RUNEvember Session 1: Great Serpent Tree

November 4, 2022

Session 0 (and a description of what's going on here).

I started off RUNEvember by playing through the Great Serpent Tree:

Standing in a petrified half life, the Great Serpent Tree balances impossibly on the tip of its own tail, scales falling to the ground as branches burst through serpentine flesh. Blood and venom flows down its length, as distant figures move about its stretch, carving up the still breathing beast.

Overview and Realm Mechanics

As you can tell from the description, this Realm is poised on a giant snake which has a tree growing in it! It's a fascinating idea and I love the map! Very good use of Evlyn Moreau's incredible art, and it's cool to see it subdivided per-point as various parts of the snake/tree as the Realm unfolds.

A snake/tree with points numbered 1-7 on it.

Realm Clock

The clock for this Realm is Death Throes. The snake is still dying, and every once in awhile it lets everyone perched upon it know. How this translates in game is that every 6 actions, a Death Throes action happens. This is different based on where you are on the snake-tree: at the base of the tree, this might either be minor or even beneficial (like opening up new paths or Lore). At higher levels, this might throw you off of the tree entirely!

I'll get into this in other Realms too but I'm always interested in how to make more cyclical clocks interesting - in my experience the more "one-way" ones are better for putting on pressure, but you run the risk of making things more unrecoverable - and this is a very cool way to do it.

Death Penalty

The Death Penalty is that, like the snake you're on, you start growing trees in you too! You gain a random penalty from 1 to 6, from reduced Move to reduced max Health to just making future rolls on the table worse. Unlike a lot of the death penalties, this one's persistent until removed by a specific thing in the Realm.

Death Penalties are a mixed bag for me because I feel like they can either be a waste of time or lead to a pretty bad death spiral effect or both. I kind of like that this one sticks around and accumulates (though, and this is something that will come up in other Realms too, -1 Move is absolutely brutal to keep around).

Other New Mechanics

Combat maps may be vertical! This means that moving "up" (towards the top rows) is Difficult Terrain and moving "down" (towards the bottom rows) can be done without spending Move if you're willing to take Damage. If you would fall off the bottom row you die! This is a neat idea (more on the implementation of the specific time it comes up later though).
It uses the Coral Rock changes that the majority of other Realms (including mine) have implemented: the notion of Hit (aka an effect happens if Harm is either applied or blocked) and enemy movement to the closest space in range.
It adds a new action type: Attack, which is like Fight but it doesn't block other actions at that point. (So this is a way to set up optional fights.)
Faction Conflict! Enemies each have a Faction associated with them, and if you're out of range or haven't damaged anyone yet they will/have a chance to attack each other if they're from different Factions. This is a little complicated to resolve sometimes but is a pretty cool concept!

Play Impressions

This was pretty fun as a whole! A few places where things were a little unfinished, or cleaved a little towards the older playtests, but with those caveats I overall recommend at least giving it a look!

Everything in this part of the post is spoilers for the Realm. Click this to show it if that's fine with you! The Death Penalty seemed pretty rough at first but the trick is that you can reduce it by being attacked by a certain enemy that's pretty close to the Sigil so it's extremely manageable. It's a little more interesting than "clears after one fight" at any rate.

The Death Throes clock was interesting because if you know what's happening for a certain area, it gives you an incentive to kind of fudge it by lingering to make sure you're in the right place at the right time. I feel like this would be better as a random roll, maybe tweaked based on how high up on the snake-tree you are.

Equipment's a little touch and go, which makes sense because it's not too far from the original playtests. The shield offered (Scale Shield) is very good as written! I reduced the movement on 6 to bring it in line and I'll tweak down the lower values as well for Realms to come. The weapon offered (Talon Fauchard) is a two-hander but the one-hand moveset is the standout with a reliable Move 2 at range 1-2. (I left this one behind because I can't easily fix it.) The Gear (Crown of Branches) uses the older Locked terminology and even with that terminology no longer being a thing (and with no third stamina die) it could be pretty handy in a pinch. (I didn't get it because it was locked behind an optional encounter with an otherwise-friendly NPC and I've never been that kind of Souls player.) There are a few consumable bombs you can get which are pretty cool, I'm always in favor of consumables.

The faction stuff was cool when it came up, but it didn't come up all that often, probably owing to the fact that the Realm's a bit on the short side. That's the kind of thing that needs a little space to breathe.

There's a setpiece fight which is pretty neat conceptually! A great hawk attacks you on the Realm's one vertical combat map while a few of the knight faction are fighting both it and you. It's not physically on the map, but it targets various areas based on the random roll and you can attack it by attacking anywhere it's currently targeting. This is a cool way to do big-enemy setpieces! I've got a few gripes with how it works relative to the verticality mechanic though:

First, as written, you can only bring in one weapon...which made a little more sense with the playtest weapons but even then that's pretty rough. Difficult Terrain might as well be permanent terrain for any build that can't reliably get Move 2, so even if you did have two weapons, you might have a very tough time. edit: Apparently Difficult Terrain no longer works like that, it just gives you -1 Harm, which is great because it makes this fight a lot more possible without fantastic luck! Also I need to edit my Realms now.
Second, you start at the bottom row and the hawk has some attacks that push you down 2 spaces if you get hit - meaning if you're in the bottom two rows and get hit by it (with roughly a 1 in 6 chance of it targeting your starting square), you just immediately die with very little recourse!

So it's a very cool concept, but could stood to have a little more time in the oven. (It was, however, extremely funny when my first enemy roll was such that 2/3 of the knights moved 2 spaces downwards and then got pushed 2 spaces downwards, meaning they got instantly thrown off. 10/10.)

The Rune Lord is ok! A little easy if you got the Scale Shield as written because you can pretty reliably trade damage with it but that's fine. There's a pretty interesting idea here, which is that if you're out of range it'll target the tree itself, which ticks the Realm Clock (which in turn causes reinforcements to arrive if it fills). Otherwise, though, there aren't any secondary enemies, meaning it's pretty hard to get overwhelmed.

Unfortunately, in spite of there being a Rune Lord, there's no Rune at the end! I just randomly rolled another starter Rune (Fate's Hunter) and went with that.

Carried over equipment

Weapons:
- Greataxe
- Longsword
- Scale Shield (Great Serpent, nerfed from 2 -> 1 Move on a 6, 2 -> 1 Block on a 2-3)
Gear:
- Amulet of Dawn
Runes:
- Fate's Foe
- Fate's Hunter (Great Serpent, added for lack of a Rune)