Frank Branham: Sunshine Family Gothic Dungeon / Prophecy Review

Girls got all of the cool toys when I was growing up. The Sunshine Family had a giant ranch house and Barbie had a massive estate-sized Dream House with cars and a spa. On the boys side, we got teensy weensy cars, sports crap, and the occasional cheesy-looking plastic fort. Action figures didn't show up until I was 12 or so.

Soooo, I'm making up for lost time. I made a dungeon.
In theory, it is the first step in designing a dungeon crawl prototype. Of course any sane designer would have actually designed a game first. Maybe someday I'll try out that whole sane thing--sounds useful.

The formula for a dungeon is pretty easy: Surf the Hirst Arts site to look for projects, then decide not to spend a couple of weekends casting little blocks out of plaster and pay Wyrmcast to send you the blocks. Spend a lot of evenings over the next 3-4 months sorting, gluing, and painting the blocks. Then build an extra large set, and spend some time snorting epoxy fumes long enough to figure out how to fake liquid. (Spent WAY too much time working with epoxy. So much for that bid at sanity.)

I've done some miniature painting in the past, but this is my first time playing with terrain building. Everything came out...ok. Some of the pieces are a little badly glued, and some of the dry brushing on the first pieces I did is a little spotty. However, Bruce Hirst writes incredibly well, and his site is well worth checking out if you have any interest in painting or terrain building. His lengthy instructions and technique advice are great reading, and perhaps just a bit too addictive. After reading enough of them, you might just decide to try some of this stuff out.

I particularly like playing with epoxy and plaster. The last bits I did (the grave, and the water pool and stream tiles) involved sculpting (badly) with plaster and epoxy, and taught me some pretty nifty painting techniques. The epoxy in particular is a strange fluid. It is a thick, thick varnish called Envirotex Lite designed for bar surfaces. The stuff heats up seriously as it cures, and dries to a seriously hard finish.

Pics below. I hope the game turns out to be as impressive.



The pic only shows 6 doors. In a fit of some odd door fetish, I assembled 25. They are taking freaking forever to paint, and I can only paint a few at a time before my internal tedium meter hits saturation.



The grave is entirely plaster with a tiny bit of one of those Halloween village accessories buried at the bottom.



The main epoxy takes 8 hours to cure, so texturing is done with 5 minute epoxy glue. I am led to understand that big ol’ pools of blood are pretty much required décor in any proper dungeon.



I had to cut a form for the falls out of the clear plastic from one of my Heroscape Tundra packs. This is also the only piece that isn’t pretty much from the project plans.



This huge centerpiece is Bruce Hirst’s idea of a way to use up leftover blocks. It is a good 7 inches tall.



It is kind of a big dungeon. Each of the 17 modular floor tiles is 6 inches across. Walls and doors are all loose, and are simply placed on top.



The gratings are also cast in Hydrostone plaster. They are sort of fragile, but most of the pieces are quite sturdy. Painting everything in exterior Latex house paint seems to help here.






Prophecy Review:

Prophecy is yet another in a very long line of Fantasy Adventure games, stretching all the way back to the late 70's. The one main characteristic that most of these games share (aside from guys in loincloths and chicks in metal lingerie) is that they largely suck.

I'm actually quite fond of Talisman clones, and I have dozens of obscure game inspired by the Games Workshop classic. I've played the ones that might even have a hint of interest, and suffered many horrors.

The basic idea is that you move, have an encounter (done with cards or rolling dice against a table), and get a treasure that increases one of your stats. Repeat until you kill the final boss. Actually allowing a player to choose their encounter, or controlling how they advance their character is just not happening. These are simple games for those old days when we were much more enthusiastic about endlessly rolling dice.

We've actually had a few nice recent additions to the line. Return of the Heroes requires some route planning to fulfill tasks and pick up all of the quests you need to complete. Runebound and World of Warcraft are impressive studies in interesting character optimization.

I like Prophecy better. Enough that it is my current pinnacle of the style of game.

It is obviously inspired by Talisman. There is a big single oval of spaces, cardstock standup characters, Strength, Magic, and Gold. You have to kill the big Bosses to win. You WILL roll D6’s.

How very typical. However, as you look deeper, you start to see how well Prophecy is put together.

Start with the rules. They are well-written and thorough. The back half of the rules includes an index with detailed notes and clarifications on every card in the game. I have (6 games so far) never had a rules question that was not staring back at me from the rules. The usage of english terms are consistent, and the text is well organized. The rules really do put most other adventure games to shame. They were also written by a group of Czechs, so it is possible that English is their second language.

The bulk of the game still superficially resembles its backward cousins. Each turn, a player:

1. Turns up an event card. This brings new places and monsters onto the board, which usually go face up. Events also provide a slow trickle of experience, gold, health, and mana. There is a also a trend in the cards to help out the weakest player. There are some clever things in these cards that affect the game almost transparently. Replenishing cards allow you to keep questing to improve without having to stop your progression and heal. Monsters and encounters going face up let you know which spaces are safe, dangerous, or unknown.

2. Moving is easy. You move one space left or right. Or you pay gold to move via a few special methods that allow you to get to farther places. This forces you to work out how to get to a destination quickly, and budget gold properly.

3. Encounter stuff. The combat system is pure Talisman. Roll a D6 and add your Strength or Magic. Compare that to the critter's strength or magic. That is the basic idea, but each monster is unique, and most have some special twist that makes combat a little more interesting. The game provides two dice, and so the active player rolls both dice at once to determine the outcomes, which makes combat very, very fast.

Experience goes beyond simple increases to Strength and Mana. Weapons and treasures are all unique and have some synergistic effects. Most importantly, each character can have up to 7 skills. There are 5 training camps scattered around the board, and each character receives discounts on skills at two of the training camps. Skills are permanent effects which affects things like die rolls, equipment, movement, combat, gold, and training. There are 40 skills, and all are unique.

The game comes off combining the best of Return of the Heroes and Runebound. Prophecy is longer (3 hours) than RoTH, but it has the path planning. Where RoTH has fairly dry character advancement, Prophecy has a more Runebound-ish wealth of different and interesting things--but without Runebound's painfully slow turn length.

All is not perfect in Prophecy land, however. Fantasy Adventure games do not really have much in the way of character interaction. Prophecy ends once a single player has 4 of the 5 artifacts (gained by beating really tough critters). If all the artifacts are scattered between players, a rather painful endgame Apocalypse. Players run around for 30-45 minutes chasing each other on the board, hoping to fight at an opportune time. I play using a house rule that the first player to obtain 2 artifacts wins. This eliminates the endgame completely.

The other concern I have is whether or not the magic-using characters are weaker than the fighters. The wizards are certainly trickier to play, as they have to replenish magic and health more frequently. I have won using a wizard, so my fears about balance may be unfounded.

If you already knew about Prophecy and were kind of interested, you definitely want a copy. The game is kinda random, and kinda long, and will not at all appeal to players who feel that dice only contaminate games. (You know who you are.) There are two expansions available in Czech. The only way we will ever see them is if tons of people buy the english edition of the base game. Please do so.

© 2006 Frank Branham

---

Comments:

You must register with BGN in order to comment. Registration is free, but if you appreciate the news, previews, reviews and other material posted on Boardgame News, please consider becoming a member to keep the info flowing to your screen!

That’s one impressive dungeon… I hope you have a game ready by the spring! Posted by Erik Arneson on Sep 14, 2006 at 05:28 AM | #

Frank, Next time you’re in Columbus, you should let Tyler show you the basement.  He has an entire dungeon building workroom.  He has about 2 dozen dungeon plaster molds, dozens of small clear drawers each filled with a different plaster block, hundreds of put together dungeon pieces in different states of painting, etc.  We have used them most often for Hero Clix Dungeon. Valerie Posted by Valerie Putman on Sep 14, 2006 at 06:28 AM | #

That dungeon looks like an amazing piece of work, Frank.  Fabulous job. Oh, and don’t worry too much about turning sane on us.  I think you have even longer to go than the rest of us! Posted by Larry Levy on Sep 14, 2006 at 06:36 AM | #

Wow. That is cool. How about a game that combines a dungeon crawl with a bar crawl? Adventurers would go down into the dungeon to try and hook up with really hot monsters. Posted by Joe Gola on Sep 14, 2006 at 07:26 AM | #

Bad idea. To do that I would probably have to explain why male monsters are all giant hideous bulbous things wearing rags, and why all female monsters are always naked girls with horns or cat ears. It is a lot like a trip to Dragoncon, really. Posted by Frank Branham on Sep 14, 2006 at 12:10 PM | #

or a Bugs Bunny cartoon… Posted by Brett Myers on Sep 14, 2006 at 01:12 PM | #

With that blood pool, it could be the dungeon of Elizabeth Bathory’s remote castle in Transylvania. Posted by J.M. Green on Sep 14, 2006 at 02:03 PM | #

No one’s ever explained the naked fantasy chainmail girls up to this point, why should you have to start now? All the adventurer minis could be pasty guys in glasses and ponytails wearing Monty Python T-shirts. “Sooo, pretty lady, you torture here often?” Posted by Joe Gola on Sep 14, 2006 at 06:35 PM | #

Just one question: how do they keep the blood flowing so it doesn’t dry up? One bloody neat dungeon, that is. Posted by Mikko Saari on Sep 14, 2006 at 11:26 PM | #

Blood fountains. They are all over Diablo II and Oblivion. I figure that the fountain pumps keep the blood flowing, and somehow cancel out protein coagulation. They come in the standard crypt lair package when you buy them from Cryptmasters Inc. Posted by Frank Branham on Sep 15, 2006 at 08:53 AM | #

< Back Home