Stories and Monkeys
Of Dragons, Devils and Kings…
A truly tactical dungeon crawler.
A truly co-operative adventure.
A truly narrative-driven board game.
Truly epic!
Kingdoms Forlorn is a solo-operative dungeon delver for 1-4 players with a focus on loot, tactical battles, character building and storytelling. It’s something we’ve been working for more than 2 years now, since before our highly successful Kickstarter campaign for Aeon Trespass: Odyssey. As AT:O nears completion, we thought it high time to reintroduce Kingdoms Forlorn to the wider audience!
In the coming months, I’ll be slowly unveiling the magnificent beast that is Kingdoms Forlorn, and showcasing each and every major theme and concept, as well as highlighting the innovative mechanics we hope will reinvent the somewhat stale genre of ‘dungeon crawler board games’. And of course, along the way, I’ll give you a sneak peek at the exquisite art we’re using to illustrate it: from Monsters, Knights and Kingdoms to Gear, Maps, Saints, UI elements and the next generation of our miniatures!The long-abandoned marketplace is hauntingly still, dozens of crumbling buildings looming over it with darkened, empty facades like ghostly faces. Wind whistles through the empty homes that once boasted life and activity, a soulful dirge to the lost. Most disturbing of all, however, are the figures that infest the square. Statues of countless different kinds, from merchants to washerwomen to little children, all frozen in a moment of time. The petrification spared none of them.
You pause to take a closer look at one, and a sudden scraping sound behind you catches your ear. Figures emerge from the abandoned buildings, hunched, twisted, clawing at the ground with long talons. Perhaps they were once Human, but now it is impossible to tell. Stony growths cover what flesh is visible. They encircle you, making ready to attack.
Fields of Stone
Deep Hand-crafted Stories with Roguelike Elements
Kingdoms Forlorn is many things. One of those thing is the narrative, or, rather, narratives, plural, as each Knight will weave their own tale of valor, courage, revenge, redemption, despair, fall, discovery or rebirth. These stories are tailor-made for particular Knights and encompass sprawling choice trees and branching narratives. A lot of these are mutually exclusive and will lead you to diverse outcomes, character builds and, ultimately, endings.
These branching narratives are not exactly choose your own adventures either! Over the years, we’ve been steadily pushing the limits of what stories our games can tell through mechanics and mechanically-driven choices, and Kingdoms Forlorn is the next step in that direction. What I mean by this is: rarely will you find yourself at a straight, clean choice, like, “save those people or single-mindedly follow your nemesis”. These are interesting, but, ultimately, very static choices. “Save those people and lose a hand or single-mindedly follow your nemesis and lose access to a whole in-game faction” is a better proposition, as it adds additional stakes. However, it still boils down to a single ‘crossroads’; you may have played a reckless Knight who doesn’t care about anyone but themselves, and yet now you can ‘make the right choice’. No. A lot of the times, you’ll have to sleep in the bed you’ve made: Kingdoms Forlorn will track important statistics, ability use and other factors, and will sometimes arrive at the conclusion of who you really are before you do. How many people have you left to their fate in the last delve? That many? Well, then clearly you’re driven by revenge! What kind of clues have you collected the most? What kind of tactics were you using? How did your other interactions fare? All these and more will dictate or influence the number of choices each fork in the road presents.
Stoneface
And, of course, you will be allowed to fail. What I mean by this is that the game’s story will rarely stop for you when you stumble. Have you failed to save your informant? Tough luck, he will take their secret to their grave, while you will be forced onto a different story path. “Fail forward” they’re calling it, though I’m not that fond of the term myself. You see, fail forward suggests the game will progress in the same or similar way, regardless of your success. In Kingdoms Forlorn that’s not true at all. There are easier and darker paths, there are good and bad endings, there are things that make your game more challenging or easier – at a cost, of course.
Then there are the ‘rogue-like elements’. I do not mean rogue-like in a sense that your progression will be in any way reset. Rather, it’s about more or less random story encounters that will influence your main stories. Chance meetings, fateful duels, dreadful discoveries, all these will open up new interesting avenues or tip the scales in favor of one path or another.
Finally, the Knight stories do intersect – in interesting, non-obvious, sometimes shocking ways. As the saying goes: you can’t rob the same tomb twice – or at least walk out of the second attempt alive!
On the Poor Knight’s Road, utter carnage awaits you. Maimed bodies are rotting where they had been thrown. Shards of broken weapons and pieces of armor have been scattered across the highway like autumn leaves. The carriage is lying on its side, wood split open like a rotten pumpkin. Torn cushions and curtains are the only things left inside.
“No bandit did this,” you surmise. “We’re in for a treat, my nimble friend, maybe there is some enjoyment to be had here after all!”
Little Ser chirps in agreement.
Knighteater
Who put a monkey in there?
Yes, there are monkeys in Kingdoms Forlorn! The worlds we create tend to have some eccentricities to them, though each is always well-thought out and a great springboard for creativity. We find that these type of unique elements are what differentiates the greatest fantasy and science fiction settings, those small details that add up to a somewhat familiar, yet quite unknown new world.
So there are monkeys in Kingdoms Forlorn – as well as apes! These are called the First Men, and are thought to have been civilized, once. Now they roar the edges of the Deep Fog (and the Sunken Kingdom), hostile to humans, but not overly aggressive. Some scholars believe they are the subjects of a separate Curse, that these were in fact humans, bondsmen of one of Forlorn Kings. But this is surely false, for each King, and Kingdom, and each Curse are accounted for, so where did these First Men come from?
Firstman
