Next Stretch Goals, Las Vegas, and a Field Demo Video!
about 5 years ago – Fri, Feb 08, 2019 at 03:41:44 PM

Hi again everyone! Hectic day today as we take to the road to the Las Vegas Open gaming convention to meet with backers and friends within the community! So we've got 2 topics today: Next stretch goals, and a demo video of some basic mechanics.

Almost there for Token Upgrades...

First one's easy: Next up at 10,000 pledged, we'll be adding acrylic standees of our archetype factions to the token kits included in the game. These can be used as proxies or for an advanced mechanic called 'Dataplane Manifestation', where a Raider with an Interface Deck can jack into a terminal, projecting their consciousness across the battlefield and taking over neutral machinery or harassing enemies until stopped.

There's 7 standees added, featuring one of each faction.

So there's that! And next up afterwards at the 12,500 level we'll be adding more Co-Op Missions with a free PDF Download as well, to continue and expand that aspect of the game.

 Field Demo Video at the LVO!

So we've got a quick demo recorded here at the Las Vegas Open. Pardon some recording hiccups as we're in the field, but it gives a feel of some of our core mechanics. There's more to see and a campaign to go into, but we can go into that further separately.

To start, here's two example stat sheets for our opposing sides for the demo. The nomadic survivalist Technomads, and a fierce reptilian Morlock Clan. Normally a team is between 5-10 and battling over a larger board, but we'll shrink it down for this demo.
 

  There's a lot of stats there! But they should be familiar for veteran players, and easy to pick up for new ones. 

•  Raider Name - The name of your character, giving them a measure of individuality!
•  Speed - Your movement in inches whenever taking a move action
•  Shooting - Your chance to hit a target with ranged combat rolling equal to or under on a d20, without modifiers.
•  Melee - Your hand to hand combat prowess rolling equal to or under on a d20, without modifiers.
•  Defense - Your protection from enemy attack, base and with armor bonuses
•  Survival - Your ability to survive injury or hazardous areas, base and with armor bonuses.
•  Aptitude - Your general technical ability and situational awareness.

Likewise, weapons and gear are similar. We'll stick to Armor, which grants bonus stats as well as Mobility Actions such as Grapple, Wallrunning and Leaps which expand your movement options. 

Models can have 1 Primary Weapon, which represent rifles or other large weapons that sometimes must be reloaded between uses. You can equip handy pistols, melee weapons, grenades and other weapons as well. The range of weapons shows their most effective range, and the strength indicates how capable they are of penetrating enemy defenses.

Skills and Gear expand your model's versatility with special actions and moves--- which we'll largely leave out of this demo, but they can add a new tactical layer to the action.

So take a quick look at our field video above, and if you have any questions be sure to ask them in the comments below, and we're more than down to answer. Cheers!

Gameplay, Campaign, Factions and More
about 5 years ago – Thu, Feb 07, 2019 at 02:51:34 PM

Hey everyone! Campaign is going strong and we're looking so very close to fully funding at 96% currently! That's tremendously exciting with much to look forward to. So to that, we've had a ton of great questions, and I'm happy to answer, as well as give a bit more insight into the game's details. 

That said, we do have videos coming. In the meanwhile, lots of info going below: Feel free to comment if you have specific questions!

Highlights of how Zone Raiders plays

We plan on having a gameplay video shot shortly at the Las Vegas Open with demos and other material to give more detail for sure. Lots of elements should be familiar to veteran tabletop gamers, but we have our special elements as well. As a really quick overview:

• ~6-12 models per team average in a full game, 
• Alternating activations, with each player activating a model before passing play. A model gets two actions, such as moving, shooting or hunkering down in cover, and can do them in any order, though some actions will end the activation outright (such as shooting). Each player will have the limited ability to chain a few activation together though, to enable combos such as spotting a target for friendlies, or two models catching an enemy in a deadly crossfire.
• Each player picks from a list of missions then reveals their choice to generate their objectives. The table is set up with any a special setup these require, plus a roll to see what unexpected elements are on the table like special loot caches, AI opponents, or dangerous radiation areas.
• Most actions will need to roll equal to or under a target value to succeed, using a d20. There's a few big modifiers that will raise or decrease your number dramatically, based on your advantages of position, range or gear. There's resources you can spend to mitigate really swingy d20 rolls of course. Smart positioning to pin a target down under suppressing fire so that someone can hit them off a ledge in hand to hand can well win a game.
• Armed with shooting and melee weapons, harming a target needs to get through their armor first. Then a check against the survival potential of the model hit to see if they shrugged it off as a light wound, or if it was powerful enough to take them out. Some weapons are powerful enough to breach the armor on a hit even if the target withstood it, reducing protection from follow ups.
• Most models can be equipped to grapple, wallrun or powered leap across obstacles. These add to what movement choices a model can make, giving them great dynamic action to reach unexpected locations or to gain advantages such as flanking or the high ground. 
• Missions have an emergent element! On a random turn when a natural 20 is rolled on checking the initiative, suddenly the battlefield may shift as a radiation storm flares in, unknown snipers shoot out, or a piece of junk terrain is revealed to be a functioning object replicator. Your plans may need to shift to match up with new occurrences.
• There's a lot of truly unique gear and campaign level-ups. 

We'll definitely show more with videos coming soon!

For more information, we have an earlier demo PDF published at www.zoneraiders.com, with some rules streamlined to help get in that first game. Give it a look!

What about Campaign or Co-Op?

From day one Zone Raiders has been built with a campaign in mind. Linking games together and progressing your team creates both narrative and a new layer of strategy on how you decide to attempt to achieve the greater goal. This is an aspect that we focused on to provide a new style of play both familiar, yet different and interesting in this genre of games.

The Standard Campaign details the struggles of each player’s Raid Team in building up their strength to try and find an ancient artifact known as an Oracle. This relic would allow them open a great armored partition that leads into new unknown regions of the Megastructure, with the promise of vast riches or legendary power beyond. 

Character Advancement

Each skirmish represents a clash for a newly discovered data terminal, resource node, or simply assaulting a rival team. Occasionally, it may even be fighting the Zone itself, to repel an incursion of the deadly Immunocyte machines that infest it’s depths. Each fight survived contributes to a Raider’s experience level. With enough XP, a Raider can level up and improve baseline stats or gain special skills.

A particularly lucky Raider may even uncover ancient Artifact technology: Lost weapons, armor and gear from eras long forgotten. These strange devices can project graviton beams clean through walls, deploy point-to-point portals to travel through, or summon wild nanite storms. Of course, your opponent may covet such devices and make a point to capture the wielder to claim the artifact for themselves...

Doctrines System and Special Resources

After each fight, a Raid Team can gain special Tech, Bio or Tactics resources. These resources can be used to enable Doctrines, a unique system that represents a team developing new tactics or infrastructure to support its efforts.

There are both common and faction-unique Doctrines, each of which helps a veteran team adapt it’s playstyle to a player’s preferences. They provide a way to differentiate teams of the same faction as well. For example, you may enable Doctrines to increase your deployment cap of units, or allow more capable new recruits. Others that are faction specific can represent genetic modifications, special guerilla tactics, or temperamental prototype devices.

In a way, Doctrines represent the culture and character of the group you've created: are they more akin to mad scientists? Guerrilla fighters? Humanistic survivors, or other flavors through game mechanics.

Life and Limb

Of course, there’s a price to victory and defeat. Raiders who are taken down must roll to determine if they were merely injured, or if they were outright killed. Worse yet, your opponent may have recovered their gear, providing them cross-faction equipment they may not have access to!

If you’ve planned your Doctrines to anticipate losses, recovered medical lore or simply better trained recruits can compensate for wounds. Those teams with exotic artifact technology can even preserve the memories of their best Raiders, implanting them into survivors or resurrecting them entirely!

Cooperative Missions

Not all missions are necessarily against other players. If a Campaign allows it, teams may even join forces against greater threats, and cooperate in special missions against (literal) AI opponents. With your forces always outgunned and outmatched, careful balance of stealth, speed and striking power will allow your allied Raiders to make it through alive.

AI Enemies (known as 'Adversarial Intelligences') are powerful and outmatch the players. But many missions give you the element of surprise. Can you stealthily evade wandering patrols, eliminating some quietly and others with blunt force to accomplish missions such as rescuing prisoners, assassinating warlords, or holding out while others evacuate?

Additionally, these missions can be played solo as well. We do plan on releasing more missions in the future and possibly a full solo/co-op campaign, so stay tuned on that as well.

The rest is up to you!

Providing a framework to tell a story is our job. The rest is up to you and your playgroup in how your tale of survival, loss and triumph is told. A campaign may last a few weeks or months, but stories arising from that may last forever.

Factions

The game is built on the idea of Factions: Generalized archetypes that give you a basic flavor for how your models represent these heroic survivors of the distant future. Each Faction has 4 pages of write up on it's themes, example teams, special gear, units and doctrines. they can easily be tailored to fit a group of miniatures you have, and we'll have examples in the book of how each faction can be themed in wildly different ways.

 As a brief overview:

•  Zone Stalkers - Stealthy mercenary bands that travel from settlement to settlement, adventuring for treasure, fame and hunting the Zone’s deadliest monsters.
•  Technomads - Mobile and highly technically adept scavengers that dwell in the most broken-down of areas, living among ruined factories as their natural homes.
•  Reclaimers - Proud militant armies protecting what few cities of human settlement exist. They wear heavy armor and powerful weapons to reclaim the world, one sector at a time.
•  Exanthropes - Transhuman cyborgs seeking greater individual perfection, they use techno-biological augmentations, combat drones and a mastery of science to grow ever more powerful... and arrogant. 
•  Morlocks - Mutants born from humanoid and animal DNA, these diverse survivors use ancient vaulted relics and their own biological hardiness to defend their kind and way of life.
•  NthGens - Evolving robotic lifeforms that adapt themselves to dangerous situations. Lead by a prototype unit, each one upgrades in accordance to the Prototype’s experiences for a more optimal existence.
•  Atropics - Mutated organsisms infected by a variety of viral strains, Atropics are cunning predators. They can siphon biological matter from their enemies to trigger mutations into more powerful forms.

We'll go over how these and building a team works out in a later update! There's so much more to show...

Fully Funded!
about 5 years ago – Thu, Feb 07, 2019 at 12:26:37 AM

A second post for today, short but sweet

That said, thank all of you for continuing to support us in making this project a reality for us all, and so much within that sprint of a first 30 hours. We'll continue to communicate and keep you all up to date on plans, and share more info, photos and videos as the campaign continues.

Good luck with your dice, and talk to you all again soon! :)

So it begins!
about 5 years ago – Tue, Feb 05, 2019 at 06:21:24 PM

So we’re off! The first day of this thrilling campaign is underway. The community’s been nothing but supportive through development up until this point, and we’re happy to show you all we’ve been cooking up! My goodness, at the time of writing we're over halfway funded in just a few hours! Thank you all so much. There's a lot of questions too that we're more than happy to answer.

---

Coming right up, we’ll be at the Las Vegas Open gaming convention between February 8-10th, in the vendor area showing off demos, art and more! If you’re there, be sure to stop by to chat for a demo and get an acrylic Raider silhouette token. We'll be taking videos and bringing preview material too!

Second, with getting things started in getting Zone Raiders out to you, I figured it’d be good to explain where this idea came from. Tabletop gaming is a unique hobby, in that it brings people from all sorts of backgrounds together in a shared social space face to face. Some people love the crafting, some love the socialization and some love the crunch of good competition. They’re all great aspects of our community.

Having been part of several groups and meeting lifelong friends playing games as a social experience, I wanted to fill a niche that had been growing: A skirmish-scaled game that was fun, thought-rewarding but also easy to learn, while also being able to tell stories and have room for people to express their imagination. 

From that (and a number of inspirations in TV, Movies, Games and Fiction), Zone Raiders slowly developed from those desires. As a project of passion, the goal was not to start a profitable model line, or endless drip-feed of releases, but to build the best experience and game that friends and I wanted to play. With tight rules that didn’t melt your brain, not too much dumb chance, and the opportunity to build fantastic tables that didn’t get in the way of the action.

I hope that in the next few weeks, our game can become yours as well.

Thanks,

Tony

Creator of Zone Raiders