Designing Keet – Part 2: Artifacts

Last week I talked about my original idea for Slugfest Games' RDI 2014 Character Design Contest, and how I decided to change plans and build a deck for my goblin archaeologist, Keet.

When I started designing Keet's deck I had an idea for a secondary deck, similar to those found in RDI:3, but I wanted to do something different. I had an idea; archaeologists are always studying valuable artifacts, so why not replace Keet's gold with a deck of unique artifact cards?

I knew Keet was overly excited about mundane things, so it seemed natural that some of his 'artifacts' would be worthless, random pieces of trash that he had just found lying around. I loved the image of Keet proudly anteing into a round of gambling with an ancient shoestring, or being fascinated by a 'rare and mysterious' bent coin. I could just hear him: “It's not just any coin,” he'd say enthusiastically, “look at it it! It's bent!” to which his comrades would just look at him, unimpressed. Not all of his artifacts would be that terrible, but I couldn't resist the humour of it. Worthless items and cursed items were just entertaining. Of course, bad items also opened up the possibility of designing more powerful artifacts that balanced out the trash.

I liked the idea that Keet would have to carefully manage his artifacts, and cursed items played right into that. I've always been a fan of cursed items in stories and RPGs; I feel that they provide characters with a very difficult choice: are the bonuses worth the drawbacks? Keet's artifacts, even the good ones, would serve a similar role. Good items would have to be discarded to be used, meaning if Keet was running low on Gold it would be risky to use those artifacts. By contrast, Keet's cursed items would have a negative impact on his Fortitude or Alcohol Content, meaning if he was getting beaten up or drunk he would have to find a way to get rid of them.

With all of this in mind, I knew I had to give Keet specific tools to manage his artifacts. For instance, I knew I wanted the artifacts to start face down; I liked the randomness of not always knowing what Keet was using to pay the inn or ante into a round of gambling, but it wouldn't be fun if Keet had no control at all over which artifacts he anted. This meant that the deck would need some way of 'identifying' artifacts by turning them face up. This way, if the goblin was able to spend some time 'studying' what he had, he could pick and choose which artifacts to keep, and which ones to give away.

Keet's deck came together surprisingly quickly. Once I had a rough draft, I printed a copy and began testing as soon as I could. I scribbled notes on the cards with tweaks, corrections and more major changes. I did the same with the rulebook. After some feedback from testing, I added card types to the artifacts (Sometimes, Action, etc.) so that other decks could interact with them more, and I removed a problematic mechanic that turned face up artifact cards face down. Otherwise it was going very well.

One thing I knew I wanted to include were artifacts from the existing Red Dragon Inn universe. I loved the idea that Keet had 'discovered' treasures like Dimli's Great-Grandfather's Helmet and took them to study. Interestingly enough, these artifacts were the easiest to write rules for, since I was basically able to copy their effects from other decks. I also felt like adding them really put Keet in the RDI world.

I could go on, but I'll leave it here. I look forward to Slugfest's final version of my deck. They're making some changes, which is good. While I was pleased with my work, there is definitely room for improvement. I trust Slugfest Games to do a good job, and to take good care of my Keet.

13/13

Designing Keet – Part 1: Relic

Recently, Slugfest Games announced that I won their 2014 Character Design Contest!

When I got the e-mail letting me know that I had won I was giddy beyond compare. Heck, I still am! They asked that I not tell anyone that I won until they made their announcement, so I had to wait, but now that they've announced it, I can talk about it. Since the cat's out of the bag, I thought I'd talk a bit about the design process I went through to create Keet, the goblin archaeologist.

When I first heard about the contest, I jumped at the idea of turning one of my RPG characters into a deck. My initial plan was to make a deck for a completely different character than my winning entry: an ancient warforged named Relic. I had been playing this stoic character in a D&D campaign for some time, so I had a pretty good idea how I would translate him to RDI; I was going to make a tanky, durable deck that would win by attrition. It would be able to ignore drinks and fortitude loss very well, but would deal less damage than the other 'bashy' character decks. Relic was all about endurance.

With this plan in mind, the first step was to go through the existing Red Dragon Inn decks to figure out the card distribution of a typical deck; I knew that there were a number of cards that each deck had (“Gambling? I'm in!”, “Tip the Wench”, etc.), and each deck was 40 cards. How many of these common cards did each deck have, and what was the distribution of each other type of card? How often did the bashy decks deal damage, and how often did they prevent it? My girlfriend and I sorted all of the decks and I put our findings into a spreadsheet. I was surprised to find just how similar the basic structure of each deck was. This kept things simpler than I was expecting, which was nice; it meant that I had fairly rigid guidelines for the distribution of abilities in my deck.

During this grand sorting, and over the course of several days, I would periodically jot down ideas for card names and effects. While doing so, a few good phrases popped into my head that a different character of mine would say, and they sounded like they would fit into a Red Dragon Inn game quite well. In fact, they sounded far better than what I had been coming up with for Relic!

Keet, the other character, was one that I created for a short-lived RPG campaign last summer. We ended up only playing about two sessions, but I really enjoyed the character I had made for it. He was a hyperactive little goblin archaeologist, whom I described as “a bad Indiana Jones.” He was remarkably clever, and was a great researcher and appraiser, but he was also a handful. He was very energetic, and got extremely excited about the most mundane things, like libraries and ancient grain shipments.

In the end, I decided that I would set aside the deck I was making for Relic to focus my efforts on this new project. To be honest, I was unsatisfied with how passive Relic's deck was going to be, and Keet's personality would fit in far better in the Red Dragon Inn setting anyway.

Ideas for card names were coming easily for Keet's deck, but I still had a long way to go before I would have something playable. I had to work quickly, too; the deadline was looming.

Please join me next week for part 2 of Designing Keet.

13/13