by gordon calleja

The Idea

The seed for Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan was planted by Rahdo in 2016. I was at his flat in Gozo for a game session, and we started discussing Vengeance, which he had played a game of with Jen. He felt it was a pity that the game had a cool system that many people, like Jen, would not get to experience because of the dark and gritty setting — then his eyes lit up and he excitedly goes, "What if Vengeance had a fantasy theme? Wouldn't that be great?"

That seed lay in my subconscious humming with a beckoning resonance that made itself felt as soon Vengeance was sent to print and my mind was free to explore new design directions. While I had other games in the hopper, the call of fantasy Vengeance was too loud to ignore. I sat at my favorite beach on the Maltese islands, Ramla l-Hamra in Gozo, and sketched out what I wanted the game to be.

Design Goals

The first thing I wanted to try to achieve was a campaign adventure game that would be easy to set up and which had flexible session times that can be as short as an hour.

The initial name for the game was "Fast Forward Dungeon" and as its name implies, the main goal was to have a dungeon crawler/adventure game that felt like an RPG that could be set up in five or so minutes and in which each combat would be played in 20-30 minutes. I find it hard to maintain more than a few sessions of dungeon crawler campaigns, given the time they take to set up and play and the busy life I have. I also prefer playing campaign games with my partner, who is a big fan of fantasy adventure games, but balks at the idea of a game that takes half an hour to set up and three hours to play.

Related to the above, I wanted to make sure that if I spend 3-4 hours playing the game, I want a whole bunch of story beats to happen, not just a single combat with some added story on either side. I wanted to create a game in which a long session feels like an epic slice of adventure with lots of events happening, including story sections, world exploration, and combat.

This meant that on top of the short play sessions, the streamlined, easy-to-set up combats and other sections of the game would all be emergent narrative that constitutes the party's adventure. For this to work, combat scenes needed to evoke the imagination rather than being abstracted, number-based affairs. (Two concepts — emergent narrative and immersion — are subjects I have researched and written about extensively in my academic work.)

Finally, I wanted to preserve the beating heart of Vengeance — the combat system — while making it even more action-packed and crammed with interesting decisions without increasing the rule complexity.

One curious aspect of Vengeance that emerged from testing and observing people play the published game was that, although it was competitive, opponents tended to get excited about what the active player was doing, often giving suggestions on how to best use the combat dice rolled and complete the objective, even if, at times, that was in direct opposition to their own game goals. This prompted me to experiment with a co-operative version of the Vengeance combat system. I couldn't believe I had missed this! Co-op Vengeance is really fun! More on that in the combat system section below. The game thus had to be co-operative.

The game's design goals would thus be:

• The game would be co-operative.
• Easy to set-up and play in sessions of one hour.
• A lot happens in each session so that a longer session felt like an epic adventure.
• Combat needed to be fast-paced and generate action-movie-like images in the mind of the players.
• Although streamlined, combat needed to be full of interesting decisions.

First Iteration

The game was initially much smaller in scope: a set of combat scenes with minimal story framing that progressed you toward facing off with a chapter boss. After a certain number of these chapters, depending on the Big Boss in question, you would fight the final Boss. If you got too many KOs along the way or failed to complete enough objectives, you'd have to start from scratch.


Enter Studio Agate

Everything changed when Studio Agate came into the picture. I met Nel from Agate at Gen Con, and we struck up a conversation that led to our decision to set my new game in Agate's Fateforge universe. I fell in love with the philosophy behind the world building and the gorgeous, warm art. The idea of having a world that already existed to inspire the story and combat scenes was incredibly exciting. When I pored over the art assets that Agate gave me access to, ideas for combat scenes and story snippets popped into my mind with greater ease than when I sculpted these from scratch.

With the richness of Studio Agate's world in play, I felt it was imperative to beef up the narrative of the game a lot more than I had initially designed. Daniel Vella, a researcher colleague of mine at the Institute of Digital Games and an excellent writer, came on board to write the story sections of the game.


At that point, the scope of the game bloomed to a full-on campaign. My initial desired length for the whole campaign was twelve hours or so to make it nice and snappy (with the intention of releasing other adventures as expansions). In reality, this felt too short for a base campaign, and we expanded it to 25-30 hours of gameplay.

The Combat System

The Fateforge combat system is an evolution of the combat system in Vengeance, casting it in co-op mode and leveling it up a few notches.

The Vengeance combat system does a good job (at least according to reviewers and players!) of nudging the player to imagine their hero performing sequences of action-movie-style maneuvers that give a sense of a choreographed flow of actions. I was excited to see whether I could translate this systemically generated experience from the revenge/action movie setting to a fantasy one. If that worked, it would break considerably from most existing dungeon-crawler combat systems that represent combat at a further step of abstraction, both spatially and in terms of expressing the state of the entities represented and their actions through numerical simulation. I will try to describe what I mean with a bit more clarity below.


Immersive Systems

Games that immerse players in a character acting within a world, especially at the micro-level detail required by combat scenes, often face a conflict between creating a tactically interesting system and fostering a sense of immersion — and by "immersion", I mean imagining oneself inhabiting the fictional space of the game, as opposed to immersion as a sense of being deeply engaged with the game more generally.

One of the challenges is that the number of rules needed to simulate moment-to-moment action can work against a player experiencing immersion. The easier it is to internalize mechanisms, the more likely actions in the game world will transition from system processing to imagining oneself within the world. To meet my design goals, I needed to depart from many standard designs found in games of this nature.

My general approach to this issue was to take every major aspect of such systems and abstract it as much as possible in a visual rather than a numerical manner, without losing the potential to create sequences of emergent narrative. By this, I mean that every aspect of the combat system should prioritize generating a sequence of mental images over processing numbers, e.g., counting squares to move, making number-based skill checks, recording damage points dealt and received, etc. Where possible, I wanted a system that deals directly with character actions in the game world rather than numbers that translate into actions in the world.

This is also a matter of personal taste. I will happily delve deeply into competitive, heavy simulation-based systems in which number processing is key to the game experience, as long as the system offers a wide variety of interesting choices and the formation of a strategy. In these situations, I actually enjoy crunchy and complex systems; that is one of the central attractions of such games.

On the other hand, most dungeon crawlers I've played have simplified those simulation systems to their less interesting elements (at least for my personal preference), leaving me, the player, with the worst of both worlds: little tactical and strategic engagement, and minimal rich mental imagery. This is a very subjective observation, of course, and speaks more to my personal preferences than the games themselves. There are exceptions, such as the excellent Gloomhaven system, but for the most part, I get bored waiting 10-15 minutes to move my character a few squares, attack a goblin, and roll a few dice to see how much damage I dealt to said goblin.

This is entirely personal, but obviously, the games we create are often games we would like to play but don't find out there. It's worth noting that one of my favorite examples of a game that balances interesting decisions, streamlined mechanisms, and sequences of vivid images in my mind is Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game. Here, every mechanism and resultant action fluidly generates a vivid emergent narrative that, in my mind, perfectly balances mechanical engagement and fiction.

Combat Overview

I took the stats of traditional RPGs and abstracted them into different colored combat dice representing each hero's strengths, allowing players to build a mental image of their heroes. As the game progresses, players add more dice to their hero's dice pool through various means, including weapons and items. However, they will still only ever roll a maximum of four dice in each combat round.

Time and Actions

I wanted this combat system to create a number of events — and thus mental images — in one player turn rather than one move and one attack. If I perform only one or two actions, and those actions don't have imagination-worthy content, it's hard to experience much in terms of mental image sequences.


In Fateforge, every die face signifies a simple action. Players roll four dice per round and use these as their base actions. This image, for example, shows a hit, a focus action, a shot, and a move. These basic actions can be played as they are, modified with a skill into another action, or combined together to trigger powerful combos.

For example, the Rogue hero, Aqbad, can use the Knife Kata skill to turn a focus and a step into two hit results.


Things become more exciting when skills are chained together, allowing players to modify die results with some skills and using these to trigger more powerful ones. For example, the two hits I obtained from the shot and focus of the Knife Kata can be used to unleash a deadly shot dealing 3 damage with the Knife Storm skill.


This system performs two functions: It allows a player to modify the dice for tactical purposes (as well as luck mitigation), but it also creates the image of the hero flinging a flurry of throwing knives at an enemy.

This entangling of mechanisms and fiction/mental images is a core aspect of this system. It's worth noting that while the name of the skill may seem trivial, it performs an important function in inviting players to imagine the action depicted. This works better when the effects the skill does mechanically feel like the action evoked by the title. This was a major part of the thematic engagement that a lot of players and critics were excited about in Vengeance.

The effect that such actions have in the game world is also important. Just half of my combat dice for a round result in several events in the game world, not just one. Enemies have 1-3 health, for the most part. If you assign a hit or shot to an enemy with 1 health, they are dead. Done. In the above example, the Rogue would have flung a series of knives at a militia guard and killed them, sprinted out of the room and stabbed a militia grunt with a final hit action. That creates a cinematic sequence of images that makes the single round both tactically and narratively satisfying.

Limited Rounds

A central element of Fateforge's combat system is the small number of rounds allowed to complete a combat scene's objective. Combat scenes must be completed in three to five rounds, depending on the combat. The party can also opt to push their limits by taking an additional round and suffering a corruption card that often results in a persistent negative effect. At the end of the last combat round, the party leaves through one of the exits on the map by tracing a path to the exit, suffering 1 damage for every zone that has enemies in it.

Limiting the number of rounds creates a tight puzzle with the party needing to push forward and resolve objectives, while possibly collecting important gems by clearing certain zones and interacting with map features like chests and healing fountains.

This limitation also makes it easier to create separate paths that require heroes to split up, and it poses the difficult question of how many actions out of the limited pool they dedicate to collecting gems and other loot. Since players have a limited economy of dice they will roll for the entire combat scene, they need to maximize the effectiveness of their actions collaboratively while avoiding taking damage or using up too much energy. (I'll note that heroes recover only one health and one energy per combat. The rest need to be bought with gems that are used for things like buying new skills and items at specific points in the campaign called rest scenes.)

Finally, this limitation conveys urgency, keeps the length of each combat short and contained, and expresses the tension that a group of adventurers would feel while in such situations like rushing a guarded outpost to free an ally, chasing a thief through back alleys, etc.

Enemy Health and Abilities

The health of enemies in Fateforge resets after each round. Part of the collaborative aspect of the puzzle is working together to overcome enemy abilities — or at least not get too damaged by them — and kill off enemies in a single round.

This was present in Vengeance, but in that game the enemies had only one health point. Here the default is two, with three being the highest in the first act of the game, then scaling up from there. This requires players to plan their round well in the preparation phase, when heroes roll dice behind a screen and discuss what they will do in their turn, the default rule being that they cannot then talk during the action part of the round (more on this later). Since the number of total actions available is limited by the number of rounds and the combat scenes are carefully curated to take this into account, each wasted hit or shot is felt by the party, not to mention the resulting damage from the surviving enemies.


Enemies are defined by their health, the actions they take at various ranges, and their ability. These abilities are key to creating the tactical puzzle mentioned above. They are either passive abilities that hinder heroes' plans or active abilities that boost the enemy's actions. Passive abilities are things like not allowing heroes to move out of their zone while the enemy is still alive, not being able to be hit unless they're the last enemy type left in the zone, following players automatically if they leave their zone, and so on.

Active abilities are increases in damage, pushing heroes out of their zone, pulling heroes into their zone, and so on. These abilities combine with the layout of the combat scene and various other elements to create a multi-faceted puzzle that is further complicated by the fact that two enemies will react to heroes' actions at a variable point in the round. The players know when enemies will react, but not which ones or what they will do. To complicate matters further, these reactions are similar to, but not the same as the actions all surviving enemies take at the end of the round, adding to the dynamic nature of the tactical puzzle.

Space

One of the earliest considerations in designing this system was to shift the mapping of space from the traditional square or hex grids to a more abstracted and easy to parse spatial traversal system. Measuring distance in discreet units like squares or hexes often involves counting and re-counting spaces to make sure one can do the action they want to do, with players often frustratingly falling short by one or two spaces and not performing the cool thing they want to do. The Fateforge combat system maps space onto larger zones. A combat scene has around seven to twelve zones, and a move action allows a hero to move one zone.


At the start of each combat round, players can perform a "dash" representing a reckless run that doesn't cost them an action die, but which results in damage if they dash out of a zone with enemies. This dash also puts them at risk since if they move into a zone with enemies or a zone adjacent to enemies with ranged attacks, the enemies might react before the players have a chance to kill them or move to safety.

Similarly, range in combat is straightforward. Melee attacks can hit anyone in the same zone while ranged attacks can hit enemies only in adjacent zones. Some special ranged attacks can hit enemies two zones away, but these are rare. This framing of space makes it easy to parse how far one can move, who they can hit, and so on without having to count and re-count spaces.

This ease of processing movement and range information serves two crucial purposes. First, my stream of mental images is not enriched by knowing that my hero moved four instead of five meters; on the contrary, the counting and re-counting involved in that operation undermines those mental images. Second, in terms of the tactical aspect of the game, it gives the sense of the combat being a dynamic, tactical puzzle since players can quickly work out which enemies are within reach of being attacked by who and which enemies will damage who. This not only allows players to figure out their own optimal actions, but to easily discuss what each of them can do and collaborate more closely than if they each had to factor in x units of movement and attack ranges.

These three elements — space, defined/limited rounds, and resetting enemy health and abilities — combined with the objectives of each combat scene come together to form the tactical challenge that the players need to solve through allocation of their combat dice and the triggering of skills, weapons, and equipment while minimizing damage and energy spent – and, most importantly – doing all this in close collaboration with others.

The Narrative Challenge

One of the major issues we found when testing the game initially was that half the testers were deeply invested in the story, while the other half wanted to jump from combat to combat and delve into the dice-based puzzles they offered. While it would be hard to fully satisfy both types of players, I wanted to reach a middle ground that would allow the narrative-focused players to be able to pull more narrative towards them if they wanted, while leaving the narrative sections palatable enough for them without alienating the combat-focused players.

The initial issue was the length of the narrative sections. We wanted to respect and do justice to the depth of the Fateforge world developed by Studio Agate, but to do this Daniel, our writer, needed a certain amount of length to communicate the world. For my part, I wanted players to feel like they were walking through the streets of this bustling city they hadn't been to yet before. This resulted in story sections that were too long for most of the combat-oriented players. We edited the story over and over again, but the length complaints still came.

Then it struck me: the lengthier sections were those describing the city and having players walk through it. What if we took all those out and actually had the players look at the city and walk through it?


Map Exploration

My good friend and inspiring game designer David Chircop and I sat down to try to solve this. The result was the map exploration sequences.

We asked our graphic designer, Max Kosek, to draw a detailed map of the city with certain features that we would draw in and link to certain quests and sections of the game. Then David pushed the narrative system we were using, Inkle, to map every corner and street in the city into it and allow players to walk through the city by getting a description of where they were standing, having them find that location on the physical map, place a party mini on that, get a description of the area, then choose one of the possible directions to walk to. This is done in the context of either knowing where they wanted to go to visually/spatially on the map and navigating there or having a quest that required them to visually scan the map for clues based on the hints given by the quest or story section, then navigate there. This created a blend of MicroMacro-style searching and old-school text adventures.

The result was a massive slashing of the volume of text in the game and a sense of growing familiarity with the city by actually looking for places and actively walking toward them, much like we used to do before the advent of smartphones and Google maps. This approach gave players that sense of walking in the city and exploring it for the first time, much like a first trip to a new city using a physical, paper map.

Another cool thing with this system was that bigger buildings are seen from the get-go and players can guess (and are asked to figure out by certain quests) what the buildings are from their shape or other elements drawn on them, in addition to having landmarks revealed when the party actually walks to them through the use of a map key with hidden sticker-based elements.


Conclusion

Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan has been the most complex game project (or possibly any project, full stop) that I have dared tackle and I have to say that while over five years of non-stop work on the game has been challenging, I am extremely happy with the result. It has also been moving to hear reviewer and player feedback not just on the game system, but the experiences they had with the game and their partners and friends. That sense of shaping a fictional world and sharing with others that appreciate it is hands down the most satisfying and heart-warming part of making board games, and I am humbled to have the opportunity to do this as a core part of my life. Thanks all for taking the time to read this diary!

For more info on Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan, you can visit the current Kickstarter page for details on the game's second printing and the new Kin of the Wild expansion.

Gordon Calleja
Mighty Boards

Back to the beach for more inspiration...