RUNEvember Session 14: Shrouded Hamlet

So the base idea for this one came from wanting to do more of an explicit horror thing about digging too deep. So I came up with a general structure of mining town -> mine runs out -> bad idea to prolong the village's life -> disaster. I came up with the bad idea being related to some kind of food/drink because I don't think anyone had really done food/drink/etc before to this level as part of a Realm and it's a really good way to drive worldbuilding. People gotta eat.

I was looking up the French word for mushroom (fungus zombies are cool) and it turns out champignon looks a lot like Champagne. So I tweaked it around until it wasn't actually a word and thus, Cammillon was born - and much like its origin, the village named a kind of booze after themselves. And you can then tie it into the mines, because they dug out the old mines further to make room for more beds...and then that gave me the idea for the Realm Clock - the toxic "fog" is actually a bunch of invasive spores.

In general there's a lot of ways to progress through the Realm: you can head towards 2 or 3 from the outset, which branch before rejoining near the center of town.

• Point 3 incurs a pretty massive Realm Clock hit, which is used as a soft deterrent to go to 2 - 2 has a "tutorial" style easy encounter, a Bottle of Cammillon, and a +1 Lore that hits you for a bunch of Clock increases at once. It's right next to the Sigil, so you can go back and rest/remove those clock ticks, lesson learned about what you're about to encounter.
• From there, you can either continue that way or use your Bottle to go to 3. Or you can just go to 3 from the outset, of course. It looks risky but if you can get past the FIGHT you find something that makes travelling between 1, 3, and 5 faster, and it's a quick way to get another point of Lore (in addition to a pretty big early hint as to what's going on in the village, the Lore stuff elsewhere isn't as explicit).
• There's useful stuff at various parts that are kind of "off to the side" from the main obvious path, like point 5 (the docks) and point 8 (the very end of the road near the edge of town), and you can unlock point 7 which gives you some helpful gear and dumps a lot of what happened on you, in the form of the master brewer's diary. (I'm not wild about that decision, loredumps are bad practice, but I couldn't figure out a more artful way to lay it all out there.)

The standard enemies are pretty "standard zombie" stuff: the "fast" one, the "boomer" that's slow, hard to kill, and explodes on death (represented here by having a fair amount of Health but no Block, and it deals +1 Harm if it would die), and the "ranged" one that has some terrain stuff (it adds Beds to the map on a 6). There's a few other ones in a special encounter off to the side too which benefit from being clustered up. A bigger focus is generally on the grid/map rather than the enemies themselves - you have to balance the risk of advancing the Realm clock vs. letting enemies regain Health freely. (Obviously that second one's less of a threat if you've got a very aggressive build, but that creates other risks - there's a lot of instances of 2+ Harm hanging around so you're sure to get pinged unless you're at range.) It doesn't quite play the same after the difficult terrain change but it's fine.

As far as the equipment, there's a lot.

• Realm Items: Bottles of Cammillon are all around, which let you negate any Realm Clock increase from an action/movement. (This is extremely helpful for a few actions, but especially the one that lets you jump straight to the Rune Lord if you have enough Lore, in exchange for Harm and/or a massive Realm Clock increase - if you're clever, you can use a bottle to do it for free and skip some really nasty fights at point 9.) There's also a Plague Mask you can get which removes Realm Clock advances based on movement, which is a very nice convenience thing - a lot of players will get this late in the Realm because it's at point 8 which is about as out of the way as it can get, but it's a straight shot to get it from point 1, so it can reward some early curiosity.
• One weapon is Witherburst, which is a Same/Adjacent weapon (this was after the big weapon change to make most of them Adjacent-only, so it's a little weaker to compensate). It has the Spread keyword, which makes kill Harm spread to other adjacent enemies.
• Another is the Hand Crossbow, which is my way of trying to balance Move + Range 2: after each shot, you have to spend a turn not moving to reload it. (I'm going to change this to alternatively being able to spend a stamina die to reload because in practice that's a little too harsh.)
• One piece of Gear is the Caustic Solvent, which lets you remove one piece of terrain 1/combat. This is obviously useful given the Bed/Bloom situation but it's just useful in general.
• Another piece of Gear is the Mining Explosives! This one sets a charge by spending a Stamina Die that goes off for 3 Harm in that square in 1d6 rounds. This is another one that's definitely specific to this Realm (specifically the Rune Lord fight) but can definitely find use elsewhere with less mobile enemies.

The Rune Lord (the Infection Heart) is a fun one. I decided to make it a "setpiece" fight where the middle of the square is Blooms and the boss can move between them. You can win this in one of two ways: either hit it until it dies or undermine the columns on the 4 corners by destroying them so the location (the inside of the mine) collapses. As columns collapse or the Heart is Harmed, it gets nastier, first by adding Blossom to more moves, then by rolling twice and doing both actions. The two pieces of Gear support one approach or the other: Mining explosives help with the columns, which are explicitly weak to them, while the Caustic Solvent helps destroy a central bloom, which harms the Heart as well as restricting its movement and increasing yours. Witherburst's a little better for direct assault because you can cancel Blossom, but the Hand Crossbow's probably a little better at sniping at columns.

Depending on how you defeated the Rune Lord, you gain one of two Runes. Destroying the Heart directly gives you the Blossom Rune: when you start/end your turn on Difficult Terrain, you have +1 Harm next round. (Reminiscient of enemies being able to hang out on beds and regain Health.) Taking out the columns nets you the Command Rune, letting you 1/combat decide an enemy's action instead of them rolling. (Reminiscient of the Heart zombie-controlling all the villagers.)

All in all I really like how this one turned out! Definitely intended for just-starting-out Engraved, I soared through it pretty easily, but it's fairly quick and punchy and replayable.