Hello everyone, I’m Kristian, I’m one of the designers on Runefire and I’ll be stepping in this week to talk about the encounters of Runefire.
A quick backstory real fast before we jump into talking about the main topic. I’m a new addition to the Catalyst team, though I’ve been a part of the Catalyst family for a while now. I met Bryn Bills back in first grade and we became fast friends and pretty much family. Growing up Randall practically helped my family raise me since I was at their house every weekend. Naturally I wouldn’t be able to escape getting into Battletech as my first big foray into tabletop gaming, which grew into a love of the industry. Fast forward to after high school, Randall had asked me if I wanted to come over to help playtest a new game he was working on, that game being Dragonfire. I spent the next year helping playtest Dragonfire and I found one of my favorite systems in tabletop gaming. Fast forward one last time to last year, as Randall mentioned, we were all sitting around playing games one evening at Gen-Con when Bryn made that infamous comment, why not Dragonfire but Pathfinder. Now we are here, developing my favorite RPG into my favorite card game.
Alright moving into the topic of the week, encounters.
I had a blast recreating the encounters from Dragonfire and moving them over to Runefire. Pathfinder has so many fun monsters to pull from. These monsters have a width of flavor, whether it be eldritchian, mythical or just robots. Pathfinder has anything you need to help fit the flavor you want in your campaign. On top of that these creatures are a vital element to the world building of Golarian. They help make each region feel distinct from one another. Whether it be the hordes of potential undead encounters in the Impossible Lands or the megafauna of The Realm of the Mammoth Lords.
Now the monsters of Pathfinder are not found everywhere. Many are found in specific environments and it is a rare occasion to see them outside of there. We divide each encounter deck based on these environments. The environment decks are then divided into Difficulty 1 or 2 decks, with Difficulty 2 having a much more difficult curve than difficulty 1. As the adventuring party levels up, they will be able to tackle Difficulty 3 and even 4 decks, as well as boss encounters. The core box of Runefire will contain five main environment decks with two decks being of the same environment but of a difficulty 1 and 2 decks. These environments and difficulties will be important in helping determine what set of encounters you will face in each adventure. The environment can be found in the bottom left of the encounter card. I will let you all guess the environment each card belongs to.
Moving along into how encounters tie into the engine of Runefire. All encounters fall under the four colors of Runefire, Blue (Arcane), Red (Deception), Green (Divine), and Black (Martial). The color of the encounters will determine the flavor of the encounter. You don’t want an archwizard encounter running around as a Martial encounter, that wouldn’t make sense! Unless this wizard decided it liked swords and put some attribute points into strength and grabbed a weapon proficiency. The color of the encounter will be reflected by the damage tracks of each encounter. Naturally an Arcane encounter will have more Arcane levels on the damage track. So your wizard might want to focus more towards helping out with Arcane encounters.
If an encounter was too resilient to your attacks, it will retaliate against the player that it is facing dealing its damage back to them. However, some encounters will trigger certain effects when dealing damage. These text effects, as we call them, will affect the players in a variety of different ways. There are effects that are applied when they attack or damage a character, like the Hydra that heals every time it attacks. There are surprises which will affect the players when the encounter is placed in front of you. There are dangerous continuous effects, like the Orc Scrapper which targets your replenishment, stopping characters from being able to draw cards. Anything that targets replenishment should be a priority target.
After an encounter is defeated, the most important part of adventuring happens (ignoring what the champions think), which of course is the gold payout. Unfortunately for the roguish members of the party, but fortunately for the rest, gold is shared between the party, doling out 1 gold starting with the player that defeated the encounter and then passing out 1 gold to each party member in order until all gold has been dolled out.
Encounters will vary in difficulty. Each encounter will follow a difficulty curve that balances out the damage track and how much health and individual color or colorless damage an encounter has, damage, gold, and its text effect. Like the encounter shown above, the Hydra is what we consider a very bad encounter. Showing up in a difficulty 1 deck, it has more than the average health, damage, and severity of text effect and in return doesn’t have a gold payout that reflects the amount of effort required to take it down. Now compare that to a very good encounter, like the String Slime. It has a fair gold payout compared to its total health and on top of that, allows another 1 player to draw a card, which is one of the best effects to gain.
Finally for the last segment, we’ll go over location encounters, or simply locations. Not all encounters adventuring come across are creatures. Some are locations, which characters can get trapped in. Locations function similarly to encounters except, when a location is placed in front of a player, that player gets trapped inside. Characters trapped in a location can’t help anyone outside and vice versa. Parties will need to work together from the inside and outside to defeat the location.
Alright I believe that is it for the encounters. It has been a blast working with the team to bring this experience to life. Until next time!
