Here is the map seed, for anyone who wants to play along with the same world. I chose a middling difficulty, which I'm sure I'm going to regret. Now let us meet our heroes.
Anmos is a slacker with no family and the classic amnesiac past. Currently a bookbinder, he's a greedy snark. I'm sure this will cause no problems down the line.
Yvilde is a greedy goofball and a self described “Dragonbearchainsaw”. No one in this fantasy realm knows what a chainsaw is, but this ex-actor is humoured by the rest of the group.
Rounding out the party is Rath. Something of a loner, but also a romantic goofball, once a thief, he is plagued by nightmares but he's willing to fight.
I'm not sure this world is ready for this lot...
Our story starts a thousand years ago, with someone who in no way has all the trappings of a mad scientist.
And we fade into the present. I'm not sure what that thing he was working on was, but it is obviously not good!
Whelp, so much for your idyllic childhoods! Oh wait, Amos never had a childhood!
Okay guys, when something out of your nighmares is fleeing for it's life, it's probably time to follow it's advice.
Oh yeah, Rath sees worse than this every night.
Here is our first character choice – while I want to give you some optons, I can't save during the prologue, so I'm going to have the make the choices – Anmos is a slacker, so the first option seems the best. Leave it to Yvilde, she seems to want to be the leader.
Yvilde is so done with this shit already. With that, we begin our first combat!
Our story choice gives us all plus one armour – as we are classless for the first battle, that's going to help!
Every battle starts by showing the foes – we have two close range Spectiks and a ranged Sommelier to deal with.
The Village is burning, and our heroes scattered. Every hero gets action points a turn – which can be used to move, attack or trigger a special abilty. We have none of the latter for now, so it's move and attack – Yvilde is going to be our hunter, so she gets a bow.
Which she immediately uses on the Spectik. The red/green bar is health, the blue pip is armour – as you can see, we did three damage here, but one was blocked by the Spectik's armour, so it took 2/5 damage.
With his pitchfork, Anmos can hit from a square away, so he moves up and finishes of the Spectik.
I then make the first of what will be many mistakes in this game, and advance Rath to far forward, a Spectik comes from the north and hits him for three of his four health – he would have been dead bar for the bonus armour we got at the start of the scenario!
This one has more armour, but Yvilde still gets it down to two HP.
Anmos finishes this one off as well.
The Sommelier comes out of the shadows and hits Yvilde. The purple pip on her stat bar is warding, used to reduce magical attacks – which halves the damage she takes.
Our heroes advance on the monster, and take some health off it.
But it's counter attacks take Yvilde down to one health as well!
Anmos rushes forwards to save the day! Victory is ours! Everyone now levels up.
Anmos becomes a brawny warrior, I chose Sentinel for him, as that extra leap is extremely useful.
Yvilde is a hunter, and chooses Piercing shots – we've already seen the Morgathai have a good amount of armour, so this seems like a good choice going forwards. She also decides to leave half her clothing at home, in true fantasy RPG style.
With such a haunted past, how can Rath be anything else than a mystic, I pick up Elementalist, though soulsplitting was a close call.
After every battle, you loot a bit of kit, here we have a fancy chest strap with a bear on it. I consider giving this to our Dragonbearchainsaw.
Ultimately however, more health on our tank will be more useful.
After the battle, our heroes commit themselves to a life of adventuring, but Anmos, I get the feeling Yvilde still wants her hammer back.
Oh god, I completely forgot this would happen, and that I didn't ask for a company name! I'm going to have to make a choice here, and I'm not feeling that inspired, so I'll go with one of the procedurally generated ones.....
Look this is me, how can I give up a name when the game misspells “Griffins”. This is the kind of quality you guys have come to expect of me.
While we have levelled up, the world also gets tougher – all Spectiks now have an extra point of armour!
Now we get to see our world map – and this is an interesting one, our town, Hamcooper, is nestled between mountains with a bay to its back - a very defensible position! I've not seen a map like this before, and it's going to be an interesting one – we also have a river to the north. We can also see our mission for this chapter one of five – clear all hostile sites and then locate the Villainkins forge. Not a foreboding name at all!
Hamcooper is situated in the Duckplains, and produced four resources for us at the end of the chapter. (The white icons under the name). It also has two opportunities – the purple icon is forging new weapons, but with no resources to our names, this won't help us.
The other one is recruiting a fresh face to the party – this would cost three legacy points, which are gained by completing battles/missions, and can be used to recruit, stop bad cards from being added to the deck or to replace missing resources when forging. We have just enough points to recruit a new hero.
Our heroes need to heal, after that they will be heading into the Mistcliffs to scout – hoping to fins fresh resources to add to their little kingdom.
