RUNEvember Session 5: Castle Blanchard

So basically there's two sets of enemies, a bunch of semi-natural constructs and on-fire soldiers. The Realm does a very good job of distinguishing them through mechanics: the constructs tend to have the Thorny keyword, which Harms players when enemies with it move into their square, while the soldiers have the Ignite keyword, which deals harm next turn if the player doesn't spend Stamina to put it out. This makes them feel meaningfully different and that's cool! My problem is that neither of these clearly outline methods of mitigation. Can you Block this Harm? Can it be mitigated at all? It's unclear what the answer is, and I suspect they have different intents. Also tracking Ignite is kind of a pain. Enemies in general do a little too much per action, especially the soldiers - many of them don't do Harm but do Ignite and also move and block. Encounters tend to have a few too many as well, for instance one of them has six (!!) enemies on the field at once. It's a lot to keep track of! A little more restraint would have been appreciated. Also things just have too much Block, which gets extremely annoying because even Cleave doesn't help that much with too-high enemy counts when things can regularly ignore it.

There are two unique enemies, both of which do something cool: they both have abilities that give some benefit/penalty next round (+1 Move in one case, +1 die result/-1 highest Engraved die result in another). This is a cool pattern for solo fights because it provides more dynamic back and forth and I wish it got used a little more here but it's cool when it happens.

One thing I noted is that given I had 3 Stamina dice on account of the last Realm's Rune, Threads and Ignite weren't quite as nasty as they could have been. With 2 dice that'd probably be pretty rough going at points.

The Realm has a fair amount of different equipment. The first weapon is the Carver's Knife, which is a very simple weapon with the caveat that it only operates on a 1-3 (which could make it a useful second weapon depending on what your main weapon is). The other is the Lance of Light, a Versatile weapon that goes between a defensive high-mobility, low-Harm weapon with Block and a two-handed mode that hits a whole row at once. (I nerfed it a little bit by removing 2 spaces range from the 1H and removing movement from the 2H, with those tweaks it's mostly in line with other equipment.) As far as the other equipment, it has a few consumables, which mostly restore Health; a Charged item that turns into a passive +1 Harm to Constructs thing after you've used it eight times; and another Charged item that reduces one enemy die. It's also got a few consumables (which, unlike many from other Realms, are usable in combat by spending a die).

The Rune Lord is interesting because you can either fight it in its lair (which I did just for testing purposes) or, if you have enough Lore, summon it to another location. If you fight it in its lair, you'll have to contend with a second enemy, a big mechanical heart that takes up the middle 4 spaces and buffs everyone else every round. Speaking of second enemies, the Rune Lord's first phase summons another enemy on a 5-6, which gets really annoying if you fight it in its lair and are trying to take out the buffing heart! I think I ended the fight with 5 of its summons on the field because it kept rolling high. It can also advance the Realm Clock, which can add more of those Threads mid-fight. All in all, pretty fun.

The Rune of Control lets you, 1/Fight, force an adjacent enemy to use an action on a target of your choice. Fun little ability.