Valentines Day Update and Playtesting a "Raid" Scenario

Development for The Merging World is speeding along! Juggling this along with 4 other studio classes worth of workload is a nightmare, but I can't help but have so much fun working on this weird little passion project. 

Recently I rewrote an entire zombie themed scenario that just wasn't turning out as interesting as I had wanted it to be. My orginal plan was to make the gameplay loop of COD:Zombies translated to tabletop but it instead just became a dull chore to run; too many characters to keep track of and not enough things to do with them. Once I added new objectives for the "zombie" team to complete, it suddenly became something else entirely, which brings us to a new scenario, RAID.

One team of "Defenders" work to protect several objectives that they place around the map from the opposing team, the "Raiders". Strategic placement is key, if the objectives are too close to eachother, they'll be easy to get to for the Defenders, but the same would go for the Raiders as well. Placing Objectives too far apart would make it easy for Raiders to take an unprotected point, and pick off Defenders one by one. 

The strategy goes further when considering how you build your team.  Both teams choose from a selection of pre-made character archetypes. The selections for Defenders are generally stronger than the Raiders. The only catch is there are twice more Raiders than Defenders. Team balancing is important, and certain teams could look different depending on the player's favored strategy. 

Owlbear Rodeo has been a ton of help for the development of this game. Being able to just open the site and drop assets in for immediate play is so wonderful (for free too, and its super easy to run on laptop). I've lost track of how many times I've reccomended this website... I've also been looking into getting Foundry VTT and DungeonDraft to really get into it and mess with more advanced stuff. In the future I would love to have a billion more maps for use in The Merging World or whatever skirmish game people are playing nowadays, for now The Alley (the map you are seeing in the attached image) has gotten a lot of mileage for me. I'm planning on adding a margin around the map that has easy to reference rules. There will also be a one sheet rules reference at the end of the final book. 

Wow I rambled. Hopefully future posts will be a bit more brief as these logs become more regular. Layouts of the final product are still in progress. The "for sure page count" will be 20 pages interior, and there will be plenty of art to look at for all of 10 seconds. Next up, more playtesting!