The Kickstarter campaign of One More Quest is about to finish and, curious about the project, we decided to interview the authors.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve also taken a look at the quickstart (you can find our first impressions here), but it wasn’t enough for us.
Horrible Guild’s team was extremely kind in revealing so many new details and we decided to share them with you. Here are all the news!
Some fans have asked us if there will be a future version in Italian; you can say something about it?
We cannot announce anything for sure yet, but we are in negotiations for the localization of One More Quest in several languages, obviously including Italian. However, these are long and complicated matters, so for the Kickstarter campaign we have chosen to focus on the English version; having only one language makes everything easier both from a production and logistical point of view.
Dungeon Fighter (one of your board games) is already a few years old. Have you thought about One More Quest for a while or the idea suddenly popped up after all this time?
True, Dungeon Fighter originally came out in 2011… so it’s been over ten years already! Regarding One More Quest, the idea of making an RPG out of it came to Lorenzo Silva when designing the second edition of Dungeon Fighter for the Kickstarter campaign that we successfully concluded in late 2020. In fact, the very first version of One More Quest (which at the time was called “Monstronomicon”) was revealed mid-campaign as a “surprise add-on” for the Dungeon Fighter campaign.
At first the idea was to do something simpler; a kind of “monster manual” with basic rules on how to fight monsters using the mechanics of Dungeon Fighter and how to create characters based on those of the board game. But having a long history as role players, things quickly got out of hand. “Monstronomicon” got bigger and more ambitious… until we realized it was a shame to relegate it to a “simple” Dungeon Fighter add-on; the project deserved (and required) a much greater investment of time than we had initially budgeted.
Hence the decision to cancel “Monstronomicon”, reimburse the brave backers who had supported it during the Dungeon Fighter campaign, and begin planning a dedicated Kickstarter campaign. With the decision to also give the project a new name, One More Quest was finally born!
What is the hardest roll in your experience? And, since you can also create impromptu launch modes based on the situation, which is the strangest situation you remember?
Since the release of Dungeon Fighter, we’ve learned that the question “which is the hardest shot” has no answer. A shot that is impossible for one person may be as easy for another, and vice versa. The other great lesson learned over the years is that with a little practice any roll is possible! Of course, if we talk about combinations between different rolls, things get a lot more complicated…
However, playing One More Quest can generate some really absurd situations… in a positive way! For example, during a game one of us played a batrachian character (a race of “frogmen” that we created specifically for the game world, Middlewhere). He was armed with a dazzling magic knife called “Dazzling Dagger”, with which he created a strobe light effect in the room. In the meantime the bard of the group played a musical accompaniment with a “unz unz unz” kind of melody. At that point the wizard entered the room dancing like a god, striding in front of the overlords of the dungeon with this groovy background of lights and sounds… which obviously left them disoriented for a moment, allowing the last member of the party to take advantage of the moment of distraction and steal the artifact we needed.
Which differences have you noticed most in your experience between creating a board game and a roleplaying game?
Tough question; as we said before, we have always been avid RPGs players, so we probably already had a certain mental attitude to understand the RPG game design, at least on a subconscious level.
Nonetheless, it was an incredible challenge! The game design of an RPG is very different from the one of a board game; the boundaries of the rules are much more blurred and the center remains, especially in a comic game, the scene that takes place at the table. It is necessary to find a continuous compromise between the narrative part and the mechanical component (the ruleset), continuing to suggest narrative ideas that help the players to immerse themselves and that make the narration flow.
Furthermore, our system comes from Dungeon Fighter, a game of dexterity, which features a fairly high number of failed tests. This has a relative impact on the board game experience, but a much larger impact on the role-playing game. One of the first changes, therefore, was figuring out how to adapt mechanical failure to a narrative game in which the simple “you miss the roll, nothing happens” is a result that does not lead to any consequences and is not fun at all.
We used the philosophy of Fail Forward and we adapted it to the comic direction of One More Quest. Despite the failures, we suggest the narrator to carry the story forward in funny, grotesque or absurd directions. Perhaps, despite a failed roll, your bard still managed to charm the Orc General with whom you wanted to sign a peace treaty… but that also made his Orc wife fall in love with you… and the peace may be in doubt again soon!
There has also been a lot of world-building work compared to an average board game; Middlewhere is a world with more than 20 kingdoms, 40 types of monsters, a millennium of history, many cultures in contrast or in harmony with each other … all always in a comic key. But it is something we love to do; we had already tested ourselves with The King’s Dilemma, so it was less difficult than expected… but equally challenging.
Considering that this way of rolling the dice generates humor and the difficulty of the types of rolls is not balanced from person to person, have you ever tried to play One More Quest with serious tones?
Honestly, no… it’s just impossible! 😀
Thanks again to the authors of One More Quest for what they revealed in this interview; now we just have to wait for this role-playing game to be officially completed and released!