Imagine being in the Underlands, where every room is a new danger! There is no escape from what lay ahead, so you and your party – if you’re lucky enough to have one – steel yourself and press forward into the darkness. Through, the maze of shadows, there are rooms, caverns, and spaces, and then there are the echoing hallways that connect them.
Hallways are as varied as rooms in the Underlands. They’re safer in some ways, and more dangerous in others. Perhaps you will get a brief respite in an echoing hallway, or perhaps your troubles will only be compounded.
The Mathematics Behind The Echoing Hallways
This deck is designed, as with all exploration decks, with a lot of math. In the Echoing Hallways, one of five things can happen:
- Safe travel, often accompanied by flavor text for immersion.
- Trap! Diabolical minds place traps in hallways because they are natural chokepoints.
- Enemy! You’re less likely to run into an enemy in a hallway, but it is not uncommon to find one hanging out there. Wandering monsters also use hallways to find noisy adventurers in their territories.
- Flavor events, subtle and interesting events that modify game conditions in immersive ways.
- Find an item. You have a good chance of finding something useful in the hallways because adventurers tend to leave them behind as they hastily travel.
We’ve designed this deck to where it will alternate between fun, interesting, and dangerous. The nice thing about Echoing Hallways is that, regardless of player count, you only have to draw one card per hallway! That card is drawn when the first hero enters the hallway.
We Use The Echoing Hallways To Immerse You In The World
From our team’s perspective as gamers, hallways are a missed opportunity to create consistent immersion in dungeon exploring, especially in dungeon crawler and adventure board games. (RPGs tend to be better about these details!) We really wanted the Underlands to feel oppressive and weighty, and by creating the Echoing Hallways Deck, we feel like hallways can now shine and do their jobs as the “best supporting actors” of the Underlands story!
We hope that when you crawl through the treacherous dungeons of Vrahode, that our work on the Echoing Hallways deck will pay off by making the game more immersive for you.