Design & Inspiration: Encounters

Now that I've posted a quick overview of the board concept, it's time to talk about what'll happen on that board.

Here I'm taking a lot of inspiration from Arkham Horror - if I'm being honest, I wonder if that inspiration is a little too strong. I read a bit on Mage Knight and thought about doing some deckbuilding elements, but I don't think it makes sense for this game. Like Arkham Horror, I'm planning for North to use location-based encounters. When you end your movement, you draw the relevant encounter card for that tile, and do what it says.

Ideally I would like to use fewer card types than Arkham Horror does. That game has piles and piles of cards. Currently the idea is to have five or six encounter piles: each of the three zones will have one encounter deck for generic/wilderness tiles (like forest or islands) and one encounter deck for unique locations (castle, army base, etc). Each card will have an encounter listing for each of the tile types it covers. For example, if you're on a forest tile in the green zone, you draw a green wilderness encounter card and follow the "forest" entry, ignoring the "snowfield" and "abandoned house" entries.

I'm starting simple with only a basic concept for each encounter and the relevant rules to resolve the encounter. I'll add in flavour text later to more clearly explain what's going on and make it feel more like something important is happening, rather than just rolling some dice.

Most encounters will involve a skill roll (which I talked about last post) but some will have automatic positive or negative events. To start I just threw down a bunch of stuff that made sense for each zone, but in the future I'll want to refine and balance the zones against each other for suitable levels of risk vs reward - if a player chooses to avoid a terrain type I don't want it to be because the cards are all bad, but rather because they have a certain strategy in mind.

Here's an overview of the basic encounter types I've got so far:

• Automatic event. Something good or bad happens with no roll. Usually these are good, and since it's no fun to take a penalty due to bad luck without a chance to avoid it, the penalties are not severe (usually a point or two of heat/endurance loss).
• Skill check. The outcome will vary - on some cards a success gives a benefit and a failure doesn't; on some success is a benefit and failure is a penalty; and on some success does nothing but avoid the penalty for failure. The benefit can range from taking one or more items to movement bonuses to heat/endurance/health boosts, while the penalties are typically loss of heat/endurance/health.
• Move a bandit or coldbringer to the player's current tile. When this happens, they'll resolve a bandit or coldbringer encounter, as I explained in a previous post.

These are pretty basic, and so far I only have 6 different encounters per tile type. I'll probably want more, and I also want to experiment with the frequency of each encounter type - say I double the number of green zone encounter cards to 12, but that doesn't mean 2 of each encounter. Some would be rare, some would be common. That's the kind of variance I'm talking about.

I'll want to do something similar in terms of rarity with item cards - which will be featured in the next post!