BUILDING A SUROS CAMPAIGN
This weekend i started slapping some things together for a campaign. This ended up taking up a good bit of my time late into the nights! Keep in mind I made this stuff up very quickly and I am sure much of it will change or just straight up be removed, we will see!
THE TIMELINE
The first thing I did was layout a time track or some kind of progression system. I play a lot of Kingdom death so I first thought to just put together a singular track that you would simply work your way down as you beat bosses. But to differentiate mystelf from that I had to think about what I didn't like about it maybe just what i could do to put my own spin on that, make it my own.
I had a game called Slay the Spire on my mind, which is a rogue style game. In this style of game you can build up your character but more than likely death is imminent. And when death happens you will start your journey over with the caveat of having a few upgrades to use to progress a bit farther. I think this might be a pretty swell idea to implement in a board game and it is something we don't really see outside of video games so far.
THE PROGRESSION SYSTEM
Ok this is what I came up with. The players will do "runs" meaning they will see how many bosses they beat in each run and record them. Bosses will be randomly drawn from a deck and battled at the level stated on the progression track. If 6 bosses are beat in a row than you will move on to the final boss! After a boss your players will not reset the damage dealt to them on continue on in their journey.
PROGRESSION AFTER DEATH
Below the track I put together a death track, inspired by Dark Souls style games. When all players die, you will lose everything you gained along the way on the level you died on. But there is hope! Just like in Dark Souls, if you make it back to where you died you have a chance to gain everything back. If the boss on that level is defeated than you gain everything you lost back. My thought process with this is that when I am playing a game and I lose, sometimes I just simply will cheat and progress anyways. With this type of system though dying IS part of the process as sometimes you will need to lighten up the difficulty to gain some extra EXP and resources.
Finally at the bottom we have some "Battle Records". I don't exactly know what this will be but I can things happening along your journey like gaining key items that may help you later in battles or something or maybe just to record your gruesome deaths for fun!
KEEPING TRACK OF YOUR CHARACTER
Players will be using EXP and resources to all sorts of things in between battles. Besides crafting new weapons and skills, players can unlock new abilities and level up. They will keep track of all of that here.
As you battle you will defeating hordes of enemies on the map besides just the main boss. These enemies will be called "minions" and the player that performs the killing blow will gain some resources and exp. All of this will be recorded in your campaign book under "Battle Resources" If the the players are successful, all of the resources and EXP will be transfered to the "repository" which is basically your bank for holding these things.
When they bank their EXP they can then check to see if they have enough to move up a level. If so, They will will choose from the available options to permanently increase a stat to that player. Those are just the options I thought of but maybe there will be more!
The training Facility is the first place you can see where resources can be spent to learn some new skills, abilities, etc.
GEAR AND HOW TO CRAFT IT
The last thing I will touch on is gear and crafting it. Everything will be tiered levels 1 - 3. If a player is at least at that level or higher they can craft from that tier. You will use resources you have gained to craft weapons, armor and Materia.
This entire system is heavily influenced by Final Fantasy 7 and will give the players tons of options for building out their characters. By the end of your 4th run your player should be crazy powerful! So far, I am thinking of having ONE of each gear. this will force players to diversify quite a bit but I may change my mind on that when I start play testing.
All this said, I have not play tested anything, nor have I even printed anything physical out to mess with. This is all just hypothetical things I think will work together. it's a fun journey of thinking up ideas and destroying others. We will see how it goes!
