A cooperative campaign experience for 1-4 adventurers set in a fantasy world on the brink of being consumed by nature. Setup in only 5 minutes, and complete a scenario in 30 minutes per player. Pre-Orders & Late Pledges are open now for a limited time!
Latest Updates from Our Project:
🔓 350k! New Stretch Goal Unlocked!
5 months ago
– Sun, Jun 02, 2024 at 10:39:08 AM
Well, clearly our Backers aren’t afraid of a little challenge! The latest stretch goal you’ve brought us to features a particular kind of Encounter we had initially been worried about developing…
When it comes to training and protecting their clan communes, keb rasska have come up with a variety of means to prepare guards and sentries. One such method is where a potent keb Thought Caser bridges together the minds of a combat unit and unleashes them into a mental arena, using the experiences of each member to create novel situations to practice their responses to.
Where such a technique is often rather dubious in effect, drawing only upon the limited experiences of guards that have barely traveled outside of their clan territories, for a party of Rovers it would prove exceptional!
Narrative contrivance aside, the point here is to present a fully optional Encounter that requires mastery of Rove’s systems, synergies, and thorough scrutinization of each challenge. Many of the Encounters designed in Rove use particular collections of adversaries to evoke a certain theme or singular challenge within; but for this Encounter we can really go all out and combine adversaries in strange and novel ways to put your party fully to the test!
While we have numerous ideas on how to really drive the challenge on this Encounter it is important to note that this will likely be one of the longest in the box as a result! Nothing about this Encounter is going to look like anything else during your adventure, so definitely be prepared.
The next goal is going to be another vote–this time for a unique item that will summon something to the field in battle! Thank you again to everyone for your support and comments! It’s been a journey to get here and it means so much that you’ve helped us make it this far.
Creating the Rovers, Pt. 2 📖
5 months ago
– Fri, May 31, 2024 at 12:46:02 PM
🪶Charles: Charles here again, back with part two about the creation of the Rovers! It’s no coincidence that we’ve presented the different peoples in the order we have; it also largely mirrors their order of conceptualization! Design is always an iterative process and the dynamics of our “society” were no different.
The last post covered the species that could be considered extremophiles. With the starlings, they exist anywhere but are equally comfortable in the churning depths of the ocean and the roiling heat of a volcano, to say nothing of a comfortable grassy plain. The keb rasska need loads of space to handle their colony growth so you often see them claim the large empty stretches of caverns or savanna. To the edges of any region in Chorus are the tihfur–comfortable in their ability to control their own territory and so fear the threat of beasts less than most clan groupings do.
At some point soon we’ll be going over how society is spread across the world but the general structure is the same in most places: Smaller clans with cultural biases formed of a given group of people. With starlings spread far and wide, keb rasska filling out dark caverns, and tihfur roughing it in the wilds, we needed people that would work better as “social glue”, which brings us to our remaining sapients!
I was given free reign to create somebody to join our cast of characters, and as ever the instinct was to fill in the gaps we had. The reason that two of our elements are referred to as the “Major Anima” was because they would serve as the literal animating force of a given creature. This is of course not specifically true, but without microscopes and spectrometers it becomes something of a “best guess” for the denizens of Chorus.
Morph was the foundation for the keb, with their abilities to seize and manipulate brain chemistry, as well as the tihfur, with their body-shifting and other bodily disruptions. The starlings start from either end and don’t have a primary anima, so we need a proper direct representative of the element of Crux!
The smaller you are, the easier it is to turn you into a snack. Using the intangible aspects of Crux, zusag are able to wield their affinity for this ether to craft illusions and other distractions to elude predators and evade detection. In their nascent days these illusions were quite unrefined, but zusag cultures have grown to be about showing off how refined your techniques using it (and other methods) are. Knowing is half the battle, and so zusag cultures prize the collection of information as the key to success in all fields. That means that graphics-wise and narrative-wise, zusag function as sort of a universal anchor for the presentation of “information”.
With gameplay that features a zusag, mischief and trickery are paramount. You are a smug, difficult-to-pin-down jackalope. A zusag that dons the mantle of Rover will have to keep a more open mind and incorporate techniques they might not have considered before striking out to maximize their effect in battle.
🎲 Tyvan Grossi: I established some clear design goals with this class from the start. We were concerned we hadn’t given players enough options to mitigate damage, so that made it clear to me that the Sophist needed to have some meaningful options to protect their team, if they wanted to. I liked the idea of having a tank themed class that wasn’t about absorbing damage like the True Scale, but about avoiding that damage. I also really connected with the light construct theme of the race. A diminutive people who can fashion their thoughts into living light? Yea, I can make a mechanic out of that.
The Sophist became this class that combined the guile of air with pushing and pulling their enemies and the bolstering effects of crux, the Chorus embodiment of will. For this write up I’ll focus on glyphs, the most unique mechanic of the Sophist. Glyphs are tokens that you can put onto the map. On their own glyphs don’t do much. Units that occupy a glyph may gain a bonus or a disadvantage, depending on the glyph and its passive effects, but the real magic comes from the Sophist. The sophist can move their glyphs, fire off attacks of heals from their glyphs, detonate their glyphs as traps, and much more.
The Sophist is a bit of a thinky class. If you like more crunchy rules or like skills that make you feel like you’re outsmarting the enemy, this is a great class for you.
Human
Motti always knew that humans were going to be involved in the world of Chorus. The challenge is, of course, humans need to stand out in their own unique way. I’m sure we’ve all played RPGs where humans end up as the catch-all or jack-of-all-trades type and we absolutely wanted to avoid that for Rove.
Something we came to was that humans in fiction often seem to “end up” in places. Through whatever scheme they plotted, or series of events outside of their control, we end up with humans in a place that everyone else looks at and goes “how could you have possibly gotten here?”.
Humans do have a certain adaptability, that much is impossible to deny, so we do have a little touch of “jack of all”! Nobody else can singularly trawl the sands of a desert next to a starling, crawl through the deepest reaches of caverns with the keb rasska, haul themselves across the trees as a tihfur, or spall the mountaintops where the zusag frequently retreat, all at once. I don’t think that surprises anyone though. It’s why humans “end up” all over the world!
What really makes our humans stand out is a sense of empathy that the rest of “civilized” Chorus finds almost unsettling. It’s not just that humans are adaptable–it’s that we adapt ourselves for others. Not just other people, but even the more beastly denizens of Chorus. While the keb rasska have had some limited success at domestication and rearing of the subterranean creatures found throughout Chorus, it is a drop compared to how quickly and effectively humans can befriend creatures of all shapes and sizes. This also extends to your adversarial humans as well!
As with all of our playable characters, incorporating the thematic elements is very important to us. This means that no matter what you do with your human as a player you can expect to be supporting your friends–whether they be Rover or beast.
🎲 Tyvan Grossi: The Duner Dancer at first was a bit of a puzzle for me. Humans, in Chorus? When there are symbiotic bug and lizard people, transforming were people, overly verbose jackalopes, and people made of living ether, how can a human also be as interesting?
I liked the pitch about humans and their close relationships to animals. There’s a lot we can do with a summoner class. I couldn’t help but think of the fun, if not slightly terrible, 1982 movie, The Beastmaster. So, I knew this class would need skills and actions that allowed you to be a powerful frontline warrior, who can keep up with the more esoteric members of their party with the help of powerful beasts.
I couldn’t ignore the artwork of the class that Alexander drew, with the captivating woman and her playfully commanding a dust devil. The natural other mechanic for this class to explore would be a spell mage, longer range abilities that focused on controlling the battlefield. What’s fun about this mechanical hook is that you can combine the skill sets, the warrior and the spellmage, to become a spellsword who commands beasts. Yea, we have ourselves an interesting class for players to explore.
That wraps up this particular series of concept discussion! Thank you for sticking with us and please comment with what else you might want to read about the design or world of Chorus at large! Working on Rove with Motti and the Addax team has been a fantastic experience and I can’t wait to tell you more about it.
Thank you and until next time! 🪶Charles and the Addax Team
🎲 How Rove "evolves" as you play!
5 months ago
– Thu, May 30, 2024 at 03:08:53 PM
Hello everyone!
We’ve had a fair number of comments expressing confusion about the specifics of how your components and adventure evolve/progress over the course of a playthrough, and while we’ve been extremely conscientious about spoilers, it is fairly easy to create a fake series of examples and slot them into our systems to explain everything. We will do our best to clear up the logistics without revealing anything actually found within your product!
Please note that while some things are made-up for this post to explain how progression works, there are actual spoilers in this post as well about later content. We’ll be sure to label them, but this is your warning ahead of time!
Choice & Consequence
A playthrough of Rove takes place over several major Chapters. There is a shorter “tutorial” Chapter which doesn’t affect the Choice & Consequence, and an additional and much longer Chapter found in the Expansion Box.
Beginning at the not-tutorial Chapter, your first few Chapters are the “Choice”. You are presented with two different Quests in each of these specific Chapters–each Quest being usually 5 Encounters relevant to the Quest. To bring that all together, a Chapter in Rove is a dividing point of the entire adventure which offers you a Quest which contains the Encounters you will actually play.
As an example, if you are playing through Encounter 3 in a Quest at Chapter 2, that means you are approximately 8 Encounters deep into your entire playthrough at this point, as Chapter 1 in our example would have had a different Quest with its own collection of ~5 Encounters.
So, back to the “Choice”. During one of the relevant Chapters, a Choice of two different quests will be presented. The narrative will prompt your major decision.To give a made-up example, perhaps: “To the east is a massive plume of smoke–the forest must be on fire! But we saw the giant child-stealing crow and their human rider take off to the west! Which do you pursue?”. Of the two fake Quests described, let’s say you chose to pursue the giant crow–you will begin the giant crow Quest for that Chapter of your playthrough, and play through the ~5 Encounters therein.
With every “Choice” comes a ”Consequence”; in a later Chapter you must return to the forest you turned away from in the above example and begin the Consequence version of the burning forest Quest during that Chapter. What might have originally been a series of Encounters that featured mostly forest-life and a halfway point that involved fighting the fire and the boss responsible for it, will instead be your group contending with a completely burned out wasteland filled with new creatures, terrain, objectives, and an entirely different boss fight to top it off!
Rovers
We’ve heard you, so to try and make this as explicit as possible, we’ll crack open the box on a particular Rover (the Flash, in this case) and use specific in-game examples for this one to explain the whole process!
The intro/tutorial Chapter first helps you come to terms with the mechanics of playing Rove, so there’s no significant change in your character there. The next Chapter is where you will begin your actual development!
Full Flash character board, 2 reacts, 5 rave/rally, and the stripped scroll + catalyzing amulet items.
This is what your character looks like at the end of the tutorial chapter. Throughout your adventure, each stage of your character’s evolution will first feature acquiring some upgraded skill cards before you undergo the jump to the next form. You’ll also have access to Mo & Makaal’s Shop between most encounters, so equipment is also naturally part of your character’s evolution.
Choosing your upgrade cards.
Every Rover has several upgraded skill cards, but you’re only selecting some of them as part of your overall development. The rest are tucked away for future playthroughs. A Rover can usually only bring 5 Rally/Rave and 2 React Skill Cards, so you’ll be swapping out cards as you jump into Encounters. It’s always possible that the upgrade cards aren’t the best fit for a given Encounter, so you can swap back in the original cards. You’re basically building a “pool” of usable skill cards for the entire character!
Full Flash character board, 2 reacts, 5 rave/rally, and the 2 selected upgrade cards.
From here we get into the full upgrade! In a later chapter you will go from Rover to Prime Rover. If you have the Expansion Box, the Prime Rover upgrade becomes a branching evolutionary choice at this stage of character development. Later on, each Prime will become a subsequent Apex tied to that selection specifically. The Flash’s upgrade found in the Core Box is the Helion!
You will receive many new components upon your evolution. This includes 3 Prime Rover skills, 4 Prime Rover abilities, and the main Character Insert. These are all better than even the “upgraded” Rover cards, so everything is a linear increase in strength.
As you can see, your character already looks dramatically different! As you play through Chapters with your Prime Rover, you’ll eventually come to similar choices featuring upgraded skill cards (selecting skill cards out of several and leaving the rest aside). The other important development during Prime and Apex is that you will gain a passive character trait.
Choosing 1 new trait
Which means that by the end of your Prime development, you will have accumulated a grand total of 7 new skill cards, 4 new abilities, and 1 new trait, along with whatever other equipment you’ve purchased in the interim.
When you finally achieve Apex, the process is very similar to what we just went over with Prime. Remember that your previous skill cards are always viable options for your selection for a given Encounter; you are meant to cater your selection to the given encounter based on what you see with enemies and the map layout!
Everyone in the party undergoes these same transformations at the same time, so you will notice significant changes in synergies and tactics at these various thresholds. Part of the fun is comparing and contrasting your choices with everyone else and plan how your team might take advantage of the possibilities available to the group!
We hope that this post has helped you better understand the particulars of character and narrative evolution in Rove. Please feel free to stop by our Discord server where we are always available to discuss the game and answer any questions that you may have! You can find the link to our server in the signature below.
