Deathly Thrones
Editor Version
Deathly Thrones is a print & play solo player roguelike game. Use playing cards along with the story laid out in the quest booklet to play. It takes less than one minute to setup, and each game runs about 15-20 minutes long. The rules are simple, you choose your hero, note your health and armor, and then select a Quest to conquer a new throne!
This is the Editor version. We use it to create new quests. You need the Basic version to obtain the rulebook and play Deathly Thrones.
Print & Play Game
The game uses a print & play format. All you need is a printer and a standard deck of playing cards. Anyone can play!
Each Quest is on a single page and come in two formats:
- A Booklet version. Just fold the page to create your booklet. No need for glue or staples.
- A Single page version. This is a reference sheet that you can view on digital devices or print to play.
EDITOR VERSION
The quest editor is a set of spreadsheet files with several tabs that we use to write quests.
Each file has is own format: QuestEditor_Standalone_A4 to write a quest on a "one-page" style for A4 format; QuestEditor_Zine_Letter to write a quest in a "booklet" for the US Letter format.
Each file has several tabs to choose which pages you want to put your stories on and which ones are for event arrays.
These spreadsheets are formatted to be print into the format you want for the version you want. If you want to create a quest in the "booklet" format, QuestEditor_Zine_Letter and QuestEditor_Zine_A4 are formatted to be fold into a booklet. Their contents are blank space and empty arrays allowing you to write your own story without worrying how to print it. Just add your contents, and you have a new quest.
How it works
To be simple, each quest of Deathly Thrones are composed of 8 parts. For the "booklet" format, these parts are pages and each quest has 8 pages:
- One page for the cover
- Four pages for the events
- Three pages for texts
By default, a quest is:
- Art cover with the designer name
- Beginning of the story
- 2 pages of events: Events 1 from 20
- Middle of the story
- 2 pages of events: Events 21 to 40
- End of the story
Typically, the beginning of the story describe the context (you are in a middle of a forest, you want to reach the near city to slay the King), 2 pages of events will describe your encounters (wild boar, bear, camp site), the middle of story give you more context (you arrived at the city but everyone is dead, the King used black magic on his people), 2 new pages of events will describe your encounters (skeleton, ghost, king's guards), the end of the story concludes it (you killed the King and took his Throne but there is no longer a city to rule over, only a heap of ashes remains).
Now, the text parts and the events parts are modular and it's your choice to determine how you want to create your story. I set several tabs with different positions and you can set your own, it can be :
- Cover -> Text -> Events -> Events -> Text -> Events -> Events -> Text
- Cover -> Text -> Text -> Events -> Events -> Events -> Events -> Text
- Cover -> Text -> Events -> Events -> Events -> Text -> Events -> Text
- Cover -> Text -> Text -> Events -> Events -> Events -> Text -> Events
It's all your choice.
Three pages for texts
3 pages by quest are destined to receive texts. Text, not story, because these pages can be more than few sentences to describe the context.
They can be a map, they can be an image, and more than anything, they can be a new gameplay mechanic!
Just after the cover, add a map of the quest, or/and, on the middle of the quest, add the terrific portrait of the boss, will be very good to add the flavor of a fantasy book and to surprise the player.
But more than flavor, you can surprise the player by adding original gameplay. In the middle of the quest, you can say that, from now, the player must draw 2 attack cards to reflect a newly acquired magic medallion. Also, you can add complex mechanic like a betting system where the player has to guess which range of attack cards he will draw and add bonus/malus with the result indicating his clairvoyance level.
The game is yours. Don't hesitate to surprise everyone.
System Agnostic
Deathly Thrones is system agnostic, it means that the gameplay and the theme are completely separate things.
Once you understand how the system and mechanics work, you can use any theme with any type of stories. You can set you world in science-fiction, prehistoric, 1920s mafia, AND, you can tale an adventure, a romance, a horror story.
Let's say your hero is a person looking for love, set every event to be about convincing your future girlfriend friends and it will works. You can also set a bank robbery and every event are a security system that you need to crack.
These are your stories.
How to use it
Each row in the event arrays has 6 columns: Step ; Kind ; Name; ♡ ; ♤ ; Outcome ; Result.
- Step: The event number, 1 to 40.
- Kind: The kind of event, a trap, a help, a fight.
- Name: The name of the event.
- ♡: If it's a fight, the health value of the enemy.
- ♤: If it's a fight, the armor value of the enemy.
- Outcome: What things you obtain after the fight.
- Result: Define if you lose or gain health or armor point.
The game balance of each quest is defined through the Step, Kind, ♡, ♤ and Result values. Name and Outcome are purely elements of the story.
In addition to the PDFs, you receive the quests in the calc format. With these files in hand, you can directly modify them, but above all take the arrays content to create your own quest. The game balance is already define and tested. Copy the arrays events and set your own story.
For example:
First we select a theme. Here it will be the book "At the Mountains of Madness" from H.P. Lovecraft.
Then, we choose how the part of the story will be set. This time it's: Cover -> Text -> Text -> Events -> Events -> Events -> Text -> Events.
To create a Veteran quest, we take all the events arrays of the official quest "Lamiam" and we delete the Name and Outcome texts.
Now, we need to fill the quest:
- Cover: "At the Mountain of Madness" and we add an image of a mountain in Antarctica.
- Text: Add a map of the surroundings of the campsite where the first team disappeared.
- Text: Tell the story of a scientists team who have disappeared and we play the rescue team.
- Events / Events / Events: We replace the name and outcome text of the "Lamiam" quest by a lot of traps. Enemies are the cold mountain winds, deep crevasse, danger of avalanches, etc, the player cross mountains in search of his friends.
- Text: Tell the new element of the story. The player arrived in a front of a maze and he look at an incredible extraterrestrial city.
- Events: We replace the name and outcome text by fight against aliens with hundreds of eyes and limbs. The 40th steps is a monster with 99 ♡ and 99 ♤, the player is guaranteed to die.
Yes, it's a sad story without the possibility of a good ending but yes, it's a Lovecraft one.
Dedicated website
It's really easy to create new stories.
A dedicated website exists to share your quest with the community.
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