Super Descent - coming soon

By thinkbomb, in Descent: Journeys in the Dark

Project long time in the works, I'm posting a preview here. It'll be available to play at some point within the next month or two.


Super Descent is essentially an unofficial 3rd edition. The 30 second sales pitch is as follows...

- A summoning resource called "Peril" will allow the Overlord more strategic flexibility regarding when to unleash a wave of monsters on the heroes. As well, monsters will have different strengths that cost different amounts of peril (rather than Act 1 / Act 2 distinctions).

- Heroes have a healthy/wounded status (similar to IA). Bearing in mind the game has been rebalanced for this, it does remove the oppressive nature of Corpse-Stalking and always targeting the squishy mage/healer first.

- Heroes will have their own unique XP upgrades called Talents in addition to their chosen class (this is to enable more flexibility in what heroes are good at what classes).

- Great efforts have been made to retain as much Descent-ness as possible, including maintaining minion/masters, wealth of conditions, separation of heroes/classes, etc, etc, etc

- A companion guide to update existing campaigns to Super Descent (no maps included, so original copies still required, for obvious reasons)

- A new AI deck is being developed specifically for this mod (given the other systems are incompatible)

- There will be a card creation suite to enable faster development.

- And a host of other changes to accommodate for the major new systems. For example: the new tools have been used to push each monster into its own role (for example: the sluggers like Ogres, Giants, Ettins, and Trolls all now have more diverse personalities and roles)


Being said ... here's a couple of card previews ...


The Monster Card
Monster_V2.jpg
The big thing is that EVERYTHING is on 1 side of the card. This means the Overlord can hold a small hand of monsters and not reveal to the heroes what they'll be up against until he pays the peril and unleashes them.
A couple points to note ...

a) the new dice icons at the bottom were born out of necessity to allow for b/w printing
b) the white text will have black outlines implemented in the card editor suite
c) The card template will be extremely flexible, including adjusting: surge abilities, whether or not surges are master only, if you hide extra info like the monster traits, attributes, etc
d) awful pink picture is there as a safety-net. The card editor will allow the user to input their picture of choice


The Item Card
Item_Template.jpg
These changes are more quality of life than anything, but it certainly helps.

a) the item type icon has been moved next to the picture. This was done to allow more text space and cleaner presentation
b) Now there's an option to include class restriction at the bottom of the card. It makes it a lot easier to tell the starting class equipment from shop cards without having to look at the backside.


Skill and Talent Cards
Class_Card_Template.jpg
Talents (XP Upgrades) that are specific to heroes now have their own fancy background colors. In addition, I put the Heroic Feat on the talent card (hence the little add-on graphic there). Also, some cards will have the option of being double sided (flip over mechanics).
... which leads to ...


Hero Cards
Hero_Template.jpg
Hero_Template.jpg
Healthy Heroes have an extra ability. yay! That ability gets lots when they're wounded, and their stats take a hit. Uh oh!
- If nothing else, facetiously, it provides players an actual reason to flip over their hero card.
- More importantly, it's in the best interest for the Overlord to spread damage and eventually attack EVERYONE (as those stat decreases can affect the success of a mission).

I've put out a rough roadmap to convert all retail content, as well (with permission) a great portion of community content.
The development tools (which is really all I'm waiting on) are going to super straight forward and will allow everyone to pitch in if they want to (as well as making it much easier to kick out content in a timely manner).


So if you're interested: discord server's here --> https://discord.gg/fw6ssGH

I'm impressed by your work and curious but it is too much of changes to me.

But since I'm curious I can look and give my opinion.

Edited by rugal

The card creator is undeed something I'm interrested in for sure

On 6/6/2020 at 3:22 PM, rugal said:

I'm impressed by your work and curious but it is too much of changes to me.

But since I'm curious I can look and give my opinion.

To be clear this is basically a new edition. That means there will be a great deal of changes inbound for the game (despite trying to keep the spirit of the thing in tact).

The phrase "too much" is also very subjective. While some changes were out of necessity, most were made based on trying to alleviate design flaws. However, there's always that camp which will view inherent design flaws as "part of the charm" of 2nd edition. It'd be foolish for me to comment on that aspect for you (as in: judging if it actually would be too much or not given the subjective nature of the thing).

The only I can say is that when this content is made available, the option will be present to download it in segments. So while the core game will have an unavoidable bulk (to deal with monsters, items, etc), a significant chunk will be broken off into smaller downloads (for example: class decks, plot decks, overlord decks, etc). So efforts will be made to break down the download/print bulk as much as possible.

Regarding the editor, there's a couple notes...
* it will allow for more effective play testing, as filling out text forms is far faster than manually adjusting photoshop files. Obviously that means faster fixes to balance oversight issues (an issue ubiquitous with FFG style multi-component games).
* There will also be the spreadsheets made available for armchair devs to tinker with. For example: the process of calculating the peril figure cost is a bit mathematically involved, so a spreadsheet was created to automate most of that. Documentation and best practices guides will also be made available for all of this.
* Ideally, it'll be approachable enough to allow interested parties to both convert their D2e content, as well as add original creations without the psd barrier.

Edited by thinkbomb