Video Game / For the King

For the King is a video game developed by IronOak Games and released in 2018.

It has a main story mode, which is a Western RPG with Roguelike elements, and several bonus gameplay modes.

In the main story, the king of Fahrul has been murdered and the land is being overrun by strange creatures and cultists worshiping the chaos god Omus. The story followers a party of ordinary villagers who set out to discover the truth behind the king's death and ultimately brave the dark tower in which dwell the leaders of the chaos cult.

Other game modes are:

• Frost Adventure — A new quest: explore the snowbound northern lands and claim the treasure that's reputed to lie at the summit of Frostbite Peak.
• Into the Deep — A new quest: explore the oceans and foil an invasion by the Merlings.
• Lost Civilization — (2021 DLC) A new quest: explore the tropical rainforest and save the world from a planetary conjunction.
• Dungeon Crawl — More dungeons, less plot.
• Hildebrant's Cellar — A single endless procedurally-generated dungeon crawl.
• Gold Rush — A multiplayer competitive mode.

With the exception of Gold Rush, all modes can be played as a single-player game (with one player controlling each character in turn) or as a multiplayer game (with each character controlled by a single player).

Followed by a sequel - For The King II in 2023.

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This game contains examples of:

• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Outside special encounters, items and services have a standard price across the world, which rises over time as the creeping crisis makes them more valuable. The price of basic Healing Herbs can rise more than thirty-fold by the endgame.
• Anti-Armor: Among the many Status Effects that can be inflicted in combat are Armor Down, which reduces the target's physical Damage Reduction by a set amount for a few turns, and Resistance Down, which reduces their resistance to magical damage. The effects can't damage Hit Points or reduce armour below zero, only clear the way for other attacks.
• Anti-Debuff:
  • Certain creatures have immunity to specific harmful Status Effects, such as The Undead's immunity to Bleed. Player Characters can gain immunities by wearing protective equipment.
  • A few rare pieces of equipment allow characters to cast spells that remove harmful status effects from a target character or the whole party.
  • Inverted with the "Wet" status effect, which removes the target's immunities. Zig-zagged further with items that grant immunity to Wet.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Accomplishing something that awards a chaos reduction while the chaos level is at zero will knock the next increase off the timeline instead, so you never waste a major award.
• Apocalypse Cult: The villains of the main campaign are chaos cultists whose attempts to summon the dark god Omus are corrupting the landscape and will ultimately bring about the end of the world.
• Apocalyptic Log: One type of non-combat random encounter involves finding the remains of an earlier adventurer, some of which are accompanied by journal entries hinting at what befell them.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: A wide variety of weapons have special attacks that ignore the target's Armor and Resistance points on a perfect success.
• Artificial Insolence: Status Effects include "Confused", which randomizes the target's actions on their turn, and "Scared", which forces them to try to flee the combat. "Confused" can also be self-inflicted through some alcoholic drinks.
• Bag of Sharing: Averted, each character has their own inventory and coinpurse. The party can't even use items on each other in battle, only pass them back and forth.
• Basilisk and Cockatrice: Cockatrices are introduced in the Lost Civilization DLC as one of several creatures with the new Petrification attack. They're depicted as large monstrous cockerels; a fully grown cockatrice has additional dragon-y features including horns and a long spiky tail.
• Battle Trophy: Each region on the world map includes a boss-level character called a Scourge. Each Scourge is a distinct character, and defeating a Scourge scores you their unique headwear, which will have some useful set of traits, such as conferring immunity to all status effects.
• Beast Man: "Beastmen" are low-level enemy type that spawn in the Guardian Forest, resembling humanoids with fur, snouts, and tusks. Per the lore, they use makeshift weapons or those looted from their slayed enemies.
• Book Ends: The Lost Civilization quest begins with a fight against a flock of young weak cockatrices, and ends with a final boss fight against an ancient and very powerful cockatrice.
• Breakable Weapons: Not all weapons in the game, but some. A variation; rather than breaking after a set number of uses, a weapon with the breakable property will come apart in your hands the first time you get a Critical Failure while attacking with it. Types of breakable weapon include:
  • Equipment seen wielded by common enemies, mostly goblin-made, which is depicted as being rather makeshift and has a small but ever-present possibility of breaking.
  • The crystalline weapons (obsidian staff, sapphire sword, etc.) which are usually only obtainable as quest rewards or in the night market; on any given attack, a crystalline weapon will either succeed perfectly and deliver massive damage or fail and shatter (and unlike with the first class of weapon, the player is explicitly prevented from spending focus points to avoid a fail).
  • In "Frost Adventure", the Ancient Weapons stored in the royal vault have extremely powerful attacks, but are a bit fragile (perhaps with age) and will break on a crit fail.
• Chaos Is Evil: The villains of the main story are adherents of the chaos god Omus, and chaos is depicted as generally a bad thing.
• Character Class System: Each character belongs to a particular class, which determines their starting stats, starting equipment, and special abilities. As part of the theme that these are ordinary people stepping up to save the kingdom, the character classes are named after the job the character had before the crisis hit: for instance, the basic melee fighter class is "Blacksmith", the basic ranged fighter class is "Hunter", and the basic mage class is "Scholar".
• Character Customization: Each character class has a "male" and a "female" character model, which can be tweaked with skin color, hair color, costume color (which any clothing item the character equips will change to match), and starting outfit. Names are also fully customizable.
• Cheap Gold Coins: The only unit of currency in the game is the Fahrul gold piece, and even the cheapest item in the game is worth one gold piece.
• Class and Level System: Each character starts out at Level 0 in a particular character class (defined as their occupation before they started adventuring). Gaining Experience Points leads to leveling up. In the quest-based game modes, including the main story game, the final confrontation features Level 10 enemies.
• Clock of Power: The Golden Hourglass is an artifact trinket that boosts the owner's movement rate and their speed in the Combatant Cooldown System. It's won from the Old One, a Time Master Scourge who makes the PCs randomly skip their turns while he's active.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: Common items have a grey background in the inventory, uncommon items are blue, rare items are purple, and artifacts are red. Rarity is loosely correlated with overall power, but aside from the scaling numerical benefits of pipes, there's no guarantee that a higher-tier item will be more useful than a lower-tier one.
• Combatant Cooldown System: Characters are slotted into the Visual Initiative Queue in increasing value of ([Current Round]÷[Character Speed]), which can let characters with a much higher Speed stat take more turns in the combat than slower ones. This can be manipulated by speed-boosting effects and attacks that slow an enemy.
• Combat Exclusive Healing: "Cure"-based character abilities remove negative status effects but can only be used in combat, costing the user their turn. Downplayed with "Party Heal", which can also be used in the "Ready" phase between fights inside a dungeon, but not in The Overworld. Otherwise, characters need to spend precious consumable items.
• Curse of the Pharaoh: The Buried Temple, found in the desert region of the world map, has Egyptian-inspired architecture and all the level bosses are Mummy Lords with curse attacks.
• Cutscene Drop: When one player character enters a dungeon, the entire Player Party is drawn in from The Overworld. This can be Exploited for the free movement to regroup the party, making it easier for them to split up to handle other tasks.
• Damage Reduction: A character's Armor stat is subtracted from the Hit Point damage of each incoming physical attack, to a minimum of zero, while their Resistance stat does the same for magic damage. Protective equipment, spells, consumables, and other sources can all raise Armor and Resistance.
• Devious Daggers: Among NPCs, knives are used by thieves and scamps — Fragile Speedsters whose Signature Move is to try to cut the PC's purse and flee combat. Their attacks aren't powerful but can be Armor Piercing.
• Difficulty Levels: Most of the game modes (Hildebrant's Cellar and Gold Rush are the exceptions) offer three difficulty levels, described as "Apprentice", "Journeyman", and "Master", which affect things like starting stats and equipment, frequency of item drops, how fast the opponent difficulty escalates, etc.
• Double Unlock: Unlockable Content is unlocked by spending Lore points in the Lore Store, but before you can spend points on an item you have to unlock the item's listing by fulfilling some condition that varies for each item. About half the items are related to milestones in the main story quest (some listings are unlocked when you attempt the quest for the first time, more the first time you beat the Disc-One Final Dungeon, and so on); others are related to milestones of other kinds, either numerical (tributing a statue or dedicating a sanctum enough times will unlock a better kind of statue or sanctum) or qualitative (such as an item of sailor clothing that is unlocked after the first time you sink a boat); still others are related to specific encounters (such as the Monk character class, which is unlocked by finding and completing a specific random encounter in the Frostbite Adventure quest that involves rescuing a trapped monk).
• Dragon Hoard: In "Frost Adventure", the fabled treasure of Frostbite Peak turns out to be the hoard of a large and bad-tempered ice dragon.
• Dual Wielding: Dual weapons include daggers, hammers, and even maracas. They're treated as a single two-handed weapon; you can't equip two one-handed weapons. They vary in effect and in the stat they're keyed to, but all of them grant boosts to speed and Critical Hit chance.
• Dungeon Crawling: Key milestones in the story game mostly involve exploring an ancient cavern/crypt/labyrinth, fighting enemies and disarming Death Traps, either to retrieve a Plot Coupon or defeating a chaos cult leader lurking at its heart.
• Dungeon Shop: Goblin merchants are among the special encounters that can be found at random within dungeons. They generally offer healing supplies, consumables, and rare items, albeit at a markup.
• Easy Communication: Exaggerated; NPCs can talk cross-country with each other and you as if you were all in a fantasy group call. In the main adventure, even the Big Bad crashes the chat from time to time.
• Elaborate Equals Effective: In general, more powerful weapons are fancier-looking than less powerful weapons of the same type. To some extent this is justified in-universe by the characters starting out as villagers with basic weapons and eventually being able to afford equipment that's magical and/or made for the nobility.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: The game features a number of elemental powers — fire, water, ice, lightning — and each type does extra damage against creatures of one other type.
• Emergency Energy Tank: Firesilk is the game's most powerful healing item, which restores a character to full health and focus. The number of doses of firesilk to be found in the game can be counted on one hand, and most of them are in the stash the characters find just before the final boss fight.
• Emergency Weapon: If a Breakable Weapon breaks on you, or you somehow else lose your equipped weapon during a fight, the default weapon is Bare Fists, with a weak melee attack.
• Equipment-Based Progression: Character Class determines starting stats and abilities, while level only boosts damage rolls and Hit Points, so equippable items and Rare Candy are the primary source of stat boosts, special attacks, and special abilities throughout the game. Though more powerful equipment generally becomes available at higher levels, characters can also get lucky and pick up endgame-quality loot early (or the opposite).
• Escape Battle Technique: "Coward's Clover" allows a character to escape from a battle at the cost of losing their next turn.
• Exclusive Enemy Equipment: Some equipment items, such as the various types of goblin weapons, can only be obtained as a Random Drop while looting the corpse of a defeated enemy that was using that equipment. Such weapons are often slightly better than the equivalent normal weapon, but are usually Breakable Weapons.
• Experience Booster: Some items and sanctums give the affected character a percent-based boost to the Experience Points they earn.
• Fantasy Gun Control: Weapons include flintlock pistols and muskets. While they can oneshot most enemies, they have the Necessary Drawback of requiring you to spend an action reloading after you use them, and have a non-zero chance of misfiring and wasting the shot.
• Final Boss:
  • In the main story quest, it's the head of the chaos cult, a powerful wizard.
  • In the "Frost Adventure" quest, it's the dragon who guards the treasure of Frostbite Peak.
  • In the "Into the Deep" quest, it's the ancient sea god awakened by the Fish People to raise the sea level and flood the land.
  • In the "Lost Civilization" quest, it's the dread guardian of the lost temple, which turns out to be the mature version of the first monster you fight at the beginning of the quest.
• Fish People: The Merlings, who are the main enemy in the Into the Deep quest and also occasionally appear as random encounters in the main story quest.
• Flying Seafood Special: The Puff Puff is an oversized floating blowfish that pops like a balloon when defeated.
• Glass Weapon: Three tiers of them — swords, rods, bows, and lutes can all be found in glass, sapphire (apparently not a crystal), and obsidian. It isn't explained how, for example, one could draw a glass bow, but as a small nod to physics, these weapons shatter on a failed attack.
• Global Airship: Toward the end of the main story game, the characters acquire an airship which can be used to zoom around the world map clearing up any unfinished business before heading off to the evil tower and the final confrontation.
• God of Chaos: Omus the God of Chaos is the Greater-Scope Villain of the main campaign, the unseen master of the Final Boss and his Apocalypse Cult, and the ultimate source of the Chaos energy corrupting the world.
• Healing Herb: Most of game's healing items are herbs. There's a herb that restores hit points, one that restores focus points, one that heals poison and elemental status effects, one that removes curses, and so on. Amusingly, they aren't chewed or applied in poultices, but smoked, with the fanciness of a character's pipe dictating how effective they are.
• Healing Spring: Healing springs can appear as random encounters inside dungeons. Only one character gets to drink from each spring, and a stat check determines how much benefit they get from it (from "full health and focus" down through "none" to "lose some health"). It is also possible to find a Fountain of Life on the world map, which offers the possibility of a 1-Up (and a much larger possibility of getting in a fight with the fountain's guardians).
• Humongous-Headed Hammer: Played for Laughs with The Walloper, a torso-sized two-handed hammer that does massive damage but has terrible speed and accuracy. You find the previous owner's head squashed flat underneath it, their body still gripping the haft.
• Inexplicable Treasure Chests: No matter how deep or inaccessible, there's a good chance a dungeon will have an elaborate chest of loot at the end.
• Intoxication Mechanic: Some booze-themed consumables, like rum and Hildebrant's Reserve wine, grant power-ups but inflict the Status Effect "Confused", randomizing the character's actions for a turn or two.
• In-Universe Game Clock: The clock advances with each full round spent in The Overworld. This affects things like shops restocking, scourges awakening, and monsters and events appearing. Some monsters, random events, and locations are only accessible at night or during daytime, with nighttime generally bringing greater overall danger.
• Item Amplifier: There are four tiers of pipe, numerically increasing the benefit of all Healing Herbs consumed.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: Characters move independently on the world map and will spend most of their time in different hexes. While they have to be nearby to join battle together, there's nothing stopping two party members giving a third all the cash to do a supply run back to town.
• Limited-Use Magical Device: Orbs allow any character, regardless of their usual magical ability, to cast a spell with guaranteed success; depending on the type of orb it may be an attack spell that targets the entire enemy group or a healing or buff spell that targets the entire friendly party. Each orb can only be used once. (The exception is the Orb of Infinite Gaze, which is functionally a funny-looking high-level Magic Wand.)
• Load-Bearing Boss: Once the final boss has been defeated in the story game, his evil tower collapses, killing the player characters.
• Loot-Making Attack: The Astronomer's unique ability "Black Hole" has a small chance to trigger at random and instantly reduces the enemy to a chunk of Star Matter, a rare consumable item that grants the party a powerful shield.
• Luck-Based Mission: Between the procedurally generated overworld, Random Drops, Random Events, Random Encounters, and almost every action's outcome being based on a stat-derived dice roll, there's a lot that can happen without the player having a say in it. The central strategy of the whole game is luck control - the game is always transparent with the player's odds of any given outcome, and odds-improving Focus is a precious resource. Learning what risks to take and what to never rely upon is the key to getting far.
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic: Characters can spend points of Focus for automatic successes on stat rolls. However, each character has a small Focus pool and limited means of restoring it, including consumables, leveling up, and rare events.
• Macrogame: Items purchased from the Lore store outside of individual adventures affect all future play, gradually adding more complexity and potential resources.
• Magic Music: The main combat ability of the Minstrel and the Busker. Musical instruments are a class of weapons linked to the Talent ability, often combining attacks with various utility effects.
• Magic Wand: The other main magical weapon apart from the Spell Book. (They're described as "magic staff" and depicted as a two-handed staff, but by TV Tropes definitions they don't qualify as a Magic Staff because you can't hit people with them.) Each allows the wielder to perform a number of spells, usually connected by a theme (fire spells, healing spells, etc.)
• Mana: In addition to their Hit Points, each character has points of "Focus", which can be spent to increase the probability of an action succeeding/getting a Critical Hit.
• Man-Eating Plant: One type of monster that can appear in random combat encounters is a large carnivorous plant.
• Mayincatec: The inhabitants of the Jungle Falls region, featured in the Lost Civilization quest, are an indiscriminate mix of several different Central and South American cultures.
• Mega Maelstrom: One of the possible Random Encounters at sea is a large whirlpool that damages your boat on a failed skill test. Due to the Overworld Not to Scale effect, it could be anywhere from boat- to town-sized.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: The Lost Civilization quest begins with chicken smuggling and ends with a secret cult trying to destroy the kingdom (and the largest, most terrifying chicken Hildebrant has ever seen).
• Mistaken for Dog: One of the new creatures in the 2021 DLC are cockatrices, which are introduced in-game in a mini-quest involving a farmer who bought a flock of cockatrice chicks thinking they were an exotic new kind of chicken.
• Money Multiplier: Some items, such as the Pirate's Coat, give the character a percentage boost to money they acquire from random drops.
• Money Spider: The Random Drops after a battle is pretty much guaranteed to include money unless the opponents are all incorporeal, even if the opponents are all mindless beasts like killer bees who have no reason to be carrying money.
• Monsters Everywhere: The overworld map is littered with an ever-refreshing assortment of enemies that range from hostile wildlife to liches, witches, golems, and slime monsters, even right outside the capital city. Of course, the PCs seem to be the only characters who need to traverse the land rather than just spawn at their destination.
• Mooks Ate My Equipment:
  • The Status Effect "Acid" destroys a random piece of equipment unless the target gets an Anti-Debuff or ends the combat before the start of their second turn. It can be inflicted as a special attack by a few monsters, including the Festering Blob.
  • Mimics and a rare few other monsters have a special attack that threatens to destroy a random item the target is carrying. It's appropriately called "Chomp".
• Non-Damaging Status Infliction Attack: Various physical and magical weapons grant special attacks that inflict specific status effects on a perfect attack roll. Some of those attacks are pure debuffs, like the lose-a-turn effect of a Fire Wall or a Disarm.
• Ominous Clouds: While a Scourge is awake and affecting the game world, swirling purple clouds appear above their lair.
• One-Hit Kill: The Astronomer, a character class added in the Lost Civilization DLC, has an attack that causes a black hole to form and suck up one opponent, who is immediately killed. The black hole then drops an orb that can not be obtained any other way, but any other drops that would have occurred if the opponent had died normally are lost. The attack can not be deliberately invoked but happens at random: when a player instructs the Astronomer to attack a single opponent, there is a small percentage chance that the Astronomer will use the black hole attack instead of whatever attack the player chose.
• Only One Plausible Suspect: Early in the story game, it's mentioned that the court wizard has been missing since the king's death. The characters are shocked when he is subsequently revealed to be the king's killer and the head of the chaos cult, but it's not really a surprise to the player because the game has made no attempt to suggest any other possibilities.
• Out-of-Turn Interaction:
  • Player characters can swap out their equipped items and pass inventory items to each other at any time, although they can only use consumables during their turn — potentially a major boost, given the Equipment-Based Progression.
  • "Encourage" is a passive ability that has a chance to trigger during an ally's turn and grant the ally a successful skill roll. "Distraction" is its opposite, forcing a failure on an enemy's turn.
• Painful Pointy Pufferfish: Puff Puffs and Poison Puffs are giant floating blowfish that appear as Random Encounters in aquatic areas. They attack by running into you with their spines and pop like balloons when killed.
• Plot Coupon: A late stage of the story game involves visiting two demon-haunted caverns and retrieving a MacGuffin from each so that the two MacGuffins can be used to complete an airship that can carry the characters over the evil tower's defenses.
• Pre-existing Encounters: Many of the monsters are visible on the world map while they're active, giving the players a chance to dodge them or at least plan ahead. Some kinds of non-combat encounter are also visible on the world map first.
• Random Drop: Defeated enemies have a probability of dropping money and other useful items. The game avoids Impossible Item Drops; the items found after a battle are ones that the opponent(s) might plausibly have been carrying, such as the weapon one was using to attack the player characters or a power-up item that explains one of its abilities. Incorporeal enemies such as ghosts don't drop items at all.
• Random Encounters: Sometimes an encounter will appear without warning in the hex a character has just moved into. Usually these are non-combat encounters such as skill tests, but occasionally a character will be ambushed by a type of monster that would normally be a Preexisting Encounter. Depending on the type of encounter, the player may or may not be offered an opportunity to disengage.
• Rare Candy:
  • Various candies that, on consumption, increase a single stat (physical attack damage, magical attack damage, physical armor, magical resistance, depending on the candy type) by one point.
  • Smoking Scholar's Wort grants XP proportional to the user's pipe tier. It's the only standard way to trigger a Level-Up Fill-Up in the middle of combat.
• Rescue Introduction: The Lost character classes must first be found in a special Random Encounter and then bought in the Lore Store to play. The Monk is partially frozen into a yeti's ice cave in Frost Adventure; the Treasure Hunter was Swallowed Whole and is at the end of a Whale Belly dungeon in Into The Deep.
• Roguelike: The story game is not intended to be completed in a single attempt, but for the players to make multiple attempts that each end in death but result in new learnings and unlock new useful game elements. (In-universe, this represents one group of villagers failing their quest and a new group starting out.) On each attempt, a fresh world map is procedurally generated, containing all the key quest locations but mixing up where they are in relation to each other and also what hazards lie between them.
• Roll-and-Move: When a player character begins their turn in The Overworld, their total hexes of movement are set by their successes on a number of skill rolls, usually against their Speed statistic (Talent when boating; Luck when flying). The number and difficulty of rolls are affected by factors like terrain, weather, and equipped items; and there are a few means of gaining extra movement points.
• Rooftop Confrontation: The heroes confront the Final Boss of the main campaign on top of his Evil Tower of Ominousness. For some reason, they fight their way up from the ground floor to reach him, despite arriving by airship.
• Rotten Rock & Roll: For whatever reason, skeleton bards (including the Royal Droll) produce electric guitar riffs from their lutes when performing their Magic Music.
• Shaped Like Itself: Flavor Text helpfully clarifies that every gold coin is worth its weight in gold.
• Shout-Out:
  • One non-combat random encounter involves finding the journal of an earlier adventurer, who records an encounter of his own with a strange old man who worshiped a turtle god called the Great Atuin.
  • A non-combat random encounter in the Jungle Falls region offers a chance to acquire a golden idol by evading a rolling boulder.
  • In the Lost Civilization quest, you have a choice of looking for a MacGuffin in a desert or on an island. If you choose not to go to the desert, the quest-giver Hildebrant remarks, "I don't like sand, it's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Let's go to the Volcanic Isles."
• Single-Use Shield: The spell of Protection protects a character completely from the next physical or magical attack and then disappears. (If cast on the entire party, each character gets their own individual magical shield that lasts until the next attack on that character.)
• Skeletal Musician: The bone bard is one of the undead enemies you encounter. They attack with musical notes from their stringed instrument that’s also made out of bones.
• Spell Book: The starter weapon of the "scholar" class is a spell book allowing the character to cast a couple of weak attack spells. As the game progresses, they have the opportunity to acquire other more powerful books, each on a particular theme (fire spells, ice spells, healing spells, etc.) A character can only cast spells out of the book they currently have equipped as their weapon.
• Splash Damage: Splash attacks do full damage to the target and half damage to adjacent enemies, in contrast to Area of Effect damage that affects everyone equally. Since a battle has at most three enemies standing side by side, they can damage all three by targeting the central one. "Splash" is usually a trait of specific attacks, but the Woodcutter's passive ability has a chance to apply it to any two-handed melee weapon attack.
• Starter Equipment: Each character starts off with a couple of items determined by their occupation, one of which is a weapon (a blacksmith's hammer, a hunter's bow, a rudimentary Spell Book for the scholar) that is slightly worse than the most basic weapon of that type anywhere else in the game. Depending on the difficulty level, the characters may also start out with other useful items such as healing herbs and a tinder pack.
• Status Infliction Attack: Various physical and magical weapons grant special attacks that inflict specific status effects on a perfect attack roll. Some of those attacks also deal Hit Point damage, like a mace's Stun Attack or a Magic Staff's fire blast; others are pure debuffs, like the lose-a-turn effect of a Fire Wall or a Disarm.
• Suspicious Videogame Generosity: In the evil tower, the room before the final boss fight contains a loot chest which, unlike the random loot in other chests through the game, always and only contains one dose of firesilk (the game's Emergency Energy Tank) for each character.
• Take Your Time: Averted, every turn lets chaos slowly increase, making the game world much more hostile. On the other hand, rushing straight for the next plot objective will quickly get the party in over their head. Balancing taking the time to power up and gain new supplies against getting to the next objective before things get out of hand is part of the strategy.
• Technicolor Toxin: Poison is depicted as a cloud of green gas.
• There Are No Tents: Averted. The "Tinder Pack" item allows a character to set up a campsite with tent and campfire anywhere there's a patch of empty ground, which allows any member of the party to gain the advantages of an Inn or Meditation free of charge. Each tinder pack is single-use, but the campsite persists for several rounds; if you set up a campsite outside a dungeon, it will last long enough for the party to spend a couple of turns resting and meditating up to full health and focus, crawl the dungeon, and then rest and meditate again on the way out.
• Thinking Up Portals: Portal Scrolls create a magical gateway between the activating player character's current location and a map tile of their choice within range. Each scroll is single-use, but the resulting portal lasts for ten rounds with no limit on its use.
• Tinfoil Hat: The headwear in the game includes an item called the Iron Foil Hat, which resembles a tinfoil hat and confers immunity to mind-related status effects such as stun, confuse, and frighten.
• Trauma Inn: Each town contains an Inn where you can stay one turn to regain a significant chunk of hit points and a smaller chunk of focus points, and also a collection of more expensive specialists including the Healer (regain all hit points and remove status effects other than curses), Meditation (regain all combat points), and Blessing (remove curses).
• Turn-Based Combat: In combat, combatants act one at a time while everyone else waits their turn. It's not a strict rotation of everyone getting one action per round; faster characters may get two or more actions between the actions of slower characters, and there are attacks (stuns and hastens) that affect how often a character gets to act.
• The Unchosen One: Integrated into the gameplay at length. The player characters aren't adventurers called upon for a defined quest, but ordinary villagers who volunteer in defence of their home. Their classes are based on their profession, their Starter Equipment is their tools of the trade that are inferior to any purpose-built weapon, and they start at level 0. Yes, zero - they have no adventuring experience, after all. They'll have to stick together and pick a few smart, easy fights to get that first level of experience and start toughening up as professional adventurers. Also, groups of normies stepping up to fight a major threat are likely to die in droves, but each new group can learn from the stories of their predecessors.
• Universal Poison: There is only one kind of poison in the world, found in all venomous creatures, poisonous gases, etc., which has the same status effect (gradually sapping Hit Points) and can be cured with the same herb. It's green.
• Unlockable Content: The reward for completing certain challenges includes "lore" points, which can be exchanged to unlock extra game content, including new character classes, helpful random encounters like traveling salespeople and healers, the Alluring Pools Warp Whistle system, new weapons and other items that might appear in markets and random drops, and a wider range of cosmetic starting outfits.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon:
  • The dark tower in the main story quest, where the characters have to battle up through several levels full of chaos cultists before confronting the Final Boss at the top.
  • Frostbite Peak in the "Frost Adventure" quest, where the characters have to battle up through several levels full of assorted monsters before confronting the Final Boss at the top.
• Video-Game Lives: At all difficulty levels except Master, the party has a shared pool of extra lives, which are represented in-universe as the character only being unconscious and able to be revived by another character during that character's turn. If a character dies when there are no lives left, or if the rest of the party also dies too quickly for any reviving to be done, they stay dead. A character who has dedicated to a sanctum gets an additional individual life; if they die, they will be immediately revived without using one of the party's lives, but the sanctum is destroyed and they lose the other benefits of being dedicated.
• Visual Initiative Queue: The top of the combat screen shows all the combatants' character icons in order for the next few rounds' worth of combat, since some creatures get to act more or fewer times than the standard. Icons also indicate any Status Effects affecting their turn order and highlight the enemy the active character is currently targeting.
• Warp Whistle: Each geographical region contains one Alluring Pool, a mystical location that can teleport you to any other Alluring Pool that you have already visited.
• Weapon of X-Slaying: Several weapons and equippable items grant a percent-based boost to damage against a specific type of creature, like "humanoids", "flying", or "Scourges".
• When the Planets Align: In the Lost Civilization quest, a planetary alignment is imminent. As it approaches, the days get hotter and adventurers take increasing amounts of "sunburn damage" if they are not indoors at the end of each daytime turn.

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