Design & Inspiration: Enemies

North is a cooperative game - the players work together to attain their goal. To make the game dramatic, I need something to get in the players' way. The players won't be the only ones moving around the board! I have two enemy types in mind: bandits and coldbringers. 

Bandits are humans who do whatever it takes to survive in the harsh environment. Typically that means stealing from others. When a player encounters a bandit - by moving onto a bandit's tile, by having a bandit move onto their tile, or during an encounter - they immediately make a skill check to try to either fight or escape. On a success, the player escapes unharmed, but on a failure, the bandit steals an item from the player. Bandits won't hurt you directly (most of the time), but they'll make it harder for you to survive.

Coldbringers are the game's monsters. The coldbringers feed on heat, drawing it out of their surroundings and chilling the area - they're the cause of the spreading snow and ice. When a player encounters a coldbringer, they'll make a skill check as with the bandits, but instead of losing an item, the player loses heat. A single coldbringer isn't too dangerous, but the heat loss can add up quickly and begin to eat into endurance and health, especially when some heat loss occurs every turn.

As I said above, these enemies move around the board. Currently what I'm thinking is that a 6-sided die is rolled, once for all bandits and once for all coldbringers. The enemy moves according to the result - 1 is north, count clockwise. So in the image on the right, the bandit is in the centre tile. If the movement roll is a 3, it moves to the southeast tile.

Sometimes the bandit can't move to the correct tile - for example, say that the centre tile is on the right edge of the map, and there's nothing where the 2 and 3 are. In this case, the bandit moves in the opposite direction - northwest, into the tile showing the number 6. As a result, movement will always happen, and no one will get stuck.

One aspect of this that bothers me a little bit is that all bandits will move in the same direction each turn, and all coldbringers will move in the same direction. I don't like this because it seems kind of organized, and that's not the intention. However, I'd rather that than rolling a die for each enemy on the table - if they're moving every turn it's way better to make two rolls than twelve. This is something I'll have to think about a bit more.

I'm also thinking of giving the coldbringers some form of advanced movement compared to the bandits. These monsters are adapted to the snow and the cold, so it makes sense that they'd be more mobile in their element. It could be something as simple as having them move two tiles instead of only one - in fact, that's probably what I'll playtest first.

June 20th edit: so I reconsidered how coldbringers move. They move towards the town in the green zone (the place where players revive when they run out of health). Why? Check the post on winning and losing, which isn't out yet.

The other thing I'm considering is whether to have the bandits and coldbringers move at different times. I'm planning for each round to represent a day: players move and have encounters during daylight, and do upkeep stuff and heat loss at "night" (the last phase of the round before the next one starts). I'll mess around with timing ideas, because if I have the bandits and coldbringers move at different times, I'd like there to be some mechanical weight and implications behind that difference, rather than just arbitrarily having the movements happen at different times for no apparent reason.

You might've caught that hint about encounters. That's the topic I'll cover next: stuff that happens when you move through the many environments on the board.