Developers at BGG posted:

Tainted Grail: the Fall of Avalon is an unforgettable, solo or cooperative adventure experience for 1-4 players. Blending Arthurian legends and Celtic mythology with a unique vision, it allows you to impact the game world in deep and meaningful ways. A deep, branching storyline allows you to tackle problems in different ways, ensuring no two games play alike. Difficult decisions or harrowing choices wait behind every corner and seemingly minor tasks may reverberate with major long-term consequences.

In a land slowly sinking into the Wyrdness and torn apart by conflict; surviving each day is a challenge on its own. Starvation, sickness, violent weather, and random incidents all conspire to end your journey. Guardian Menhirs, that ensured safe travel throughout the realm, are slowly going dark turning simple logistics into an involving puzzle. To overcome these challenges, your character develops along several conflicting lines, such as Aggression / Empathy or Practicality / Spirituality. These traits unlock a rich choice of mutually exclusive skills and lead to different deck-building strategies, making character advancement meaningful and deep.

The character you develop is going to be tested during dozens of combat and non-combat encounters. Sometimes you will need to brute force your way, but often diplomacy might be a better option. Regardless whether you fight with your strength or your wits, our unique dice-less encounter system makes resolving each conflict fun and exciting, while keeping you immersed in the game.

In Avalon, there’s a legend waiting behind every stone and every tree. All locations have their own rich stories and secrets to discover. Places and characters are often much more than they seem. As you slowly put all the pieces of the larger puzzle together, the land will always have a surprise waiting for you just around the corner. Many secrets can be discovered only after several games. Created by one of the best polish fantasy authors, Krzysztof Piskorski, the story of Tainted Grail: the Fall of Avalon aims to push the boundaries of non-linear narrative, building upon the rich experience Awaken Realms has infusing ambitious stories with excellent board game mechanics and striking visuals.

Basic Rules posted:

The game is divided in Day cycles; each day our characters spend Energy to perform actions like:
- Exploring their current location (in a CYOA-like scenario).
- Activate location or character specific Actions.
- Travel to an adjacent location (connected by a travel arrow).
- Activate other miscellaneous actions - provided by an Item, by a Quest, a Secret, etc.

At the start of each Day the Story progresses a little, no matter what the characters do; a new Chapter is revealed, and new Quest, Task or even obstacles are added to the game. Day by day, the wyrdness grows closer and only lightning up new guardian Menhirs can keep it at bay; there is a constant sense of impending doom, so the characters can't allow themselves to idle around...but at the same time not preparing enough could be the end of the expedition.

Each Character is defined by six basic Attributes, divided into three opposing pairs:

Each of them could be of assistance OR hindrance during the adventure: having a lot of Aggression, for example, is going to help if we need to fight or scare someone away...but it means our character has a short temper. The more of matching pair of Attributes a character possess, the more difficult it is to improve them. Each point above 2 in a single Attribute also comes with an additional Skill that further improves the abilities of the character. Each character has also access to resources like Food, Wealth, REPutation, Magic and EXPerience; these can be used during the CYOA sections, gathered/traded/spent on the map or have specific in game uses. For example, at the end of each day, the characters can have some FOOD and Rest to recover their Health and Energy and to lower their Terror . They can also spend EXP to gain new Attributes, Skills and to improve their Combat and Diplomacy decks.

At the end of the day, the characters can also experience Dreams or Nightmares, that may have prophetic powers or may be simply influenced by their surroundings.

The land of Avalon is fraught with dangers. Not every creature is out to get you and not every villager is hostile to our characters...but most of them are. To avoid making a quick end, our characters will have to defend themselves in Combat or try to de-escalate things with Diplomacy. Both mechanics revolve around building and improving a deck of cards (one per type); this result in a deceptively deep series of minigames - more in this once we'll face our first foe.

Characters List posted:

Beor is a Smith and a strongman; he starts with 2 Aggression and he will probably spend a lot of time hitting people and stuff with his big hammer. He's not really a people person and his Festering Wound makes Exhaustion (IE: digging into his Energy reserves to the very last drop) an even worse proposition. His active ability is quite expensive, but also quite useful at the beginning of the game.
Pick Beor if you want to smash.


Ailei is a wise woman and an empath; she starts with 2 Empathy and she's the most suited to deal with other humans around Avalon. She is not very good at fighting and being Tramatized she has difficulty dealing with her Terror . Her active ability allows her to turn 2 Energy into 1 Health at will and is situationally useful.
Pick Ailei if you want to talk your way through problems.


Maggot is an ex Druid and a drug addict; he starts with 2 Spirituality and he's the most apt at Magic from the get go. He's not super good at either Combat or Diplomacy, but he's not too bad in either since he can usually count on a larger amount of Magic compared to the other characters (Magic can be used during both Combat and Diplomacy, and of course it is often checked against or used during exploration); when he sleeps, he may get Nightmares instead of Dreams even if he is not currently Going Insane. His active ability allows him to turn 2 Energy into 1 Magic at will.
Pick Maggot if you want to interact with the Supernatural.


Arev is an ex soldier turned farmer; he is the jack of all trades of the group and the most well rounded character, being good at both Combat and Diplomacy from the start, but not excelling in either. His drawback puts a weight on top of the whole party, although not a massive one; his active ability is situationally useful when the alternative is Starving (which is really bad).
Pick Arev if you want to have more of a say in how your character develops.

LP rules posted:

This goes without saying but please NO SPOILERS, not even in tags. Feel free to participate and vote even if you are familiar with the game, but please don't spoil future events or mechanics for people that have not played this before.

The thread is going to be full coop, with the limitation of asynchronous play taken into consideration. I'll ask the thread what to do next and I'll try to follow the most popular consensus; my plan is to play through a full Day cycle each update, automating decisions where possible in accordance with the thread's will. This means that I'll leave the big decisions to the thread and I'll play through more mundane steps on my own.

Unless it makes sense not to or unless the thread decides otherwise, I will Automatically Explore new locations, multiple times if necessary, until the main CYOA-style branches for that location have been exhausted. I will also Resolve Combat and Diplomacy encounters at the best of my abilities. The thread will have full authority on Party composition and on Character advancement (more on this as soon as we get some Exp!); the thread will also decide which direction we take and what our goals are each day.

Unless the thread decides otherwise, I will move with both characters together, as a Party. I will also use a popular homerule called Tag-team: whenever I explore or start another type of interaction, I'm going to do it with only 1 character (meaning that only of them will have to spend the initial Energy cost to explore); then, if the other character is needed - and if the situation makes sense - I'll allow them to retroactively spend 1 Energy (or other cost to initiate the interaction) too and act as if the interaction had been initiated as a Party. Normally, you have to decide if you want to start an interaction with only one character or with the full party in advance, but it's not always evident which character would be the most suited for a task and from time to time the game is affected by "old-CRPG-itis". We will still end up spending more Resources than the optimal amount, but at least at a more reasonable rate. I will not be able to do so if the situation would be unfeasible (IE: we will be able to call in support our other character to sweet-talk a merchant in a settlement; but we won't be able to magically teleport them on top of a mountain we have climbed if we need them to pick a lock then).

Even with this change, this is a long and difficult game and we will probably end up dead somewhere. If that happens, the game has two built in mechanics to allow us to continue playing without having to restart from the start. We'll explore them more in depth when it'll become necessary...

I plan on updating twice or three times a week.

Finally, in case there was any confusion: we are going to play the original game on Tabletop Simulator (which I digitized myself from my physical copy, since I have limited space and I find it easier to play it on TTS), but there is a Digital Version of the game on steam. However, it is NOT a 1to1 port of the game, and plays a lot differnent to this.

Travel posted:

These are the Locations we have discovered so far; the ones marked as Available are in range of an active Menhir, but we have not scouted them out yet.
- It is only possible to travel to adjacent locations in the four cardinal directions;
- The two locations have to be connected by a travel arrow (so for example we can't travel from Location 105 to Location 109).
- Travelling to a new location normally costs each character 1 Energy .
- Some locations are marked with a small lightning symbol . Anything marked with this symbol needs tobe resolved as soon as we enter the Location.
- The art and flavor text on the cards can give you an idea of what we can expect when travelling there.
- Locations outisde the range of an Active Menhir are engulfed in wyrndness and hidden from us (each Menhir only reveals the 8 Locations that are either cardinally or orthogonally connected to it). We still know that there is something there, if there is a Travel arrow, though.

Black Robe posted:

Never heard of this, also interested. Maggot and Aieli

bagrada posted:

Seconding this pair, they look like a good balance. I tried backing this but my bank at the time refused to authorize a payment to England due to all the fraud complaints they were dealing with. A friend of a friend got it with all extras, but I missed that session and it turns out they didn't much like playing it. So I'll be interested to see it in action.

That Italian Guy posted:

We should be able to avoid most forced "No" answers to "Do you want to go on an adventure? Y/N" questions thanks to the medium of the LP and that homerule.

Omobono posted:

WHY are there forced no answers to "Do you want an adventure"?

Black Robe posted:

Never heard of this, also interested. Maggot and Aieli

yamiaainferno posted:

Joining the Maggot and Aieli train. Looking at Aieli's outfit annoys me, though. Granted no one in this bunch seems to be fully dressed for whatever reason, but the poor woman is basically wearing a bikini and a push-up bra made of leaves. Why??

malkav11 posted:

I'd be interested to know how you made your own mod - I have several games (including Tainted Grail) that aren't on TTS and the tutorials I've seen seem mostly about prototyping games, which is not anything I care to do.

I take it you don't have Niamh? (who is the dedicated jack of all trades as she has her own specials and cards, but otherwise slots one of the four colored decks the other characters use.)

That Italian Guy posted:

And yeah I don't have Niamh cause I only got the basic box without the expansions.

malkav11 posted:

Probably not worth complicating the vote at this stage, but I do have Niamh and could try importing her stuff into TTS if you ever want to do a second run (the game has significant branching, so it would support it).

Black Robe posted:

Never heard of this, also interested. Maggot and Aieli

Omobono posted:

Is that required by the scenario or merely a really good idea? Because that's what I would have voted for first action anyways.

quote:

(Do we know what's needed to recharge the village menhir right now?)

Kobal2 posted:

Interesting concept. I wonder if it influenced 7th Continent or vice versa.

Kobal2 posted:

Interesting concept. I wonder if it influenced 7th Continent or vice versa.

Ailei posted:

Starting at 7, Ailei has the highest initial Energy pool of all the characters. She only has room for 1 Bonus Energy point, though. Her lack of Aggression makes her a poor fighter, but her high Empathy makes her great in non-combat interactions. She starts with 3 Food and 1 Rep. Neante, the Priestess of Cuanacth (one of the 5 heroes the introductory blurb mentions) and her mentor has left her a letter before departing for her quest:

Maggot posted:

Maggot starts with 1 extra Health compared to Ailei. His lack of Practicality also makes him a somewhat weak fighter - although his Magic can carry the day, it is a limited resource. He starts with 2 Food and 2 Magic. Lord Yvain, leader of the previous expedition, has left him a somewhat scathing letter before leaving:

Our adventure begins in Cuanacth Farmhold (Location 101). This is the village we currently live in, and it was the starting point for the doomed(?) expedition that preceeded ours.

Every Location card in Tainted Grail contains plenty of lore, secrets, or tasks, and Exploration is our primary way of discovering them. Each location points point to specific parts of a sizeable book called the Exploration Journal, that contains all the CYOA style sections of the adventure. The character that starts to explore a location usually has to pay 1 Energy (and we can tag-team the other one in by paying 1 Energy too if we want them to take part in the unfolding events). Our Energy allows us to keep readin until we reach an “Exploration ends” point; if we want to continue exploring, we'll have to pay more Energy .

If we are in a Location with a Menhir (3rd icon below our current location's Name), we can check what it'll take to rekindle it for free. This is Cunacht's Menhir:

Exploration: Cuanacth Farmhold posted:

Intro:

Whenever an entry says "If you have > go to Verse X" you have to do so immediately. We don't have any of these entries for now, so we can start by asking about the previous expedition. Reminding everyone of their allegedly dead family members seems like a nice ice-breaker.
Verse 1:

Ailei has not just 1 Empathy, but 2! We can over the ankward conversation topic without the need to get people drunk.
Verse 2:

Remembering information we are given is a key piece to our success during our exploration of Avalon. We have also gained our first Status! Statuses are a way for the game to keep track of our progress; they are often checked to see if we have access (or if we are prevented from accessing) specific numbered sections in the CYOA. We mark this Status down on our save sheet and move on.
Since we have reached an "Exploration ends" point, we have to pay an additional Energy to proceed. Ailei spends 1Energy ! (current: 5) We're going back to Verse 1, and this time we ask the villagers for help.
Verse 3:

Success! When we need to have certain resources to get a result, we can pool the Party's; and we only need that total amount to proceed. We remind the villagers that our friend, Maggot, is also part of the expedition. Maggot spends 1Energy ! (current: 5) We both get 2 Food and we receive a random Item from the pool:

Those effects makes it more difficult for us to travel, so ignoring them is a good thing! Items fall in different categories and, of course, we can only equip them if it makes sense (so we can't for example use 4 weapons at the same time, or 2 sets of armor on the same character. Some items don't have any keyword (like the one we just got), so there is no limit to the amount we can equip. Some Items also contain a “C” symbol – these are the Craftable Items, the only ones that may be manufactured by player Characters; certain events will instruct us to draw a specific type of item from the pool.

Vote Options posted:

A) The Chapter card suggests we end our first day in Cuanacth, to experience the (potentially) prophetic dream available at this Location. If we chose this option, Ailiei will gain some Rep, Maggot some Magic and both of them will be able to bank some of their leftover Energy for tomorrow. This option will give us more insight into Dreams, Location Actions, Characters Actions and Energy Management.
B) We go North to 102 and gather some Food. This option will introduce us to Location Actions, Combat and Dreams.
C) We go North to 102 and Explore. This option will introduce us to Tasks and Dreams.
D) We go East to 104 and Explore. This option will introduce us to Combat and Dreams.
E) We go West to 103 and Explore. This option will not introduce new mechanics.
F) We go West to 103 do a Combat Trial. This option will introduce us to Location Actions
G) We go South to 105, buy 1 Item and Explore. This option will introduce us to Location Actions and Dreams.

Omobono posted:

Is the village Menhir on the clock right now or does the start of the game take mercy and its decay is assumed to go at the speed of plot (until something happens)?

Anyways, changing my vote to A, follow the out of character hints and stay in place. It won't be optimal, it won't gently caress us over.

That Italian Guy posted:

A) The Chapter card suggests we end our first day in Cuanacth, to experience the (potentially) prophetic dream available at this Location. If we chose this option, Ailiei will gain some Rep, Maggot some Magic and both of them will be able to bank some of their leftover Energy for tomorrow. This option will give us more insight into Dreams, Location Actions, Characters Actions and Energy Management.

Omobono posted:

Is the village Menhir on the clock right now or does the start of the game take mercy and its decay is assumed to go at the speed of plot (until something happens)?

Anyways, changing my vote to A, follow the out of character hints and stay in place. It won't be optimal, it won't gently caress us over.

Expedition Log posted:

Tasks: None!
Active Menhirs: Cuanacht Farmhold (101): 7 days left.

Location and CharacterActions posted:

Location Actions
Most Location cards contain one Action, clearly visible on their front.

Activating this Action is possible whenever a Character is present in this Location, and is not involved in some other Action (like an Exploration in progress). Location-based Actions are important, as they often let you gather or exchange critical resources; certain Location Actions can be repeated at will (as long as you can pay its activation cost), while others are marked as “once per day” (like the one in Cuanacth).
In a Party: We may activate a Location Action as a Party. In this case, we pay the cost only once and receive the output of the Action once. However, characters in the Party may help each other pay costs, splitting them any way they want, and if they trigger an Encounter, they resolve it as a Party too.

Character Actions
Every Character has a personal Action on their Character Tile. Activating this Action is only possible outside of Encounters and Exploration.

In a Party: only the character owning the Action can use it, but Party members may help pay the cost. However, the character performing the Action must ALWAYS pay at least 1 .

End of Day posted:

The day Ends when all Characters have Passed or run out of . When this happens, we perform the following steps for every Character:
1) Rest. Eat 1 Food. If we do, we restore 1 and lose 1 . If we don’t have enough Food (or we don’t want to eat it now), we drop our to 0. If our is already at 0, we lose 1 instead.
2) Restore Energy. By default, we restore our to the initial value at this step. There are a few exceptions:
- Our limits the total amount of we can recover (we can never have more than );
- If we are Exhausted (our marker is in one of the red slots) we recover only 4 points of (this leaves us with very litte effective for the following day, if we don't want to keep getting Exhausted; it is Bad, although there are certain strategies that revolve around this);
- If, instead, we are not Exhausted and we are at full , we become Well Rested and we can bank up to our Bonus level (+1 for Ailei and +2 for Maggot). NOTE: this is another popular homerule, and it's going to be really useful for the asynchronous nature of this LP.
3) Advance our Characters: If we have any Exp points, we may now spend them to raise our Attributes, gain new Skills or add new Combat & Diplomacy cards to our deck (more on this once we do have some Exp).
4) Build our Characters decks: we can modify our Combat or Diplomacy decks by adding or replacing cards. More on this after our first Encounter!
5) Experience Dreams: If the Location we’re in has a Dream icon , we can read the Dream section in the Exploration Journal. If our marker is on one of the red slots and (we are Going Insane), we read the Nightmare instead of the Dream. Dreams often provide helpful tips or reveal more of the lore and story.

Vote Options posted:

A) We go North to 102, Hunter's Grove.
B) We go West to 103, Warrior Fair.
C) We go East to 104, Charred Conclave.
D) We go South to 105, Forlorn Swords.

Omobono posted:

C

Charred Conclave is absolutely one of the locations. The others are unrevealed at the moment. I think the island is at 108 (it's the only sea visible) and the other one could be anywhere else.

fake edit: never mind the map show an island with a skull on it where 109 is. The mound looks like it's around 106.

Kobal2 posted:

go north to the mound

Kobal2 posted:

Ah, my bad. Then changing my vote to A). Less optimal maybe, but there's nothing wrong with topping up food on the way in AND out. *7th Continent trauma vibrates ominously*

(that also means we can't swing by the shop on the way back from Death Island, but we can do that on our way back out of the village if the next step of our Menhir Maintenance Mission points us west)