Trudvang Legends: Infos und Überblick

CMoN zeigen diverse Infos zu ihrem kommenden Spiel.

Trudvang: A World of Epic Sagas

This is an ancient land, filled with magic and mystery. The people who live here are hardy and rugged. Civilization exists, but it is sparse and separated by wide tracts of untamed wilderness. There are enormous, ancient forests. There are wide plains. There are archipelagos of unique islands. To the far north, a vast frozen expanse stretches for seemingly forever, so dangerous that it is said a man will only live for as long as he can stay awake. This is Trudvang, and this is the land in which players will travel around in the upcoming Trudvang Legends board game from CMON and Riot Minds. In this article, we’ll briefly explore the different regions on this mythical landscape.

The land of Trudvang can be broken up into different regions. To the east, there’s the Stormlands. In the west, there’s Westmark. Separating the two is the Mittlands. The south is dominated by the Soj, a collection of islands. Going north, one finds the Nhoordlands, overseen by the mighty Jarngand mountains, and containing the Darkwood, the most ancient and foreboding forest of them all. At the very farthest northern reaches, there is the Great White. Let’s take a look at each of these regions and see what makes them unique.

The Stormlands, as one would expect from the name, is a land of clashes between the natural world and that of civilization. This is an untamed land. The rivers are filled with treacherous rapids. The snow-capped mountains are nigh unclimbable. The forests are deep. The warmth of summer lasts but a fleeting moment before the harsh cold of winter once more takes hold. The people that live here are as untamed as their homeland. The warriors shave their heads and usually wield huge axes. They are known for entering devastating rages. The borders of this land are ill-defined. A traveler might suddenly find themselves caught up in a major storm and suddenly realize that they’ve strayed into the Stormlands.

Mittland, by contrast, is a place of splendor. Dominated by grasslands, this is a land of heroes. The wide plains are home to giant herds of horses while gryphons soar overhead. The region is pockmarked by ruins of kings and heroes long since dead. It is an epic land for epic people. People who may start out as humble farmers may find themselves drawn up into plots much larger than the family home and range far and wide across Trudvang. Not to say that heroes only come from Mittland, but a large number do.

Bordering the other side of the Mittland is Westmark. The peoples here are dominated by the Viranns. While strength of arms is respected, it is not nearly as highly regarded as strength of mind. Learning is valued above all else and the Westmark is home to great schools, libraries, and repositories. Those seeking any kind of information can find it in the Westmark, though it may come at a price. This legacy of knowledge comes after a long, dark time where trolls had ruled the land, enslaving the population and marching them away, never to be heard from again. The current civilization was freed by Siro Werte, and many are infinitely thankful for the new age of stability that he brought to the land.

In the south is the Soj, the mystical archipelago of islands inhabited by the elves. Their story is one of heartache and abandonment. Long ago, the dragons rose up to make Trudvang their own land. The elves and their gods, the Vanir, took up arms to defeat them. The Vanir, immune to dragonfire, were strong on the battlefield. However, at the final battle, the Vanir were not present. They had left the elves to fight on their own. Many elves died a burning death in that battle. Though they were triumphant, the elves paid a heavy price. They seeked out the Vanir, looking to see why they had not stood with the elves, but the Vanir were gone. Now, the Vanir are only barely visible in the sky, ever-retreating from the world.

The Nhoordland in the north is bisected and bordered to their north by the Jarngand mountains. These mighty peaks are so insurmountable that the hardiest giants or the most committed dwarves have not reached their summits. They form a nearly impenetrable barrier to the areas further north still. The Nhoordland is also home to the Darkwood, the oldest forest in Trudvang. Here, trolls, dragons, and other creatures hold court and curate secrets that humans, elves, and dwarves can’t even comprehend. Who knows what plots are being hatched under the canopy of darkness?

While the Great White is considered part of the Nhoordland, it really deserves to be a region in and of itself. A place of unrelenting cold and dark, it is almost entirely uninhabited. Certainly, no humans, elves, or dwarves have settlements there. The snow is thick and ancient, stretching as far as the eye can see. Many brave souls have ventured there. And many brave souls have certainly died there, forever trapped in the frozen wasteland. Only the mightiest ice giants call this wasteland home, and they rule over it from their massive castles built out of solid ice.

Here you have but a small taste of what awaits you in the lands of Trudvang. While much of the land is wild and untamed, there are still glittering cities and quaint villages. There is certainly no lack of adventure to be had, as getting merely from one settlement to another can be enough or a lifetime’s worth of stories. What stories will you create when you go adventuring across this wild and untamed landscape? That’s for you to find out when you play Trudvang: Legends.

By Jason „Polar Bear“ Koepp

Legends: The Beginning

Since childhood, I’ve been enthralled by oral storytelling traditions. I’d go to sleep nightly being read folktales from diverse cultures, and I loved making up similar stories to tell my parents and friends. As an adult, some of my favourite times were telling bedtime stories to my nieces and nephews.

One of the highlights of the oral tradition, I found, is that the stories tended to involve audience participation. Instead of “t’was dark and stormy night…” it was “…and the Elves raised their shields to defend their tree fortress! What do you think happened next?” This became an even stronger tradition when the youngins began inserting themselves into the stories, either as characters or narrators, and our nighttime adventures became fully collaborative.

In my years of gaming and game design, I’ve always harboured the desire to make a game that took this oral tradition into other mediums. A game that fuses the narrative elements I loved about indie character-driven roleplaying games with the toyetic advantage of board games. Stories about toys, but with richness and depth of theme to satisfy adults. I was just looking for the right idea.

I encountered Trudvang as a game already in design concept stages (with my esteemed co-designers Fel Barros and Guilherme Goulart). An epic storytelling game in a living world (the board), with heroes and monsters (the toys) and stories inspired by the fantastic roleplaying game by Riotminds. Immediately I saw the potential to adapt this oral, mythic storytelling tradition to board game form and joined the team to embark on our most ambitious project to date.

And so was born Trudvang Legends.

The vision for this game was simple, if daunting: to create a storytelling board game experience unlike any others on the market, but still familiar enough to board gamers and fans of CMON big box games to be appealing. A game based on interconnected mythic stories, where player’s actions could permanently change the world, and come to life with the amazing plastic hero and monster minis that players expect from us.

Finally, we were driven by the mandate to weave storytelling seamlessly into gameplay. To design a game with learning curve and scope that mirrors the folktales of old; deceptively simple and small at the beginning, only to unveil a rich, multi-threaded tapestry of heroism, impossible feats, and world-changing consequence.

Over two years the project proved so ambitious that we recruited Fabio Tola and Jordy Adan, to complete the biggest design team we’ve ever had, for the biggest game we’ve ever made. Over the course of two years we’ve crafted a storytelling experience that I hope will transport you, as it does me, to the days of traditional folktale wonder.

This is just the beginning. The story continues in a few days, when we dive deeper into the Legends system, and what exactly it means to change the world.

By Eric Lang

Shaping the World: The Legends System

The initial design team (Fel Barros, Guilherme Goulart and myself) spent a lot of time working out just how we wanted to implement the mechanics of a living world for Trudvang Legends. Where the choices made by heroes in one story have lasting effects on future stories, and the combination of stories played and choices made creates a rich unique tapestry that makes each game feel very different.

As the Legends system (our fancy name for the storytelling engine behind the game) took shape, it became clear that our perspective on the living world is from three angles: The Story book, The Boards, and Events.

The Book of Sagas

When you sit down to play a session of Trudvang Legends, the first thing you do is choose a story from the Storybook. At the beginning, you will only have one story to choose from, but achieving a heroic ending to that story will unlock others … and each story, depending on the choices you make, has the potential to branch into multiple others.

Once you’ve chosen which story to play, you open the book to that story’s first page and are given your set up instructions and relevant lore text. It’s of vital importance to pay attention to the lore, as it is by design loaded with hints and foreshadowing. It’s one of my favourite features of the game; reading the story really does help you to navigate through difficult choices. Do note, however, that we did throw in a few red herrings here and there, to keep you on your toes!

We’ll go into more detail about the story book and how to use it in a future diary.

The Boards

Perhaps the key feature that distinguishes this game are the boards and the pockets. They are central in making the game come to life, allowing players to feel the consequences of stories they played in the past, along with the agency to change them when needed.

Trudvang features two modifiable boards: the Map and the Storyboard. The Map is a gorgeous, four-fold representation of the provinces key to our saga, separated into regions. The two-fold Storyboard sits beside the Map, representing the bestiary (stats for the monsters of Trudvang), Stories (spaces for world-spanning events) and the turn sequence of the game itself. Several of the Map regions and every slot on the Storyboard have pockets built into them, each capable of fitting one square card.

During the course of the game, whenever a player takes a world-changing decision (like uncovering an ancient Fountain of Life on the map), or an epic consequence of player’s actions (such as a legendary story event, global evolution of monsters in the bestiary, or even a change in the very nature of the game turns) takes place, players will slide an appropriate card into the slot and change the world forever.

The possibilities here are mythic, and endless: You could, for example, win the favour of a famous Dwarven king who gives you favour with his people. Maybe you destroy so many Draugr (fierce undead from the north) in a mythic story battle that a special event changes the stats of all future Draugr to reflect this. You could rebuild a lost mining city in the mountains, giving you the ability to trade in items for experience, but at a future time this city could be invaded and destroyed by rampaging monsters, causing you to lose it forever!

The Events

Events go hand in hand with the board to create long lasting story effects. During the course of play, you will encounter story-specific points of interest on the map, which correspond to specific cards from the story deck (Trudvang contains well over a hundred of these). These cards are two-sided, and when you interact with them, they trigger a unique event that challenges, rewards or even harms the heroes (use lore-based clues in the book and the cards themselves to navigate!).

Events can often end up slotting into the world board and remain there, changing the very nature of the game for all future stories. A big part of this game’s mystery and enjoyment is that while you are playing out a current story, you must constantly deal with the echoes of the past, working to keep the world in a state of harmony and possibly working to undo the catastrophic events from a previous saga.

Trudvang Legends is such an epic game that world-changing events is only of its key features. Join us next week when we go in further depth about your characters, the Heroes.

By Eric M. Lang

Quelle: Cool Mini or Not