Hot on the heels of their successful Hidden Realms: The Mummy’s Tomb, Forgotten Paths is the second game by Spyros Kallos and Myrto Gkizli, Greek gamers and content creators otherwise known as Tabletop For World.
Like Hidden Realms, this is roll-and-write, monster bashing, treasure hunting adventure, though much larger in scale; a 9-quest campaign across the Misty Isle as opposed to exploring a single dungeon, comprising 18 separate maps and 9 characters to choose between, along with a rulebook and 49-page storybook. Also like Hidden Realms, it’s print and play, so will be delivered digitally; all you need is a pencil and eraser, three dice and a dozen small tokens (such as cubes from another game). And a printer, of course.
Gameplay Summary
The rulebook is a 20-page rather affair, and although it contains plenty of pictures and several comprehensive explanations of examples of turns, it takes some time to get familiar with the nitty-gritty of the game. This section will be a brief gameplay summary, skipping the ins and outs of precisely how dice are used, and the details of the many, many tables.
The game doesn’t present an overarching story at the beginning, but as you travel across the island by completing quests, you discover more about what’s going on, leading to the final confrontation. I won’t say much, to avoid giving away spoilers for the game, but these quests start by choosing one of two maps at each stage: for example, the storybook introduction describes the threat of the undead and ends with the player being offered the option of journeying from Mistbreak (your starting point) through the Windmere Plains to be able to coordinate efforts with the settlements on the other side, or to Greenvale to hinder the undead advance towards Mistbreak. This choice boils down to picking map 1.a or map 1.b, and I confess that there’s little advantage in choosing over the other as the map/quest complexity within a stage is broadly the same (though if you complete the campaign once, you can repeat it making the other choice at each step).
You will also choose a character to play across the whole campaign, accumulating items, skills (known as Talents) and experience points, as well as something called lethebane. Lethebane doesn’t actually carry across quests, but can be spent to, for example, adjust dice rolls during an individual quest or in the Marketplace after a quest.
Once you’ve got your character sheet and map, and your position marker token is ready to place at a map entrance, you’re good to go.
The map is a hexagonal grid with a mix of numbered spaces, spaces with rewards, traps and monsters, and several you can’t enter but have to navigate around; some of those latter contain mini-bosses and the end-quest boss, who is generally quite far away from where you enter the map. The map sheet also contains multiple tables where you record your dice rolls, actions taken and the results of encountering traps and monsters.
Each turn consists of rolling two dice, noting their values in the rounds table, then using the values to reveal new parts of the map, moving around the map, and ‘preparing for future challenges’—essentially accumulating strength and the like for later battles. And, of course, encountering the bad guys—more on that in a bit.
A reveal operation means placing a tile onto the map, making the spaces underneath it available for crossing. Along the left of the map sheet is a list of the tile shapes offered by this map and the die values they correspond to—I’ve not come across this variable-sized tile mechanism for exploring an environment, and would love to see something like this implemented as physical pieces in a boardgame. You pick one of your available dice values to choose the tile shape and also where to place it adjacent to your player marker, and covering a hex containing the same number as the chosen die (the image below shows valid placement for a size-3 tile at a map entrance). Placing the tile is indicated by lightly shading the covered hexes, which I do prefer over the Hidden Realms way of drawing lines for walls.
For any space with a number covered by the new tile, you immediately resolve it by making a new die roll (i.e., you don’t use up any of those recorded in the round table) and use the value to decode what the space gives you, which could be a movement point, lethebane, defence points, or combinations of them. You could also find a trap or monster, which you encounter immediately by—you’ve guessed it—rolling a die and looking up the result in a table. With both, you may end up taking magical and/or physical hits, some of which can be avoided using defence points of the appropriate type, but if any hits get past those, they reduce your health count. And if your health decreases enough, you could end up missing an entire round in order to recover—your character doesn’t ever die in this game, just suffers penalties like this. However, that might mean you don’t succeed in the quest as each has a maximum of 20 rounds before you’re forced to quit.
Movement involves using dice values and any additional movement points to move your marker into a different space, e.g., getting into position for the next reveal. You can move onto spaces that haven’t been revealed yet, but it will cost a damage point.
As mentioned earlier, you don’t enter the boss and mini-boss spaces, but instead sidle up to them. When you’re in an adjacent space and if you think you’re hard enough, you can attack. These critters are stronger than the run-of-the-mill revealed monsters, especially the final boss, so preparation is essential. The rulebook states: ‘There is always one special monster in every lair. The one the rest follow blindly. It is nearly impossible to kill, but it grows weaker as it loses supporters. Facing it without first weakening it would be a suicide mission, but there are those who claim to have done it…’ In other words, defeating the mini-bosses will indirectly make your final battle easier by reducing the number of dice rolls required to tackle the big bad.
At the end of the quest, you may also get the opportunity to make another decision, which might or might not be of benefit to you, before doing post-quest cleanup, resetting some rewards and discarding unused temporary bonuses.
That was a very brief look at playing a quest—a lot of dice rolling, consulting of tables, and strategic thinking about where to move and how to best use those dice values. There is much, much more detail in the comprehensive rulebook, along with several extended examples.
Between quests, you can visit the Marketplace shown on your character card, spending lethebane to buy various one-use items which could help you in your next quest. You can also convert experience points into Talents, which provide a range of ongoing boosts.
After that, it’s back to the storybook to see what your next quest will be…
Crowdfunding Campaign
As I’m writing this, there’s not a lot on the Gamefound page, as the campaign is currently in its ‘pre-launch’ phase, prior to the full launch in September. However, you will find some nice pictures, a brief outline of the game and available rewards, and most notably a rulebook download (but not the storybook), enough to get a feel for the game, especially if you’ve played Hidden Realms.
Spyros and Myrto have chosen to use Express Crowdfunding, a recent innovation which kind of converts Gamefound into a storefront! It’s for creators who have their final product ready to ship, and backers actually buy it rather than pledge for a future purchase. It does seem to me an odd concept for crowdfunding, but it makes business sense for Forgotten Paths to use a mechanism like this as the delivered material is digital in form here, and the creators have all their assets ready to go. It’s also where they’ll get people to see the project: Myrto told me, ‘Technically, it is not a project in need of crowdfunding, but that’s where people are.’
I do find the concept of stretch goals (some of the character sheets, the map of the whole island, and a rather nice freeform ‘quest only’ variant of the game) here a little odd; why should someone backing (purchasing right now, remember, because it’s express crowdfunding) the project early have some of their game components held ransom until enough other people choose to back? Still, Hidden Realms was sufficiently successful for all of its stretch goals to be unlocked, and I fully expect Forgotten Paths to be equally popular, if not more.
Notes from the Creators
When I had a chance to chat with Myrto and Spyros over email just before the pre-launch, I asked how Hidden Realms led to Forgotten Paths. Myrto told me Spyros came up with the idea without any intention to make it a sellable game, but as Hidden Realms: The Mummy’s Tomb came together, they started thinking that might be an option. As mentioned above, they were concerned about getting the game in front of enough people, which is why they chose the crowdfunding route.
Hidden Realms started with only three maps in the game, but it became apparent from backer reactions that it would be important to extend beyond that to ‘make the project as rich as possible.’ Forgotten Paths is a much larger project, addressing that aspect right from the outset.
They also acknowledged the assistance of experienced crowdfunding creator Florian Fiedler in presenting the campaign and in navigating Gamefound’s processes. ‘Without him, that campaign wouldn’t have been as successful and we’ll be forever thankful for his help.’ Myrto adds, ‘I’d say most of the problems we faced were small but stressful for first time creators. Business info, tax information, VAT and how it works for different countries, the process of creating a project on Gamefound, technical questions, not knowing how much time to leave the preview page up and how much time to let the campaign run, things like that were the ones that kept stressing us and consumed a lot of our time. Ironically, nothing relative to the game, only secondary tasks that always get in the way…’ As I’ve said elsewhere, game creators can be great designers, but not so hot on the business side of things! But it’s clear from examples like this, if people put in the effort, they can do a great job.
The Hidden Realms campaign surpassed Spyros and Myrtos’ expectations and its success led, indirectly, to Forgotten Paths. Myrto says, ‘At first, we focused on expanding Hidden Realms, but all our good ideas turned out to be disasters, so we decided to create something new,’ and ‘one thing led to another and we ended up with a 49-page storybook, 18 maps and 9 characters.’ I suspect she’s being quite modest, and ‘one thing led to another’ is hiding a lot of hard work.
Because Spyros and Myrto been through the mill once, the process this time round is less stressful. ‘The experience from the first project truly paid off and gave us room to go the extra mile and create something we are really proud of.’
But there’re always some doubts. Myrto says, ‘We can’t know how Forgotten Paths will be received and if the campaign will be a success, but we know we did the best we could and then some more. The rest is up to the community.’ And I wish them every success.
Verdict
This is a nicely designed and well-presented game. It is a lot more complex than the previous game, but the rulebook does a good job of explaining things—though you might need to keep it at hand to flick through from time to time. The first quest is also a gentle introduction to the game, while the complexity ramps up as you progress.
Overall, I’d say that if you like roll-and-write dungeon crawlers, and especially if Hidden Realms piqued your interest, do check out Forgotten Path.
About the author
Current favourite boardgames are Ark Nova and Spooktacular, with a side of Terraforming Mars and Paleo. When not playing games or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside over 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). In any time left over after all that, L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
