Storytime (Shadows of Kilforth)

There’s a term I’ve seen crop up a lot lately that tends to be applied to some solo games: emergent narrative. It’s a very specific term used more frequently to describe video games, and I didn’t give it much thought until I started playing more solo games during Neverending 2020.

During this time, I’ve played a number of excellent solo games that I feel almost no desire to play again. In this case, games like The Lost Expedition, Warp’s Edge, Friday, or Falling Skies play very well solo. The experience is fun, thinky, and difficult. That being said…. I don’t really want to play them again. Even Warp’s Edge and Falling Skies, two excellent designs that are specifically tailored for solo play, left me a little lukewarm. So why didn’t I like these intricately designed solo-only games more?

Unsurprisingly, I found my answer in playing other games and responding to them differently. Warp’s Edge and Falling Skies are both very solid mechanically, but because of that feel more like a mechanical exercise. In multiplayer games, I don’t mind this at all–I actually prefer it in most cases. I often caution people against the allure of a game’s theme. I love Stefan Feld games, and Feld’s games are notoriously mechanical and light on theme. That being said, when I play multiplayer, I don’t really need theme to engage me. If it does, awesome, that’s a bonus. If it doesn’t, though, I’m getting all of the engagement I need from the person I’m sitting with and the experience of trying to out-play them.

“TL;DR I don’t mind mechanical or themeless games if I’m playing with another person.”

— ME

Playing solo, I find myself responding to games that break my own rules or expectations in regard to what I typically like. Rather than digging into Falling Skies euro dice placement/threat mitigation, I find it a little flat to play alone, regardless of how satisfying the puzzle is or how challenging it is to win. Same with Warp’s Edge and its bag building. But if you offer to play Orléans with me, I will be delighted, even as it relies on very similar mechanics to Warp’s Edge, albeit with a much drier theme.

This brings me back to the idea of emergent narrative. If you google emergent narrative, you get this nice succinct definition: “A design technique where a game's story consists of many fragments that can be collected, experienced and interpreted in many different orders and ways.” That’s actually a definition for “procedural narrative,” but they are essentially synonyms in this case. I’ve found that games that create a story as you play really work for me in a solo game, even if it means the strategy suffers a little for it.

The best single example of this is probably Nemo’s War, a dice rolling game of exploration. On paper, I have no interest in Nemo’s War. It’s dice heavy, and pretty much everything in the game is resolved via random rolls, from enemy spawning to event resolution to attacking ships. It’s uber random; all dice, all the time. In a multiplayer game, I find games that are this reliant on dice pretty frustrating. Rather than enjoying the planning and strategy, I find the turns almost pointless. What’s the point of getting invested in a strategy when you could potentially roll 10 dice and still fail to roll the one six you need?

In solo play, however, this is not the case–as long as I have a theme and narrative I can latch onto. To be clear, the experience is not the same, but it doesn’t matter. In a solo game like Nemo’s War, my personal enjoyment comes from what happens to Nemo and his crew. Rolling badly will alter the story in exciting ways, and I don’t care if it hurts my score or leads to a premature game end. In the event I strain the Nautilus’s crew to make it through a Typhoon in the Indian Ocean, the fact that I’ve rolled and failed, causing my crew to inch towards breaking will ultimately lend a great cinematic quality to the play–and this is what I enjoy. It’s participatory, and what I do will create and affect the story as I go. I really don’t mind at all if I lose the game; it’s an experience, and as an experience, I really like Nemo’s War.

*Nemo’s War: Worth your time to investigate.*

Which brings us to Shadows of Kilforth, the second of (currently) three iterations of Tristan Hall’s …of Kilforth series (Gloom of / Shadows of / Call of). On one hand, the Kilforth series typifies what I like in adventure games like Pathfinder the Adventure Card Game, Arkham Horror: The Card Game, Warfighter, or Apocrypha: The Adventure Card Game. It’s a location-based card game of exploration, some kind of loose narrative, and conflict resolution. That’s a broad definition, but can apply to each of these. Of them all, Pathfinder and Kilforth have the simplest mechanisms and conflict resolution mechanics: roll a bunch of dice. You do this to resolve pretty much anything. Looking to befriend a musician? Roll a bucket of dice. Looking to overcome a collapsed bridge? Roll a bucket of dice. Looking to fight a leopard? Roll a bucket of dice. The number of dice you roll varies, but not much else.

In regard to Pathfinder, I grew tired of this, and I think I’ve wanted more than anything to really like Pathfinder: The Adventure Card Game (I own a ton of it!). During gameplay, you level up, sometimes a lot, but you’re always just taking your dice and throwing them, hoping to roll a specific sum total. You don’t read the cards, you don’t know what you’re doing. Look at the success value, dump the dice. The cards are remarkably ugly, the narrative is pretty skinny, and at the end of the day, your options feel minimal.

But what about Kilforth?

To its credit, the Kilforth system doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, but it is aware that simple dice resolution mechanics can be bolstered by small tweaks and a little bit of narrative. Each game of Shadows of Kilforth starts with character creation by mixing a race and a class, with each providing unique stats and abilities. Once your character is created, you take on a four-part quest, ranging from deposing an imposter king to finding a family heirloom. Okay granted, this is pretty straight high fantasy trappings, but each part of your quest is introduced by a short description of what’s going on for you. It’s short, but it does enough to lay out the what/where/why of the small tail. As you complete quests, you’ll learn new skills, on your way to the finale and ultimately your encounter with the big, big boss.

*In my last play, I was a Seraph Diabolist. Not great at fighting, but I’m good at book stuffs and… flying!*

You will build a 5x5 map of location cards, creating your version of Kilforth, and set your character at the center. Every time you enter a location without an encounter card, you draw a new encounter from the top of an accompanying deck. Your job is to move around the map and find evidence to progress you on your quest. In clearer terms, you’re looking to explore these locations to find cards with keywords required to complete each phase of the quest. Keywords exist on all encounter cards, as well as loot cards that you pick up along the way. Kill an enemy? You have the choice of either adding it to your hand or discarding it to top deck a random reward. Either one could potentially provide you with the keywords you’re looking for–or maybe neither.

In a way, this is one of the gamiest aspects. Moving around a map to randomly draw cards from decks in hopes of finding specific keywords? Yikes. To be fair, the colors of the boxes around the keywords give you hints as to what type of location (mountains, plains, badlands, or forests) you’re more likely to find the item, so it’s not quite as random as it sounds. What defies expectation and makes this work for me, though, is that Kilforth’s design allows the exploration aspect to work beautifully. The variety of cards you flip is excellent, and unlike Pathfinder, you’ll oftentimes find interesting albeit not immediately useful things. You’ll meet potentially helpful strangers, find new places, trigger events, or be attacked by baddies. But not everything is a baddie. In fact, more than once I’ve been looking for an enemy card and had a hard time finding one. And you can’t overlook how important it is to find allies and items to help you along the way; you’re not strong enough to do this on your own.

With a good variety of cards, I’m glad to say that they’re all useful, even if it’s not immediately apparent. Once per round you can discard a card from hand for an automatic success on any test (as fate), and sometimes one success is a big deal. You’ll also sometimes find cards unhelpful now but paramount in future parts of your quest, begging the question of whether you want to hold onto it and forfeit it’s discard ability, or discard it as fate to pass an especially difficult test. There’s not a huge variety of choices, but the choices are presented to you in different circumstances, meaning what may be an easy choice in one game is very difficult in another.

An example of cards you may reveal: Events and Places. Note the keywords on the Place (Place/Abode/Plains),
you’ll need to collect certain keywords to complete the stages of your quest.

The conflict resolution is, as I outlined above, the handful of dice. It’s not my favorite, but it works here. In a way, it works because the conflict is an exciting part of the game, but it’s not the whole game. As I said previously, I like Kilforth for its exploration, and because of that, I like the moving and collecting aspect. There are a few kinks to the resolution here that are interesting, like if you fail to get at least one success when trying to convince a stranger to join you (add their card to your hand), they will attack you. This, like a few other design choices, help to break the typical mold of these kinds of card games to make it more thematic.

Another example of one of these choices is the rumor/discover mechanic. Throughout the game, you are able to pick up loot cards, something like a spell or item, to be added to your hand. These are called rumors. Rumor cards have locations printed on the bottom that, if you are in those locations, will allow you to play the cards in front of you as an action, effectively “discovering” them in Kilforth and making the rumor a reality.

*A big big boss, also known as “Ancient.” In this particular game, I faced the REAVER OF MALICE. His friends call him Bubbles.*

The fact that items are not going to be potentially worthless hand-clutter (looking at you, Pathfinder), but almost always helpful either in completing quests or in strengthening your character for the big boss fight at the end is very refreshing. Villain plots that crop up must be addressed lest you find the boss only to be reminded that with all of these plots in play, they are even more powerful than at first blush. Mechanically, this is all very simple, but these design choices really incentivize you to get out of your shell and move around. You found a super powerful sword? Not yet! You’ve just heard a rumor of it. If you actually want it, you’ll need to cross the map to find it in the Sea of Clouds. You better take care of that cult mounting in the Spider Grove, because with them in play, your fight against the boss is going to be so much worse.

There’s more to this game (quests, the night deck, finale & totems, the gloom, accumulated successes carry over!!, weather, hiding, etc), but at the end of the day, Shadows of Kilforth works for me because of the lovingly created–to say nothing of beautiful–world Tristan Hall’s team has created here. The exploration does not feel like a chore as it does in so many similar games. The theme and loose narrative that emerges as you play really make this game work. Like in Nemo’s War, I don’t care when I roll six dice and fail to get any successes. It means that I tried to overcome that sunken temple in the Black Cave and failed. Maybe next turn. It’s the story and worldbuilding that counts, and Kilforth has it in spades.

And when I’m in the mood for it, Shadows of Kilforth gives me exactly what I’m looking for: an excellent solo experience.