Why I am backing Story of Many - an open world sandbox adventure game

0:11 hey everybody welcome back to the dungeon dive Daniel here I hope you're doing well and if you're not I hope you are soon okay today in the channel we are taking a look at the Prototype version of story of many and this is a game that will be hitting Kickstarter or or crowdfund I think it's Kickstarter huh today the day that this video posts and so I'm making this video to uh provide some information for people so the story of mini is a dark Fantasy game set in an original open world uh the story of mini is a sprawling sandbox game inspired by tons of the things that we love at the dungeon dive and some of those things include fighting fantasy Arkham Horror second edition with those kind of emerging Stories the emerging and narrative and those memorable moments that that game creates uh games like hero Quest Dungeons and Dragons descent and then video games like Elden ring Dark Souls Titan Quest and Grim Dawn these are all cool things these are all things that have inspired this game as a matter of fact the designers have even used some of the tools that we as solo RPG players use to craft our own solo games they've used things like the tone of of Adventure design to help create their world and to help create their quests and Adventures so the world of vaa and the world of this game is

1:42 overflowing it's packed with things to do and discover with lore to uncover that will reward the careful player and something that the designers stressed to me uh over and over again while I was talking with them I had about an hour and a half long conversation with them over Zoom is the idea of organic exploration of organic Discovery they want the players to feel like they are in this world wandering about looking for neat things to do looking for things to discover and kind of being in charge of that feeling of Discovery and I think that is great so so far I've only dabbled with the game and to be honest I'm not so concerned with the details of the mechanisms if you want to learn how to play the game this is not the video for you I am just going to be giving you some reasons why I'm excited about this game and why I am backing it if you want to learn how to play if you want to dive into the nitty-gritty of the mechanisms uh there are two channels rolling solo and con Studios they both have very detailed Let's Play videos showing how everything works in detail so if that's what you want go check out those two channels and you will will be satisfied so after reading the rule book and looking at everything it's pretty clear to me that the designers aren't trying to reinvent the wheel here uh we have dice to be rolled you will be adding

3:12 bonuses to those die rolls we have stat tests and combat challenges there's map movement exploration reading story text uh having campaign and character progression if you've played an RPG or Adventure board game or video game in the last 10 to 20 years you know what to expect with the story of mini and hey that's perfectly fine the entire focus of the dungeon dive is the phrase just like only different so they're not out there to reinvent the wheel they've taken all of these really cool influences and combined them into something that I think is really interesting what I'm most interested in is how all of these things are combined into a game that seems to do it all and that's really what I'm interested in in this game and that's why I am backing it they sent me this prototype to check out without any promise of a complete copy or any payment of any kind and as a matter of fact I'm go I'm putting my money behind this game I am backing it if they happen to send me a copy it'll just be an extra copy that I give away to a dungeon dive Patron so I don't know if they're doing that or not I don't expect it and they haven't offered and from what I've learned with talking with the designers and after reading the rules and the adventures and the Book of rumors and checking out all of the components that were given to me in this prototype version I've learned that I want to back it and I'm going to give

4:43 you some reasons why right now one of the first reasons why I'm interested in this game is that we as backers have a decision we have a choice to make and that choice is whether we want Miniatures or not and I am very happy with that so there will be a a a regular version a base version that contains all of the good stuff and that's the cardboard that's the stuff that actually makes the game what it is all of the adventures all of the books of text and rumors and the maps and the stickers and the cards everything that you need to play the game will be included in that base version and that base version only comes with I think one miniature and that's a party miniature to represent your party around the board and then there will be a deluxe version that will come with all of your Miniatures and there will be hundreds of Miniatures that this game will come with it looks like it's coming with even some scenery that you might be able to use to make your adventures look more interesting you'll have H minis for your various enemies that you will be fighting and for your Heroes and your party each of the classes will have its own mini so if you want to go crazy with plastic the option is there for you but for those of us who just want the cardboard who just want the game we have that option with the bass version and I am very happy to have that choice if the only choice was hundreds of Miniatures I actually don't know if I would be backing this so that

6:13 right there really pushes me towards being excited for this game another reason I'm interested in the story of many is all of the different ways that we have to play the game there is a large campaign with multiple different story paths that you can work through and in one play of the campaign you won't see all of those story paths so you can play through the main story multiple times discovering things as you go there are also dungeon crawls large and mini dungeon crawls there are large story arcs there are individual Adventures within those different story arcs there are oneoff dungeons there are oneoff adventures and it's really easy for players to drop in and drop out without uh messing things up so if you're short on time and you just want to play through a little dungeon you can set up a randomly generated dungeon and have a little Adventure if you have a friend who might be interested in joining your campaign but they don't want to make the commitment yet you can invite them over and play through a small one hour oneoff session so they can learn the game and I think that is really cool this is a game that I think is has learned a lot from Modern video games in that it respects the player's time and it knows that not everybody has hours and hours and hours a week to devote to the game so it has broken

7:44 things up and little bite-sized chunks that you can play when you have the time and you can plug away on your overall campaign and as you play through that campaign you'll learn more things about the world and you will develop your world and your character as you are playing through all of those different ways to play the game and that is very very cool so I think the thing I'm most excited about is the huge open World sandbox the world of vard that we will be able to explore with all of these different regions there are 50 different regions we have the pocket Hills the silent Moors the Lauren swamp Fang hold Forest we have the Thunder Gale mountains the Eastern heartlands the pastor Fields uh Darth ula's seat uh teria we have huge uh civilizations and settlements like murin Hall up there or Von varos just off camera here we have these sea regions with all of these different Islands this is a huge open sprawling world that is really open to the players from the very beginning of the game so the way that works is the the the game is divided into five different tiers when you you start the game you will be at tier one and you can choose one of the major settlements to start your game in from there you can venture out and you can discover new little locations different Adventures depending on which Adventure you've chosen in the book of Adventures you

9:15 might go out and find a dungeon or some ruins or have to go to a village and discover what's in the village and while you are at tier level one all of the adventures all of the encounters all of the quests will be at tier one but as your character levels up from tier one to the final tier at tier five then the game levels up with you so if you're at tier two you will have tier 2 encounters and tier three quests and tier or or tier 2 dungeons tier 2 Adventures so the whole world is open and it just depends on what level your character or your character party is at that will determine the level of the adventures and the level of challenges that you have available to you each one of these different locations and again there are 50 uh we can take a look at a small map here so this is our campaign track here so here here are all of the different locations in the world of va but each one of those locations will have a number of different rumors associated with it and the designers told me that there will be between one and five rumors for each of the 50 different locations and these rumors will point the players to a additional quests they will point the players to points of interest they will point the players to ruins to Dungeons and to things to do in the world and as you are playing you will take a set of stickers and you will put those stickers on those Maps as you

10:46 discover those various points of interest as a matter of fact at the beginning of the game you will seed your map with a certain number of rumor stickers and dungeon stickers and treasure stickers and that will give you some direction of where you might want to go at the very beginning of the game you don't have to follow that main path you can go off and have some side quest and some side exploration while you discover those rumors and you will take off the rumors as you read them as you discover them from moving from one region to the next and each one of those regions will give you each one of those rumors might give you a little Choice maybe it might be a little side quest or it might open up something in another region where you will put a sticker and that will be a point of interest that your character can go out and explore at a later time so think of this as when you are playing Skyrim and you're walking you know you're you're walking to one of the major cities and all of a sudden you know you you see those uh things start appearing on your map like hey to the north there's a ruin uh to the South there's a cave and things like that so as you are walking as you are discovering the world the map will start to populate and for those of you who are concerned about the stickers the stickers will be removable so you can reset your game but the designers are encouraging people they they told me that they're encouraging people to keep playing in this persistent world that you have

12:17 created while you are exploring because it kind of has a new game plus type situation where you can complete one major story arc of the campaign but then you can start again in the world that has already been populated with some things that your characters and that you as the players know and so you will continue to play in the world that you have created and because it's open-ended everybody's map is going to be somewhat different as they play you can also unlock different types of weapons and gear and encounters depending on what tier you are in and then when you start a new game you can start with all of that stuff already unlocked so there is a light Legacy element you aren't really destroying anything for those of you who don't want to destroy your stuff like you would in a typical um in in a typical Legacy game but there is that idea of a persistent world that you will be creating while you are playing and I think that is really interesting the next point I want to cover is the book of Adventures and how the different Adventures are associated with those rumors with those locations and how these regions will have different things that we can explore while we are working through the adventures so each one of these regions there are 50 different regions about each one of those will have a an adventure I don't know maybe two maybe more but we'll have at least one

13:47 Adventure that you can go on in that region so there are is a ton of stuff to do and the adventures are quite detailed the Prototype version came with three different uh adventures and they start in different locations so we have Adventure one the waystone and this is a tier one intro Adventure so when your characters first start out you are at tier one so you will play through one of the tier one adventures and you can choose which one you want to play so right there there's already a whole bunch of variety because you could start the game with a completely different Adventure in a completely different part of the land than someone else who might be starting the game on the same day as you as you play through the adventure you will have different things to discover different Clues to discover and the adventure will walk you through all of the things kind of like a solo RPG module we have another adventure here tier one intro and that is the Flames of Revenge and same thing there and the designers have stressed to me that they want each adventure to feel different have different types of mechanisms have different puzzles that maybe you have to solve or different types of encounters and one thing they stress is that each region will feel different it'll have its own kind of biome and you will you will start to learn about each of the regions through the different types of encounters you have and the encounters will be will make sense in the lore of the game and as you discover things you will be able to put the pieces together of this large kind of Story puzzle

15:19 that's going on and careful players who pay a lot of attention like the lore hunters and the from software video games they will discover a lot of little hidden secrets and things that they can take with them as they continue to play the game so here we have our third introductory adventure and that is the unexpected Patron and again that is a tier one introduction and when you play the adventure each one of these Adventures will have its own deck of exploration cards and this is where the game gets really interesting so uh We've often talked on the channel about a kind of dream game where you are working on an Overland map and then you get to a certain location and then you get to dive into that as a more detailed Adventure as a detailed Dungeon Crawl or a city crawl or something and this game does that so each of the adventures will have its own adventure deck and that Adventure deck will be a certain type of dungeon or certain location that you will be able to explore in detail as you work through the tunnels of a dungeon or the rooms of a ruin and you will turn to the different pages the different paragraphs in the adventure book to see what you have discovered on each tile as you build the map and each of the adventure locations will be different here we have some kind of stone structure in uh the Flames of Revenge we have a kind of a cavern this is like more of a man-made structure here we

16:50 have a cavern that's kind of mixed with some man-made uh locations there some rooms and then this one is very different in that third Adventure the unexpected Patron this will have an entire Village that you will be exploring and you will be building the village as you explore and as you read through the adventure game and or the adventure book and so this here is kind of like uh the designers were inspired by things like seventh continent or tainted Grail and as you build these out you will learn about the different thing and maybe Destinies as well you will be uh exploring this world and reading about the different inhabitants and having all kinds of different Adventures I think these many location decks are really cool and some of these can be used for those one-off game modes and that might include here these dungeon cards so there will be a whole bunch of different dungeon and Cave cards that you can mix and match to create random Dungeons and so these are kind of like your dungeon morphs here on the side and you might have different color doors that you will have to find keys to unlock we have green red and blue and different encounters that you might have while you are on a random Dungeon Crawl there will be dungeons populated throughout the world some of them might use these random dungeon cards some of them might use a more Unique Kind of bespoke tile set to represent that different location but they're really stressing that each of

18:21 the the locations should be different when you are on these adventures and you enter into combat you will pull out the the little combat board here and there are three different spaces for different types of tactical uh tactical positioning and setting up your strategies and you're a little bit of a skirmish style kind of abstract Skirmish style combat with these different wells around to keep track of the health for all of the different monsters so I think this system is pretty cool I love how the different locations will have room the different rumors will point to different other more detailed locations all while you are exploring this world and working through one of 50 plus different Adventures working towards that uh solving that that that overall campaign Arc that overall story arc and then you reach the end and then you can start all over again with your same characters and go through a completely different style of Adventure that is amazing another thing I'm excited about is the character creation and character progression so there are uh 10 different classes we have barbarians paladins Pirates Rogues clerics Fighters ninjas Sears Sorcerers and wizards and I have cards for most of those here so here we have our Barbarian our sorcerer the cleric The Fighter the

19:55 Paladin the pirate uh the Reaver witch hey that wasn't mentioned so I'm not sure again this is a prototype so things might be a little bit different we have our Rogue and our sear and then on the backs of those we will have our starting little a little bit of lore about that type of class and our starting um our starting attributes and our starting gear for when you want to play that character and then there will also be 16 different races uh things like humans and necan and goru and Sil so not your standard fantasy they uh you know maybe not elves maybe not dwarves so there are some unique races that you can play as and that you can interact with in this game it does feel like a holy original kind of fantasy world and that is something I'm excited about now with characters you can either create a character using a point system or using the characters you can create your own character with your own skills and things or you can use one of the pre-generated character and the game is going to come with a whole bunch of pre-generated characters so that if you have a friend over and they want to check out the game you can just hand them one of the preens and they can Dive Right In without having to take the time to create their own character and the developers have told me the designers have told me that they want to uh keep like their website populated with a whole bunch of different pre-generated characters for people to pick and you can make your party compositions I

21:25 should say I don't think I mentioned it so far but the game does need to be played with two characters and it scales down to two characters and it scales up to four characters so if you are playing solo there is no Lone Wolf mode you will need to play as at least two characters but I've been told that the developers are trying to keep the characters simple enough to where that won't be a major problem there won't be a ton of bookkeeping but complex enough to where you will feel like you have some good choices to make in putting together a party of only two and how those two characters might uh work with each other supporting each other and balancing out each other's strengths and weaknesses so the really cool thing about the character uh system though is the skill system and you have a whole bunch of different skills that you can learn in different schools we have body and melee and survival perhaps for the Barbarian and as you are developing your character you're going to be working through this book of spheres and hey fans of Titan Quest and Grim Dawn I'm sure this skill system looks very familiar it was inspired by those action RPG uh computer games and so here we have our our skill tree for your body for your physical strength and when your characters are at tier one they can learn these skills tier 2 tier three tier four and finally in tier five you

22:57 will have your ultimate skills that you can work up towards and so this is a skill tree and you will be making progress on this skill tree as your character progresses so we have skill tree for body we have cloaks so that's kind of like your Espionage your thieves we have a conjuration we have death probably your necromancy there uh your defense skill tree destruction uh divination holy uh law melee and what else do we have we have arranged and survival and treasure hunter man look at that one that looks way different that is super cool uh witchery and here we have a few others we have the path of Rage we have the men wounds path the blessing of the Gods the Master of Arms the warcast Rune life on a ship how you can be like a naval character these look like skill specializations the sneak attack and The Clairvoyant and the elemental bolt so there is just a ton of variety in how you will build out your different characters uh here we have some blank sheets for the cleric for the fighter for the Paladin so on these sheets you will keep track of your basic stats like your strength agility stamina mind and willpower you will keep track of what you have your encumbrance how many things you can carry and then

24:27 you can also use these large character double uh tiered character uh stands or not stands but uh sheets here these double layer sheets that you can slide in your character sheet and then you can keep track of it on here and then around the character sheet you can keep track of all of your different skills from your tier one to tier five and you can have all of your tier one skills up there you'll keep track of all of your skills around here and then all of your wondrous treasure and then here you can keep track of things that are in your backpack and things that you are holding your different defenses and your saving throws and your different skills that you have learned and this will be a place for your health so very thoughtful everything seems like it's welld designed we also have a whole bunch of different armor and weapons I think there will be something like 200 different uh pieces of equipment unfortunately my prototype version came with a duplicate stack of cards so I didn't get everything needed but we can take a look at some of the armor here so here we have our different sets of armor that you can uh obtain during the game you can buy and sell and you can find uh we also have here we have uh some armor some magical properties for your armor so ways to strengthen your armor with magic and then there will also be these kind of relics these wondrous items that you can find and those will be numbered and so it might tell you you know on this Quest here you have found wondrous item number 49 and that was the Ring of nahala and

25:58 then here we have what it does it gives us a plus two our agility and then a really cool little piece of lore for each one of these items so we can you aren't just getting a mechanical benefit you're also learning about the world and the story as you discover these wondrous items so with the characters you can keep your characters in sub subsequent playthroughs as your characters grow stronger they will unlock certain things you will unlock uh certain uh types of treasure that you will be mixing together in this treasure bag and as you play all of this stuff is permanent all of this stuff will will carry forward will be persistent from one game one campaign one session to the next and so everything is kind of working together to promote this idea of a persistent world with persistent characters that changes with you that changes with the players as they continue to play the game and that is kind of the main thing that has me very very excited about this game it really does feel like this kind of big open World sandbox Adventure game and finally the things that I am excited about is the bestiary and there will be I think over 200 different creatures in this game so a lot of times games kind of fall down when it comes to the bestiary there isn't a lot of variety in

27:28 the combat challenges but this game has tons of variety and as you can see here we have tier two so each tier again tiers one through five will have their own cards that you are going to use so at the beginning of the game you will use your tier one standard enemy deck and the enemies we have things like the uh Spore Cloud octopus a skeleton I love the art in this game it's really good uh the aidian warrior the aidian assassin the Leo blaka Hunter the Leo blaka dreader the glutinous decomposed the Frog folk the Frog folk Warrior the fish folk the fish folk Warrior a decomposed one a tan slave a rabid pygmy an ogrekin a free Booter Forest wolf crows of the new dark officer the crows of n AR the corpse eater the Cox Swain the brown bear the the Stellar anemon the giant uh spinner and the Vagabond and these en these enemies will have different keywords and those will denote where they can be found in what biome they can be found in you know you won't find fish folk out in the desert the fish folk will be around the water so where you encounter these enemies will make a world sense and I think that's really cool and the enemies will have all of their different stats along the bottom here they will have different

28:59 types of attacks you will roll a D6 to determine what kind of attack when you meet them they will have different reactions so you don't always have to fight them sometimes you can bribe them uh sometimes they might fight so this decomposed one will always be a fighter but uh let's see what this Vagabond does uh flee you can bribe the uh the Vagabond here or you can serve or fight or flee so really cool all kinds of different ways to encounter the enemies it's not just I I've come across enemy and I fight the enemy you might be able to bribe them or do something else to avoid a violent conflict and here we have our Elite enemies so again we will have a deck of tiered Elite enemies and these Elite enemies of course are stronger and here we have things like giant crabs a water weird a veil Thorn ooze a THU a shadow a lord a a leoa lord the Leo Leo blaka sounds like some kind of faction that you might be uh discovering we have our frog folk Shaman the emerald Priestess the Kaka the wolf Knight the Tormentor the pirate Captain the minan twin Viper the herreria the guzma the giant centipede the crows of new dark leader the khaak Moore and the blood Rock gollem so already just in tier one we already have a ton of enemy variety we have more enemy variety just in one tier than some games have in their

30:29 entire boxes so if you are into large bestiaries with different types of creatures with different abilities in different biomes with different ways to interact with them yeah this game definitely has you covered and that is one thing I'm really excited about because it is a problem that I find in a lot of games where they have a really limited bestiary especially games that focus on combat with a limited bestiary it just kind of feels like you're doing the same thing over and over and over again and I don't get that sense with the story of many one thing I completely forgot to mention when I was talking about the big open world is our campaign tracker as you are playing you will keep track of time and the world will transition from Summer to Winter and there will be different spots along the summer or the Autumn or the winter tracks here where certain things will happen and so as time progresses you will also unlock different events so there are time gated events that you will come across while you are playing while you are exploring the world you will have uh you will be able to gather keywords and keywords will trigger certain things here we have our our map that you can keep track of if you don't want to you know if you can pass this around the table for people to take a look at a smaller more condensed world map and then at the back here we have our different achievements and these achievements as you take those up they end in a number and that number will be a different rumor or a different thing that you might be able to discover so those are all the things that I really

32:00 like those are the things that I am excited about those are the things that are getting me to put my money where my mouth is to back this game those are the things that I'm looking forward to of course there are some concerns I hope this game avoids crowdfunding bloat right now they are planning on one expansion to be released with the game the designers have uh played the game extensively since 2018 they showed me a stack of the characters that they have played with in play tests and it was like 2 in thick I mean they've played the heck out of this game since 2018 and they claim that they are 80% done with everything but as we know it's that last 20% that can be the most difficult and timec consuming I think Roger daring of a dungeon Crusade will will definitely uh support me there because he was 90% done with his game for a long long time and it's that last 10% that can really kill a designer so I'm hoping that that 80% covers a lot of the detail a lot of the work and maybe they're just in that last 20% putting the final touches and I'm hope hoping that they don't you know just go crazy with too much stuff it already feels big but we don't need tons and tons of of stretch goals and things to just add to that time so the designers are Greek I think this might be the first game from Greece that I've covered and English is not their first

33:33 language but the game is being written entirely in English first and there will be a ton of text and because the text drives the entire game it needs to be well written it needs to be well edited and presented what's here so far is pretty good I'd probably give it a seven out of 10 as far as a the rules and stuff written from a nonnative English speaker there is room for improvement I'm hoping they take their time with that to get it as good as it can be because it's going to be a Monumental task to have all of this edited the rumors book and the adventure book they are both going to be hundreds of pages so there is a ton of text there are a ton of ways where if something isn't right it could completely stymy somebody's ability to progress in their campaign if it tells you to turn to a wrong paragraph or a wrong page or to set something up wrong and so it really needs to be right and because there is so much that is just a huge huge task and you know i' I've seen games that are sunk by too much AA that completely derails the flow of the game for people so that is one concern I have uh the rule book is pretty massive it's already coming in at about 80 pages and I think at version 6 is the latest version that they have released and so while the game

35:04 isn't doesn't necessarily have anything really complicated it's not like learning a whole bunch of new systems there are a lot of things to keep track of and so the rule book does need to be good and I'm hoping they can bring it in I'm hoping it doesn't balloon to over 100 Pages or more another thing is the table space this game is quite the table hog I can just barely fit the main map and kind of the components and cards over here in order to play the game I am going to have to utilize my small side table my TV side table in order to keep track of my characters the characters might fit on the board but when you start adding in that double layer sleeve for the characters and then all of the cards that your characters will have it can take up a lot of table space and so I'm hoping that I don't have have to add too much more as of right now I can actually play the game hopefully it doesn't get as big as something like Bard song which didn't even fit on my table so I never even got a chance to play that game because I couldn't I literally could not fit that game on my table I don't think this is going to be I don't think that'll that'll be too much of a concern with this game but as of right now I'm I'm kind of at capacity so just know that if you are a gamer who plays on a small table like I am just keep that in mind you might need a little T table to make everything work and finally I hope that Adventure tier system working through tiers 1 through 5

36:34 I hope that's not too throttling on the fun when you were starting I hope that tiers one and two are just as exciting are just as much fun with just as many things to do and discover as tiers 4 and five so hopefully I don't feel like I'm too th throttled at the beginning of the game hopefully I don't feel like I have to play for a really long time to finally get to the good part I want the game to be good from the very beginning well all right you guys I hope you enjoyed my thoughts on the story of mini again if you want to check out detailed gameplay footage go to One-Stop Co-op shop or con Studios both of them have very detailed videos on the mechanisms I just wanted to tell you all why I am excited for this game and the reasons why I'm backing it and some of the things that I am concerned about so we'll talk to you later bye-bye