Tales from the Red Dragon Inn

Paint Stream and Intro to Solo Mode!
over 2 years ago – Tue, Oct 05, 2021 at 10:21:15 PM

Greetings Adventurers! Later today at 3PM Pacific Time we’d love to have you join us on Twitch for our first minis painting stream with Jen!

However, while you wait for the stream, why don’t we dive deep into the new Solo Mode variant you all unlocked with the first Stretch Goal?

Solo Mode is an enhanced way to play single-player Tales. You will choose only one hero to play in each scenario. To compensate for this handicap, as you progress through the campaign you’ll unlock additional item and hero card slots beyond the normal game’s maximum, plus enjoy some other significant advantages.

Starting with Scenario 2, your hero will equip not one, but two Minor Items. Most of the playtesters used this bonus slot to equip a recovery item like a potion, but other testers got real tricky later in the campaign when the variety of minor items available in the Armory becomes much broader.

Starting with the second Chapter of the Campaign, you will also be equipping five Hero Cards instead of the usual four. By the fourth Chapter this is further increased to six Hero Cards.While it’s easy to end up with four abilities on cooldown, it’ll be a challenge to have all five or six of them unusable.

All these extra cards are important, because you’re going to be taking more actions than normal! In Solo Mode you will have your normal initiative token as well as the solo mode initiative token. Just like in two-player, you’ll activate twice in the Combat Round, but unlike in two-player, both are full activations. This allows you to take 2 Actions and 1 Shenanigan EACH time you activate. This is critical for keeping your positioning safe, increasing your odds of acting at important points in the Combat Round, and taking down more opponents than a hero would typically be responsible for. Having more Hero and Item cards at your disposal will ensure that you spend most of your time having an impact each Round.

But you won’t be alone! Companions are simplified adventurers that can reliably offer you a helping hand while also absorbing some damage on your behalf. Each Companion functions a bit differently from the others in how they play and what you need to do during setup. For now let's dive into Otto as a prime baseline example.

Otto is a mechanical automaton constructed by Wrench and Wizgille. When you pick Otto during setup, you will choose one of his four different Companion Cards, giving Otto a unique ability to use each activation. Choosing a version of Otto that matches the demands of the scenario or synergizes with your chosen hero will be an important factor to your success at the higher difficulty settings.

Otto will play with his own set of two initiative tokens, resolving the same ability each time it activates. When Otto activates, you’ll be responsible for making all the choices for it. Since Otto is a fearless automaton, you are encouraged to have him dive deep into the action! Companions like Otto count as though they were normal hero for game effects, particularly enemy Schemes. Ideally, they should be helping you out by splitting the attention of enemies on the board, soaking some of the hits on your behalf.

This is made all the safer because you don’t lose the scenario if your Companion is defeated! Depending on the Companion, defeat may yield some surprising results. In Otto’s case, regardless of the Class Card you chose for it, when Otto suffers lethal damage it will flip into Recovery Mode, slowly repairing itself while tumbling around the map as a sentient pile of junk. Fortunately, while Otto is in Recovery Mode, he possesses the “Trivial” keyword, and will be ignored by all Schemers when they are determining their Focus!

Companions help make Solo Mode a unique and fun experience unlike what you’ll find in the solo-play experiences in other games. We are very proud of the mechanic and hope you’ll find it a fun way to play the game.

We look forward to showing you Solo Mode in action a couple weeks from now! Thanks for reading. Thanks for your support! Now let’s all kick back and listen to some nuggets of wisdom from Jen, as she takes us through her tips and tricks for painting your game minis!

Stretch Goals, Stream Schedule and Solo Mode!
over 2 years ago – Tue, Oct 05, 2021 at 10:59:31 AM

We keep on busting goals left right and center! Let's take a moment to talk about our streaming schedule for the next few weeks and the cool stuff you’ve unlocked so far.

On Tuesdays throughout the campaign Jen will fly solo streaming her process for painting plastic miniatures! Since Tales has some pretty sweet minis, it’s taken every ounce of her considerable willpower to not have them painted already. So join Jen for her paint shop, ask questions and have a chill time!

On Thursdays we’ll be continuing to show off the game by playing through each of the scenarios and variants available in the Tabletop Simulator Preview. We played Scenario 1 last week for our Launch stream, and will be diving into Scenario 2 next, with special guest star Will Brown the Hungry Gamer! We hope to see you all there!

We blew right past a whole bunch of Stretch Goals this weekend, including upgrading the printed custom dice to molded dice! Now that you have that sweet, sweet feeling of custom dice in your hand, it’s time to dive deep into some more content-related stretch goals. We have more miniatures for the Kickstarter Kit, another exciting Companion for Solo Mode, and a sweet new map mechanic!

There are few things more exciting than when you think you’ve won, and then the boss music starts again and a brand new health bar grows across the top of the screen. These stretch goals recreate that experience for our most important scenarios!

Enhanced Scenarios are two-parters, where you and your friends will need to conserve resources and fight through an extended, critical event in the campaign. Physically, this is done by having maps that change after a certain point in the scenario, literally flipping the map over, changing the schemes of your opponents and the topography of the battlefield.

We can’t go into more detail than that without spoiling critical elements of the game’s story. Seeing as how each of these enhancements includes a new mini to replace one or more standees, you can probably guess that these are going to be epic boss fights.

We already upgraded the dice the players use, why not upgrade the scheme dice too? The Scheme Dice become custom molded dice with some swanky new icons for their recessed faces! This replaces every die in the game with a custom, unique die except for...

For a milestone like 300% funding, it feels only right to give folks a little something they’ve been clamoring for! Pooky gets his own plastic mini, a custom molded die for his abilities, and also gets Companion cards for Solo Mode! Now any of the adventurers can take their favorite murder bunny with them into the dungeon on their single-player adventures!

And that’s a wrap for today’s update! We’ll see you again Tuesday for our first painting stream with Jen and a more info about the recently unlocked Solo Mode!

Funded! Let's Talk Stretch Goals and Your Questions!
over 2 years ago – Sat, Oct 02, 2021 at 01:28:55 AM

You did it! You crazy fans did it! We are making a dungeon crawl adventure filled with love and lore and you all came to play! From the bottom of our hearts, we appreciate each and every one of you and are thrilled to get a great game into your hands.

Now that we have 24 hours of comments under our belt, it’s high time we start making an FAQ and do some light clarification work!

A number of folks have mentioned the cost for shipping the game, and we suspect that many of you might not understand the sheer mass of Tales. The above image shows the approximate dimensions of the game box. The final dimensions are still close but still may change as we continue to unlock more stretch goals and add more to stuff to it, but as it currently stands, Tales is going to be in a box that is likely larger in every dimension than any of our previous big-box troves.

Another aspect for the shipping cost (as well as our February 2023 delivery estimate for that matter) has been because of the current global shipping crisis. Just a few days ago, TIME even reported on how logistics are gutting the board game industry.

Back in 2018 we would have probably had both a closer delivery date as well as cheaper shipping costs. In this post 2020 landscape we have to do our best to set realistic expectations that address the problems we are all actively dealing with today.

There seems to be a bit of confusion about Pooky’s role in Tales. Those of you who haven’t checked out the Tales Preview yet will be pleased to find out that Pooky is definitely not just an ornament for Zot’s artwork!

Pooky is a critical part of Zot’s kit, providing Zot’s player with two figures to control throughout the scenario. Well, “controlling” Pooky is a bit of a misnomer. Pooky has a special Hero Mat that comes with three different abilities he can use. During the Ready Phase, Zot’s player must roll Pooky’s Die, thus determining what action Pooky will perform when it’s Zot’s turn. The player still carries out the action, moving Pooky’s figure around the board and attacking enemies, etc. but you’re left up to the whims of Pooky as to what it is the rabbit-thing will be doing each turn. This adds an exciting bit of chaos to Zot’s otherwise very deliberate and calculated game play!

Furthermore, as you unlock new Hero Cards for Zot, you’ll have the opportunity to lean harder into utilizing Pooky. For example, the Hero Card “Sympathetic Fire Expulsion!” lets you breathe a burst of fire from both Zot AND Pooky!

You can see Pooky in action in the Announcement Stream we posted to YouTube back in early September.

Now let’s talk about Stretch Goals! Over the first 24-ish hours we not only hit our funding goal, but also blew past the first few Stretch Goals. For those of you who don’t know, for our campaign Stretch Goals are improvements to the game that are unlocked by hitting certain funding thresholds. The more folks back our campaign, the more we can invest in the new game! It’s win-win!

Our first Stretch Goal was for an enhanced Solo Mode, turning the single-player experience into something special and decidedly different from the normal “just play as two heroes” solution typical of dungeon crawl games. You’ll get a brand new mini, Otto, as well as the new ruleset and components needed to take either Otto or the Beer Goat with you on single-player adventures. Expect a deep dive into Solo Mode soon!

Our next couple of Stretch Goals were more Scenarios! These scenarios were held back because they had unique components, mechanics or enemies that wouldn’t see play in the rest of the game. However, they really let Tales flex its adaptability and are a ton of fun. We look forward to unlocking more of them throughout the campaign!

The Stretch Goal we are working toward right now is very exciting for the dice-heads at SlugFest Games. We would love to upgrade the Attack, Epic and Doom dice from cubes with painted faces to custom, molded dice with recessed and painted icons. That means manufacturing three distinct molds (one for each new die). This is definitely one of those upgrades that just makes the game feel better, and is particularly great because these are the dice players will be physically rolling most frequently!

In case you weren’t aware, the Attack dice determine the damage dealt by most of the abilities players use. Epic dice are a shared set of bonus dice the players can farm by performing game actions to improve individual attacks or shelter the whole party from damage. The dreaded Doom die is used on Legendary difficulty, making attacks a little bit riskier than before. But that’s not all - some of the most monstrous foes will force you to roll the Doom die even on Journeyman and Veteran difficulty!

And that’s a wrap for this Update! We’ll be back Sunday with more exciting news including a deep dive into Solo Mode and info about our upcoming Twitch streams. If you’d like to join the discussion, there’s no better place than to hit up our Discord server or leave a comment here on Kickstarter.

Thank you all again for backing the campaign!

Join us for our Launch Stream!
over 2 years ago – Fri, Oct 01, 2021 at 06:17:08 AM

What an amazing first few hours—so let’s celebrate! Join us on Twitch for our inaugural launch stream. Watch us play the game, ask us your questions, and get hyped for a wild ride.

If you haven’t yet joined us on Discord, what are you waiting for!? We have a thriving community building up and folks are ready to play the Tales Preview and meme it up.