If you're getting sick of these things just say so.



Zebulon is the first of my "Mythlands" sub-set of the team. Each character card has a name and a version. "Zebulon" is the name and "Mythlands" is the version. This was my way of keeping the Mythlands crew a part of the greater Lair Legion, but it also lets me play around with some Mythlands specific effects.

Zebulon is fairly basic. Since he is an elf, he gets toys, or in this case, equipment. He has the keyword "Backup", which means his ability has to be used before combat starts. I chose to give most of the Mythlands characters Backup powers since they were all about providing support to Maggie and Griff's parents on their quest.



Next we have yet another Fleabot. Fleabot is one of the few Mythlands characters without a Backup power, but I wanted to play around with the idea that he became powered by turning a key in the Mythlands. When his key is fully cranked, AKA when you have the initiative, he is a force to be reckoned with. When he is wound down, however, AKA when you don't have the initiative, his stats are far smaller than a 4 cost character would normally be.



Finally for today we have Visionary. I chose to reflect Visionary's tendency to surround himself with great friends who can do the heavy lifting in battle. Rally means you get to look at the top card of your deck; if it is a Mythlands character card, you get to keep it, if not it goes on the bottom of your deck. Since Visionary was cut off from asking the rest of the Legion for help while in the Mythlands, I thought it appropriate that he couldn't rally for the "regular" Lair Legion.

~Hat~

Having a different subset of cards specifically for the Mythlands. I liked the ideas behind all of them... really well thought out. Plus, that was one of my favorite adventures, so that never hurts either!

Well, when I realized you did a whole set of Mythlands character portraits, it only made sense in my mind to highlight the Mythlands team. The art is too gorgeous not to use.

~Hat~

Are that I've never been able to grasp the rules (probably because that happens any time numbers are involved) and...unlike actual writing, there's zero capability for a character to surprise everyone.

Someone like Visionary is a good example. Most of the time, number-wise, he'd be one of the worst cards you can possibly draw because he doesn't have the strength/stamina/damage stats. He might be able to rally another card, but the odds are still dead set against you - the most powerful cards are very few. But when he's written, Visionary is highly capable to the point of being overestimated. Usually he's teamed badly, but manages to come through anyhow.

Faite is another who couldn't win a fair fight by the numbers. Her capability lies in the ability to modify her surroundings, which is something more abstract and unpredictable than can be figured out easily with numbers. I suppose you *could* stretch it a tiny bit by giving her related or unknown power and a rating to go with it, but then anyone playing the game might think that's ridiculous and unfair.

Not true, actually.

There are 4 types of cards; Characters, Locations, Equipment, and Plot Twists. Just like a story, there are Plot Twists to change what happens. For example, Visionary might be attacked by another character, and while that character is bigger than Visionary, Vizh might have a Nasty Surprise in store for the attacker.



All of a sudden Visionary is a much bigger threat.




Actually, Visionary is far from the worst character you could draw. See, each turn you play a resource and gain 1 Resource Point. You use Resource Points to recruit characters. So on Turn 1, you have 1 Resource Point, Turn 2 you'd have 2, etc. So yes, you don't want to recruit Visionary on Turn 8, he's a great play for Turn 2 because he has the potential to get you extra cards. Card advantage is key to success in any card game.




There are characters with very low attack and defense values that have a power that is very effective; often when a character has a great power they might have lower stats to balance the effect. For example:



Lady Shiva is a 7-cost character. A standard "body" for a 7-drop is about 15 or 16 ATK and 15 or 16 DEF. Lady Shiva is therefore very small for her recruit cost, but she has the ability to remove a character from the board without even attacking it. It's a very powerful ability, so to balance it the designers gave her much smaller attack and defence values.

~Hat~

Even so, the numbers are designed such that it's extremely rare that a very weak character will just happen to have something else picked to help him. Probably winning at blackjack has better odds.

The point isn't that it's impossible, just that the vast majority of the time players will hate drawing a Visionary card because it most likely won't last long. In PVB stories it's quite the opposite - we just wait to see how he gets himself out of this mess.





What I'm getting at here, and why I have so much difficulty with statistics-based games is that I'm terrible with math. I once attempted to write for another shared universe, but it was run by D&D-type statistical gamers. I was literally expelled from it because I could not provide statistics for the characters I was using.

Basically the conflict was that they wanted every story that was written and submitted to conform to statistical analysis and rolls of the dice, and I thought it was more fun and interesting to have surprise twists. I got a lot of "you can't do that, the stats don't support it" and the either the stories were rejected outright, or if it slipped through because someone was in a hurry, it was pulled later and other stories re-written to remove mine from continuity. The other writers got tired of my inability to grasp the numbers and voted me out.

Part of the problem, of course, was my tendency to create characters who weren't really fighters but were highly creative. That caused a problem either for me or for them, because statistically they should have turned up dead in each story. Rather than let them die and create new characters each round as in a tabletop game, I pulled clever surprises instead.

So to this day I feel like a numbers system for characters is extremely limiting. I guess it's good for keeping things on track during a game that needs strict rules (though I'd never really get a handle on it), but it's no substitute for good storytelling.