maybe uh the upgrade on the travel one uh is the same. Plus, on daytime, you could spend instead of two travel tokens, spend one and an aura point to move one. So it just makes it so you can spend your travel tokens to do gathering resources.
Yeah.
Camping, resting, visiting villages, all that kind of stuff that cost points. You could spend that more loosely knowing you can make traveling cheaper
or even maybe move farther.
Yeah, maybe
it doesn't cost as much.
Maybe. All right, so you just slide that under your talent side here. Whoops, not that way. And there you go. So you just get talents. You can get more talents. They just kind of keep going out from the right side here. And again, if you upgrade them, you just flip them over and boom, you have a new talent or an upgraded talent. Okay, so just shove these in. So that's that. And again, when we level up on that table, you'll get a chance to grab more talents in the future or upgrade them. It'll tell you when um which reminds me, I think, of Chronicles of Du Dugenor we played on the channel that had the whole thing like at certain points you'll get new
skills or talents and then at certain points you'll be upgrading them and you can choose which ones you want to level up.
Yeah. same idea in this like very similar. Okay, now the next thing is our starting weapon card. Uh so it says to draw one randomly. So the basic weapon cards in the game, obviously there's probably one per hero that come in the game, which is so weird. I don't know why this is randomly drawn like this. And you can fully trade with each other no problem outside of combat. Even in combat, you just have to be beside each other to set an action point you can trade. So based on what we draw here, like if Mel drew this bow, she could be like, I'll just give it to you and I can give her whatever.
I guess we could just draw two.
But I just want to show you. Yeah, it's like very weird because um again like I find it silly because
even
Well, it's not randomly. It's an error in translation. You choose it. That makes so much more sense.
Okay, Ra. Thank you. Yeah, that does. That's weird.
That makes so much more sense cuz you're like, why?
But I am looking at like the updated rule book that had all the fixes. I thought Okay, thank you. It does say draw one randomly. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I thought that was very strange. Uh, okay, that makes more sense. Okay, so
you want the bow?
Yeah, I take the bow and why I was saying it needs to be not random because, uh, even starting out the game, like some characters start with two dexterity and others don't. So, if a character got this and didn't have two dexterity, their weapon be way crappier than someone who did.
Mhm.
Um, so that's why we were playing off stream, too. That makes more sense now. Okay. So, I'll take this bow and I will just replace my bare hands or my claws. Um, but if I ever lose my weapon, you automatically can take this back. And these don't take up a slot. So, I do not need to keep my hands here to switch them. I can still switch to my hands. They just cost an action, but it doesn't take up a slot. So, I can put these here if I want to, but they I can still hold another weapon there. Um, so yeah. So, I already get to have the second line visible. We'll deal with that when combat comes up or stealth, I guess. And also
sorry throat tickle. Um this can be used in stealth at range to assassinate an enemy. Uh which is cool. Some weapons you can't do that. So I can't use this to murder guy melee but in stealth. But you can by default with any weapon, even your hand. So
they don't put that symbol on there, I don't think. Um, but this one shows in stealth. You can do a melee kill in stealth mode for one less action. So, uh, what do you have two? No, you don't have two. Um, what is this one? Perception.
No.
So, it like wouldn't make sense for you to take this. No,
but you could. And you can sell it later for half the cost if we still have it.
I think
there is this club. You have two of
Yep.
Okay. So, Mel has two of intelligence. So, she could use this, which is obviously smashes really hard. But maybe the defense is not so great. I don't know. But then there's an axe. Oh, yeah. The axe has dodge. So, yeah, it looks like this is heavier, so you're just kind of taking hits and blocking with blue.
This was like you're just standing there taking hits.
I see.
Um, but this weapon is more lighter, so you could roll shields, but you also have a chance of completely dodging it if you roll a one and six side on the black dice. Um, but there are some shields on the black dice, too. But, um, and this one has two knowledge, which you have. Yep.
So, this is also an option for you.
And I already have two in intelligence, so I'm already like partway.
Yeah. I don't know if this is what your character is supposed to take.
No, I think I'll just take the next one that you're
And then this one.
Maybe not.
Oh, also keep in mind some of them are heavy, too, which you can carry.
So, Mel's special ability, actually, I forgot to mention. Um, she can actually carry one extra heavy item is her special ability. So, I bet one of these heavy items you're supposed to take.
Yeah. So, it's not this one. Sorry.
Yeah. This is a dexterity one. Not this one.
Okay. So, not this one.
And it's this one. Yes. And I think the one and it's not the first one. So, it's out of those. Yes. Not that one cuz I don't have two purple.
Okay.
So, I think it's just out of these two.
So, out of these two heavy items,
five for two yellow
and raw. if you know which one's supposed to go with your character raw. Like I don't know if they were actually supposed to be like for a specific character. They just like should have put our symbols on them or something. Um but yeah, so basically one is like again the red dice hit all the time pretty much. They're just hit less. Yellow are more powerful but they could miss. And then the defensive capabilities of both these is like the same but this one costs a little more to roll an extra blue dye. It's basically are you going strength build or strength build because you have two in Oh no wait that's dexterity.
Oh that's the wrong one.
Oh yeah I'm being dumb.
No there's I think there's another one that was
Yeah. Yeah. Sorry this one. Yeah. I'm so sorry. I just grabbed the two heavy ones. So maybe you're supposed to have the axe.
I think I might be supposed to have the axe.
Oh, Ros says you can do whatever you like. Okay. Perfect. Perfect.
Um let's go with
Thank you, Ra. Um, let's go with the axe. Actually, the other one gives me another die.
So, how I would decide between the two, I wouldn't flip a coin. I'd just be like the loot goblin. Yeah, the loot goblin in my mind would be like, "Oh, I could sell this for more later."
Yeah, let's take uh the club thing.
Yeah, Rod's recommending the the cancelling a black dye on the second line. We know that's good.
Yeah, I know it's huge.
We know that's good. But if you just want but if you just want more damage points but again a single black dye can negate all of your hits on these dice.
Okay. Okay. Um
you make the choice. I'm not I'm not going to pick it for you.
Okay. I'm going to take the axe. I don't I I'll take the axe. I'll take the axe.
So just to be clear uh this so things I haven't explained. So uh this just tells you action points spent. So, there's a default line on a weapon that always is on. The attack side's red, the defense side's blue. So, it's weird. Your weapons are also what give you defense in this game, but they can be augmented. Your defensive capabilities can be augmented by armor that gets slid underneath the card on the right. Uh, so by default, you spend four action points with this axe. You'll roll two red dice. You can spend aura points to roll more dice or whatever your character lets you do. Um, and then if you have, in this case, two knowledge, it unlocks this line, but you don't get to do the line. It's optional, and you would have to spend an extra action point to do it. But it would basically say the one and six side of the red die, which is called the special face or whatever, the special side, gives you this ability to basically steal a black die from the opponent and not let them roll it at all. It's not like you get to look at their dice they roll and cancel one. you actually just stop them from purely rolling one black dice. Sometimes they roll multiple black dice, sometimes they roll one, sometimes roll none. And the cool part is you can choose not to spend that action point if they don't even roll black dice. And then if you had four intelligence, you could spend another action point to increase in the stacks. So if you rolled like two of those special symbols, each one would be remove a black and a blue.
So you can remove two black and two blue. But the cool part is you don't have to do this in order. If you have both these unlocked, you can choose either or both or none. You just have to have them unlocked to be able to do them. And then when you unlock this line, you're also unlocking the defensive side, too. So by default, when an enemy attacks Mel, she would roll for zero action points a blue dye plus whatever the armor is giving her. And if she wants before seeing any rolls, she would have to spend these action points to allow her to also roll a black dye on defense. So, which could let her dodge the whole attack possibly if the enemy hasn't already canceled it on you. But you wouldn't spend the points to cancel it if you know the enemy is already canceling it.
Yeah.
And if she had the bottom line unlocked, she could spend an extra action point. Again, you could do both these abilities, none of these abilities, or either of them, whichever one you want, if you have them both unlocked. Um, and this will allow you to change the special phase to give you extra shields to block hits. I've changed my mind. I'm going with the club.
Uh
yeah, I'm going to take the bottom one
again. Hopefully, you'll get a better weapon before you ever care about this like four strength even. But this would allow on the bottom here allows you to spend the point if you ever got to four strength
to hit two enemies like in both those spaces beside you. Kind of like an AoE effect.
Yeah.
Kind of like you're swinging the club and hitting two guys. I'm sure there is a play here as well to take the more expensive weapon and then potentially try to sell this later because one of the options in that choose is to choose a weapon so you get a random weapon, right? Yes.
So then this you would be able to have this as potentially
like a backup. Yeah.
But I'm going to take I'm going to take
And there is a there is a tip in the rule book that says uh a tip try to have a melee weapon and a range weapon if you can so you can switch between them for certain scenarios. One might be better than the other. And that's just a general tip.
Yeah. So, you're taking the club?
Yes, I'm going to take the club.
Uh, minion is asking if you had action points, could you spend multiple to remove multiple black dice? No.
No.
Uh, it basically you're just turning on this effect. So, any specials you see just get that one effect. But you could roll like three red dice and they all show that effect. You get to remove three black dice. But yeah, you can't spend more action points to it. Just like turns on the ability, but you can't like turn it on twice. It's like it's binary. It's on or off basically. That one is good, but I have to roll the face specifically to remove the black dye.
Okay, so that's common weapons. I was doing some stuff with these. So, there are Oh, no. That's What have I done?
Weapons here. That's face up.
Oh, these are them. Yes. Sorry. That's what I was doing. So, there's also setup we need to do, which I didn't do yet, and I totally just remembered. uh on stream uh is in the common items and the common is it common weapons? I don't know what these are. Common and rare. Yep.
And these are basic. Yep.
Whatever.
Or starter.
Starter. Yeah. Okay. So, in the common weapons, this is all the common weapons in the game that are of basic quality of of just general run-of-the-mill manufactured at mass quantities in China. These are your regular regular items or weapons. Okay. Oh, no. These are not. These are Sorry, back to these. These are your weapons that I was just talking about. But they also give you to set up, which is neat. And it can be modified based on I don't know how domain upgrades, whatever those are. They say we'll learn about these later, but it's basically telling me for this weapon deck because we're starting off, it's automatically checked. We get to shuffle in two random quality weapons into the B uh the common weapon deck.
Every time you sit down to play the game, you take any that are out of there and you shuffle them all up and you put two new ones in. And even if we find them and remove them, we can still add two in every time we set up the game is how it's supposed to work. I don't know how that's going to work. We just leave it on the table. We never kind of put it away. Well, every time come back to
Yeah, I think every time we sit down, we're supposed to do this. So, I hopefully remember every stream, but uh these are the quality weapons and they have these little crown symbols here. So, these are probably slightly better than these, but it's all random. So, we're going to shuffle this up. And I'm going to take two of them. And you're going to shuffle those in there before we choose anything. And these I'm just going to set off to the side and every time those go back in the box. Basically the rare do not have the same thing. The rare weapons just a whole bunch of them are probably super awesome. And I did see somebody was saying online that like for character builds there is like a weapon spoilers uh in the rare deck that is tied to each of our classes or races or characters or whatever um that you kind of know like maybe what you should be building towards if you want to. But I don't know how you get this other than randomly or you choose it or you unlock it through side quests. I have no idea. But I saw that was mentioned if you're not sure how to level up your character cuz you might level up for a weapon you have but then you lose the weapon then you get a new weapon and then all that leveling maybe doesn't help you with that weapon.
So it's like you might need to dodge and dive through your upgrades. I don't know. But
yeah, it's like do you level up for your weapon? Do you level up based on your table of like what do I need right now?
Yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, those are
we're gonna figure it out. So, these are off to the side. Uh, so out of these. So, now we have to uh Oh, yeah. I need to do it for the common ones over here. I know where I put the I don't think I have any quality in the items yet either. No. So, where did I put them?
It's not these.
No.
Where did I put them? Oh, right here. Probably. I put them upside down. All of a sudden, I can't see them. Holy. Yeah, these are all the qualities. So, these are all the quality items in the game that have a little crown there. So, the same thing applies, but I'm going to put four four in the deck. So, it kind of changes up the loot deck basically every time you play. That makes sense. I don't know. But you can make it four.
Mhm.
Let me just see that I actually put four in for sure. Yeah. Okay. Don't see what they are. So, if you want to shuffle that, like pile shuffle it or whatever. And these quality ones I'm going to put off to the side back in the box, quote unquote. Okay. And now it says starting weapon card. In addition to their bare-handed card, the hero gets a basic weapon. Oh, we did that already. um various resources.
Okay, so to finish the setup, each player must make a choice for their heroes. Each one can draw two common weapon cards, keep one, discard the other, or draw two common objects, keep one, discard the other, and gain two gold. And gold is shared amongst the group. That's why it says for the group. Uh or take a plant cube of each color, five in total, and gain three gold for the group.
We also get the top part.
Oh yeah, I forgot that.
Yeah,
we each get a red potion, yellow potion, and five gold to start.
Oh, so we get
So we have 10 gold for the party.
And you already have Okay. So do you have 10 gold? No.
Oh, I have it.
So we'll have our little party area just between us here. So this is where all the stuff goes. As long as you get cards and scenario stuff for the party and tokens and things. So we have 10 gold. We start with the red and yellow potion. One heals for two, one heals for four. Um, and then yeah, whatever we want to
Do you already know what you want to do?
Probably just the weapon thing. I think I would assume to find a better quality weapon to help us like not die in combat scenarios, but
but maybe an maybe an item here would help with a skill check that we might fail at and die and whatever. Like, I don't know.
Or it could give you armor. But if I find a weapon that's better for you, I give it to you, too, is what I was thinking.
Okay, you go first. You go first.
Yeah, I'll do the weapons. So, maybe maybe we'll get the quality one, you know.
Yeah.
Okay. Uh neither are quality. Oh, one's a bow. One's a bow.
Okay, this is good.
It's worth 12 gold. Oh, but you can't use it in stealth
to murder guys at range.
But is that fine?
But also not murdering him at range means you don't make as much noise cuz the body dropping on the ground.
That's not a terrible thing.
Oh, look at when you're balancing.
And this one helps with balance checks. Can get you more. So, I didn't realize weapons can help you on skill checks, too. That's crazy. Oh.
Uh, okay. Okay. So, if I'm just looking at the stats here, so this one needs Oh, I have two. I have two in this.
Oh. Oh, look at that.
So, I could get it. So, if I spend So, four plus. So, five points on an attack. I would roll a red. It's a range attack. Red, yellow, a black. Why am I rolling black dice on an attack? It's probably supposed to have a line through it, maybe.
Um,
yeah, I bet this is supposed to have a line through it on that bow. Since it's inaccurate, it gives one black dice to enemy defense. Oh. Oh, I get it. I get it. Okay, that makes sense. That makes sense. So, I roll these and the enemy gets this and but I also cancel one of their blue dice.
Oh, I see. So it's it's makes it more
messy, which is funny why you can't use it in stealth because like it's not accurate. It's literally made up of like bones.
Interesting. But on the yellow die, if I get the one and six special side, if I spend an extra action point, I get three automatic hits.
H do you like that?
I don't know.
I don't like the way it doesn't work in stealth.
Yeah,
but I could still sell it for like six gold.
Mhm. if we go to a village or something.
I mean, technically you have Oh,
I also have I also have two in this dexterity stat to start.
Yes, you're already almost there.
But again, leveling up might take freaking three books from now. We're finally at like level four or whatever. Four in that stat.
But you can have two bows. So, one bow for combat, one bow for stealth.
Yeah, this bow is kind of sucky.
Yeah, it's not great.
But yeah, defensive is it better on defense or something? I don't know. Depends on how you look at it.
Yeah, maybe I did the wrong thing looking at the weapons.
But what about the other weapon? Does that help you at all? Is this a weapon in your stats?
Uh,
yeah, you you get the two.
Oh, it's a an AoE weapon. You can smack enemies on both sides.
It's Darth Maul's lightsaber. It's like two sides. You can
bam bam.
Yeah. What I do like is um you see where it says the eight gold action and if you roll that red face it gets a hit. I like that because it's just more that you don't have to pay for. So if they happen a bonus
Yeah. It's a like a passive effect.
Yeah. Which is good. Um three to roll a red a hit and minus is one shield.
And defensive look rolls two blue dice on defense automatically.
It's also cheaper than the weapon I have right now. The weapon I have right now is five.
And we only have six action points in the game. So technically you could attack twice with this,
but then that means you couldn't do all these effects though,
right? And I like on the other side, so I'd already be at level two. And I like that on the other side, I already have two free defensive.
So for this one, I'd have if I'd have to pay one action for that second line. That's a free line. So I like all these like passive things that they just happen to pay for.
Um, yes, I like that. And if you wanted, I could on my turn try again. No, no, I don't care. I'll just use my default weapon.
Okay,
it's fine. I just did this cuz I want to see better weapons. Like,
and I like that it has a stat as well, like or skill.
Yeah, we played off stream. We played did the same thing to set up when we're practicing and like um I drew a quality weapon, but it was way better for Mel's character, and I just like here have it.
Like I just wanted to add a better weapon to the party,
but again, both these are like questionable when they're better.
Yeah. I mean,
they are better cuz they're in the better weapon.
Better than the one I'm using right now.
Yeah. So, you'll take this. This one will get discarded, which I think in this game just goes back in the deck. But we can pretend like it's not back in there right now if you're going to do this deck. But again, you can do the items and the gold, whatever.
Well, just a quick question. Do you want this as a melee or is this not great for you?
Or do you want me just have it in my backpack?
I can't even have heavy weapons yet, so I can't even carry it.
No problem. Too heavy for him.
Okay.
Yeah,
I forgot about
But at least you have an extra one. you lose your weapon, you have a backup, which is nice. I believe that I don't know if the game takes all your weapons when you get knocked out sometimes. But,
um, it's up to you. I want you to make the decision. Do you want me to look?
No, I don't care. You take what you want. Then I'll take I'll take from
Yeah, cuz these are still helpful. Everything's helpful.
Okay, I'll take
You might get some armor out of here.
So, we get two and two gold.
Yeah. The reshuffle back in, right, Raw? Yeah, I thought so. I thought so.
Yeah. The only thing has a discard is like this action deck, right? I'm pretty sure that's why I left a little spare space here.
Minion says, "How freely can you trade weapons? Could you take the bow and Rob primarily use the heavy one with Mel swapping to Rob's original bow if range is needed?" Um,
so outside of combat, we can trade no problem.
Yes.
Inside of exploration mode or combat mode or whatever, uh, it costs an action point to swap between your backpack and your hand. But to switch between us, we have to be adjacent and spend an action point. And the crazy part is even when a character is knocked out and they're like lifeless bodies lying on the ground before you revive them. As you're adjacent to them, you can still trade with their body and take whatever you need off their body if it's going to help you. Even you could take a potion off them to then spend it to heal them to get them back up. Yeah.
Which is like so cool.
So cool.
Uh okay. So you're going for two of these.
Yeah.
Draw two. Keep one. So, the first thing you got are the common items is
okay,
some kind of bug thing. Um, basically this just sits in your backpack. If you sell it, it'll get you three gold, I think. Um, unless you have some way to change what the how much you get back. You can discard it to help you in whatever that test is, some kind of shouting test, and some kind of breaking wood test, whatever those really called, and it will give you a success on the helmets.
Okay. The problem is you have to discard that beforehand, which is so annoying and you might not even roll any of these heads.
But what is good is when I discard this, it works for the group if it's a group test. Like it's for the party.
Oh yeah. Okay.
So it's not just for me.
Oh, and the other thing you got, I don't know if it's any good for us, is an armor.
Oh, it's heavy. I like that.
So it's heavy. If uh you ever get knocked out, you lose it.
Yeah.
Which is something people hate this in the game, but it's like a common thing, it seems. Uh, we're six. And then this adds to her. So, let's show this weapon. So, this is kind of good. We can show. So, this just gets tucked under. You line up the little armor and it adds to her regular defense line, which is free. So, she would get to with this weapon roll two blues plus another blue. Or there's a slash. Or she can throw this armor back to discard it back to this deck to get three shields if she really desperately needed them. Yeah. And she didn't want to and she didn't want to bet on the dice rolling.
So, you have to decide, I think, all this beforehand, I'm pretty sure. Yeah.
But someone can correct me in the chat. Maybe this you can decide after you see the roll. I'm not sure cuz it's kind of a hefty cost.
Maybe that's what the how that works. I don't remember. We have never done it, but
Okay. Well, I'm taking the armor. I think the armor is better. The problem is I can't give the armor to you because it's heavy. Yeah.
So, I'm sorry. You got nothing out of that.
I am so weak. I cannot flip tables or carry anything.
I'm sorry. I feel bad. Hey, don't I do do not thou thou doth not hoist lift or none of that stuff. Okay, this gets shuffled back in.
I'm sorry.
I was a winner in all of that for sure.
Yeah, they're all saying take the armor.
Yeah, I think so, too.
Yeah, the skill thing is just a one time toss it away if you want to have a better chance in a skill check. And certain skill checks, you'll know if they're regular difficulty or hard difficulty right away by looking at them. And you then can be like, hm. You can even look at the punishments and failing conditions and success conditions a little bit. Usually you don't know because sometimes it'll lead you to another page in the book, but uh you can decide whether it's super important you want to spend the card. Okay. So these weapons I will just
when you do the weapons, yeah, you don't get gold for the weapons. Okay.
No. Yeah, that's the problem.
The two gold for the Yeah. Okay. But again, maybe we can sell this or whatever. If we get to a village, we can like sell a spare one. Maybe we keep weapons and hoard them
because you can lose them in the game easily.
Mhm.
So maybe it's better to carry two weapons just for that situation, not just like switching them in combat. It's just like out of necessity and survival.
Yeah, true.
And did you get the money? You got the money. Okay, perfect.
So, it's an hour and 41 minutes. I think we're officially ready to start playing the game. So horrible. Hopefully the people watching later were able to just scrub right through
uh who already know how to play the game. They're like, "Came for the playthrough. I was getting in trouble. This was a playthrough and you didn't even start playing the game until whatever." Uh, okay. So, we're playing the awakening book. It's got some story. So, I will read this for you. The Call of Adventure. In the beginning, there was no life on the planet Malia. Then, after almost an infinite period, matter came to life. First stone, then water, plants, and finally the wind, which completed the cycle, endowing the planet with the first conscious beings, the Titans. In deepest secrecy, another spirit came to being, that of Aeros, the spirit of time. Nobody paid attention, any attention. Sorry. Uh, Yolandal was a star. its distributed or sorry its disturbed orbit caused it to strike Malia and blow away that which was not immutable. the planets I don't know this word the planet's physioami physionami something I'm sorry uh was altered and it merged with the stars core a core feeding on soul fragments of the dead and producing an energy called latma titans physically unable to survive the impact of the star decided to save their souls from the core by merging with their source element Their era was coming to an end and under the influence
of the Latma a new form of life appeared. The dragons. So basically they got hit like dinosaurs got hit by a meteor and turned into dragons or something. Uh reigning uh reigning is absolute reigning as absolute master. Sorry. The dragons answered the authority of Tal and Zost, two white dragon brothers whose need for souls was matched only by their cruelty. Yorg, the black dragon, defied the supremacy and rallied the different clans. The dragon wars sent such an influx of souls to the core that its envelope cracked, allowing Lapma to escape. The planet split into two parallel lands linked by five rock columns topped by rifts. One land above the upper lands. the other below the lower lands. During the implosion, the soul of Harour, the stone titan, split into two. One part remained linked to [ __ ] master of the border of upper lands. The other, however, while on its way to the core, was drawn into the underworld and became a refuge where pure souls could avoid being consumed by the core. With both parts of the soul now trapped, Hamore Hamro entered a deep sleep, bidding his time until he could become whole again. Tal and Zost, stripped of their physical bodies by the violence of the implosion, saw their souls separated and held captive on separate lands. But Zast
refused to settle for the lower lands, defied his brother and sent his shadow armies to invade the upper lands. In order to protect his lands, Tall made a pact with Yorg, the only surviving dragon, to annihilate any attempt at invasion. He animated the souls of four black dragons who became the guardians of the rifts. The fifth would be guarded by Yorg himself. No longer could armies cross from one land to another. Witness to this pact. Nalik, a being of exceptional powers, became the guarantor. I don't know how you say that. guar guarantor of this balance. Meanwhile, Aeros father to son Aaros whose plan to satisfy Zoth's desire for vengeance was recorded by him in a spell book. In order to achieve this feat, he required Hamar's soul along with some very powerful artifacts. Dot dot dot.
Sounds like you're speaking another language.
Yeah. What the hell is going on? I can't I can't pronounce any of these names. I'm sorry. It's like Yeah. Yeah. Uh I hope everyone's awake now. Uh or everyone wake up. All right. So, setup. So, I've glued in uh some Arata here. So, this is the beginning of your journey. Each player takes one or more heroes and prepares them according to the hero setup in the rule book. We did that. If you're starting a single player game, minimum of two heroes. The awakening is an introductory booklet to the campaign. Is not compulsory and recommended if you're playing your first campaign. If you prefer, you can directly start with the for glory booklet. No thanks. Uh, you don't need to set up the components for the travel phase yet. If the combat seem too difficult, we recommend replacing the enemy cards used. To do this, swap enemies 1 35 with your equivalents of 2 4 six on the back of their cards, which just are weaker versions of them. You begin your journey, go to page one. So, this is like a choose your own adventure kind of book style, uh, where we're going to work through this book, and we're going to one.
Okay.
Suddenly, you feel your body come back to life. Your muscles begin to respond. Your mind clears. You finally open your eyes. You each take a few seconds to absorb your immediate environment. All at once, a voice re resounds in your heads. Awaken your consciousness and your memory. You recognize the deep voice of Nalik, the watchman, your master. Malia still needs you. Its balance is compromised. Awaken, noble guardians. You join together in this bond of eternity. In two days time, you are to assemble at first light before the sacred obelisk of Aaros in the midst of the mute woods located on the high plains of Yolbee. I will meet you there. Make haste. You rise and take to the road. Go to 16.
Oops. All right. Oh, yeah. This game also has uh like seventh con. Everyone knows that game or seventh cit. We played both those on the channel, too. Um, sometimes in art there could be numbers and if you can decipher any numbers, you go to that entry in the book you're in. And if you don't notice it, too bad for you.
So, I'm going to do this every time, even though there might not be any numbers. Um, but there's some art. I don't see anything, but uh after a long exhausting journey across the beautiful plains of GME, you finally reach your goal.
I think I do see something.
Do you really see them?
Yeah. Like, show me. Uh, I don't know where we are here.
I don't know where we are.
Is that not 14?
Or am I crazy?
Shut the hell up. You're right. Maybe.
Is that That's 14, right?
I'm going to go to 14, but it might not be anything. It's not. You know why I know it's not? Because if you ever go to an entry that's a hidden number, the entry this 14 would start with a spy glass.
Oh.
And that's how you know it's secret. So that's just weird squiggles that
Yeah, that's just that's just branches, I think.
No, cuz when you show
Yeah, that's just branches like these branches. I think that's just branches to those trees.
That looks like
I know, but 14 doesn't have the symbol.
Okay,
here I'll try to find that symbol for you so we know uh if it's even in this book. I don't know. Yeah, right here. Right here.
Oh, would look like that.
Uh uh.
Okay,
that symbol. Okay.
Okay. Sorry, I thought I saw something.
Good. Good. Mel's Mel's paying attention. She's on it.
All right. An incredible energy rushes through you as you stand in front of the obelisk of Atharos. You know this energy well. It is that of the awakened. Not far off, you spot those who become your travel companions. The voice of Nalik resounds in your heads. You finally been reunited to become one until the end of your mission. This one This one is of the utmost importance. But before I reveal more, you must first enter the temple of Aenis.
a recognized disciple of Atharos, the fallen avatar of the god of shadow. And then here is our first skill check. So one of the entrances temple is hidden under the obelisk. You understand that it'll be necessary to work together to discover it. So I want to show this because this is how a skill check kind of looks. This is a group skill check. There's skill checks that are individual. There's skill checks that are solo just for one person. You pick one person in the party, they do it. Um and this one is a group one. So, we'll each take turns rolling for skill checks, add them all together, and uh it's telling you're going to roll as many dice based on your strength stat. And it's a not an easy, but like a normal difficulty. We'll just be rolling one black dice that could result in red hands. If you ever get two red hands total during your rolls, your turn ends. Uh and then as a group and we're all done rolling, we add up all of our successes we've accumulated and we'll go to a different entry in the book. So, pretty straightforward. So, it's a group skill check. So, we can decide who wants to go first.
I I have one strength, you have one strength, so there's no difference there. But again, we have aura points. So we could spend aura points, one aura point to automatically get plus one temporarily to our strength for whoever wants to spend the aura point. And you could roll two dice for the whole skill check. And skill checks in this game are push your luck where you're going to roll and roll and you might get red hands right away and fail automatically or you might not see any red hands for a while and just keep going and going and going. I don't think I'm going to spend an aura point on this because the outcome is zero to four or five plus.
I think I'll just leave it.
You're going to just try whatever.
Yeah. Do a one.
All right. So, you can go first. Whatever. So, Mel's going to start her group test. So, she grabs one white dye, one black dye.
Okay.
She rolls and gets nothing. And she got one of those skull or those helmets, but it's blank right now because she has nothing that helps her in those kind of checks.
No. Okay, so we keep going.
Got nothing and nothing.
Awesome. Yeah, skill checks are not quick in this game. They can literally take a while, which might be annoying after a while.
We're going to keep going cuz I have nothing. Anyways,
we got one success.
So she you just basically collect tokens to kind of keep track. If she gets a second red hand, she will lose all of her successes in group check and then it'll go to my turn.
Are you spending an aura to do two dice? I'm just curious if I should stop or if you're okay that I like do I keep pushing and we maybe lose one.
Go ahead. Do whatever you want.
Try one more.
I'm not going to send an orin I don't think on this one.
Uh nothing.
Yeah. So, there's a special symbol on the on the black die which could get modified by like bad effects, but in this case it's not.
Oh, we got a red hand which stops the test. So, I lose
and she loses all of her successes. So, now I'll go to my turn. I'll just start rolling.
You got a red hand.
Okay.
You could stop at zero.
Yeah, true.
It's up to you. I mean,
well, it's it doesn't fail us like we still would go to do the Yeah, cuz it's zero. Like, there's It's not like you failed, go to entry, whatever. You're dead. You know, like you're
right. It we still would just get the success. So, might as well do it.
Oh, I got one. one
stop.
Boom. So, we got zero. Whatever. It might matter based on how many we get, too. It might ask. Okay,
that's the other problem.
You got zero
is it might be like if you had zero to two, bad thing happen. Like, who knows, right?
Uh, so I'm going to 42 42. Uh, you push with all your strength. The obelisk moves a couple of inches. You redouble your energy, but you feel that it will not be enough. Suddenly, the sound of a dull crack followed by an explosion. A powerful blast tears at you, hurling you several yards backwards. Go to 10. Another skill check. You open your eyes and see razor sharp shards of shattered stone cascade towards you as you lay on the ground. Oh, is this the balance one?
This is my balance test.
Okay, so Mel actually gets a bonus during this type of test cuz the balance test. Uh, what is your perception? Only one.
One. Oh, okay. So, this is an individual test. So, we'll be doing them separately and basically suffering or getting rewards individually. So, one person does it, finishes all up, and the other person, we don't carry them together like a group test. So, we're just trying to show us the different type of skill test right now, basically.
Uh, all right. So, it doesn't matter who goes first.
You roll one or two.
Uh,
for purple.
I roll two, actually.
Yeah. I'm extra perceptive.
All right. So, it basically looks like if you fail, you take a damage. You can't prevent it at all. If I get zero to four successes, I take a damage, but I can prevent it by spending an aura if I want. Or at five or more, I completely avoid it all. And then once all of us are done, we go to 43.
Okay.
Two,
two, and a red.
Well, I'm going to keep pushing cuz uh I could stop and actually prevent the damage actually. Uh yeah, if I didn't have a red hand right now, I would keep going.
Yeah, 100%.
I'm just going to take the Z two successes I got and just spend an or point and prevent the damage.
Okay. I only roll one die, but I do have a bonus. So, anytime I roll the black symbol, I will get a success. Uh we got one success.
You can see it up there, too. If you look Oh, yeah. Look over the lip.
It's easier. Two successes. Oh, nothing.
Yeah, that's what I was saying. Minion, the numbers don't scale based on player count, which is super awkward. And that's why I think the three players is like the three heroes is the ideal situation for like that kind of stuff.
We lost it. So, I I don't know how to I I guess we should then maybe like should we be playing with this then at two players just to balance like make it so we have a chance at more skill checks like cuz we're only like in group at least, right?
Like I don't know.
Okay, we got it cuz we got our five and we only have one hand. So, we fully block whatever was happening there. The
nice So, you just don't take any damage. So, then we're going to go to 43.
This didn't even come into play.
Yeah. anyone watching later, if you have any recommendations on how to kind of tweak the difficulty, like you found a nice sweet balance, like leave it in the comments down below. Like, I'd love to know going forward cuz we can switch it on and off as we go. Um, okay. So, 42, I said I think
43, I think.
43.
A few moments passed before you come to your senses and lurch at your feet. Uh, lurch to your feet, sorry. Uh, the explosion has completely destroyed the obelisk. In the midst of the shattered stone and lumps of charred wood, you see a passage. You descend into the dark depths of the temple that radiates pure evil. Go to 26. Uh, you light several torches and their light is enough to illuminate a number of ramshackle traps laid in your path which are easily avoided. You cautiously descend the steps. You finally enter a small and apparently empty room. A fraction of a second after you enter, the wall behind you collapses. It is now impossible to turn back. So now it's telling us to set out 42, which is basically getting that little tiny spiralbound book. And we're going into exploration mode. Okay, so let's set it up and then I'll read more.
So that can just go wherever. So exploration, we're going to go to find 42, I think. Yeah, that's 43. So 42. Um, we this got to face north this way. Uh, we need tiles C3 and F2. We're going to put them together like so. It's telling us the black squares. It doesn't matter cuz unless we're playing in stealth that this is shadow so you could hide in it during stealth mode. Uh it has some rules here for this. Um and this is not necessarily a combat. This could be just um kind of like a miniame puzzle trial whatever. Um just like again like um the folklore I think in Aridia those kind of games do this stuff too where whenever you see map tiles doesn't always mean you're going through the same story then combat story then combat like in this we're going story skill check story like a bunch of story stuff could be trials and eventually like stealth and or combat could happen or not happen. Um, so this says when all players, so we're going to put a bunch of these um kind of like interest tokens or whatever they're called. And if you step on any of these, you will go read that entry in the book. Uh, this says when all heroes have played their turn, place a pink cube in the center of the room per hero. So when all heroes play, So we're going to place two cubes every round.
Mhm.
And when there are at least five cubes in the center of the room, go to 59. So it's kind of like a timer. Yeah. So it's kind of like a timer. Uh, and we'll leave this out. And then, uh, we start down here on this space. So, I don't know if it matters. We need to reach things.
How much movement do you have? Free movement.
Free movement. I have four points.
Same.
So, it doesn't really Someone has to start on this spot. So, whatever.
And Oh, yeah. Adjacency in this game kind of matters now. Might matter. I don't know. Um but you can um adjacent is the diagonal and orthogonal. Uh movement also can be diagonal and orthogonal. Um so yeah it's like loose. You can you know move all diagonal no problem. All that stuff. Um which is cool. All right. So now we just start. Who wants to go first? And we're going to just go interact with things. Oh actually no we're not because we should have kind of story to set us up. what the hell is going on here?
Uh, which I'm like, wait, what is happening here? Okay, so the walls in front of you reveal a large embedded talismans with animal creatures engraved on their surface. You also notice writing at your feet. Oh, this reminds me if you are watching and want to play along, those that don't know, you can take notes in this game. I don't know if it ever encourages you to do so, but there is puzzle aspects to this where memorization, note takingaking can be helpful later. So, there are there's a puzzly nature to the game, which is kind of fun. Uh, so pay attention. And certain things are bolded sometimes, and I think those bolded things sometimes can be important story beats or things that you might need to remember later. I could be wrong with that, though.
Uh, the walls in front of you reveal a large embedded talisman with animal creatures engraved on their surface. You will also notice writing at your feet. So, feel free to play along if you're watching. There will be points where I know it'll ask us puzzly stuff. Feel free to play along. If you already know the answers though, we don't want spoilers. Just But if you want to play along and have fun like you have no idea, go ahead. Just whatever. Um, if if you don't mind. Uh, you also notice writing at your feet. Unfortunately, dust and debris prevent you from being able to read it properly. You get the feeling that you'll have to act quickly. Uh, what is the dexterity level of the hero present on the starting square? Oh, okay.
That's you.
Um,
what is it?
Uh, I am two. So, I guess I go to 33.
Okay.
Mhm. Uh, okay. Ah, here we go. 33. Despite the suspicion you seem to inspire, you feel perfectly capable of carrying out this task. You're going to prove everybody that you're trust prove everybody that you're trustworthy. You clean the stone as best you can. The its inscription, luckily written in a common language, are now decipherable. You read it out loud to your companions. The feather flies. The scale slinks. Sorry. The scale sinks. The main blazes. Okay. As soon as you say the last word, the inscriptions disappear. Fortunately, it is seared into your memory. Your powers of recall will be essential for all your future adventures. Your gaze is drawn to the talisman instinctively as you approach them. The first turn of play begins. In the order of your choice, move the uh the heroes can move and use their action points.
Minion, thank you. Minion put in the chat for
feather flies, scale sinks, main blazes.
I feel like
Yeah, minions. Exactly. Play along. I'm telling you.
Uh okay. And we
I think I think we're fine. Yeah, we can play now. Okay.
I think you go first.
I go first.
Yeah.
I am going to go one, two, three, four. Free movement. I then pop onto this uh token and I will read 29.
You're trying to confuse us.
20. Okay. Okay. Uh I'll hold I don't know if I can put that on here. Uh how do I No, it's too big to fit on my thing. Table's in the way. Uh, okay. You carefully examine the beautiful talisman. It is a mandrain. Its keen sense of hearing allows this lizard to thrive at the dying of the day, as the disturbing daylight gives way to the dusky cool of evening. Each of its six legs is adorned with a sharp claw capable of tearing through chain mail as easily as a duke stake. It pounces on its enemy after destabilizing it with an its aura disruption ability.
You notice that there are lines on the edge of the talisman. You believe you can move it. Okay, so look at this little scaly scaly lizard thing. You if you move the talisman spin upwards, go to 49. If you move it down, go to 28. If you decide to do nothing, your turn ends.
I think the scale should sink. So, move the talisman down and go to 28.
Yep.
Speak now or forever. Hold your piece. Okay. Uh, you force the talisman to get it to move a little. You push it downwards until you hear a significant click. You gain a success token. You can no longer interact with this talisman. Discard the interest token. Your turn ends.
Okay.
Okay. So, we have one success for the group, whatever that's for. Okay. Uh, so now it's Mel's turn.
All right. Uh, one, two, three, um, two, four. Okay. One, two, three, four is all I have for free movement, but I can spend an action point to gain one more to land on that space there. So 56. Okay. Okay. I've got another one. You closely examine this magnificent talisman. You see it depicts a misttor. Its name comes in part from its ability to create a thick mist around itself by altering the surrounding aura when the humidity allows. This mist both conceals and compensates for the misttor's poor vision. The mist also serves as a detector when a living being enters it.
The misttor is one of the oldest creatures of Malia. You also find lines on the edges of the talisman. You are convinced that you can move it. Should we move it up, down, or nothing?
Well, it's not a bird to move it up. And it's not a
It's not It's a lion basically. So obviously the main blazes or whatever.
Yeah. I'm gonna do nothing.
Yeah. So we'll do nothing.
No idea. Do nothing. Yes.
Yeah. Exactly. Like it's not up or it's not sinking or flying or whatever.
Nothing. Yeah. We're going to go with nothing.
So I think it just said my turn ends.
Yep. Your turn ends.
Okay. My turn ends. So now our turn has ended. So we have to put two Uh, place them in the center of the room. Okay. And then we will go
all right.
Back to the start of our turn. So, I don't think you've spent any actions, but I'll recover back up to six.
And then we get to choose who goes next. Do you want to go?
So, this is like our last turn, right? Because when there's at least five in Oh, no. We would put two more. Yeah.
So, we have one more round after
we can get to both of these. So, I think we're fine. Unless we have to do something after that.
Okay. All right.
Go first.
Sure. One, two, three. I did it. 45. Oh. You carefully examine this magnificent talisman. You're able to identify a tindor. This little dragon is often depicted on talismans or statueets. A symbol of protection. It adorns the most beautiful yolk castles and many of the forsaken fortresses. You also know that it is not uncommon for a horde of tindors or tind I don't know how to say this to serve a tin rag, a much larger minor dragon that uses its keen eyesight to spot its prey.
You also notice markings on some of the edges of the talisman. You're convinced you can move it. You can move it up, down, or do nothing. So, it's a dragon, so it's got scales. I'm assuming we go with the scales thing. Oh, but dragons fly, says Yogi. So, you think, but Man says, "The feather flies, the scale sinks." I don't think dragons have feathers. Yeah, dragons flying has Yeah. Yogi says, "Dragons fly and it has scales, so they uh and they can breathe fire, so they are cheating." Yes. Yes.
The dragon flies uh sinks and blazes.
Mhm.
Uh but I say down, right? We go down.
Yeah, I think so. Cuz looking at that image, it's clear.
Yeah, scales is like no question. So multiple things can have scales, I hope, because we got a success for the other one. Let's see. Uh 60. Oh, you work with both hands to pull down on the stubborn talisman. A significant click tells your efforts have finally paid off. You gain a success. Then discard the talisman. You can't do it. Turn ends.
Yes. Okay. So then my turn.
Your turn.
Uh one, two,
and this is 13. Oh, got another one. You examine this magnificent talisman closely, admiring every detail. You recognize a condor may or mah. Uh, this majestic creature is born, mates, and dies in the air. Its keen eyesight allows it to spot its prey from several kilometers or miles away before swooping down on it at full speed with its four huge wings tucked. It alters the surrounding aura and generates a terrifying sound capable of killing instantly. Like all scaled creatures, it is hunted down by the less scrupulous, but few managed to get close to it. You also spot some lines on the talisman's edges.
You're sure you can move it up, down, or turn ends.
Well, I think this is the feathers fly up.
Up 57. Okay, I'm assuming we're all good with that. Let's see. Oh, you force the talisman trying to move it even a little. You push it upwards. You hear a satisfying or significant click. You gain a success token. Yay. And discard the token, the the interest token. Your turn ends. So, now we had to add two more pinks.
Okay. So, I guess we just would do nothing on our turn, right? Cuz we already checked this one and we know that it's do nothing.
Yeah.
Yeah. So, yeah, there's nothing else here to do.
Nothing else to do. So, we're going to do nothing. and place that.
And then when there are at least five in the room, we go to 59. That's in here. Oh, in the back. Uh, you knew your time was limited, but the ominous noises barely muffled by the thickness of the walls remind you it's now now too late. You will now be judged on the revelence or yeah, re relevance. Oh, re relevance. Oh my god. Of your actions. Take your accumulated success tokens from this room and refer to the results below before discarding them. How many do we have?
Three.
So, we're two plus go to 51.
Before discarding them. Okay.
The walls begin to shake and a blinding shower of dust falls from the ceiling. After a few seconds, the pass a passageway opens in front of you. You've succeeded. You rush heatlessly down the stairs and set off a trap. Dart shoot from the walls, stabbing you into you before you can react. Each hero suffers one damage non-defend defendable. So that's fun. So even though we had super succeeded, the game still says don't care. Uh go to 31.
Okay, it looks like we're going to our first combat. You find yourself in the middle of a medium-sized room with walls faded by time. Facing you is a handful of enemies, surprised by your rival. Go into combat mode. So, this tells us we need to set up 58 from that little book. We have to grab enemy one, but we're going to use enemy two because we're going to do the recommended at the start of the book. Uh, and then we start on the enemy starting space. The whole group does. And because we're playing two heroes on these four different enemy spawn points, we're going to have one of each of the level one enemy or number one enemy put there. If we're playing three players, we add a second one to the green spawn point. And if we're playing four, we'd add another one to the blue. And if we're playing five, no extra punishment. Uh, okay. Very weird. All right.
So, I will just throw this here. So, 50 58 So, looks like we need C1, F1, and G2. Okay.
And there's our little setup. So, there's our hero spawn point at the top of some stairs, it looks like here. And these red lines are uh like blocking terrain or whatever, so you can't move through them or see through them or shoot through them. Um, and it looks like there's like a closed door here. We have the four enemy spawn points and then we have the like end conditions where if we all go to zero hit points, we go to 15. If all the enemies are eliminated, we go to 39.
We have here, blue here,
yellow's here.
Okay, perfect.
Okay,
then we start on the stairs. Oh, and then you need enemies. Sorry, it was two. Uh yeah,
you have three of them.
Yeah. So, it's saying use number one, but remember at the beginning of the book, it's like, you know, if it's your first time or you want a little bit of easier game, like it's too difficult. Um which we did try it at the full difficulty. We've played some scenarios or played some uh combat scenarios at the full. We tried off stream and like yeah, we're going to play with the backside which just to see this would go five initiative. Higher is better. So, this guy would go at five. Uh my initiative is only four. or yours is
three
or mine's mine's three, yours three. So, this guy would always go f these. All of them would go first. Have five movement and seven health. Uh they would get cancel on attack. If they get the special symbol, they cancel two of our defense dice. If they ever get this symbol on those tokens that get added, they would get extra attack dice. And they roll two red automatic hit and blue on defense. So the other side, they actually go at the same time as us. So we can break ties in this game. It's like friendly to the players. So anytime there's a tie on anything, the heroes get to decide how they want to resolve it or break it or whatever. Uh it would only have four movement and only five health. And look, it does like way way less stuff here. But it's same attack and same defense though.
Okay. And one of these everybody but pink.
Um yeah. Yeah,
one on each spot but the pink.
Okay,
cuz we're playing two heroes.
Okay. And putting out their initiative. They go three.
So, one of us has to start on this spot and then the other one just has to be adjacent to it.
Um, I can start on the spot. I guess you want to go first with their your
Actually, you you can go.
Yeah, I go wherever you want me to go.
Yeah. Yeah. Unless so there is an advantage thing we we know from playing a little bit before is like there is an advantage in melee only if out of us two like this is another reason why like lower player count's a little rough um lower hero count because there's an advantage to being beside an enemy in melee so like if I was beside this enemy and Mel was also beside it and she was attacking with a melee attack or I was attacking with a melee attack you get a plus one free damage for each of your allies that's beside the target your melee smacking. On range attacks, if my ally is beside an enemy, I actually get a punishment where the enemy becomes harder to hit and they get to roll an extra black dice, which is strange. So, it makes range attacking the same. So, normally like we play together and we like to like target and kill things one by one.
So, if we're both melee fighters, it would probably be better if we're both attacking the same enemy, getting extra damage, being beside them, and engage with them versus you go first attack, and then I range attack. It's harder to hit.
Yeah. So, like I don't know the best way to approach this, but I just want to explain that that's like something that's going through my head right now on how to do it, but um I could go first, get to one of these guys, and since I'm squishier with health and defense, I don't have armor. I I don't have uh armor. My health is only four. I might go after like this guy and hide over here so that all these guys can't like surround me and reach me because like we can't go in this space. So if I go here, yes, the enemies could go here and here and both be engag. I could have three enemies engage with me. Actually, I could have four engaging me if I'm here. But there's only three enemies. But if you also get here, cuz we can we're on initiative track of three. Uh
oh, yours.
Oh, yeah. Where's mine? Over here. like we we break ties on initiative so we can go before the enemies and if like we try to work on this guy maybe if I go first and I'm beside him I don't get p I do get punished from being adjacent to an enemy when I'm shooting range also they'll roll an extra black dye which sucks.
Mhm. But there is a play actually of you moving beside that enemy and then shooting at a different guy
or that. Yes. Or that.
Then I can then attack the other the bonus bonus. Yeah.
Yeah. I'm just trying to think of how to maximize like minmax all all the benefits. Yeah.
All it all comes down to random
and then I can try to block the other two hits
if they're still alive.
Yeah, I can just go and I can move through allies. I can't move through enemies. So I can go one, two, three, four. I can get there with my free movement. So now I'm engaged with this guy. So I can't I lose all the rest of my free movement, but I only have four, so it's whatever. Uh if I shoot this guy cuz he's adjacent to me, he'll get an extra black dice. There's like four different punishments against range attacking in this game. It's frustrating, but it makes sense. So, if I'm ever attacking a guy at range and an allies beside them, they get an extra black dye. They'll only ever get one extra black dye, no matter how many of these conditions apply. The other one is if I'm attacking something adjacent, they get an extra black dye. If I'm shooting through yellow dotted terrain, so not red lines, but sometimes there's ones with yellow dotted lines around them. That's like hazardous. If I'm shooting through or touching that or basically the line of sight hits it, uh, I would add an extra yellow die to my target. And there's one other one that I don't remember off the top of my head, but there are four and I don't remember what it is.
Oh, it's shooting through one of them
cuz they are like hazardous terrain. So, if I shoot if I have to shoot this guy and there's an ally of him in front of him and my line of sight goes through it, uh, they get an extra black dye. So, it's like again, just think of like thematically like I'm shooting an arrow and if there's anything that could mess up my shot in the way, it makes it so they could completely dodge my attack possibly. So, yeah, think of it like that. All right, so that's how you kind of remember it. All right, so uh I'm now beside this guy. I haven't spent any of my six action points. I could spend five and I can attack this guy. Maybe I can also attack this guy all the way over here because line of sight, if it's in the same column, it's just from center of square to center of square or the same row, whatever. Um, but if it's diagonal, it goes from the closest corner to the closest corner on their square and draw a line. I don't think it hits this wall, but if it does even touch the corner of that wall, that wall is also considered like a red line. I wish they kind of did red lines for all the walls. Um, but anytimes there's a wall, it's just in the art. You got to kind of catch it. Um, and if even if my line of sight touches the corner, like just itty bit touches, uh, it's no no dice. So I can just do this for fun.
Oh, it might touch it.
Yeah, it might touch it, right?
Yeah.
Uh, so corner to corner.
Yeah, that would touch that corner.
Yeah, it does touch it. So I don't have line of sight to the guy in the back. So good thing I checked. Uh, but I do have line of sight to this guy for sure. I have line sight to this guy, but this guy will get a punishment because I'm adjacent to him. But I'm being adjacent to him to hopefully benefit you on your turn when you melee attack him. Yep. To get an extra hit.
Yep.
And hoping you'll be beside me to prevent both these enemies. But there is a rule in this game. By default, most enemies will only go after some an enemy who's not already engaged by enemies of the same type. So they'll kind of spread out their aggression. But there's only two of us and three enemies. So, somebody's getting attacked by two enemies usually.
Yeah.
Uh, I think is how it would work. Um, but some enemies ignore that and they go after they want to go after whoever's engaged um more and they want to team up on whoever's the weakest. So, uh I will fire on this guy on the yellow spot here.
Mhm.
I will spend how many? He just he rolls two blue dice.
Yeah, unless you block one.
Well, I will I will spend all six action points. Now is a little risky because I also have an ability over here on my defense. I could spend one action point. So if I spend all six, that means I have nothing on defense. So that's kind of sucky.
I think that might be okay.
Kind of. I am squishy. I probably shouldn't do this.
What does it give you if you Oh, it just lets you
It lets me ignore his other blue dice. So I totally negate both of his blue dice. So they will roll nothing on defense.
Kill him potentially. Oh no. Two attack. No, you're only rolling two dice. What's the most that we can get on a red? Two, right? So, the most you can hit is four.
But I worry he hits me, rolls two dice, and his free hit.
Yeah.
And I only roll a black like he'll murder me.
Oh, yeah. We're not playing without the upgrade tokens. We forgot to do that.
Are we not? Are
or are we?
I don't know. Should we play with them?
Yeah.
Let's show them. Let's show them for this first round.
Okay, we'll do it for this round. And Yeah. Yeah, we'll do it. Maybe we do it for this fight. I don't know. Maybe they'll screw us. I'm not sure.
Yeah. Look how bad this is.
So, randomly, you draw these out. And the crazy part is at the end of each round, they go back in the bag. I mean, the bag is not included with the game. We did that. Normally, you're supposed to put them in a stack and shuffle the stack or pile on the table every time. I'm not going to do that. So, we just put them in a bag. But this this red extra offensive die they get and this every single one gets this. And you see why people want to play on easy mode and take them away. It makes sense. So that gives every one of them now they roll three red dice and get a free hit, which is insane. Which also increases the chance of getting a special that ignores our defensive dice, which is nuts. And when this round is over, this goes back in the bag, shuffled up, draw again. You could literally get the same thing again, which is nuts. Um, it definitely increases the difficulty quite drastically in my opinion, but it also spices up the combat and makes it like a little unpredictable. Like he could next round have extra movement that you don't expect or get extra initiative or get an extra ability or something like
Yeah.
Yeah. It's crazy.
So,
so now that might change what you do with a defense.
Yeah.
Hey, Bernardo. Bernardo says, "Greetings from Dor. navigating the CBRON uh with a lady and a loot and a crazy cobalt that has personality disorders.
Playing some too many bones today. I I would take it. Good to see you. Hope you're doing well. Uh all right. So, and yeah, that is these um upgrade tokens. That's what we're talking about right now. That is what the easy mode playing with one fewer just means we wouldn't have drawn any for this enemy because they would get one by normally. But if we ever played against enemy that gets two or three of them, they would just get one less. All right. Uh All right. So, I was uh Okay, I need to decide all my stuff. So, now this is even scarier because I'm beside this guy and he might be attacking me, but I want to murder one of these guys.
I'm debating even like drinking a potion to get my five points back. Yeah,
I could go all in on the offense right now and spend an aura so that I roll an extra red dye and I get an extra hit.
I'm going to do that on my turn.
It's just the real debate is do I spend only five action points. So, I have a chance of getting some defense here. But that's only on the black. Can I see some dice here? Yeah. So, the black die has only one special side. has I think one side with two shields and one side that fully dodges the whole attack, but the rest is completely blank. So that is crazy. But is if I get a special on my one black die roll and I get two shields, is that really going to save me from death when they're rolling three red dice that don't miss and one extra hit?
Well, they kind of miss. Like on the red dice, they have some one damages, which I don't think I've ever really seen. I feel like every time you play, they always roll these twos.
Oh, they has two specials on a red die,
which I mean, just remember,
I did not know that.
So, technically, those could be considered misses.
Two two hits, two single hits, and two specials,
which for you, you're not even rolling blue dice anyways. And the yellow dye, the power die or whatever, has two threes, a one and a two, a miss, and a special. And the blue defensive die has like single shield, single shield, special. Uh, two misses. Yeah, two singles, a double, a special, and two misses. If I got that all. Yeah. Hm. Yeah, cuz killing this guy like I still have this guy.
I'm going to try. I'm going to roll three red dice.
Yeah. And if you kill that guy, that'd be amazing. And then this guy would just say attacks you who you have way more defense.
Yeah.
Yeah. I'll go all in. I'll regret it later. I'm sure
you're fine. I think you're good.
Okay. So, how many?
So, that means I'm activating the second line
on my offense here. So, I'm going to roll because I spent aura. I'm rolling three reds. I also have an extra automatic hit, so I can't forget that. And I reduce the enemy by two blue dice, so they will not roll any defense.
This is straight hits.
So all of this is straight damage. And we just need five to kill them.
And you already start with one.
And I already start with one. So I just need four on this roll. Maybe that's too crazy, but whatever.
Can you read that?
Yeah.
You got two. And a special face if that does anything.
No, that's three damage. Okay. Okay. It's okay. It's okay. It's okay.
Yep.
Yeah. That's rough. That is so rough.
Yogi, don't poke the bear.
It's how it is. That's how this game is, though. It's crazy. Uh, what I could do too on my turn, I can maybe drink a potion or I can spend an aura point just to heal two so I have like five health and I hopefully don't die on the next hit. Like this red I'm worried this red is like the it's crazy.
Yeah, if you die then I'll just pick you up with my potion.
True.
You won't lose anything.
True, true, true.
I don't think you'll die.
Okay,
I don't think you'll die.
I I don't know if you have to spend an action to get me up.
That's fine.
I don't think you do. I think just an action to trade with me if you need to get a
Yeah, but I have already, so I think you'll be fine.
Okay,
cuz I can use these on.
Yeah, you'll be beside me. Okay, I'm not panicked. I'm not panic.
Don't panic.
I think we got this.
No, there is like no special abilities that I know of that I've seen yet that allow you to do anything after the roll. All this stuff you have to do and and spend and commit before the roll, which feels that's what makes it feel extra bad so many eggs in one basket. It's just same as Gloom Haven, right? I'm going to use this item. I'm going to do this. I'm going to spend this and play my best card and double all my stuff and I moved in this position and I did my last three turns all to build up for this and be in this right spot and everyone else to be positioned correctly. And here I'm going to hit the guy and then I draw the card that nulls the whole attack and everything else falls apart. That can that's how this game works. Every single attack do the same thing. So it's like I kind of went all in there but whatever. We'll see.
Yeah. Not no rerolls either.
Yeah.
Not yet.
All right.
All right. I have four. Move. One. Two. Do I only need to actually I'm going to Oh, wait. How can I do this so that I one? No, cuz once I'm here, I lose my the rest of my movement. So, I can't position.
Yeah. So, so how this is what Mel's talking about right here is kind of crazy. This is also very important in this game is how the movement works. The free movement is as soon as Mel becomes adjacent to an enemy, loses all the rest of her free movement. So, she's trying to figure out a way.
Oh, I don't actually because I have my ability. So, that Okay, normally.
Correct. Correct. So, normally Mel was trying to figure out a way she could sneak and get to this position. Yeah.
But she can't get there with her free movement because as soon as she goes adjacent to this guy, she's lose the rest of her free movement. She could then by normal rules spend an action point to move, but then that means she's like has less to do on her attack or defense. So, it's very expensive. Um, but she has the artifact that allows her to ignore that rule. Yeah.
So, she can kind of go wherever she wants. She doesn't lose the rest of her free movement. The reason I want to do this is because I have an ability that I could hit based on positioning. So,
Oh, yeah.
Yeah. I'll start there and then see what happens. Okay. So, here is not my dilemma, but kind of. So, for three action points, I can roll one red dye. I can spend an aura to make it two red dye. But then I can do that twice, which might be a better option instead of just going in with adding an extra red dye. I think I'm gonna do Yeah, I think I've talked myself into I'm going to try to do the attack twice. So, one, two. So, I'm at three. I roll one red dye. I'm going to spend an aura to give myself a second red dye plus a damage.
And you get an extra damage from the outnumbering effect of me being also engaged with the same enemy you're attacking. So I technically start with one, two, three damage.
Three hits already.
Okay.
But they are rolling two blue dice.
Yes. Which I block one shield.
Yeah.
But I can do an attack again.
All right. So you spend everything you want to spend.
Yes.
Okay. So you roll attack dice first
and I have three already. Three hits. Four. Five. Okay. So we have exactly five.
Okay. So five is floating. And now we're going to roll the defense dice on the enemy based on what gets canceled and not canceled. So
yes. And I block one shield. So, we'll roll two blue dice.
Oh, he got two shields.
Two shields. So, you block one.
Okay. So, he takes four damage.
And this blue special does nothing. They don't have anything modifying the blue specials.
Okay. So, this guy has four.
Okay.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Damage gets puts on the board, which is annoying, but
yeah, not my favorite thing, but we can. Okay. Then I can spend three again. One, two, three. I can hit one more time. And because I want to spend the aura. I don't know that I need I only need one to get through. So, I'm not going to I'm not doing it cuz I already have two damage to start.
Y
because of this and then being beside you. And I already block one of my shields.
Okay, that face does an extra damage. So, I have three damage. He's going to roll his two dice. I block one shield. We just need one to get through. You got three shields. I block one. So, that's two. We're good. That was very close.
So close. So close.
Oh my god. All right. So, this guy's knocked out wherever he goes.
I'll just put him back. Do you feel better?
Yes. Okay. The other thing too is technically we're both engaged. I just thought of while you were taking your turn is I kept thinking I'm going to get hit by this guy, but we could have chose him to attack you.
Mhm.
And these guys only go to attack somebody who isn't already engaged with their party or whatever their their same group and we're both engaged. So we can break that tie and choose. Yeah. So it not necessarily we have to choose them to attack me. I forgot about that.
Okay. Okay.
But if you were engaged with someone else,
then one of them would definitely come after me for sure.
No, no, we're good. One one is dead.
So now the enemies are going to go.
I think we'll just have this guy go first.
Okay. So he'll move the shortest, simplest path, which is one space here.
Okay.
And then he's going to roll three red dice. And he already has a hit against.
Okay. So I don't have any action points that I can spend. My defense doesn't cost any action.
But you could spend an or point right now before rolling. You must do it before rolling. Yep. any dice and you could get an extra blue dye and two free shields.
But I think I won't because I already roll three blue dice.
I would do it if you're like on death's door and like you needed it, right?
Let's see how this first one goes. So they roll three
and they already have an automatic hit. Oh my gosh. So they have one, three, four, four damage and their face does removes one blue dye from me.
Yeah.
So this is why this is why you completely roll attack dice first because then it'll determine now Mel rolls one less blue dice. So, you don't roll all the dice together and then cancel. You roll attack first and then it literally takes a dieice out of the pool, which is cool.
And yeah, enemies do lose their free movement, their quote unquote movement when they engage with us, too. A lot of the rules in this game apply to characters, and that means both enemies and heroes. Then some rules apply to heroes and some rules apply to enemies. Um, but yeah, movements, a lot of the stuff is to both of us. So, yeah, same applies there.
Okay, four hits are coming in. I block zero of the Oh, yeah. I block zero of the hit. So, I take four damage. One, two, three, four. And now, unfortunately, I can't use a potion until it's my turn, right? I don't think I can do that.
I don't think so.
Okay, that's fine.
And now this guy's going to go one, two, three. Yeah.
Okay. Now, what do I do for this guy? This guy on
Well, they prefer diagonals, I think, when they're going their shortest path. I don't know. We could just say it's there. Okay,
I only get I I don't think I can prep them in a way that this will matter.
No, that's okay. Uh three. They are going to hit for three. I will spend an aura to get extra blue dye and some extra shields because I am in trouble.
Yeah.
Oh my gosh, they got four again and removing one of my die. Okay, so I had one, two, three, four. So I'm still rolling three blue dye. I still already have two shields. They're hitting for four. I got a shield and that phase gives me a shield here. So I have two shields, three, four shields. I block all four. We're good.
Wow. Wow.
Oh, yeah. The enemy has a extra attack cuz outnumbered. Yes. Correct. Correct.
Then I do take one damage and that will Oh, and then I lose my armor.
So
maybe I should So then I probably should do this instead. If I can do this after.
I don't think you can. I'm not sure. Um
Oh, no. I chose anyways. cuz I rolled the dice. I rolled the dice.
I think it's an or a thing. Yeah.
So, because I'm because I died, I lose that armor.
Yeah, because it's printed on here.
Oh, but I guess I still
Yeah, I forgot they outnumber too.
Know when you're adjacent to me?
No, you actually take your mini off the board and you put your initiative marker
as kind of like a body sitting there knocked out.
Uh here.
Here's me telling him he's fine. He's fine.
Yep. This is what I was afraid of, man. We played a bit of combat off stream and I'm like it gets rough. Like it's extra red dye.
Yeah. A lot of RNG. It's like it can go so bad. This is why people have all the easy mode, the ex explorer mode and and have come up with all these different house rules and stuff to like Yeah, it's it's tough. There's like no room for error. And then even if you play it all perfectly like just couple bad rolls and it's done. But they they designed it to be that way. It's meant to be that way. So I don't know. Wait, could we though have not said that this guy moved like this? Then when that guy comes in, he's not because we get to control the movement, right? As long as it's the same.
How what was this for?
For when this first guy moved, we just I just instinctively moved him like this.
I moved him, but yeah, sure.
But he could have moved like this.
I feel like they there's something in the rules about they prefer diagonals if for if the shortest path is needed, but I think it's when it's moving like more than one space, but whatever.
So then I would still be alive. Why?
Because then he doesn't get outnumbered cuz he's going to still move the same.
But they're still engaged with you.
Oh, I see. It doesn't matter.
Yeah, that doesn't matter.
Oh, I see. Yeah.
I thought you were trying to like line them up for some positioning thing. Uh Dominic says it gets a bit a bit better later or with better equipment and more space to maneuver better. Oh, okay. Okay.
That's okay. That's okay. It was the red dye. The extra red dye killed him.
So, it's okay.
You're just knocked out. You're knocked out. We're okay. I can still get her back up, maybe. Yeah, you can. You spin a potion.
Yeah. Okay. So, what has happened? That's their turn done, right?
Y.
So, now we go back to the initiative phase where we look if initiative has changed. At this point, I could spend an action point.
Well, I think we do this first because I think that would determine their could determine their initiative. This again, like we're not even playing on easy mode, but like this is why I'm saying like if they had one fewer upgrade token right there, we you would not be dead already in the first round of like a tutorial combat. We're already reducing the difficulty by playing with weaker enemies.
So, it's like this is so it's up to you. We could enact this right now and you not draw any more tokens. We showed them off. I'm I'm letting you decide.
Sure. Let's do that for now.
I know we played it before. We played it with it fully f and we were fine.
Yeah. But it like literally got better rolls. That's all it came down to, right? It's like I don't know.
Yeah, cuz them having different um different abilities.
So yeah, that's the upgrade tokens and that's what they're saying in easy mode to play with one less. So we shouldn't be drawing those if we're going to be playing on easy mode.
Yeah. Okay.
But yeah.
So then in that case then
it is about the journey. This is correct.
100%. Yeah. You guys got to see death
uh
knocked out, I guess.
All right. So I'm going to choose to go first even though we're both the same initiative. Mhm.
Uh, I will spend a yellow potion to heal you for two. And that puts you back on the board.
Yeah. Thank you.
Oops. Knocked this out.
And I heal two.
Yeah. Two healing points. You're back up.
Thank you.
Uh, or actually,
no, I can spend a red on myself. So, don't you save the rest.
Does it only give you one point? I forget when you get resed. Um, maybe I do only. No, you only you get one at the start of a combat or something, don't you? Isn't that
Oh, that's right. Yeah, it's if we if we moved on in the story, you would get auto revived basically at one hit point, right? That's what that I'm thinking of probably.
Yeah. Like if you just won this.
Yeah. You Yeah. Like when we leave combat or whatever or change locations.
All right.
Um Oh, yeah. It's still your turn. Yep.
So, I'm going to try to murder this guy.
Mhm. Do you get a bonus hit because I'm engaged with him?
No. I actually He rolls a black dye because you're engaged with him. That's a bad thing.
True.
So, then don't res me yet.
Remember?
Is this true?
Yeah, you can do whatever you want.
I would assume No, but I'm assuming he's not engaged with a corpse on the ground. I don't know the rules to that actually. That's why I'm saying I'm not sure.
You're saying raw?
Like, does anyone know? Make sense?
Yeah. Like, is he still adjacent to one of my allies? I know I'm allowed to actually go on this space. I know that.
I'm like kind of not there.
I know in the rules like I'm allowed to move on you and stand on you and stuff. I'm pretty sure. I just don't know.
Or maybe Jana if she's still around.
Yeah, this is kind of a weird one. But, uh, anyways, I'll start preparing. I'll start preparing. So, I'm going to shoot at this guy.
Um, and I need to hit him for two. Yeah, I think yeah, I'm going to spend all six. I'm going to spend all six. So, I'm I'm rolling only I'm I'm not going to spend an or point, though. I'm going to roll two red. Yes, might be bad. Yeah, I'm going to spend two red and I ignore both of his defense dice.
Okay, perfect. Uh, yeah. I don't think anyone knows, but it's okay. It's a weird one.
It's not specified.
So, if it's not specified, then it's not explicit that we can't do this.
I'm going to say thematically because you're lying flat on the ground, you are not affecting me shooting an arrow at an enemy.
I think so, too.
But if you were standing,
Yeah. Like that's
I would need to yell out Mel duck.
Mel, get out of the way. And that would cause trouble to what's going on. Yeah. So, all right. That makes sense to me.
Two specials which do absolutely nothing.
No damage
cuz my weapon is so basic. It doesn't have any bonuses.
Okay.
I do zero damage. Nothing. Yep. Fun. Uh, okay. So, now I will spend that potion and you get up and
Oh, yeah. But I can do something fun now, I think.
Weeks. I probably should have switched to freaking melee.
Well, I can get both of them. So maybe I can get rid of one of them.
Like now thinking about it is like I I need to start thinking outside the box. Like are my bare hands quote unquote claws would have been better cuz I would have got auto hits.
Then you have two hits.
Like look
rolls.
Two hits plus rolls.
No he didn't.
No. No.
No. Cuz he didn't spend an aura.
Yeah. I didn't spend an aura on that. I thought maybe I'll get like two hits off the die. All I need is two hits. They had no defense. I just need to roll two hits which could have been on one die. hit a two or two dice hit ones.
Mhm.
Yeah, I shouldn't have to spend an aura point every single attack in the game.
No,
that is not good game design. But um if I switch to melee, I resed you first, then switch to melee, then use my free movement to move next to them. On that role,
I would have had two hits plus a built-in hit and only spent three action points. And then they would still roll, but you would minus one of their shields.
Yeah, I shouldn't have been using a range weapon at that point. I'll put that on me. Um because it would have even on the special symbol, it would have had a better result cuz I only needed two damage.
So that's my bad now looking back. But we'll keep going like I don't know. I want to show off the game and how it's designed too. So even though we're applying all these easy cheats, um yeah, showing how it is. This could be playing devil devil's advocate. This could be these guys maybe love from soft video games. And this could be like the kick your ass intro.
Oh yeah.
Like a Dark Souls, Demon Souls, all those Souls like games where the first intro is you're going to fight a boss. He's going to smack the crap out of you. You barely have a chance of winning unless you really know the game. And this is just a learning lesson. Fail forward. Boom. And it's part of the story.
Well, they also maybe don't want to hold your hand and make it think it's easy.
Yeah, maybe that's it. So, maybe that's the thing, too. Maybe we're supposed to die in this one and like you're supposed to fail and it's part of the story. But, I don't know. Just feels bad. Like, it's not a good gamer feeling when you're like, I suck.
I mean, we are just like out of the out of the wilderness. Like, we just like met each other and we're like, okay, let's
we just we just awoken like altered
be up and rise from your grave. Uh, okay. Started my turn. I'm going to spend a red potion to heal four. One, two, three, four. So, I go back to full. Okay. I do have a slight question here. Um, I am going to use three actions plus I'm going to activate the second line. So, I'm using four points.
Um, does this mean that I can get ores?
All of them are ores. So, I can get plus one die or this or this.
Yes.
Okay. So, I'm going to choose this.
You're going to hit both the enemies.
So, you roll once.
Roll. And then they they roll defense separately.
Okay, I'm going to spend a a for another one cuz if I'm hitting both, this will do one two hits for sure. It'll block one shield and if I get a face, it'll do another hit. Okay, let's see. Okay, so we got one nice,
two, three, four, five.
Five hits to both. You said they roll defense separately.
Yeah. Yeah. So,
and I block one shield.
Okay. So, you didn't negate any defense. So, you can roll whatever first. This guy.
And I block that one shield. So, he's dead.
Boom.
Okay.
And then roll the two blue dice again for this guy.
I blocked the one shield. He does have a face. That doesn't mean anything.
Oh, Ra did find the rules. We were We were correct.
Perfect.
Page 54. The other miniatures can move uh for an unconscious hero. The other miniatures can move through this space and can stop on it. does not give any bonuses or penalties for being outnumbered or for line of sight.
Perfect. Thank you,
Raw. Thank you so much for taking the effort to do that. We appreciate it. I thought it makes sense, right? Like it makes sense.
This game is pretty thematically designed, so that that would make sense.
Okay, I did it. I got him cuz I blocked that one shield. I hit him for five, but I blocked that shield, so he's dead, too.
Boom.
Okay, so they I was really pissed after what they did to me and I just like took him out.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You knock me down, I knock all of you down. We had to use some potions, which probably is not great, but we got there.
Sorry. Okay,
whatever. It's like give us give us potions.
Okay.
Uh, all right.
I have no aura.
So, now all the enemies are eliminated. We're going to 39.
Okay. I like that ability.
Even though time is running out, you can't help but search the corpses to see what you find. You search the bodies, draw up to two action cards is what it's supposed to say there. Uh, and then you gain two purple keys.
Okay, I'll take one. You take one. Is that fair?
Sure. We each get two purple keys. That can help us in lockpicking. Uh, two action cards. So, action cards are used to randomize everything in the game. This deck randomizes enemy stealth movement. It randomizes things that need compass directions on the overall map. It randomizes loot you get. It It randomizes uh outcomes in events. It randomizes um
the crafts,
the materials and plants you find out in nature. Um so we're just going to draw two of them and they're multi-use cards obviously. Uh we're just looking in the bottom left area here. So we're getting one common item plus two gold for the group.
Okay.
Okay. So those will go in a discard pile. And the common item we will get is so this can sit in your backpack. It's worth 10 gold
and you can discard at any time to get two red potions which are the ones that heal for four.
That is very good.
So it's cool. It doesn't take up a potion slot until you want it to.
So you can carry up to two items. So we got our first backpack item or I could carry up to one item. But I I don't I don't care. Whatever.
You're the one who's like could be away from me getting melee attacked.
Yeah. and you might need the potion to come and get me up. So, yeah, that's what I'm thinking. But,
okay,
I don't know. You could just get rid of that right now and just put you have the slots for it.
But again, like whatever. Uh, you manage it however you want.
Okay.
All right.
You leave the room and walk through a corridor before entering a small, beautiful decorated room. In the center of the room is a small pool with a totem pole. To the left of that immediately catches your eye. To the right of the same pool rests a heavy chain. At the back of the room, a carved stone also catches your attention. However, no exit is visible. We now need So, we've left combat, so this all technically gets cleaned up. Yeah, this game seems like it's all about like again, we took a while to do that, but it seems like from what we played so far, it's all about like story, skill checks, 10-minute little mini scenarios, and stealths and combats and puzzles and stuff, and then back to the story and doing skill checks and stuff like that.
Yeah.
Um, so I don't think combats are like meant to be your whole play session like they are in like, you know, Chronicles of Dun Dunagore or whatever. We play that and it's like sorry story sorry story sorry story sorry story sorry setup set up scenario play scenario for two hours or three hours or whatever and then put it away and this is like dabbling all over the place and sometimes it goes overworld too which we still haven't seen um in here okay so 64
oh I probably still need
of the expiration yeah you might need some of those tiles I like I don't know the system you have is
okay so you need D2 and F2 there's some rules we'll read here. And then we're setting up this thing that they just described. So, we're starting here. And there's some interest tokens. They said a pool in the middle, a chain on the right, a totem on the left or something. I I don't know. We'll I'll read it again with it set up. I'm like, the art on the tile is pretty cool. Looks pretty good.
Just D2 and F2.
Yeah, D2 and F2. I don't know how to put us there, but okay. So, let me just read the setup again. Uh, if I can find it again. Don't remember what was that.
Um,
looking for 64. I'll just glance. I closed the book by accident. Should not have done that. 42 0 and 42 55. Oh, right there. 64. Okay, sorry. Uh, you leave the room and walk through a corridor before entering a small, beautiful decorated room. In the center of room is a small pool. Oops. Small pool uh with a totem pole to the left of it that immediately catches your eye. I'm assuming it's this. That's a totem pole. Uh to the right of the same pool, one of these two, I guess, rests a heavy chain. Oh, no. And then at the back of the room, so this is a heavy chain. At the back of the room is a carved stone. Also catches your attention. However, no exit is visible. Set out 64 of the booklet.
Okay, so now there's special rules. At the start of each round, each hero places their figurine on a free space with an interest token. Heroes cannot move until the end of the round and can only perform the action indicated by the number of the square each hero is on. So, we just like teleport. So you can examine the engraved stone, examine the totem, observe the left side of the pool, the right side of the pool, or take a closer look at the chain. When all the figures have been placed, start playing in any order you wish. Okay, so we pick where we want to plop our miniature and then we choose who does their scenario booklet interaction first.
The hero takes their turn. If a hero has no more spaces with interest tokens available, their turn ends immediately. So there's no timer counting rounds in this one. So yeah, we just play whatever.
Okay,
I'll keep the book handy for reading entries.
Oh, yeah, there's chain. Yeah, there's a chain on the art.
Oh, cool.
Yeah, that's Oh, and
there's water. I see. And the water there. I saw the water. That's cool.
Okay. Where do you want to go?
I don't know.
I would like to examine some of the water. Um, I'll examine here.
I don't know. Um, gravestone totem. I'm going to look at the totem. 23. That's here. Now, who should we go first? Should
you?
I'm going to do the totem.
You go first.
23.
23. Okay. You notice that on the totem there are talismans similar to those in the first room. Looking at the spaces beneath each of them, you realize that they contain the four plates you picked up on the ground. Each one engraved with a different piece of a sentence. So on the left side, I see the dragon, the lion, the lizard thingy, and the bird thingy. Each plate must be inserted in its original into its original slot. To do this, take one cube of the color indicated on each plate. Then stack each color cube from the top to the bottom, matching the correct cube with its talisman while respecting the order of the totem. When the cubes are stacked, say the sentence out loud, starting with the topmost cube and moving down to the next cube. So it looks like the green cube is ready to pounce ferociously.
The blue is with a deafening scream, yellow is appointed protector, and red is I lurk in the shadows. Okay. So, yes,
you could you could scrub back in the stream. Yes. And cheat
or you can play along.
Does anyone remember any?
I remember some.
I remember one.
I remember the dragon was a protector. I remember that.
I remember the birds.
Oh, the bird screaming. We Yeah, we know that.
I know that one. I don't like birds. Now, lurking in the shadows or ready to pounce ferociously. In the shadows.
Lurking in the shadows.
Sorry. The one you said you remember is what?
The the dragon I think was the protector
cuz it was like something about it was on all like the castles and the walls or pedestals or something and it was like they said those dragons are protectors or something.
Okay. I lurk in the shadows.
I lurk in the shadows. I remember there was like um the one was like at dusk and all that stuff.
Dragon is protector. Okay, that one we already I think we know that one. Which one is in the mist?
The mist was the lion.
The mist. The lion couldn't see.
The lion was in the fog
and it was in the fog. Oh, in the shadows. The the line is in the shadows. You're thinking with the fog.
Okay. So then
like the what is it called? Like the misttor or something.
Okay. So then based on elimination of that, what?
So here's the thing. The ready to p pounce ferociously. So, like I know this is tricky and it's on purpose cuz this lizard guy, I remember he was all about the dusk at dusk when the sun is setting something or other. But does that mean shadows? I I don't know. Maybe he was ready to pounce.
One of them did talk about pouncing.
Yeah.
With some kind of disabling ability or something.
Definitely. Scream is a bird. Yes, I agree. Yogi the scream is the bird.
So we got to come up with the order based on this. So if dragon I think is protector, yellow is the first thing. You just put them from left to right.
Okay.
Cuz we're making a sentence. It's fine.
Yeah. Okay.
So you also maybe be able to decipher it based on what makes sense as a sentence.
Uh
we know
so like
the bird is last.
So anointed protector. Do we know what second? Uh, what's the lion doing?
Well, if they think the lion is in the shadow,
Yogi's saying the lizard pounces.
The lizard pounces.
So, the lizard's number three. So, put pouncing at green. Uh, number three.
Number three. So, then red is number two.
Uh, number two is the lion. Is that the one we say is in the shadows?
The lion lurks in the shadow
because of the mist or not?
The lion's in the fog. Birds. Bird's screaming for sure. So, the bird is last. You can put the screaming one last then is the deafening scream blue.
Yeah.
Oh, so then process of elimination.
That's what I'm saying. It's just those two. And if if Yogi thinks that the lizard is the pouncer,
okay, so we'll put Okay,
so it's yellow.
Okay, so let's try to read it. Yellow is a pointed protector.
Red.
I lurk in the shadows.
Green.
Ready to pounce ferociously.
Blue
with a deafening scream.
Oh, that sounds like a good sentence, right? Or it could be a point of protector. Uh, ready to pounce ferociously.
I lurk in the shadows with a deafening scream.
Well, that could be good, too. Both of those.
That's the other way that I could go.
Both of those work.
The first one sounds better, though.
Okay, we'll go we'll go with that.
We're going to 38.
Yeah, cuz Yogi says the pounce.
Okay, 38. Uh, it says, "You insert the cubes. You insert the cubes and say the sentence out loud. It echoes against the walls of the tiny room. Compare the order of colors in your stack of cubes with the solution. The correct sentence to saying the correct sentence to say being, "Appointed protector. I lurk in the shadows, ready to pounce roley with a deafening scream." Uh, if all your cubes are in order,
they are.
Oh, sorry. Yellow, red, green, blue. Yeah,
thank you for that.
Uh 53.
We really got to pay attention. I didn't realize,
but we It could be like now you roll down the stairs and get shot in the head with some arrows. Like, who knows what's going to happen. All right, let's see. Let's see.
Uh the spoken phrase seems to have triggered something. The plates start to glow. A light green smoke starts to seep out, becoming more and more intense. So much so that the totem the totem begin to rotate. A small metal box worn by time appears, causing you to congratulate yourselves for your close attention. You know how valuable all the information gleaned during your adventure is. You gained six gold coins
and the totem is gone.
Okay,
so the totem is what I was at, right?
Uh you are on totem yet.
Okay, so no more totem
in the water.
So the totem turned around or whatever and had some money in it.
Okay,
cool. I just noticed on the front of the booklet, remember you said the number 14. Yeah,
like it's there. Like, does that still look like a 14?
Yes.
Or does that just look like cuz it's colored now? I don't know if that matters.
I mean, it still does look like 14 to me.
Anyways, uh, okay. So, now you have to go. Yep.
Uh, left side 61.
No, we don't need these anywhere.
You dip your hands in the pool. Nothing. You don't believe it. You concentrate and sharpen your senses. After a while, you feel something beneath your fingers. Without even thinking, you press it. You hear a shrill sound of gears turning. The basin empties completely as the bottom rises. Before your stunned eyes, a tomb appears inscribed upon it. Here lies uh favorite disciple of Atharos and Grandmaster Silamina. So there's some art. I don't see any numbers at first glance.
No.
Uh if your hero is an which is a different class or race or whatever we're not playing with. Or if your hero has level two plus in knowledge,
I do. I do.
Go to 32. Otherwise, you go to 11. Okay. 32. Uh 32. You speak. A salamina practices a very special form of magic. It is able to command animal creatures through soul bonds. The stronger the link, the more control the creature has, but it is a dangerous power as it works both ways. It takes great control not to be overwhelmed by an animal spirit. Your new companions, thank you for sharing this information. You decide to open the tomb now. Go to 11. Oh, so he's ready to go to 11. You just read some cool stuff.
Oh,
you translated some texts. An enormous suit of armor lies in the middle of the tomb. You examine it more closely. You notice that rather than the remains of a body, there's a large mount of dust inside the armor. As if a corpse as if the corpse of its wearer had been incinerated. The thought makes your blood run cold and you prefer not to dwell on it. You gain the rare object card 69. Nice.
Oh,
so it's an armor. It's heavy. Uh, if you get knocked out, you'll lose it.
Seems to be a theme. Uh, this one will add an extra blue dye, a blue shield, and that's a green shield that actually protects against magic attacks. Normally, magic, I think, goes through all blue shields. Uh, and then you can toss this if you want to fully dodge everything from an attack.
That's cool. It's got like dragon head shoulders and stuff. That's actually pretty sick.
That's cool. Um, yeah, because I just lost my armor. So,
how convenient. Win.
Seems like the game was kind of thinking you might have lost armor by now. Now,
it's heavy. I have two heavies, so I'm good.
Okay. Uh, where was I? Uh, oh, there's more. As you pick up the armor, a light green vapor escapes from it and swirls about the room for a few moments. Each here recovers one point of aura.
Oh yes, I had none.
You also see an engraved cylinder half buried in the dust. You pick it up without thinking and freeze. It strikes you that you may have triggered a trap, but this time luck is with you. Whether this act was courageous or completely moronic will forever will remain forever in debate. But what remains is that you are now in possession of an object that you assume has some significance worth. Some significant worth. Only time will tell the truth in this matter. So, we got this cylinder thingy, which looks awesome with the dragon heads on it there.
Oh, yeah.
It's probably some kind of puzzle. Uh, take scenario card 55. The basin can no longer be examined. Discard all the interest tokens on the basin. Your turn ends.
Oh, that's both sides.
Yeah. So, no more. We don't get to interact with number six, whatever that was.
Uh
55
55. So there's like 80s something scenario cards in here. So these are all specific things.
So this costs zero. It's a scenario item, a backpack item or whatever. There's the art. It has plus 10. And then these are like excuse me those are like um they're like story what do you call that like you know in some campaign games we play and they have like a checklist or like write down that you are blah blah blah and then if you check later this will ask us maybe at some point
if you have item green/blue s or whatever
oh I see
read this entry versus that entry is how I believe that works based on the rule So, here you go.
Luckily, I can carry both of those. I mean, I could discard this to make two potions, but right now, we're good.
What you'll also do in this game is kind of neat. So, if Mel didn't have the slots for it, she actually drops it on the ground, puts it beside the board, and then puts a cube of whatever color on top of it, a cube of the same color on the board in that hex or in that square, and anyone can go up and like loot the stack, I think, for an action point, but I could be wrong. I might have to look that up. Um, but yeah, so you don't lose it. It just drops and then you could like spend your potion and then pick it up. Yeah.
Or I can come over and pick it up,
which is kind of cool.
That is neat.
Uh, okay. So, that's the end of a round. And now we get to teleport to new tokens.
Which one do you want?
Uh, I want the engrave stone.
Okay. This is the chain, right?
Sounds cooler than a chain.
The chain.
Engrave stone. Who wants to go first? What should we do? chain or an engrave stone.
I have a feeling like if we pull a chain, something's going to happen. So, you go first to do that cuz I feel like
get my loot before you pull the ceiling on her head or
Exactly. Or like all the enemies the floor disappears under her feet.
The enemies jump out.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. That I don't know. We're going to see what's happening. Okay. Uh 30. As you grasp at the stone, you notice a mechanism that you can pick. If you can't or don't want to do the action, continue with your turn. So, it's basically like a lockpicking challenge. This is a typo. This should be yellow, but it's a solo skill check. Lockpicking is skill checks. It has a lockpicking icon. Let you know it's a lockpick. Has an action cost to it to then do the skill check like we've seen before.
Okay.
Well, that's that symbol.
Yeah, that was on a Yeah, that was a different Yeah, I didn't take it. Now I'm being punished. No, I'm just kidding. So, it's like a normal difficulty. So if I spend a key, the key is the red hands on the skill check equals to the level of key. So a blue would give me one red hand there just like normal skill check or a purple gives me two and then the success is two plus I I that's just basically telling me I would have had to have discarded. So these are telling me like I have to discard these to even do these options. So
they we did get a purple key.
Yeah, I got to do it. Yeah.
Okay. So, I'm spending three action points. Oh, yeah. I should have full. One, two, three. Uh, I actually have two in dexterity, so I get to roll two white dice.
Perfect. Perfect.
I could spend an aura point to temporarily increase to three dexterity to roll a third die. But I just need two plus successes. And because I'm using a purple cube, it's two fail hands. So, discard that. Okay. How bad do I want this?
I don't know.
What? To spend one.
I'm spending an
Okay.
Uh, so I get to roll another white dice.
There you go. Okay. You got two. Mad throat tickles. We're going to need to stop soon because my throat is like getting dry. I need to drink more water probably.
He got two successes. No stops. Meaning he can keep going or you can just stop there. But you're only I don't know. Do you think this is a I don't What is that one game that we played that was like that? Um
No. There is a symbol for not knowing the successes. I think it shows a a thumbs up and like an infinity symbol or something.
Okay.
That you just keep going and then based on your result, you flip the page and it'll tell you.
So, do you ever think there would be an a time where it says two plus and there's like a check of like how many?
Since I'm only rolling one black dye, there's no chance I get two red hands right now.
At least go again.
So, I will I don't think I need to do it again.
Uh you got one for sure,
but there could be a punishment for getting red hands. I don't know. But anyways, uh, so I have three and I don't have anything that gives me helmet bonuses unless we were playing on
easy mode and that all of a sudden becomes check. So I don't know if we want to do that, but um, so this is uh I'm going to 21.
Yep.
So I lost a purple key, but hopefully this is worth it. And I spent an aura point, which is more worried about uh 21. The stone opens up like a box and reveals a small amulet. You understand that at a glance, this amulet has magical properties that will be very useful to you. You gain rare object 51 and the token is gone off the board and my turn ends.
Okay,
51. There is multiple.
Oh.
Oh, no. This is Sorry, that's the wrong deck. Wrong deck. Wrong deck. Rare object is here. 51. I don't know if these should be in number order or I'm supposed to shuffle these. I shuffled them. I don't think I should have. So, I feel like we never draw from this.
Oh, hit points.
Uh, yeah. So, this is our first amulet. So, this is slides on the right side of the board and you know that because the leather stuff is on the left. Um, and then yeah, you when you go to It's worth 16. Wow, that's crazy.
Wow.
So, this just slides in on the right, but before you slide it in, you get whatever bonus is on it. So, I need two more pink crystals.
That's very good.
And then you just slide it in. And now it just has cool art to show you have an artifact. And if you ever discard it, you then undo whatever the bonus was.
But I could trade that to you. I'm pretty sure. I mean,
if I want you to have more health being the tanky character,
I don't know. I'm not sure how to how to do this here, but
we'll figure it out, I guess. Uh, my turn's over, so it's your turn.
Okay. Um, at the 46 chain. Yeah.
46.
You cautiously approach the imposing chain. A single desire takes hold of you to pull it with all your might, but the shadow of a doubt gives you pause. So you can pull the chain the if if the basin and totems interest tokens are discarded go to seven. They are right.
Yeah.
But it says if at least one of them is still present, go to two. Okay. So we're going to seven.
Seven.
Uh you pull the chain as far as it will go. A few moments pass and a passage opens up in front of you. You dash into it just before the wall behind you collapses with a deafening crash. A little higher up, you spot an exit. You rush to the surface, happy to have survived these first trials. Suddenly, Nile's voice rings out in your minds. Well done, Guardians. You have recovered the crimson cylinder of which contains fragments of his soul. It belongs to the whispering cylinders category, and his secrets will be revealed when you make the right sounds. Nile asks you to whisper several sentences in Wallen. After several failures, you manage to articulate the words temple of Atharos. A green smoke seeps out of the cylinder and forms images. It shows a memory belonging to uh during which Atharos, his master, asked him to join him in a few days in his temple located at the Titan step.
Take scenario card 70 and place it on the region board. Oh, travel time. Okay, so these get put away. This gets put away. So, we get to see some travel stuff.
Okay. So, this is like this is like a card that goes on the overworld map and it tells you where to put it and then when you get to this spot, it will you'll go back to the scenario book at 54 in this case. So, if you can grab the big map and that goes here and this goes on four. Oh, it's like it's zooming in on the art.
Oh, cool.
So, this is the overall board. This is why it reminds me of Aridia. It's like seeing this overall map. Um, yeah, just this overall map has some like cities or something on it. Has some cool art pieces. But I guess like all these different hex's I don't know eventually do they get like little zooms in spots. So, normally this spot if we go there does nothing, but now it does something for the scenario book that we're playing. Okay. And then you know without being told that you will have just experienced that what you have just experienced has made you stronger. You suddenly feel your bodies and minds merging with a part of your aura. Its indescribable sensation of rare intensity immobilizes you for a moment. Each hero gains one level.
So, we're going to level up. That's what that symbol means. Each hero increases a characteristic by one and applies the associated bonus effect according to his people card. And then you record it on your save sheet.
So, are we level one?
Yes. This means we're as a group we're level one, which is important to write down.
Okay. So, I'm adding right here that we are level one.
There is on the back of the sheet. Uh, we're not going to do it. And can you take that off and put it on the clipboard?
Yeah.
Thank you. This I'll move.
But on the back, if you can show the back for a sec.
Yep.
So, this safe sheet, this is what it has. All this crazy stuff in the yellow is very important. That's the stuff that can totally break the story if you don't check off things in the yellow correctly.
Uh, and then on the back is if you ever want to save your hero or make notes, uh, we would each need one of these on the back, but we have like one on the front for the whole party. Is there like your party save sheet? Um, if that makes sense. Okay. And Okay.
Okay. So, we get to level up.
Yeah, we're leveling up. Uh, and all that is so we look at this table here and based on we choose whichever one of these we want to level up and ours are both different. So I based on my weapon that I have, but again I don't know again we were told we read online some people are giving the tip of like look at your super highest level weapon and kind of like to build your character towards that but I don't remember what mine was whatever but if I try to increase my purple aka perception I might be able to get to four soon and be able to have this second option on my weapon. It also helps with skill checks that need perception. So you might want to think about what kind of skill checks you want to be better at.
Mhm. So, we saw that like some of them use dexterity and lockpicking or whatever. So, I could level up my dexterity and go harder in that. And then you also want to decide based on what bonus you get right now. So, I could go for a strength and get an extra health point. I could get an extra aura token, which I think is fantastic. I could get a higher initiative so that I go before some enemies more often. I could get another aura point by going up in this or again initiative. And then you can also look ahead to kind of see like what's next in some of these lines. Like maybe I want to carry more stuff. Maybe I want to move more free movement. That's kind of nutty.
Maybe I want to get towards another talent or level up a talent I already have. So I don't know. I'm not sure. I feel like I want to do either dexterity or um whatever this one is, knowledge or oh intelligence just to get an aura point. Like I want an aura point. I feel like so bad. Do you think there's any um any play in us having not leveling up the same skills?
Yeah, for skill check stuff that happens in a group test that might be good. Individual tests, it doesn't matter. As solo, we get to pick which one of the party members gets to do the test and you obviously pick whoever is going to be better at it.
So, yes, us picking different things to be better at a variety of more things could be beneficial.
Okay.
But I I don't know. It all depends what we run into.
Mhm. Oh, shuffling it was good. Okay, Dominic, thank you. Thank you. Oh, so I probably should give it a little shuffle again. An initiative. Yeah, it could be really useful, too, to go before the enemies and maybe kill one before it goes would be nice, but feel like right now we're kind of weak where it's hard to to like oneot an enemy on your turn cuz our attacks are so expensive, too. At least mine is. I don't know. And like I I look at the dexterity line, too. Like if I just go hard in that, like eventually I'll get to carry more stuff and upgrade that talent I got already. So it's like I could just push hard in the same thing. And then every kind of time we run into a dexterity test, I'm like rolling tons of dice and feel really good. But oh, my claws need level three, too.
Thank you. I forgot about that. Claws need level three knowledge. And what's my knowledge currently at? It's only one. Uh cuz my first level up would be two. Yeah, good call because you always have the claws. Like at least in my case, and Mel always has the bare hands,
but what's this mean? Like any stat has to be level three.
That's what I assume. I don't know if that's right.
I think that's like a wild like that's any stat
is level three, you automatically unlock this. And once any stat is level five, you unlock that.
Yeah.
Or maybe that's your whole level.
Any stat. Okay.
Or is is that your level maybe raw? Is that like what's the level? any stat.
Oh. Oh, okay. Show me the save sheet, though. Is it the same symbol?
Uh, yeah. With a question mark in it.
Oh, okay. No. Okay. Maybe it's just a Never mind. Yeah, maybe it's not the full level. Okay. I was thinking maybe it was like your overall level, so like it didn't matter where the stats were.
Oh, I see.
Uh, okay.
What are you taking?
I don't know. I'm thinking Yeah, maybe that is good. But again, like, oh, I can't do this first, right? I think it has to be in order. So, until I unlock three of this,
yeah,
I'll never, even if I get to five of this first, I can't open this one until I've opened them in order from top to bottom. I'm pretty sure that's how it works, which is kind of lame. But cuz I love to just push dexterity and go nutty and like but
I mean though if you're not using your bare hands then
maybe I'll try initiative but I I feel like aura points are like so busted.
Yeah, I'm really debating aura points cuz I only start with three. So having four might be good.
Yeah, raw. That's what I was doing. I was talking about before in the stream was yeah, finding your uh weapon that matches your race. Uh yeah, I saw that online uh on BG. Somebody was saying that as like a tip. Um
I don't know. So, here's my And again, I don't know how you find this or when this will ever come up, but you could use this as a guide of like in the future. This is where my race wants to be is like for this weapon to have three in the blue and five in the yellow. So, I should keep an eye on dexterity, but I just don't need to rush the dexterity. Maybe I do that last. But um but the blue is not on my claws and it's not on this bow I have. But was it on that other bow that we saw? Like you know what I mean? Like I don't know.
I don't remember. It's
all kind of random. But then also like when we run across blue tests if I take blue it still helps us like rolling more successes possibly.
Yeah.
I don't know. Oh, getting the aura restored. That's another I don't know how often that you get them back. So maybe it's harder. Yeah, you take too many early and then you'll never get to heal them all anyway. Yeah, that's you're right actually cuz we could do I've saw you could do it in the resting
Mhm.
and like the camping the camping and the tavern and stuff you can get them back but it costs more, right? Like uh you'll have to do it more often. Okay. So, yeah, I will then just do the green. I'll take the green. So, I go up to two in knowledge and that will give me one more in initiative. So, I start for initiative in the future and then I just slide this back under and I'm done.
I'm actually tempted to go for a talent. Like maybe having more abilities early helps us win.
Yeah. So, I'm going to go forction.
Oh, do you want to see your weapon?
Um,
what's your symbol? I can't see it cuz your guys in front of it.
Okay. Shielding.
He's like, it's a weapon of a shield and a sword.
I am blind or I put it somewhere or I was showing examples.
Oh, yeah. I see it. Oh, which purple is exactly what I was just thinking.
Or green.
Yeah,
green eventually,
but purple. Okay, I'm going to go for the purple that I was thinking then. That's perfect.
What about your current weapon?
My current weapon is uh blue.
Oh,
but that's fine.
But again, you could lose that and like still we could find other better weapons along the way.
Okay, I'm going to go with perception to level two and then I get a talent. Which
What deck do you want to draw from? I think I would like to draw again from the rogue deck.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think.
Okay.
I like the rogue deck after looking through all of the talents.
So, we're going to draw three from here. You don't want to draw two from here and one from somewhere else or
one from three different decks?
No, I'll draw from three from
Okay. Uh Janice says, "I also used the in on the travel phase to restore aura and health points. does take up a travel spot though. Yeah, I I thought so. Yeah, it's kind of kind of risky to do sometimes, right?
Yeah. Minion. Yeah, there's choice. There's choice. So Mel's going to draw three from here. So I'll just take three. Yeah, you're not locked in. You're not locked into one class.
Oh, double climbing cuz I already have climbing. and balancing or whatever.
Or balancing. That's what I mean. Sorry. Okay.
Climbing and balancing.
Balancing. Okay.
Oh, this is the one we saw.
So, stealthy one.
Okay.
And then this one is if you're doing a melee attack. If you're on exactly the opposite side and I'm on the other opposite side of an enemy, so we got to be very good at positioning ourselves. you would get plus one hit on your attack and ignoring a shield.
This I think like higher player counts. Yeah, this would be like amazing. But we're only two player and I'm a range character. I want to be away from the enemies. Might not happen very often. But
I'm going to take the first one. I think the top one cuz I don't know about the positioning one. Uh the middle one is okay. But then again, when there's like a boss scenario and I don't have a range weapon and I only have my claws, I'm going to be melee, too.
Yeah, but I mean, those are
So, we could prepare for the worst. And like, if you ever level this up,
it will do based on your dexterity that much damage.
So, then I would want to um
Yeah, you'd want to start leveling up dexterity, but like
these talents can't get ripped away, right?
I don't think so. I don't think so.
Oh my god, I'd be so angry. I think all your weapons and armor drop, but maybe artifacts would too. That could make sense, too.
I'm going to take the top talent, I think, just to give myself some.
Uh, you can't upgrade your existing instead of taking a new one, unless it shows the symbol for upgrading, I believe. Janet.
Yeah, it has to have the arrow.
Yeah, it has to have this symbol to upgrade one. If it's this symbol, you're taking a new one. And Mel's doing whatever. She's on one of these ones. Yeah.
Yeah. I think you can only upgrade your existing one. It's very rare. Like I can only ever do it once in the whole game. Like the whole campaign, I think.
Unless Oh, yeah. Same. Unless the book lets us do it.
Yeah. I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure having advanced talents is supposed to be like super rare. I could be wrong. Somebody will yell at us in the chat. I'm sure
I can take the top one.
Top one.
Yeah.
That's crazy. That positioning one would be good, but I think it's going to be hard to get.
But if I lose a bow and it's like I know, I know
we'll be outnumbering. You'll get extra bonus. Yeah, whatever. I just don't know. Like is it is it
Yogi? I do get it because I don't I'm not stuck. My
go with your feather feet. You don't get stuck being engaged. So you can run around everyone to set up. Oh yeah.
All right, fine. You've convinced this one and hope.
Yeah, cuz you can make that happen more often. me it's harder. I get stuck, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a good I like
I try that. Okay, you convince me.
We also paid for this game ourselves and we own the game now. So, we can also modify and change anything later and be like, "Ah, we don't like that." and take it back and break rules. We We're totally okay with that.
Yeah.
We only play through the campaign once. So, like if we really don't like something, we can undo it and change it later or whatever. Cuz you could technically just say, "I'm recreating my hero." But then again, you would lose a bunch of your bonuses.
Yeah. But I'm sure there's probably a way to like level yourself up anyway.
Oh, shoot. Where were you?
Uh, yeah, I know. I closed the book again like a dummy. It was on the top right of a page. There it is. Uh, okay. The Mute Woods. As the sound of incessant murmuring haunt your every step, you begin to wonder about the name of this place, while at the same time hoping you never set foot in again. Now's voice echoes in your head. You must go directly to the Titan step and find the temple of Atharos before nightfall. Make haste. Malia's balance depends on it. Go to 52. So, what I'm going to do here before we're about to start this travel phase stuff, uh, which has its own little bar of day and night cycles and phases of the day happening and random events and minmaxing things and gathering materials and crafting and all that stuff.
Uh there's like a little wheel here based on this. We'll go over all this on the next stream. I'll pause and in two days we'll come back. I'll leave this out on the table. Um but we're going to pause here. Uh we do have something else to do. Um and I also want to keep the stream not too long for people to see stuff. I was hoping we get to show all in one stream overland, stealth, combat, and puzzly stuff. Unfortunately, we only got to see a combat and puzzly stuff. We'll see the travel and I'm assuming we'll see stealth in the next stream and we'll leave that as like I was figuring it' be two streams to play through this whole book. It's kind of like a lot of stuff I feel. Um but yeah, so we'll pause it there. We'll pause it there. Minion, thank you member for 38 months. Thank you for the long-term support. Thanks for the stream. Nice to get into a new campaign game. Yeah, always fun.
Always fun to try something new and check new things out. Um, so yeah, tune in next stream. We'll continue playing where we left off. Um, follow along through this intro booklet and kind of see. I definitely want to show stealth. Hopefully we can do it justice. But that is the main thing that drew me to the game originally. Um, when I backed it was like, "Oo, stealth mode." But obviously I love overworld map stuff. I love like the
riddley stuff is kind of fun. Uh, gives me that Seventh Continent, seventh ciddle kind of vibes with that that kind of stuff. We didn't see the numbers in the art yet though, but um and then yeah, there's a little bit of crafting, all that stuff. So, we'll see all that next time. Um stay tuned and then we'll kind of give our thoughts maybe at the end of the first two episodes of just kind of our feelings. I kind of kind of said like stuff I like already and and like things that are bother me learning the game, but yeah, we'll just give our initial impressions and then we'll probably continue with the campaign after that, getting into real campaign books. But yes, Dominic, thank you for being a member for 48 months.
Thank you so much.
Many thanks for the stream and don't rush. I'm only a booklet, too. Yeah. Yeah, we'll see how far we get. Um, yeah, we this weekend we'll get through the the intro book, but then after that, we'll, you know, we'll see kind of how long play sessions take. But again, we can kind of make them as long as we want, which is sweet because you can save whenever. So, it'll it should work for us to play it like two to three times a week, maybe. We'll see.
But, uh, we kind of go slow, you know that. So, but yeah, no, thanks for the help, guys. We appreciate it.
Um, oh, Jan's been waiting for us to play it. Awesome. Okay, anyways, everyone, have a great rest of your day. Uh, and we'll see you in the next stream. Bye-bye.
Bye.
Heat. Heat.