Recently, Delphi and I started a project to adapt the regular The Shadow Rune campaign to be playable without the need of an overlord. We will be using the fantastic Valkyrie software under development by BGG user BruceLGL to provide a look and feel very similar to the official Road to Legend app. To showcase what it will look like and evaluate how many people are interested in this, we adapted the introduction quest First Blood.
Give it a try, but beware, Mauler and his Goblins learned a few new tricks!

We think it is quite fun to play. Here are some screenshots:

Features:

• step-by-step exploration of maps
• new quest-dependent activation instructions for monsters groups
• quest mechanics similar to the regular campaign but adapted to Road to Legend play-style.
• travel and campaign phases at the start and at the end of each quest
• reward system based on gold and number of available Shop Item cards
• uses the Road to Legend rule set, no additional rules other than provided within the quest itself

Download: http://descent-community.org/index.php/the-shadow-rune-project/

Installation:

• install the official Road to Legend app
• download and unpack the current Valkyrie release from here
• start Valkyrie from the folder you unpacked it to
• select "Import Road to Legend content", click on the Descent button when import done
• select Start Quest and download First Blood (it will be saved in your windows user directory (%appdata%\Valkyrie\)
• Start the quest

Support Requests:

Obviously, this is a big project that cannot be completed by two people alone. We will need a lot of help from you guys to get this done.

• We need people to with ideas how to adapt each quest for app-play and put those ideas into our quest design template available for our download page.
• We need people to create the quest.ini files based on the quest design templates (using the Valkyrie Quest Editor GUI or very simple code).
• We need people to play test quests providing detailed feedback on bugs and balancing.

If this sparks enough interest, we will continue to get a full campaign adapted.

Contribute and make this project happen!

Work in Progress

A Fat Goblin : Design and implementation by Delphi

Castle Daerion : Design and implementation by Sadgit

The Cardinal's Plight: Design and implementation by rdh174

Currently we need people for design and implementation of 1 interlude quest, 3 Act 2 quests and 1 finale to get the full campaign playable.

If someone can teach me how, I am willing to help with creating some quests.

Thanks

Dan Howell

Great! There are two ways you can help:

1) You can design a quest using the word (or text) template we created ( download under Templates ). Just fill in ideas, mechanics and flavor for the quest you want to adapt. Post your design here or send the word document to Delphi or me, and we will "translate" it into Valkyrie code.

2) You can design and create the quest all by yourself. I would recommend using the Quest Editor within Valkyrie for that. There is a Valkyrie wiki at Github that explains all elements of the Quest Editior. Basically, you start with placing all tiles and tokens for the quest and then you create Events to display text, trigger the placement of monsters and show or hide tokens/tiles based on player input. You can also set a number of variables, triggers, peril level and much more. Learning-by-doing in combination with the wiki is the best approach here. Please post specific questions here or join our Wire channel.

Please post the quest you want to work on as soon as you start and I will assign it to you under "Work in Progress" above.

I have a question ...

Are you recreating the Shadow Rune campaign as it was meant to be played, or are you recreating the Shadow Rune campaign based on your wish of how it should be played? In other words, it seems like you may be taking liberties with what you don't like about the campaign to turn it into something you feel it should be?

Have I read this correctly?

We will have to compromise at some points. Not all of the shadow rune's mechanics can be adapted completely to an overlordless game engine. Also, we will try to rebalance some of the quests that are too one sided. For example we increased the reinforcements in "First Blood", as the quest would otherwise be trivial for the heroes. We will also finetune the rewards and monster activations, since we can't anticipate monster placement, and there is no overlord that increases in power during a campaign.

We hope to capture the feel of the original The Shadow Rune campaign.
However, the RtL format is really different. It starts with the alternating order of activations, the map exploration aspect and ends with a different reward system. We have to adapt and modify the original campaign a lot.

So no, we are not trying to provide a 1:1 adaption but something that people think is worthwhile spending their time with and really enjoy, regardless if they played the original Shadow Rune or not.

As we are all amateurs in this, we need ideas, feedback and help from the community.

OK, I will try creating a quest and putting it into Valkyrie. Do you have a specific one from Act I that you would like for me to try? Otherwise, I will pick one and see what happens.

Dan Howell

Just pick The Cardinal's Plight, Masquerade Ball or Death on the Wing.

Very well, I will give Cardinal's Plight a shot.

Great. Assigned.

No time to help but I just want to say that I love that you are doing this! I hope you can complete the project.

Just in case you missed it: Valkyrie is an App that is made to create and play fan-made quests in Road to Legend style. It is really good and I highly recommend trying it. At the moment single quests can by played. At the moment Valkyrie actually comes with an adaption of the Shadow Rune quest: First Blood.
Get it from here: https://github.com/NPBruce/valkyrie/releases

The good news is that BruceLGL is currently working to provide full campaign support . We will have a system in place that provides all features that RtL currently provides to enjoy fan-made content!

2 hours ago, Sadgit said:

The good news is that BruceLGL is currently working to provide full campaign support . We will have a system in place that provides all features that RtL currently provides to enjoy fan-made content!

Infinite Descent 2ed content incoming I'm thinking I might try my hand at this as well.

Absolutely love the idea. Is there any support now or planned for Valkyrie for iOS or Android? Or is this Windows only?

Windows and Mac OS now, Android and Linux a bit later.

I am not going to do iOS, but someone else can if they want. Problems are more political than technical getting into store and I don't have an iOS device.

11 hours ago, BruceLGL said:

Windows and Mac OS now, Android and Linux a bit later.

I am not going to do iOS, but someone else can if they want. Problems are more political than technical getting into store and I don't have an iOS device.

Sounds good. I'll take a look and wouldn't mind helping bring the campaigns in once I get familiar with the app. I don't have a group that likes the Overlord mechanic, so I only get to play RtL. I would love to experience the FFG created campaigns!

@Kaaihn Great, any help is appreciated!

We are especially interested in some detailed feedback on released quests. First Goblin is already available and A Fat Goblin is in its final polishing stage.

Maybe you wanna join our Discord channel: https://discord.gg/BFGhdrr

Version 1.1 of "First Blood" as well as Version 1.0 of "A Fat Goblin" can now be downloaded from within Valkyrie. Please note that these will require Valkyrie version 0.8.7 or later.

Hi guys,

I lead the unofficial translation for Road to legend to spanish (fan version). The fans version for spanish RtL is complete and i want to know if I have permission to translate your amazing work with The Shadow Rune Project, and if i can, I would like to participate in it.

I wait your answer soon.

Hey Chacal23!

Of course you have the permission to translate our work! Just be aware that Valkyrie currently does not support multiple languages. I guess it will soon after the official app will support this. So even if you translate the text that we put into the Shadow Rune quests, all the generic text (monster names, activations, etc.) will still be in English at the moment. However, I guess it does not hurt to start translating now to have everything ready.

It would be great to have another person in the team. The easiest thing would be to join our discord channel and discuss with us what you would like to do: quest development, coding, play testing, etc.

The latest release of Valkyrie (0.9) supports English, Spanish, French, Italian and German. Unfortunately as Sadgit mentioned the official app only has English at the moment, so the text from there won't be translated.

Edit: You mentioned a fan translation of RtL, how is this being done? Are you providing the info to FFG or modifying the unity packages or something else?

On 21/4/2017 at 0:50 PM, BruceLGL said:

The latest release of Valkyrie (0.9) supports English, Spanish, French, Italian and German. Unfortunately as Sadgit mentioned the official app only has English at the moment, so the text from there won't be translated.

Edit: You mentioned a fan translation of RtL, how is this being done? Are you providing the info to FFG or modifying the unity packages or something else?

We asked Edge (the official translator of Descent and "who has the rights"), if we could post a spanish fanmade version of the app by fans on their forums.

We have modified a couple of files of the app, extracting the files containing the text in English and modifying them to contain the text in Spanish, then we re-compiled the files and upload them with permission of an administrator of the edge forum.

The fan version is only to allow all Spanish people can play it in our language until the official translation is finished

If the valkirye is going to support multilenguaje, I'm going to wait a little bit to work on the translated version.

It supports it now. We also extract the Localization.txt from the official app. For MoM this means we have lots of languages, but not D2E. Do you think I could include your translations in Valkyrie? I might have to strip the english translations so that I am not publishing that.

Version 1.1 of Valkyrie with campaign support has just been released:
https://github.com/NPBruce/valkyrie/wiki

Check out the 1.1 demo (downloadable in game) for some of the new tricks.