The premise will be familiar. You've a bunch of adventuring heroes wandering through maps and battling a series of monsters. What distinguishes Vrahode: Age of Prophecy from most other dungeon crawlers is just how streamlined everything is in Jeffrey Irving's design. You'd never know it from the knockout production quality but shown here on Board's Eye View is just a preview prototype of the game ahead of its upcoming launch on Kickstarter but what we've found most striking is not so much how good Vrahode looks but how straightforward it is to play. That's not to say it's a pushover - far from it - but it means you can be and running and playing the game pretty much straight out of the box without having to plough through a heavy rules overload.
It's a fully cooperative tabletop role-playing game (RPG) for 1-4 players where you campaign through a series of scenarios. Each scenario map incorporates the Vrahode story, all the scenario conditions, objectives and rewards for success, so everything is visible at a glance. And this 'at a glance' approach extends to each character's stats and status. For each hero character, you have a dashboard that fits over a tray to give a raised view of all your stats, and to act as a card holder. Each hero has their own unique 'racial' abilities and particular skills represented by skill cards, and you can expect to add to these as you are rewarded for success in at least some of the scenarios. Triggering a skill involves spending 'ruhl', represented by crystals: so you simply move the requisite number of crystals from the resource to the spent compartment of your dashboard tray.
On your turn you get to take two actions, including the option of taking the same action twice. You can move, use a racial ability or skill, or make a ranged or melee attack. Combat is central to the game, and again it's refreshingly streamlined. Each monster has a card that shows their stats, including the number you need to roll on a d20 for a hit. You succeed if you roll that number or lower. Rolling lower than a target number admittedly felt counterintuitive and perverse on our initial plays (we're used to having to roll to beat a number) but you quickly get used to it. The weapon you use will show how much damage you do on a successful hit but you add or subtract from that the number you roll on a custom d6 (-3, -2, -1, +1, +2, +3) and you subtract the number for 'mitigation' on the monster's card.
There's no Games Master (GM) controlling the monsters but they move and attack according to clear and sensible rules. They can obviously dish out damage to the heroes but the optimisation puzzle at the heart of Vrahode is the need for players to manage not just their characters' health but also their fatigue. And simply moving between scenario maps is exhausting, in that characters automatically take a fatigue whenever they enter a new map and it costs you 2 points of fatigue to alter the party's initiative order. If your hero's fatigue is above 5, you'll suffer modifiers to your d20 rolls, and if a hero's fatigue goes above 10 they cannot take part in combat. If every character is fatigued in this way, it's game over for the heroes...
Managing fatigue involves the party forming a camp and resting. The effect of resting is determined by a card draw that determines whether the resting party members get a restful sleep (recover 2 fatigue, 2 ruhl crystals and 1 health), a restless sleep (recover 1 fatigue, 1 ruhl and no health) or whether the party is ambushed...
We highlighted the production quality from Weathervane Games. Our preview prototype came with standees for most of the monsters and miniatures for the heroes and a couple of the monsters, and the detail on these is seriously impressive. The prototype shown here on Board's Eye View has merely teased us with a taster of Vrahode. It's left us eager to dive further into the Vrahode universe when the game fulfils to backers. The Kickstarter is due to launch on 1 October. Click here to check it out.
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