Glistening Forge: Gemstones

Hello everyone.

Thanks for reading this blog :)

Today I bring you a new type of Item card for my expansion Glistening Forge: Gemstones.

Level 3 - Ruby Skull

People who have played a lot of this wonderful game will have noticed that in the end there are many Weapons that get boring or repetitive. There are always going to be certain Weapons that are better than others for certain Heroes.

Gemstones have been created to make players more hesitant about replacing their existing Weapon with a new one that has appeared in a chest.

Sometimes, playing this game you get the feeling that Heroes are limited to level 3 and that you are not going to be able to create more difficult adventures without having to add a lot of homebrew rules.

When I started thinking about how to make my expansion, Glistening Forge, I had the question of how to make the Heroes seem more powerful without changing the Hero cards and without including new levels. The obvious thing to do was to include better Weapons and Spells but this had the problem of needing new dice and I wanted to use only the original components so no one would have to buy custom dice. What if I could use black dice?

So I came up with the concept of Gemstones (inspired by the Diablo II video game). Gemstones are magical stones that can be applied to Weapons to make them more powerful.

How do they work?

Player aid card about Gemstones 

 

• Gemstones are a new type of Item that you can find inside Treasure Chests.
• A Hero can apply a Gemstone to a Weapon as an action.
• When applied to a Weapon, they do not count toward the maximum number of Items a Hero may possess.
• A Hero can only apply a Gemstone to a Weapon that uses no black die or that uses a different type of black die.
• A Hero cannot apply more than one Gemstone to a Weapon.
• A Hero can only apply a Gemstone to a Weapon of the same or inferior level.
• Once applied, a Gemstone cannot be separated from a Weapon and, if the Weapon is discarded, the Gemstone will be discarted too.
• As they are a new type of Item, a Hero can give a Gemstone to another Hero using one of the Hero's two actions per turn.
• If a Hero uses one of his actions to give a Weapon already paired with a Gemstone to another Hero, the Gemstone goes with the Weapon.

Example of using a Gemstone applied to a Weapon

In the example in the image above, you can see how a player has used one of his Hero's two actions to apply the Gemstone “Eye of the Abyss” (Level 2) to the Weapon “Resolution Crossbow” (also Level 2). Now, every time he uses this weapon, the hero will roll 1 yellow die, 1 blue die, the Special die and the Disarm Traps die... and the result of the four dice will be applied.

That is, this weapon now does 2 to 4 Hit Points, has a 50% chance of recovering 1 Spell Point and an 83% chance of 'Expelling' the impacted Monster if it is an Undead, BUT it also has a 16.6% chance of reviving the last Monster that died.

If later the Hero opens a chest and finds a new Weapon, will it be so easy to decide which Weapon to keep?

Example of an incorrect use: an attempt has been made to apply a Level 1 Gemstone into a Level 2 Weapon.

In the example in the picture above, you see how a player has tried to use one of the two actions of his Hero to apply the “Wishing Star” Gemstone (Level 1) to the Weapon “Resolution Crossbow” (Level 2). This is not allowed. The gemstone will still count towards the maximum limit of Items that Hero can have.

What types of Gemstones are there?

There are as many types of Gemstones as there are black dice in the base game. That is, there are 4 types of Gems and I have created 20 new cards:

• Gemstones that use the Search die: 2
• Gemstones using the Disarm die: 7
• Gemstones using the Special die: 10
• Gemstones that use the 'Expel' die: 1

The best ones are the ones that use the Special die and, precisely for that reason, they will not be usable on many Weapons, since only one Gemstone can be apply to a Weapon that does not already use a black die or uses a black die of a different type. I hope this will improve the variability of Weapons used by the Heroes. 

About the Gemstone level restriction

As a Level 1 Gemstone can only be applied to Level 1 Weapons, it may happen that, after playing many games with the Gemstones, I decide to increase the level of some Gemstone card so that this rule is not so restrictive.

Download

Here you can download the template to create your own Gemstones.

Here you can download the 20 Gemstones I have created for Glistening Forge.

What is your opinion about the Gemstones?