Designer Diary 2: Building Your Characters | Bardsung Forsaken Glade
Our second Designer Diary is here!
Today Sherwin will be taking you on a deep-dive into all things heroes for Bardsung: Tale of the Forsaken Glade. Find out which heroes will be joining this epic new game, ready to do battle, overcome evil, and become Bardsung!
In case you missed it: We’re excited to announce that Bardsung: Tale of the Forsaken Glade will be launching on Gamefound on October 22nd!
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Building Character(s), with Sherwin Matthews
Welcome back, heroes. My heartfelt thanks to you for stopping by—writing updates and blogs is always one of my favourite activities in the run-up to the campaign, along with talking to readers about the updates after they go live.
Today, it’s time for our first true designer diary, and we’re going to start by talking about heroes. First we’ll look at how we went about identifying and creating characters for the game. Next we’ll talk about some of the changes that veterans are going to notice in Bardsung: Tale of the Forsaken Glade. And finally, a sprinkling of spoilers in the form of some artwork and models of the heroes themselves…
We Are The Heroes Of Our Time
Bardsung adventures aren’t conventional campaigns played in a sequential order. Each one is a myth, fable, tale, or legend—all part of the rich tapestry that forms the legacy of the world, as told by the bards.
As a result, the heroes in these tales are less actual individuals, and more symbolic titles that are envisioned by the bard (or for the sake of mechanical clarity, thematic archetypes, to break from my slightly in-world description for a moment).
Thus there is always a Dawnguard, a Skullsplitter, a Dæmonblade, and so on. These individuals could be the same hero as you’ve seen before during your travels, or they might be entirely new figures. Some will look familiar while others might have a whole new spin to them, but ultimately, it’s all down to your own imagination.
Something I’ll quickly sneak in here for veterans—regardless of their identity, Bardsung: Tale of the Forsaken Glade will add backstory for each of these heroes. Our approach last time was to leave our players to build stories for the heroes they chose to enter the dungeon. Some players liked this, but we also appreciate that other players prefer a more conventional approach to learning about their characters in advance, which we’re happy to oblige.
With that established, there’s an obvious question on your lips… no surprises? I didn’t say that.
Forgewarden will not be making an appearance. His story is entirely linked to that of the Ancient Forge itself, and as such, he’s less an archetype like the others, and more a piece of lore crafted around that story.
Kind of like the original Green Power Ranger, in series one.
However, that also leaves us space for someone new… who exactly that might be will be down to you during the crowdfunding campaign. More on that in a later article.
What Kind Of Magic Spell To Use?
Each Bardsung hero belongs to a path representing their archetype, and begins with a unique set of abilities. As time goes on, players can spend XP to either build wide and expand this arsenal with more abilities, or go deep and enhance existing abilities.
In Bardsung: Legend of the Ancient Forge, we built our heroes with a suite of purchasable abilities within their own path, which not only focused on their archetype, but also provided two to three different builds within that space. We also allowed for players to multiclass by purchasing abilities from another hero’s path.
The result was maximum flexibility, but something we’ve seen since is that most players prefer to stick with a path’s main gameplay. Players also rarely multiclass (after all, to do so means ‘stealing’ a card from another player). Flexibility is cool and all, but optimisation of the existing core is nearly always the trail upon which most players walk.
In Bardsung: Tale of the Forsaken Glade, we’ve taken that approach to heart. Heroes still work the same way, but we’ve focused more on enhancing the core gameplay and identity of each hero, and less on providing a subtle set of alternate skills. This makes it easier to pick up a hero, and then make informed decisions when building them during the campaign.
But for those of you that like to ski off-piste, we’ve got your back too, adding a suite of hero-agnostic abilities that provide far greater customisation options than before, and aren’t linked to specific characteristics. I'm especially excited about these, because this is where the special combos live in hero construction!
And speaking of characteristics, it’s time to dive into statblock changes.
Some of My Best Friends Are Numbers
Remember how I said some heroes might change a little?
Yep. This Dawnguard is a literal tank… and she’s no stranger to dishing out some serious damage, either.
You’ll no doubt notice the first two stats, speed and resilience, remain the same. The third, morale, is mechanically identical to its previous incarnation as grit, and has simply been renamed to better suit the flavour of the stat. You’ll also notice that the fate generation rules remain too.
But what about attack range and damage die?
They’re still in the game, but are now anchored to abilities rather being standardised to each hero. This provides us with a lot more levers to pull when making hero abilities both feel different and characterful, and also gives more depth when it comes to upgrading.
For instance, we can now have an extremely accurate attack with a higher attack modifier but a damage die with a lower range of numbers, or an extremely powerful attack that uses a d10 or even a d12 for damage, but either has no attack die modifier, or possibly even a negative one.
The result is more strategic choices for the player not only when building and upgrading their hero, but also in the heat of combat itself—that’s where the hero-agnostic abilities I mentioned previously will come in handy.
With that all explained, let’s now talk about the two new icons… the first of which will look rather familiar.
The first is fate. Fate, the resource which heroes spend to activate their most powerful abilities and enhance their attacks (amongst other specific various skills and traits that are too many to mention), makes its welcome return.
However, rather than being a general resource that every hero can access communally, each hero now has their own dedicated pool of fate. There are a few subtle psychological and strategic nuances to this, which will become more evident as we go through the designer diaries. But the two obvious takeaways are thus—heroes will now have access to more fate than before to do more cool stuff, and using teamwork to set up your allies is now more important than ever, leading to greater synergy and more meaningful decisions around the table.
For those that are new or need a refresher, I’ll tease fate usage a little with one of the new ability cards below.
In addition to the normal rules for using fate, each hero additionally has at least one unique way to interact with fate from the start of the campaign. Here, we can see Dawnguard can simply choose to automatically pass a defence roll, for example.
The second new symbol is the hero’s proficiency. I won’t dive into how proficiency works right now, but I will say these work a little like the characteristic modifiers in Bardsung: Legend of the Ancient Forge, indicating the type of challenge the hero is naturally good at.
And that leads me to a big change to end the update on—characteristics and characteristic modifiers do not appear in Bardsung: Tale of the Forsaken Glade. Why is that? Well, you’ll have to wait a little longer for the designer diary that dives deep into challenges…
Which heroes are you most excited to find out about? Let us know in the comments and via the SFG Discord!
Follow Bardsung: Tale of the Forsaken Glade now over on Gamefound!
