Trudvang Legends Design Diary (Part 3)

The Good Fight: Combat in Trudvang

You can’t tell a great mythic story without drama. And some of the most exciting drama comes from combat. Trudvang Legends is no exception.  

Because storytelling is the main focus of Trudvang, we knew that combat would not happen quite as often as it does in other adventure games. And with that in mind, we wanted to make each combat in the game impactful and meaningful but not too distracting from everyone’s main goals.

And let’s face it: combat, especially epic combat in a Norse-inspired setting, should be fun.

Casting the Runes

Combat in Trudvang is resolved over a series of rounds during which all involved heroes will decide to attack or retreat. After attacks and retreats are resolved, enemies will deal their full damage, which heroes can divide as they choose. This continues until either all enemies are defeated, a single hero is defeated (which ends the story right there), or all heroes have retreated from the fight. 

Making an attack is the heart of combat, and where all the fun choices are. The goal of an attack, of course, is to damage, disable and/or defeat as many enemies as you can before they strike back with combat damage or worse. And this is where we focused the game’s core bag-building rune casting mechanic.

Your hero has a bag containing a unique mix of elemental runes (wind, water, earth and fire…and some corrupt dark runes). To make the attack, you’ll draw runes from your bag, one at a time, assigning those runes either to one of your weapon attacks or skills to “lock in” their damage or effects. Many of the more powerful weapons and skills require multiple assigned runes to lock in their abilities. However, any rune you draw that you cannot assign to an attack or skill is a failure, and must be assigned to your 3-space failure track. Dark runes are always failures.

Three failures, and you cancel all of your locked in attacks, and only resolve your failures. And if that wasn’t bad enough, after the first failure, you risk getting nailed by your enemies’ “fail triggers.”