Folklore: The Affliction

My first real break with creative work was on a board game/RPG hybrid titled Folklore: The Affliction. It all started with The Ed Greenwood Group and a story pitch. I hit it off with everyone involved fairly quickly; they loved my writing style and appreciated my attention to detail in following their lore documentation while crafting my pitch. Twin Fire Productions (the IP Holders) scheduled a meeting with me to talk about my story idea, and at the end of it I found out that it had actually been an interview for the job of “Lore Guardian” and that they wanted me to design some of the stories for their board game.

Main Contributions

Worked on tracking and developing lore for Folklore: The Affliction under the guidance of both Ed Greenwood and IP Holders.
Crafted two of the game’s story adventures following style and tone guidelines.
Wrote Black Alithe, a Folklore: The Affliction short story.
Assisted in writing the Adventure Creation Kit.

A More In-Depth Look

First off, “Lore Guardian” is probably the coolest job title I’ve ever had. It mostly consisted of reading/memorizing the established lore for the game, and identifying places where I thought we’d missed the mark between “specific enough to keep people on the right track” and “vague enough that we aren’t unnecessarily tying people’s hands.” When I found something I thought could use a little more attention, I’d go through and adjust the section and then send my revisions off to Twin Fire Productions (the IP Holder) and Ed for approval. This lore document eventually saw print as part of the Adventure Creation Kit that was created for fans of the board game to craft their own stories.

As a game writer, I contributed two of the playable stories in the board game, a task more in line with designing a D&D adventure than traditional “writing.” Each story within Folklore: The Affliction is designed to take a few hours to play and follows the same basic structure: it begins with a call to action where the characters are confronted with evidence that a new (or more properly, very old) evil has appeared and is set to bring ruin to the fictional land of Kremel. The characters then follow a Choose Your Own Adventure style narrative that will lead them to the final act of the story no matter what branches they’ve chosen – however, depending on their choices they may be in better or worse shape for the journey. It features both random “skirmish” encounters designed to be simple and completed quickly, and more nuanced tactical encounters that combine miniatures and a sort of D&D-lite rules. Both of my stories also featured a unique mechanic inspired by the Affliction that must be defeated.

Plague Ridden

In my first Folklore story, I introduced a mechanic for wounded players to run the risk of becoming afflicted by a zombie-like pestilence sweeping the land. Those who’ve become infected lose the ability to regain lost Vita (Hit Points) by resting, and if they’re playing on “Nightmare” difficulty they’ll also be afflicted by a random mutation that gives them penalties to their skills or combat stats. Throughout the story they’re presented with opportunities to find a temporary cure for their sickness which erases the penalties but doesn’t “solve” the plague. However each opportunity requires something extra from the characters: a leap of faith or yet another challenge to be conquered. After the first encounter the characters are presented with the opportunity to donate bandages to an injured villager – the same bandages that are their only way to recover lost Vita if they’ve been infected. Doing so allows them to receive the antidote from the apothecary for a modest sum later in the story. Otherwise, the apothecary points them to a nearby swamp they can travel to on the world map and they’ll have to complete an extra tactical battle and succeed in a skill check for their antidote. Then, near the end of the story, the characters are presented with one final opportunity to receive the antidote if they can pass a skill check. That last chance to get the antidote was a result of playtesting, too many groups were bypassing the antidote early on only to run out of bandages and coins by the last chapter.

Forsaken Temple

In my second story, the characters travel across Kremel to a forgotten crypt with a portal that leads to a sunken pyramid in a far off land. The Affliction is a fallen angel, and the characters are tempted at every step by offered power. In most Folklore stories, Rituals are magic scrolls that characters receive only rarely. In this story they’re much more plentiful and there are additional story moments where characters can rely on the occult to benefit themselves, but characters receive a tracking token for every Ritual or Occult skill check. In my experience playtesting this story, I mostly found that receiving the tokens without knowing what they were for made players nervous… but not always nervous enough to eschew the use of Rituals entirely. Groups mostly agreed that they were probably a bad thing, but tended to split on their assumption of exactly how bad it would turn out to be.

When the final encounter begins, all characters with tracking tokens have to pass a Faith check: those who succeed discard their tracking tokens and take their turn, however those who fail discard a single tracking token and lose their turn. Enemies will not target any character still in possession of a tracking token, but they’ll have to repeat the Faith check each turn until they either pass or have discarded all of their tracking tokens to join the battle.

Sample

Below, I’ve included a sample of an encounter set up I created for The Forsaken Temple, featuring two unique creatures and a battle map I designed. This is the final battle before meeting the Affliction featured in this story and was designed to wear down the characters. This was done in part because the final battle actually presents the characters with the option of escaping rather than defeating Ba’na’nach. With a separate ending (and consequence for the next story!) depending on if they win, flee, or lose.

(Note: I’m not the artist who illustrated the battle map! I just designed the layout of the map and wrote the art requisition!)