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Hey everyone,

Welcome to Part 2 of our Guide to Summoners Fate. In Part 1, we revealed why the characters of Summoners Fate look up at you. We also talked about the four key gameplay mechanics of adventures in Summoners Fate:

1. Exploration
2. Strategic Resource Management
3. Tactical Turn Based Combat
4. Team and Deck Building

Today, we talk about what’s involved in an adventure and deep-dive into our distinctive exploration mechanics.



Your goal in Summoners Fate is to guide your chosen summoner on an adventure to fulfill the cosmic prophecy. An adventure starts with you choosing your summoner and difficulty.

Difficulty determines your number of lives (or continues), enemy health and the kinds of monsters you’ll face in battles. Casual mode is designed to help players who are new to the genre learn how to play, while Hardcore mode offers a roguelike experience with permadeath. The standard difficulty is balanced for those seasoned in turn-based tactics and deckbuilding games and new to the unique mechanics of Summoners Fate.

Adventures are divided into 3 chapters. Each chapter contains a world populated with hand-crafted levels and encounters that are selected through our innovative procedural curation system to ensure you'll have a unique experience each time you play. I call out our term “procedural curation” to address concerns that the quality of content might suffer from “procedural generation”. All of our game’s content is designed by hand, not randomly generated, and each level and encounter is carefully tested for quality. What our procedural algorithm does is choose random combinations of content and distributes it into a solvable puzzle.

To complete a chapter, you must find the boss’s lair and defeat the boss to open a portal to the next world. Chapters increase progressively in difficulty and take about an hour to complete.

Fun Fact: With 20 distinctive summoners to choose from, there’s 60 hours of quality gameplay to complete one adventure with each.



Each chapter of a Summoners Fate adventure begins in a new procedurally generated world where you must find and defeat a powerful boss who guards the portal to the next world. The world itself is a series of seamlessly connected grid-based levels that may be dungeons, caves or wilderness. Navigating the world is as easy as clicking or dragging where you want your party to go. With our open-world design, you’re free to move in any direction and complete challenges in any order you wish. Your map will help you avoid getting lost by indicating your current position and the areas you’ve explored.

Exploring a forest world

Consult your map to avoid getting lost in the depths of the dungeon.

[h2]Mist of Mayhem[/h2]

Unexplored areas are shrouded in darkness by the “mist of mayhem”. Entering the mist is a bit of a thrill, as you never know what wondrous surprise or formidable challenge awaits you. Take a deep breath and a bold step into the unknown to reveal whether you’ve found a shop, treasure, campsite, enemies or something special we call Fate Encounters.

An orc ambush is one of many possibilities you may encounter when entering the mist of mayhem

[h2]Fate Encounters - Roll Dice to Change Your Fate[/h2]

Fate Encounters are light role-playing story scenarios where you get to make choices on behalf of your summoner. The outcome of your decision is decided by “fate”, which is represented by the roll of a twenty sided die or D20. During your adventures, you'll acquire additional dice which you can use to increase your odds of a successful outcome.

Here’s an example where we’ve found a caged bear who’s been abandoned in the woods. Freeing the bear could be risky (I mean, it’s a bear after all…) but there’s a chance that the bear may like us and join our team. Let’s roll the dice and find out…

Bear joins our party as a Guardian. Guardians are permanent allies that protect your Summoner throughout your adventure.

Fate encounters are a signature part of exploration in Summoners Fate and include a wide-variety of exciting possibilities such as helping a fallen angel, turning lead into gold at an alchemy table, or stumbling on a goblin birthday party.

Fun Fact: Our company name, D20Studios, comes from the twenty-sided dice commonly used to resolve the outcome of player choices in role-playing games. D20’s played a significant role in our first game, Hero Mages, as well as in Summoners Fate.

[h2]Lore - Our Unique Way of Telling Stories[/h2]

Summoners Fate has a unique approach to storytelling. There are no complex names, politics or locations to burden your memory. There is no character dialog to scroll through. What remains is a personalized and emergent story experience that unfolds through your interactions in the game. This is accomplished by our signature lore mechanic.

Lore is a collection of knowledge and secrets about the uniquely generated world you are exploring. Scrolls containing lore can be dropped by defeated enemies and discovered while searching objects. Lore scrolls will:

1. Reveal secrets about specific characters or events you will encounter in the uniquely generated world you are currently exploring
   
2. Reveal the identity of the world boss and tactics useful for defeating them
   
3. Reveal intriguing insights about the world of Summoners Fate (this is called "universal lore")
   

Lore certainly paints a picture, doesn't it? If you see this lore, a Skeleton Dragon inhabits your world.

The writing style in Summoners Fate is a combination of atmospheric and sensory-driven storytelling, playful humor and informative tactics. In conjunction with the world’s procedural curation, lore cultivates emergent storytelling that makes each adventure unique and connects you to the characters you so diligently command in battle.



I hope you enjoyed this entry in the Guide of Summoners Fate. Next time, we'll examine how strategic resource management plays a role in your dungeon crawling adventures.

Hey everyone!

Thanks for stopping by our page. Today, I’ll be kicking off a series of posts dedicated to introducing you to the lore, characters and mechanics of Summoners Fate.

For those new to Summoners Fate - it’s a turn-based tactics and deckbuilding game that challenges you to command fantasy characters in novel ways and master creative strategies.

The gameplay of Summoners Fate revolves around 4 key gameplay elements:

1. Exploration
   
2. Strategic resource management
   
3. Tactical turn-based combat
   
4. Team and Deck Building
   

But before we dive into that, let’s start with answering your first burning question: What is this intriguing game and why are the characters looking up at me? Well, read on my friends.



The world of Summoners Fate isn’t a single realm or land. Rather, it is a multiverse of infinite worlds, each representing a manifestation of the cosmic potential. Unlike other games where you play as a single character, in Summoners Fate, you command the destiny of hundreds of diverse characters through ever-changing adventures. Each time you begin a new adventure, you’re presented with this prophecy:



You, the player, are what Summoners call the Guide. You see, to the Summoners, you are extremely important because you decide their destiny. Only with your wits and creativity can they hope to survive in their journey, defeat the bosses in each world, and fulfill the cosmic prophecy. This is why you see your Summoner and other characters you recruit look up at you (literally). Their eye contact connects you to them and their world, and it signals that they are ready to receive your commands.

Through your Summoner, you play the “hand of fate,” a literal hand of cards representing magical spells, equipment and characters you can bring into the world. The spells themselves divide into five schools of magic, each representing a different emanation of creation that brings the world into existence (we’ll cover this in a future post). Should your Summoner perish in battle, your link to the world will sever and your heroes will be defeated.

One of our goals for Summoners Fate is to capture the feeling of playing a classic, miniature-based tabletop board game. I want the game to feel both familiar to fans of this genre and approachable to new players. And as you can see, there’s also a very important connection between the world perspective and the characters you command.

Thanks for reading! In our next update, we’ll talk about how Exploration works. Follow us to be notified.

Hey everyone!

Hi, I'm Ross Przybylski, game developer and founder of D20Studios. I started in 2006 with the creation of Hero Mages. Summoners Fate will be our first title on Steam. It's my pleasure to join the community here!

I'm passionate about making games because I really enjoy bringing people together in a common space where they can creatively interact. I particularly love the strategy genre because winning is not a matter of reflexes, but a matter of wits.

My goal for Summoners Fate is to bring the best elements of turn-based tactics, strategy and card play together in a fast and fun experience that players will enjoy for years to come.

Position and facing matter in Summoners Fate. Use cards to manipulate the environment and gain tactical advantage.

I'm a community driven developer, and I look forward to getting to know you and learning what I can do to deliver the best game experiences.

~Ross