EMBERKIN: BONDS OF AELOREA
A competitive board game for two to four players. Thirty to forty five minutes. You bond with a creature, fight your way across the map, and then everyone converges on the same boss at the end. Most Bond Power wins.
THE WORLD
Aelorea is being eaten by something called the Hollow Blight. It doesn't kill what it touches, it corrupts it, and the things it corrupts keep going. The Emberkin are the creatures that can still stand against it, and at the start of the game you bond with one.
THE PART I ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT
Evolution used to just be a reward. Hit level five, get stronger, no reason not to. That's not a decision, that's a button, and it's also the main reason the game read as a Pokémon knockoff.
So it changes. Evolving costs Blight. The only place that power comes from is the thing you're fighting. Every evolution and every big ability pushes you further along a Blight track. More Blight means more damage. Too much Blight and your Emberkin is lost, either out of the game or turned against the table.
You have to become the thing you're fighting in order to beat it.
That's the version I'm building toward. It is not the version I started with, and working out how to get there is most of season one.
THE THREE
PYROX
Striker · 22 HP → 28 · SPD 4
Evolves into Pyrazeon. Highest damage in the game and the least margin for error.
AQUAVA
Support · 24 HP → 30 · SPD 3
Evolves into Aqualith. Keeps the party standing, which matters more than it sounds once the boss is on the table.
TERRANOK
Tank · 30 HP → 38 · SPD 2
Evolves into Geodrax. Slow, and extremely annoying to remove.
WHAT'S IN V1
Three starters, one evolution each. Twenty four tiles. The Blight track. One boss, the Hollow Blight, 75 HP, scales with player count. Around twenty cards. 3D printed minis and tokens. A paper or cardstock board.
Cut to season two: the third evolution stage, the other three Emberkin, the forty eight tile modular board, items, scouting ahead, dashing, printed tiles.
WHERE IT ACTUALLY IS
Being honest about this is most of the point of the channel, so:
- Concept art
- done. All six forms.
- Lore and bestiary
- done, and full of contradictions I have to sort out on camera.
- Rules
- there are currently two combat systems in my own documents and they don't agree with each other.
- HP numbers
- one document says 20 to 45, another says 80 to 180. Both are mine.
- The map
- has a fire zone and an earth zone and no water zone, despite there being a water starter.
- Balance
- zero playtests. None of these numbers have been proven, they're just internally consistent.
- Prototype
- doesn't exist.
- Minis
- not printed.
I'm not fixing any of that quietly before the first episode.
The audit is the first episode.
GET THE BUILD LOG
Every two weeks I send out what actually happened. What I built, what broke, what I had to throw out and start again. Same stuff that's in the video plus the parts that didn't fit.
No spam, and I'm not selling you anything.