The Brand-New Vrahode Trailer Just Dropped

Vrahode's new trailer just dropped. Enough said.

Trailer Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wy5rapu8Dd4

Vrahode will be coming to Kickstarter most likely in quarter one of 2024. When that campaign goes live, you will not only be able to buy the core game, Vrahode: The Calteeryn Ascension, but its three expansions as well.

Learn more about Vrahode on the website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.   

Transcript

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Read the full transcript here: https://www.vrahode.com/the-brand-new-vrahode-trailer-just-dropped/

Jeff Irving: My name is Jeff Irving, and this is the Vrahode Tavern Podcast. I'm the creator of the Vrahode Game System and in this podcast we're gonna do a deep dive into the lore and gameplay of Vrahode. I'm joined by Brandon Rollins who will be acting as your stand-in, asking many of the questions you might be curious about yourself. 

Brandon, what's the topic for today?  

New Vrahode trailer dropped! 

Brandon Rollins: For today's topic, what I'm thinking of is actually this new trailer that by the time this episode is out, you will have dropped, the big one with David Diaz. You wanna talk about that? 

Jeff Irving: Yeah, sure. Um, of course the David did the, our teaser trailer. When did that come out, Brandon? That was back in, I wanna say January? 

Brandon Rollins: Yeah, that sounds about... 

Jeff Irving: Sound right? So he, you know, we, we kind of contracted with David to do a couple videos for us and. It, you know, most game companies don't do teaser trailers and then a full trailer. 

They just do a trailer. And I felt like because we're a, you know, a small studio and needed, we needed more, um, publicity and more, more stuff out there. So the teaser trailer was well received and I loved it. I thought it was well done. Um, I thought it was a good start to showing off. 

Of course, at that point, mostly art assets, but some, some gaming components. I loved the voiceover. We're not gonna be doing the voiceover on this full trailer. Um, but this one's gonna show, definitely more game assets. And it's gonna show a little bit more about the Harbinger system and its capabilities. 

 I recently was playing around with the Harbinger, just building some, you know, five level deep dungeons just so that I could make last minute tweaks to it, you know, move miniatures around on it and see what I thought. And then I sent those off to David and he rendered them. So what I built, he's turned into a, a model for that full trailer. 

So you should really be able to see, you know, the full capabilities of what you can make with it. And then also what, you know, through the, through the quests and the the campaign, um, you know, you're gonna get the opportunity to build some of those for story in, in those, uh, play modes. So I think it's just gonna be really cool.  

Brandon Rollins: It's really crazy to me to think about that initial teaser trailer that was dropped many, many months ago. And the fact that it, it couldn't, you couldn't really show off Harbinger. You couldn't really show off a lot of the things in the game. And you really, it's like you said, you really just had to rely on art assets and now you're getting to the point where, and, and people, you can, you can see this like the link is in the description right now. 

You can watch it right now. You can finally actually see what this game is going to look like on the table. And that's, that's a huge difference from the initial trailer. 

Jeff Irving: Yeah, we're definitely closer and, and we're using, you know, we're using newer assets too. We're using actual, like, production version of cards and stuff. So it's, it looks starting to look a little more polished, which, which is great. But to me, I went out there, I wanted really good music for this, this new trailer. 

I listened to a lot of music and I just couldn't quite put my finger on the tone that I wanted to, to strike with this video. I wanted it to be really dark and compelling and to kind of show that even though Vrahode is this beautiful kind of greenwood tale with, with, you know, all of, I mean, it's a world that you want to care about, you wanna fight for, but, but in this trailer, I wanted to get down into the kind of the dark depths of Vrahode. 

And my daughter, Olivia, she, she listens to a lot of cool music and she loves Lord the Rings and stuff. And, and she and I both love the, the kind of chanting song that the dwarves do when they're visiting Bilbo's house, uh, in Hobbiton. And I, I thought, man, it would be so cool to get something like that, you know, that's kind of has that dark kind of baritone vibrato to it. 

And, and Liv listens to a guy that, uh, outta California. Um, he and a couple of his friends, uh, record this music that sounds very similar to the dwarves singing in The Hobbit. And I don't want, I don't want give anything away right now, but she found me a song and I reached out to the artist and he was young enough and, you know, not so famous that the price was unreasonable. 

So we licensed a song, uh, for the trailer that I really think is gonna, uh, I hope anyway, is gonna blow some people's doors off because it's just, it's dark, it's compelling, it fits perfectly with the way the story progresses in Vrahode, you know, and the way you go underground and you're, you're, you know, you're kicking around in these deep multi-level dungeons to try to discover, you know, what's wrong with this world and how do we fix it? 

And so, I mean, it's, it's gonna be cool. It's gonna be really cool. 

Brandon Rollins: How do you even find something like that? It's, it's like, do you just go on Bandcamp and just start looking for folks or like SoundCloud or something like that? 

Jeff Irving: I mean, for me it was more about just, you know, thinking about, uh, know kind of the flavor and the tone. And, and like for me, I mean, I really, I kind of wanted to strike kind of a Bauhaus type tone. Bauhaus, of course, Peter Murphy and Loving Rockets put together. They, they're, you know, famous, big, big time goth, goth rock band, been around a long time. 

Uh, but there's a song that they, that they have, um, called Hollow Hills that I really, really love that I think would've been a, an exceptional, uh, song to do for the trailer. But of course, you can't afford to license, uh, a song by Bauhaus, obviously. It's just too expensive. And so my mind just kind of was in that area that, that just gloomy darkness that, you know... And, and this song that Liv found for me, I mean, it just, I I really feel like it was, we got lucky you, we kind of got lucky in finding, uh, you know, being able to, to reach out to the artist, the price being reasonable to license the song. Um, and it, it, and it literally just, I. Being the perfect song for the trailer.  

Brandon Rollins: You gotta love it when stuff comes together like that. 

Jeff Irving: Oh, I so want to talk about more, but I can't, I don't wanna spoil it. I've done so good for this long, I'm not gonna screw it up now. 

Brandon Rollins: That's all right. And anybody, again, if you're listening, like this thing is already out, you can click the link in the description, it'll actually show you more than we can say here. Um, but yeah. 

Recent playtesting in the Underlands 

Brandon Rollins: Speaking of things, just kind of snapping together. You, you did some play testing just this weekend, right? Over the Mother's Day weekend. 

Jeff Irving: Yeah. I think it's, to, to be quite honest, the, the group we, we have, this is the second time we've play tested with this group. We added one more person, but, um, you know, we've got. We need, we really, at this point in, in the game, we need, we need people that are, that are willing to be critical. People, that are willing to, to really look objectively. 

Um, it takes gamers to do that. It takes people that have played, um, games that are heavier than ours, games that are lighter, but where they, where they have a genuine love of dungeon crawls. They have a genuine love of fantasy. They have a genuine love of adventure games. And so we had Jess and Joe, and then he brought their friend Justin over who's also a, not, he's not an uber gamer, but he, he understands games well, and he's, he's very bright. 

And so he, he, um, he weighed in and helped us with some really cool, um, last minute tweaks. Um, I, I'm, I mean the overlands, the overland modes in the game when you're, when you're going from region to region, those have been working for a long time and they've been fun and people have been responding very positively to. 

Um, to that kind of play. But it was the under lands that really needed to be perfect and I mean perfect. And, and it may not seem like that big a deal or that hard to pull that off, but with the way we want the game to play and the fact that we have so many scaling mechanisms built into the game, it required a great deal of detailed thought and, and more than you would think. 

And it had to do with like when you enter a dungeon or the Underlands in a general sense, which, which includes dungeons from one level up to five and caves, basically anything underground. How do you enter that? How do you handle movement for a group of heroes within that when they're not in battle? 

And then how do you, through the scaling mechanisms in place, Introduce content to the party in a way that's exciting? Um, it plays fast, but it also doesn't just put the onus on one of the heroes. It lets everybody in the party have some fun. And so it's like, it's this place. You know, the Underland is dark, darker than night in the Overlands because we have two moons. 

And so the only time that that heroes experience true darkness is when they're in the Underland. And so they're just not used to it. Their eyes aren't accustomed to it. And so it's very, it's it's thick darkness. And so it's like you have to walk up to a threshold to be able to roll the door die. We have this custom die. 

You roll the door die. And that kind of lets you resolve what's happening in that threshold. Okay. And then, but, in order to effectively draw all the cards in the spaces beyond those thresholds, you have to keep the doors can't become these choke points where it slows the game down. 

And so we had to, we had to sequence the events within that just right, and they helped me do that. They, we finally got that, that action of moving around when you're not in battle, getting the thresholds, resolving the doorways, and then getting into the spaces beyond and, and having that really play fluidly feel right. 

But still have a lot of risk to it. Um, we did it, we finally did it, and it feels, it feels just right. Um, and then we also got to do wandering monsters, uh, this time, which is, um, they were on a small cavern flat counter map. I think it was 4B. Yeah. Uh, it comes in the core box. So we had a little cavern map that we were doing to test out the Underland mechanics. 

And in just that little one hall, five room cavern, um, complex, we were able to generate enough noise tokens, um, to create a wandering monster. And the way that works is, you know, when you're in battle, uh, when you go into battle with, with enemies, you generate a noise token when you, um, trigger a trap. You generate a noise token. 

Uh, when you bash a door, the door is locked and you have no key and you have to get into a room. It generates a noise token. If you're in a room and you've locked the door so that you can try to rest safely, well if enemies are coming, they will bash that door and generate a noise token so you get five noise tokens and a wandering monster is generated in the dungeon. 

And so we got to experience that. And it was, it felt really good in the amount of time it took for one of those to be generated. Cuz we were basically kind of wrapping up the dungeon, you know, the Cavern area. There was only five rooms, but right as we were wrapping it up, we generated that wandering monster. 

And so at the end it was almost a race. Could we get out before it got to us? And it was, it was just really cool. It worked out perfect. 

Brandon Rollins: Yeah, that is cool. That kind of automatically puts a limit on how long you should spend there without actually having to pay some kind of price for being there. Essentially getting stuck in a big battle. 

Jeff Irving: It is, it's almost like a, it, it almost adds a little bit of a timer element, uh, to the, to the game. And because of the rules, the way we set up wandering monsters, they, they appear in the dungeon at the farthest away point from you. So, like I, if, if you've only explored a couple rooms, we're gonna place that wandering monster off in the area you're, you've yet to explore. 

And it's going to begin moving towards your party. And it, and it moves as if all of the thresholds, the unresolved thresholds in the dungeon are open doors. So it's not hindered by doors. It doesn't have to open them or bash through them. It just continues to slowly move towards the party. And it does, it adds kind of a, it, it makes you want to be a little quieter and it also makes you not wanna dilly dally. 

Brandon Rollins: Yeah. Now before you got all the balancing right, what kind of issues were you running into with the Underlands?  

Jeff Irving: Well, what what it was was, at first I just, it was like nobody really had a turn order. You know, everybody could kind of do what they wanted, wander around, and it was not structured enough. In, in a dungeon, it needs to feel more chest like, it needs to feel more like if you, if your party is completely out of position, you have to pay a price for that disorganization. 

And so it was, it was kind of willy-nilly. And then, um, and then we tried another to add a new mechanic to it called a, uh, an Underland lead. Uh, it's basically like a party leader. And that person would, would go up front and resolve all of the thresholds, reveal all of the cards in each room, and basically, kind of take on, take all the fun out of it, you know, everybody else is just kind of behind watching this person lead the way. 

And, and it just, it, it didn't work. It didn't, I mean, because in our little cavern adventure with five rooms, um, the mage had, she had something on her that if you hit her, you, you took a bunch of damage. So like a, she had like a thorns type effect on her body. And so she wanted to go traipsing off an opening room, you know, opening doors and stuff. 

And that's really the way it should be. You know what I mean? That you sh everybody in the party should get a chance to have some fun. And so, um, let's see, what else did we have that was, that was a problem. The, oh, the last thing that we had to fix was that before when you would go to the threshold to resolve a door, that's where your movement had to end. 

And because of that, it just created like a wasted turn. It's like, well, why? You know what I mean? If, if you go up to a door and it's closed but not locked, well, then you should be able to walk in and at least into the room, that next space, so that you can then begin to look at what's in the room, resolve the cards, generate the threat, you know, roll the threat dies, uh, and uh, and resolve those. 

And that was the last thing that we fixed this weekend, was that, was that door kind of becoming a, a wasted turn. And so now if you've got movement left, you go to the door, it costs you a movement point to open it and then step through the door, and then that's where your turn can end. So in other words, you're not wasting a turn. 

You know, you're not just starting, uh, you're not just ending your turn there and waiting till the next turn to step in the room. Now you can step right in. Well, if you don't have enough movement left to do that, you can move through friendlies. So like you're. You know, if you're out of movement at the threshold, one of the other party, your party mates can actually step through you into the room to begin that process of, of finding out what's in the room and there's no more ways to turn. 

So it just, it really made it much more fast and fluid. 

Brandon Rollins: Mm-hmm. And that helps keep from breaking immersion too, because it's kind of weird in, in, in a story sense if you just kinda stand at the door and wait. 

Jeff Irving: Oh yeah.  

Newly added game mechanics 

Brandon Rollins: Now, outside of the Underlands, were, were there any other things that you needed to address in play testing? 

Jeff Irving: What else did we address? We'd been working on flyers and I'm happy with the way that works now. Uh, flyers have two positions. They have flight height and then they have fight height. Um, once a turn, once during their turn, a flyer can move from flight to fight height or fight to flight height, but they, and it's free, it doesn't cost them an action to do it, but they can only do it once per turn. 

And so if they are flying above melee range where no one can get to them except for people with ranged weapons, um, then they can choose to come down to fight height, to attack. Um, but once they've done that and used that as a free action, they can't just come down, attack and then go back up so they're not invulnerable. 

Um, and we tested that and tested it to make sure that it was airtight, that we liked the way it played. And it does, it plays well. We have these little plastic stands that elevate. Flyers. So if, if it goes from fight height, which is basically ground level up to above melee, you just use this little stand and you put it on, and then it shows the miniature in the battlefield raised up above everybody else. 

So it's very handy. 

Brandon Rollins: Yeah, that that makes sense. That just makes it so much easier to kind of know what's going on by just looking. 

Jeff Irving: We fixed, we fixed the thieves cards. Um, we wanted, we wanted, one of the things that, that I don't like to do in the game, in a game, in any game series, but especially what I'm designing, is if something has a benefit, I don't want the benefit to be isolated to one instance. Like we had, um, we have this item called a slumber spruce cone. 

So you basically, if you have a campfire lit when you're resting, when you're camping, if you put this slumber spruce cone into the fire, it allows. Everybody's sleep to be restful. So some of the cards say restless sleep cuz you're, you're having nightmares from all this stuff that you're facing, but this, these cones, you throw them in and it allows people to sleep, uh, soundly. 

Um, but then the fire really didn't have a whole lot of benefit other than just allowing you to use that item. And so we change the thieves cards to, to say that if you actually light a fire for your camp, it reduces the risk of thieves. So like, if, if you're, if everybody's sleeping and nobody's on watch, then you have a 50% chance if you draw a thie card of losing an item in your inventory, which stinks. 

Okay. But if you have an actual fire lit thieves, thieves are less likely to wander into the firelight and risk being seen to take your items. And so if you have a fire lit, not only can you put slumber spruce cones into the fire now to help you rest better, but it also reduces the risk of thieves down to a one in six chance instead of a 50 50 chance. 

So it, it greatly reduces thieves risking their lives to come into the firelight to take your items. And we thought that was a really cool mechanism without adding a lot of complexity to the game, it made lighting an actual fire worth the effort. 

Brandon Rollins: Yeah, and that's interesting because people, people hate losing stuff. It's one of those things that you have to be aware of when you're designing games or really if you just are doing marketing like me, loss aversion is a big, big motivator. So having something that allows people to reduce their odds of getting an item stolen will feel really, really good in terms of balancing, even though you're doing very little to change the game. 

Jeff Irving: Yep. The other thing we did, um, in, in play testing was I, uh, because this is a seasoned group of gamers that we're, um, that we're working with and they like a lot of the same games I do, um, like Jess is a big Diablo fan. She loves Diablo and she's playing the, she's in the beta right now. 

Um, and she was gonna go home. After the night of play, after the day of play testing and go play on the Diablo for beta. Um, but she, but they, they, they play Gloomhaven. They play a lot of big, heavy, you know, heavy things. And so this is the kind of group to say, okay, what's missing? You know, if we're, look, if we're taking a last pass over the game, they love, you know, they love the skills, um, they love the items, but what are we missing? 

And so we began to have a discussion, um, not only here, uh, uh, up in the bunk room, but also when we went to dinner, we, we continued to talk about what was missing, what things that they thought would enhance play. And one of the things that, um, Joe said was he felt like the Rook who is kind of our martial artist, he probably shouldn't start out his career with a staff, um, because he's a monk type character. 

And so, We decided to create some, um, hand wraps basically to allow the monk to start out with hand wraps that give him a little bit of a plus, um, with his fists. Because when you don't have any weapons in Vrahode, you can attack twice in your turn as long as you're not doing anything else. You can attack twice with your fists, just like we let you also dual wield small weapons, or we let you shoot two times from your bow if you're shooting at distance. 

And so we, we decided we were gonna take away the staff from Rukus, the, the, the, uh, Rook, which is our monk. Um, and, and we're gonna give him hand wraps. And so we introduced hand wraps to the game, not just regular hand wraps, but as a treasured item in, I think, expansion one. We a, we have a magic item that is, they're called jagged hand wraps. 

And they're crystal, they're crystal infused hand wraps. So there's a bunch of jagged crystals on the knuckles of these hand wraps. And they add plus two to your, to your, uh, weapon-less attacks and a bleed effect. And so we, we set out to kind of design a line of hand wraps that fit that monk function in the game. 

So we've got studded hand wraps are your first upgrade. You can go up from there to a treasured item called chain hand wraps. And those are metal and leather, but they have chains across the knuckles. And those give you plus two to your hand, to your hand attacks. Um, We introduce caltrops, which are just little pointy. 

They look like jacks when you play it, when you're a kid that you play with a ball of jacks. Caltrops are look like jacks, but they're pointy on the end. You can throw those into an area to, to as a trap almost. Um, we have, we, we introduce smoke bombs into the game, which are, um, just little jar clay jars that you light. 

Um, you have to have a firestarter kit or, uh, a special kind of ring to be able to ignite them. And then they basically fill an area with smoke, uh, that prevents ranged attacks out of, into or through. Um, uh, we introduced, uh, another variably consumable item called kurumaken which is like a shuriken or shiruken, uh, throwing star. 

It's an Asian weapon. And the way these work is, you, you find a stack of these. And you can, you can throw up to two of these stars per round. And as long as you don't roll a negative three, you can continue to throw these every round up to two. As soon as you roll a negative three, the stack is gone and you discard the card. So it's a nice little, it's a nice little variably consumable item that lets you attack twice in a round at range. Um, and then the other thing about the, the kurumaken that are unique is that they are unrecoverable. So like if you throw a, you know, a hand ax, well you can go recover that if you move to where it was thrown. 

Um, But much like arrows, once you fire them, they're unrecoverable. Um, the difference with the kurumaken and arrows is that we give you infinite arrows for your bow, but the kurumaken are, they come in a stack, you find a stack of them, and you just continue to throw them until you roll a negative three and then you discard them. 

So a really cool little, uh, unique item. Um, we've got a jaw trap, uh, that's just a single square trap, mainly for the Underlands. Um, you could use it in the Overlands, but it, it's a one by one trap and it's literally made from the jaw of some large beast. Um, so we've got the jaw trap. We introduced a new, uh, regional item to the game. 

It's called uh, simple carpus. And that is, um, it, it's an agro plant. The way that plant works is you find them in, in marshes, and they're stinky. And if you wipe that on your clothing and your armor, um, enemies within a certain range will attack you. It's an irritating, stinky smell. 

They're gonna come after you, um, for, for like two turns. And so it's a great way for warriors who want to keep enemies away from their healers and their casters. They can rub this, this, uh, simpler carpus on them, and then everything's gonna try to attack them. Um, we've got a, we've got a brand new whip now that is, can be dual wielded. 

It doesn't do hardly any damage, but it allows you to pull enemies to you from, uh, three spaces away. And so it, you can draw them in and because you can dual wield with it, you draw them in and then smack them with your short sword or with your hand ax or whatever. Um, and it, so it's, it, it's. The biggest benefit of a whip is that it's a pull item. 

It it, you know, if you had a, a pit in the ground, you could, you could grab, you could smack someone with the whip and pull them into the pit, and then the damage from the pit would be, basically what you're trying to do to them is, is pull them, um, got a new ring of flames that allows you to light, uh, campfires. 

You can, um, light a torch with it and a lantern. And then if you on a plus roll. With the ring of flames, it will actually, uh, imbue a weapon with a burn effect for the duration of, of a, of an encounter or a battle. But you have to get a successful roll. It's not guaranteed that your weapon will have a burn effect, but you, if you get lucky and you roll a plus number, then that battle your weapon will actually have a burn effect. 

So that's kind of a cool ring. We have a ring of water walking that allows you to treat all deep water as if it were just normal flat land. And so, you know, river crossings are a whole different animal then, or, or coastal areas where you can get out and move around in the deep water without a movement penalty. 

Very powerful ring. We have a new marksman's bycocket, and if you don't know what a bycocket is, a a, a bycocket is, is the type of hat that Robin Hood wore. So it's a long, narrow hat with a pointy front and a feather. Most, uh, commonly. And the, this magic item allows a hero with a bow to get two more range out of that bow. 

And so that's really important because, you know, obviously if you're a ranged attacker, the farther away you can hit accurately hit those enemies, the better for you. And then finally we have the Explorers Redound. Um, and the Explorers Redound is a bladed boomerang. It is, it, it can be used once a turn, you throw it. 

It's not designed to cut deeply, it's designed to graze the enemy and cause a bleed effect and come back. So it does almost no base damage because we're not trying to stick it into them. We're just trying to graze across their skin and get some blood flowing so that they bleed out. And so the Explorers Redound is another new item in the series. 

Brandon Rollins: These are gonna be all really fun to play with on the table. And honestly, I can't wait to do the t t sTTSdemo. Like I need to do that as soon as possible. But, uh, yeah, this is the, they're all gonna play, these all sound awesome. 

Jeff Irving: Yeah,  

Brandon Rollins: Like just immerse of the kind of stuff that you would expect in, in, uh, in a world like Vrahode. 

Jeff Irving: Yeah. No, it's, it's, it adds a whole new element when you can drop down traps, you know, when you can drop down some cow trips or set a jaw trap or in a hallway, um, throw a smoke bomb and block the hall.  

Yes. Very simple, very strategic. None of the stuff in the game is, is hard to understand or implement. Uh, we don't use complex iconography. 

We use plain language and plain math that you can understand without having to look in a rule book. And so this stuff just gets you, it grabs you, it pulls you in, and it does not let you go because there's so many fun and consequential things happening around you, uh, quickly. And that's the thing, everybody that's ever played tested this game or played at convention, that's the thing they all rave about, is this thing is quick and easy. 

And, and even though you had to explain some things to me, I was ready to play in five, 10 minutes. And that's really where we are with Vrahode. It's, it's, I don't know, it's...  

Brandon Rollins: Your play testing consensus has been very good. I mean like objectively very good. Even if you've got, even if you don't have a stake in it, like the real thing, the only real obstacle left at this point, which I don't think is going to be a huge problem for you either, is just blind play testing. And like, once you get the rule guide ready for people to look at and play on their own. 

And the quest book, same thing. Um, it's just gonna be a couple of months of just changing up the wording so that people are, are able to follow things without your input and it's like you've got it. 

Jeff Irving: Yeah. No, we're, we're, we're approaching that. Um, yeah, I think it's, I think we're getting real close. 

Brandon Rollins: Yeah. Um, So on that note, I, I actually think we're, we're at time on this episode, but there are a few questions I want to ask you in the next one. I was gonna ask you about what you're doing to prep for, uh, KublaCon and Origins. 

Until then, do you wanna take us out? 

Jeff Irving: Sure. 

Thank you for listening to the Vrahode Tavern Podcast. If you enjoyed this show, take a moment to subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts. And if you're on Apple Podcasts, please leave a five star review. It helps more than you know. 

You can learn more about Vrahode on vrahode.com. That's V R A H O D E.Com. Link in the show notes. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, where we are @Vrahode. Thank you again for listening. We really appreciate it. Keep an eye out for our next episode in two weeks.