Let's Play Hand of Fate: it's metaphors all the way down.

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Hand of Fate is a 2015 game by indie game studio Defiant Development. I really like Hand of Fate for how unique it is—I've seen it described as an action RPG, but it blends action segments with card drawing, deck building mechanics, and random adventure layouts. The studio got around to making a sequel, but sadly, that was the last game they made.

The Gameplay

The game is easy to pick up and play. A typical session goes as follows:
  • Select the opponent you want to go up against.
  • Build a deck of encounter cards and a deck of equipment cards.
  • Optionally, change your character's starting modifiers.
  • Make your way past the encounters you selected, set up in multiple randomized layouts, managing your resources and equipment along the way.
  • ...and hopefully, defeat that session's opponent! Or die.
Dying may happen a lot. Sometimes it's lack of skill, and sometimes the RNG just fucks with you.

As you progress through the game you unlock even more cards, not all of which are beneficial. You also get to contend with the dealer, who will add his own cards to the deck just to spite you.

The game has a really cool amount of replayability. You can play around with starting decks to modify your encounters and see if they'll give you an easier time, and different weapon and armor builds will change not just the action experience, but modify some encounters as well.

The format

This LP will be somewhat casual. I want to show what it's actually like to play through the game, and while this won't be a 100% LP (unless I die that much), I'll be showing off as much of the unique content as I can such as story dungeons, some of the DLC, and runs of Endless mode to unlock new cards. This LP is getting dialed up to 100. I will be unlocking every encounter the game has to offer.

The audience also voted on some of the game's difficulty modifiers, called Fates, and I'll be be massively fucked overshowing off the Soldier's Training, Nomad, and Merchant Guard fates in story dungeons. We won't use the other ones to play through the game, but we will see what their encounters are about.

Spoilers?

Everything's fair game!

Table of Contents

Part 1 - Jack of Dust
Part 2 - Jack of Skulls
Part 3 - Queen of Dust
Part 4 - Jack of Plague
Part 5 - Endless Mode, first run
Part 6 - King of Dust
Part 7 - Jack of Scales & Bonus 1: Finishing the Soldier's Training encounters
Part 8 - Endless Mode, second run
Part 9 - Queen of Skulls
Part 10 - Queen of Plague
Part 11 - King of Skulls
Part 12 - Endless Mode, third
Part 13 - Queen of Scales
Part 14 - King of Plague
Part 15 - King of Scales
Part 16 - Fate roundup #1
Part 17 - Finishing Murder at Sea and Getting the Dragon Relics[/url]
Part 18 - The Dealer
Part 19 - Encounter roundup
Part 20 - Fate roundup #2
Part 21 - Endless Mode, fourth run

Extra - A further look at the game's resources
Last edited by Anaxite on Wed Dec 22, 2021 2:01 pm, edited 15 times in total.

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Our adventurer started out with normal adventuring life, traveling through the woods, finding simple equipment, going after simple bandits, speaking with Elves... and all the while his life got more and more complicated until he started making some questionable decisions. While we cannot deny that he has done some good in the world, our adventurer has made some strange or horrific choices, was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or was just not the smartest of people. Here is a small list of things that might be weighing on his mind:

So far, the adventurer...
  • Begged an elf for gold coin
  • Got tricked into collecting gold and treasure from deadly mazes most generously agreed to help a goblin with internal politics
  • Killed people and other sentient beings for gold and entertainment
  • Killed hundreds of humans
  • Let himself be robbed just because a ghost wanted it
  • Sold his equipment to a nobleman who only gave back five gold each
  • Destroyed a family by helping their deadbeat son elope with a lover who eventually ditched the son
  • Refused to give food to a local peasant with a starving family
  • Got cursed by a priest
  • Made deals with devils
  • Sold his blood to vampires for gold. Multiple times.
  • Helped the resurrection of a Lich
  • Literally went to hell
  • Sold a part of their soul to a demon for objects
  • Decided that going to a desert where you might get lost was a good idea
  • Angered old gods by praying badly to them
  • Stole from a Guild Master
  • Released a tentacled beast monster from a mage's control
  • Gambled for curses
  • Helped release minotaurs from their maze unto the world
  • Literally sold his child to a bandit
  • Had his gear stolen multiple times by goblins
  • Was cursed by treasure
  • Got exploded in the face by lava golems
  • Walked into a dangerous cave without being careful
  • Fought his way down to the bottom of the Underworld
  • Got gassed by treasure chests
  • Was forced to fight for a Wizard
  • Was eviscerated by many traps
  • Offered his blood to a Desert Cult
  • Was used by Druids in a dark ritual to become their unholy champion
  • Got stung by a scorpion when handling a cursed urn
  • Fought a Kraken and its lizard cult
  • Got cursed by a ghost
  • Enriched Goblins
  • Got sent on a wild goose chase for some dragon relics, getting heavily burned in the process
  • Got burned by a dragon
  • Poisoned a Guild for money
  • Asked an old deity for unimaginable power
  • Resisted the curse of Davy Jones
  • Stole from a royal treasury
  • Literally gambled with the fabric of reality by spinning a wheel... of the gods
----

Do you like extra content? I like extra content. Specifically, I like seeing what makes a video game tick.I want to show you a highlight of some of the assets that make the game what it is. We'll start with...

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(all images below shrunk from their original sizes)

We'll start by taking a look at a screenshot from the game:

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There's a lot going on here! The foreground is an overlay with cards on it, a glow effect, a number, and banners. There's also a 3D area that our avatar and monsters can run around in. You've got sun rays, a sun, and a sky! Let's take a look at the sky.

Very briefly, a Skybox is a way of creating backgrounds to make a video game level appear larger than it is; you enclose the level in a cube, a sphere, or a hemisphere that you then apply a texture to. Hand of Fate has two sets of textures for skyboxes, with the two main ones represented below. I stitched them together to show you how they can be laid out.

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Appropriately dramatic, isn't it? The fifth image in the first skybox is an alternate version of the first, just to have a sun effect. There are also more images to these skyboxes, including a top cloud cover, and some images that have sun textures. These were just the ones that are easiest to stitch left-to-right.

If you think about it, two sky textures is quite enough. We fight indoors way more than we fight outdoors.

Speaking of fighting, how about a look at our enemies?

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The humble ratman, reduced to a wireframe or sculpted toothpaste. But what kind of stuff goes on it?

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A texture, of course. Above you can recognize a skeleton, ratman, lizardman, and bandit; those are the Suits we keep fighting against. Mind you, there aren't just four textures per enemy. There are many variations of skeletons and lizardmen, for example, and speaking of our ratman, I could find three main variations his skin.

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The game internally refers to the three ratmen textures above as mangy, scarred, and plague, and you can see that enemies actually have at least three texture maps:
  1. Showed in front, a color texture. Standard color information
  2. In the middle, either a reflection or a gloss map, to add some shininess.
  3. Behind, a normal map, aka bump map, to give the model more relief.
    [/list=1]
    Bear in mind I resized these textures and laid them out in a convenient way. That said, many objects in the game follow this three texture setup, though anything with metal might have a metallic texture map instead of a reflection/gloss map. You can see that from this texture set for the basic shield:

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    The color is on the left, normal map on the right, metallic map in the center. The textures have also been resized, but are proportionally correct—the metallic map is half the length and width, as not all textures are the same size. The transparency is not a mistake, either; the textures files are really like that.

    There are a few other miscellaneous textures that stood out to me, such as little critters:
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    Sprite sheets for fire animations:
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    And all the different markers to show you an attack is coming. These must be colored by the engine.
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    Unblockable on left, blockable on right.

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    Unblockable, blockable, and a warning cone for offscreen attacks.

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    A reflect marker, which appears over your own head.

    And finally, the tokens we get at the end of a session. Both of them have a normal map, but only the latter has a metallic map that I could see. Maybe the former uses a generic metallic map I don't know about.
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    There are way more textures than I'm showing off, but you get the idea. I want to move on and show off a bit about...

    The cards

    I think it's fair to say that the most prominent, memorable visual elements in the game are all the cards that get played and encountered during a session. They all have a distinctive style, a kind of tarot deck of their own. Did you know how the game engine constructs them? It's pretty cool!

    First, the game loads a 3D object and gives it a card texture. Each texture has a front, back, and an unused area. There are twelve designs.
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    From left to right, top to bottom:
    • Upgrades
    • Shop cards
    • Pain
    • Monster
    • Gain
    • Equipment
    • Endless mode
    • Encounter
    • Failure
    • Chance
    • Blessing/Curse
    • Archetype, the internal word for Fate
    Yes, this list is in reverse alphabetical order. It was my fault it happened when stitching the photos.

    The game can then overlay one of various other textures. For instance, you have borders:
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    Centered elements like the icons for fates:
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    Or in the case of encounters, the entire encounter with its border is the overlay:
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    The game also adds text towards the bottom of the card. It uses the Behrens Schrift font, saved as a texture.

    Keeping elements separate like this makes it a little faster to create new cards, and a grayscale design can save on storage space if you take advantage of the low color.

    One thing to note is that the game uses PNG images for all its textures. It's not an awful idea: PNG is a lossless format with wide support that has an alpha channel and a bit of compression. What's not immediately obvious is that many (if not all) of the textures did have some other compression applied before being converted to PNG. Remember the Encounter card examples posted above? If you zoom in, you'll notice some interesting visual artifacts:
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    The left side of this image shows what happens if you zoom in on one of the card overlays. There is some antialiasing, and it looks clean-ish, but you can also see faint splotches of color. On the right I enhanced the image levels to show you the color blocks. There was definitely compression pre-applied. It's neither bad nor good... it just is.

    Interestingly, I haven't found the icons used to create the "X of Suit" cards such as 2 of Dust, 4 of Scales, etc. Either there's something special about those icons, or maybe the cards are using the Suit Curse icons with a special mask applied.
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    The card art was created by Jesse Gillespie, who also goes by gladlad. He worked with Defiant Development on both Hand of Fate 1 and 2, and created more art for the Hand of Fate: Ordeals board game. I reached out to him on Discord while doing this LP. He seemed pretty happy to have people interested in his work! :) You can read a bit more about his role, and the drawing process, in an interview he gave (archive link here).

    You can find more of his work here.


    When thinking about the game's art style, I don't want to forget its beginnings. Have a look at this Kickstarter page with early screenshots. Though some of the assets look the same, it progressed quite a lot!


    To finish off the art section, the coolest image you might never see...

    The placeholder.

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    Moving on from visual media, we have...


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    Music Layering

    Did you know there are only three battle tracks in Hand of Fate? They tend to repeat, but they're effective.

    Each track has three music files that the game can seamlessly switch between depending on how "dynamic" the action is. There are multiple factors that go into figuring out what "dynamic" means, and I don't know all of them, but your combo meter and how recently you got hit are definitely factors.

    You can see a demo of the layering here: https://youtu.be/wdjA700wXzU

    The music in this game was composed by Jeff van Dyck. You can listen to the OST on the YouTube playlist he made, which also links to buy the music if you're interested. Most of the OST tracks are a bit different from the game's versions.


    The Dealer's Voice

    The dealer's audio clips are roughly categorized in the following sets:
    • Achievement audio
    • Generic anecdotes
    • Cabinet text - clips played when viewing a Court card in the cabinet
    • Story card text - clips played when dealing with an encounter or effect added for story reasons, such as the desert with the Queen of Dust, or encountering a 6 of Scales card in the King of Scales dungeon.
    • Court card text - clips played when dealing with a Court card directly
    • Audio discussing the four relics
    • Dynamic responses to game-wide events such as resource amounts, chance draws, taking stairs, winning a token
    • Dynamic responses to events in story dungeons, such as meeting the boss, death, tokens, boss defeats, etc
    • Encounter-specific voice clips
    • Equipment-specific voice clips
    • Miscellaneous clips, including idle voices
    • Tutorial clips
    There are just over 1,100 audio clips for the dealer's speech alone. That list may seem either short or long depending on how much you've worked with audio but either way, when you consider just how many different combinations and orders there can be, that's definitely enough to be effective.

    There are a few audio clips I couldn't show off in the main LP, but some people who worked on the game gave me the OK to post some clips extracted from the game: https://youtu.be/w4Dxt-2kyzk

    I show off:
    • A few Anecdote-type clips I think didn't play.
    • The various Death clips for combat and starvation... including one that plays when you haven't managed to progress much in the game.
    • Two clips that can play if you manage to make it to the shop with neither food nor money. There aren't many clips for this, but there were more for lack of gold or food.
    • Some voice clips labeled as tutorial clips, for when you keep making a deck you can't play with (too many or too few cards).
    • Some miscellaneous clips, including: A comment that plays if you launch the game a few weeks after your last session, a comment for being really low on max health, a Kickstarter-exclusive clip, and comments if you've had many bad runs in a row.
    • Many idle clips: a few for when you're generally going around pre-dungeon menus, some specifically for when you're looking at equipment cards, and one for when you stick around in your inventory too long.
    Chinese VO

    The game has some interesting language options; Defiant managed to get a wide variety of translations. What's also kinda cool is that there is an option for Chinese audio. That's right—every single one of the Dealer's voice clips have a Chinese equivalent, probably Mandarin. You can see an example in this video as I run through the game's intro and first dungeon with the subtitles on. You'll see the dealer animations were only ever done for English voices.

    The game also has the graphics for a Chinese title screen, so I admit I'm curious about what prompted this particular translation and recording effort. Cool nonetheless.


    bacon

    The funniest sound files are five files labeled bacon01 through 05. It's just the sound of bacon frying, probably used for a fire sound effect.
Last edited by Anaxite on Wed Dec 22, 2021 2:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Part 1 - Jack of Dust (YouTube)

The first dungeon is really short, and serves as a gentle introduction to the game. It only has two floors, with two unique layouts they can take on. You're not in any danger of anything yet.

The Suit of Dust

Dust are the first of four card suits—the main enemy types of the game. These bandits start with basic melee attacks that come out fairly predictably, easily dodged or countered. They're not much of a threat at first, but it's still easy to get careless and take a hit or two.

The Jack of Dust

In the ruins of an ancient temple, among the eternally shifting sand dunes, lives the mysterious leader of the desert bandits. Infamous for his reign of terror over any spice caravans that dare take their chances travelling through his domain, he rules as a king over the barren lands.

Our first boss is the first member of the Court, the twelve named cards among the four suits of the game. He's here mainly to teach about unblockable attacks, but you'll pick up some of the quirks of enemy attack order in this game if you're observant. We'll get more into that later.
Last edited by Anaxite on Thu Nov 11, 2021 2:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Part 2 - Jack of Skulls (YouTube)

Second verse, not quite the same as the first. The second dungeon throws more things at you: equipment variety, new enemy types, new floor layouts, more chance events, and the knowledge that you don't really know how deep a dungeon goes until you reach the end.

As long as you don't do anything stupid, you're not in any huge danger. Still, it's a good time to practice stocking up on equipment. And speaking of which, I really like the Hag's Wraps. Any cheap item with a clear upside and no downside is great in my book.

In the video I mention how visiting shops and going over unknown items (face-down cards) is a great way to identify them. This is true, but I'm not going to do it all the time in the LP for two main reasons:
  • Going through the shop intro all the time is a bit tedious for me, especially if I have no gold.
  • New cards will still show up organically in the LP.
Whatever you do yourself you should get new content unless you try really hard to keep new cards out of your decks.


The Suit of Skulls

Skeletons are a moderate upgrade from bandits. The melee variety can absolutely use their shield to block your attacks, making them momentarily impossible to damage unless you stagger them, use a special ability/artifact, or use another source of damage to your advantage. Riflemen are more of an annoyance due to their unblockable attacks, but their attacks come out slowly and infrequently. You could just walk out of the way if you wanted to.

Skulls are also our first enemy type that's weak to a particular damage type. This might make them seem easier to deal with, but they'll get some more tricks up their sleeve later on...

The Jack of Skulls

Serving as captains to squads of lesser skeletons, these unholy abominations strike fear into the hearts of all warm-blooded folk. For until this fiend is defeated, their legions are, effectively, endless.

He's just a bigger swordsman skeleton. The only real annoyance is his ability to revive fallen allies of his Suit, which can be interrupted by a few good attacks. If you equipped a mace, the fight is as good as over once you take him out.

If you didn't equip a mace, however, you'll have a slightly harder time taking him down while the entire battlefield is after you.
Last edited by Anaxite on Thu Nov 11, 2021 2:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Now that we've had a glimpse of Fates, it's time for instant regretaudience participation time!

Fates are both the game's difficulty setting and its rules modifiers. You've got the regular easy/normal/hard difficulties, as well as nine new modifiers that were added in a later update. All fates aside from the default have their own quest line to complete, rewarding you with special equipment at the end of the quest line.

This LP will showcase a couple of the DLC fates, as chosen by you! For every three story dungeons I go through, I will do my best to survive by the rules handed down to me.

:!: Pick three fates and put them in your reply. I'll do my best to use the most popular ones in future story dungeons. :!:

As this LP is crossposted, replies from both forums will be used.

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Soldier's Training
Highly skilled at combat but unlucky.

Rule changes:
Unlucky - Chance card events are more difficult.
Trained For Combat - You do increased damage as your combo rises.

Starting resources:
Health: 100
Food: 20+?
Gold: 0
Health gained from eating: 5
Health lost from starving: -10

My notes
When failed chance events lead to combat, this fate really shines. It's not as great if chance events are just there to screw you over.


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Shadow Agent
An expert at games of chance and luck, but unskilled at combat.

Rule changes:
Lucky - Chance card events are easier.
Combo Multipliers - Combo multipliers are reduced.

Starting resources:
Health: 70
Food: 20+?
Gold: 0
Health gained from eating: 4
Health lost from starving: -10

My notes
I won't call this easy mode but better luck is amazing to have, as long as you can stay alive during fights. I make no guarantees.


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Nomad
Has forsaken carrying excess equipment to pursue a personal journey.

Rule changes:
No Inventory - Cannot carry extra equipment. Equipment that would normally go to your inventory is automatically sold.

Starting resources:
Health: 100
Food: 3+?
Gold: 0
Health gained from eating: 5
Health lost from starving: -10

My notes
It's not immediately obvious why this fate might be harder since msot of the time you can only equip one piece of equipment of a given type. The rest of the game will find ways of messing with what we have.


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Iron Hunger
Eats equipment instead of food.

Rule changes:
Iron Hunger - Discarded equipment grants 'Iron Ore', a special food that is all that this Fate can consume...

Starting resources:
Health: 100
Food: 0+?
Gold: 0
Health Gained from eating: 15
Health lost from starving: -10
Iron Ore: 5

My notes
I hate you.

This fate adds more resource management. Your food is useless, equipment is life and it's definitely limited. The quest line can be particularly hard to complete, but we'll see.


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Curse of the Lion Prince
Weak, but becomes stronger through battle.

Rule changes:
Max Health - Start with low max health, but increases with each defeated enemy.

Starting resources:
Health: 40
Food: 10+?
Gold: 25
Health gained from eating: 5
Health lost from starving: -10

My notes
Aside from some rough times at the beginning of a playthrough, it's not too bad. You want to get into fights and win. If you can pull that off it's smooth sailing from then on.


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Explorer's Gift
Great at exploring.

Rule changes:
Armour - Can't wear heavy armour.
Eating - Moving over completed encounter cards costs no food.

Starting resources:
Health: 100
Food: 5+?
Gold: 15
Health gained from eating: 5
Health lost from starving: -10

My notes
The other not-quite-but-still easy mode, as long as you can dodge in combat. What you don't see here is that the starting helm helps you find floor exits and can give a gold bonus. Great for clearing everything.


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Merchant Guard
Must visit every shop, and will be ambushed more often.

Rule changes:
Reveal Merchants - Merchants are always revealed when you enter a level.
Ambush Curse - Leaving a level with ambushes unencountered causes you to be cursed.
Reduced Prices - Shops always offer reduced prices.
Shop Combat - You will always be ambushed at the Tinker, Shop, and Jeweler.

Starting resources:
Health: 100
Food: 5+?
Gold: 10
Health gained from eating: 5
Health lost from starving: -10

My notes
I haven't tried this one. It's another fate where being good at combat is key, and resource management will be harder if card placement is unkind.


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Hoarder's Desire
Grows stronger the more you carry.

Rule changes:
Hoarding Strength - The more spare equipment in your hoard the more health you have.
Hoarding Power - You do more damage in combat when you have more spare equipment.

Starting resources:
Health: 40
Food: 5+?
Gold: 10
Health gained from eating: 5
Health lost from starving: -10

My notes
More useful later in the game, when dungeons are longer and more equipment has been unlocked.


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Monk
Equipped to fight the undead, forgoes material wealth.

Rule changes:
Forsaken Wealth - Gold gain cards have no effect.
Crusade Rewards - You are rewarded for slaying undead.

Starting resources:
Health: 100
Food: 5+?
Gold: 0
Health gained from eating: 10
Health lost from starving: -10

My notes
It feels like success in this fate comes down to the first cards that you get in the encounter, and seeing skeletons in the deck. Might be more luck-based than the others.


(Descriptions taken from https://handoffate.fandom.com/ to save myself a lot of typing)

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Voting is complete, results in the OP

Code: Select all

Votes so far:

Soldier's Training |||
Merchant guard	   ||
Iron Hunger        |
Nomad              |||
Explorer's Gift    |
Warlord            |
I'll start recording some runs with alternate fates. We'll see Soldier's Training first. And in the meantime... new update!

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Part 3 - Queen of Dust (YouTube)

If you didn't think the dealer was that hostile, the traps will make you rethink his place at the table. He's loving every second of pain he deals you.

My run could have been a lot worse. I managed to trigger all the rock fall traps, and didn't pick a helmet at the first chance... but it worked out! Getting gold loss pain cards on this dungeon is like getting a slap on the wrist. If you're doing this, though, wear a helmet. Not doing so would be a bad idea. What's a bit funny in retrospect is that only the default Fate in the game has no headgear, so anything but Normal mode has an advantage at this point of the game...

We briefly saw the Suit of Hell. I'll explain more when we compare them to our third Suit.

The Queen of Dust

The Bandit Queen was taken by slavers as a child and raised in the desert. Over the years, she has bribed and murdered her way to her current position as second-in-command of the desert thieves, proving herself capable of ruthless cunning.

The Queen of Dust isn't too hard, but she can easily catch you off guard if you're not expecting a stream of unblockable attacks to the face. She loves to spam them when you've killed all her allies... which you want to do because dodging ranged attacks is not my idea of fun.

Use weapon or artifact abilities if you have them. They're the best way to speed up the fight either in a damage race, or by interrupting her.

The DLC
I touch on this in the video, but I'm not sure if I'm sold on the way the DLC/update cards are presented.

The newer cards (all the fancy color-coded encounters) have different mechanics per questline, which is a nice way of adding some variety. You have some combat-heavy encounters, some chance-heavy encounters, encounters that have specific unlock requirements (however annoying that may be)... that's not so bad. It's trying to reach people who have different preferences. My main issue is that some of the cards are just story cards. They're not the only cards that seem like that, but when so many encounters offer a little bit more than "read this story, get a token," it feels like a bit of a waste to me.

Maybe there was no good way of ramping up some quest lines besides doing this. Story events do give you a bit of a breather if everything else in the dungeon is tough, and they guarantee a card token/unlock, which lets you feel progress.
Last edited by Anaxite on Thu Nov 11, 2021 2:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Part 4 - Jack of Plague (YouTube)

It's poison time!

The Soldier's Training fate interacts badly with the dungeon's curse but not impossibly; the windfall we got was quite nice.

I got incredibly lucky and managed to avoid any of the dealer's Angry Mob encounters. They're first used here, and force you to choose between giving away a lot of your food (with a possible reward), or risk losing it or getting some serious pain cards. A few items have effects that let you escape the Angry Mob... including the Frost Fang I passed up.

The Suit of Plague

Ratmen are annoying.

You'll often fight their melee and ranged varieties together. The melee variety start out with two claw attacks, one of which is unblockable. The ranged variety can throw either a single spear or a barrage of three spears that all need to be blocked or dodged. To make matters worse, dead ratmen leave behind a poison cloud. Stand in it too long and you'll get poisoned, suffering chip damage for a short while. It's not as if the damage is the end of the world, but wiith everything else in a dungeon that might kill you, you'll want to avoid poison.

From an escalation standpoint, ratmen are pretty good. They mix up features enemies have showed so far, with one more wrinkle added to keep us on our toes.

Also related to the ratmen... last time we saw The Suit of Hell. These enemies are exclusive to a DLC quest line, and they're basically ratmen reskins with a bit more power but no poison effect after death. They aren't considered a primary enemy type in this game. I wouldn't say they're much more dangerous either.

The Jack of Plague

Here is a beast who hates your kind, and has grown fat and evil with that hatred. The Jack of Plague will kill you and suck the marrow from your bones.

Individually, he's not much more than a large ratman. In a group, enemies around him start attacking faster when he's hit, and it's easy to not notice in the middle of combat.

I also feel like killing his entourage makes him do his unblockable attacks more often, but don't quote me on that.
Last edited by Anaxite on Thu Nov 11, 2021 2:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Part 5 - Endless Mode run 1 (YouTube) aka ratmen! :evil:

Endless Mode runs show off how spiteful the dealer can get when you try to give him a run for his money, and help me unlock a few cards. The run started out well but, but my choice of armor kind of hid the ratmen's poison effect too. Don't get boxed in like I did!

This Endless Mode run shows off two things:

The Suit of Scales

Lizardmen are the last of our four main Suits, and we get to see them a bit early. The melee variety has both a blockable and an unblockable attack, and will use its shield until you bash or kick it out of the way. They're much happier using the shield than some other enemies, too. The ranged variety shoots fireballs. Fire projectiles come at you quickly, and I find they're easy to block them as other projectiles, so I tend to dodge (or burn).

Scales are our second Suit vulnerable to a damage type (ice) but there are fewer options for stuffing your deck with ice damage than adding maces to deal with skeletons. Of course there are also upgrades that will make Scales stronger.

Combat Queues

Many reviewers have noted that the combat in Hand of Fate is inspired by the Batman: Arkham series. I thought I had read an official statement from the developers stating that was their inspiration, but I can't find the article again. Either way, you can see some parallels. And the combat system in Hand of Fate has a neat feature that helps it be more manageable... an enemy queue system I explain in the video. If you prefer to read it in text, read on!

I noticed enemies in a combat area are put into one of at least three attack groups:
  • Melee
  • Ranged
  • Special/Boss?
At any given moment, you'll only be attacked by one enemy from each of those groups. The game doesn't seem to treat the groups as simple queues; it appears to pick the next enemy a bit intelligently, such as having a melee fighter attack you if closest to you. This system stops combat from being a total clusterfuck, and lets you mostly dodge and block reliably if you play your cards right. It's also why mass melee becomes a blockfest: you hit one enemy, then another attacks, you hit that one, then another attacks, rinse and repeat.

I honestly don't know if there are more attack groups, or if each boss enemy has its own separate group, but I've been lucky enough to not encounter that so far! :v:

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I figured out what sound issues are on some of my videos: my editing software has some annoying bugs with 48kHz FLAC audio :x. Any sound issues have now been fixed.

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Part 6 - King of Dust (YouTube)

This LP has changed my opinion of a few cards.
  • I like the Spirit Walk artifact all the more after choosing it for this LP. It's a lot of fun, especially if you can use friendly fire to your advantage! I'd love to try it more on trapped areas.
  • I also do like the Toxic Blood blessing, but there are better ones if you're good at avoiding hits. I'm not that good, though I'm wanting to do other blessings where possible.
  • Desperate measures looks like a really good weapon on the surface and I've picked it many times with success. Who wouldn't take advantage of that damage output, after all? In the next video I'll show off why following that gut feeling is a bad idea... slowness is bad.
And then we come to Alicia in the Underworld.

Steam has an achievement for getting 12 'Failure' or 'Huge Failure' chance cards in a single session; Alicia in the Underworld is what got me that achievement. Nothing indicates the result of the shuffle is anything but random, but I've had many sessions where I've pissed away all my gold just by selecting the same card hoping randomness would favor me. And then even if you do get the successful outcome, if you didn't bring an artifact with you, you can't progress. This has happened many times as well. In fact, I've only ever had one playthrough which unlocked this card.

I don't like it much, and at the time of the recording I was looking forward to being done with it.

The King of Dust

The King of Dust broke faith with king and country long ago, and has made himself rich and powerful through the judicious application of cruelty and terror, outside the law, for decades.

Kings are supposed to be bigger and badder than previous Court, but for being our first King, the King of Dust isn't too bad. His unblockable combo attack is a bit more dangerous than what we've been used to in how much ground it seems to cover, so don't stay too close. The third attack, with falling rocks, just requires you to be attentive to when it happens; te fact that the King doesn't move while dropping those rocks makes the attack less menacing than you might imagine. Use it against him and his cohorts if you can.

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When I started the LP I wasn't 100% sure how live vs post commentary would work for this LP. I settled on live recording to give a better sense of how it actually feels to play the game, though it means you'll see everything I forget! I might also complain a lot about certain encounters or mechanics, but overall I do consider this a good game. Where I can I'll start adding subtitles, or extra notes in these posts, to give better information.

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Part 7 - Jack of Scales (YouTube)
Bonus - Finishing the Soldier's Training encounters (YouTube)

Mister Lionel! :argh:

I tell myself I like maces and hammers... but I promptly eat crow as they start to be my downfall. If you're better than I am at using slow weapons by all means use them, but there's no shame in using a lower damage weapon just to make yourself more mobile. Play around with all the weapons and see what you can do.

Lizard Eater is a great blessing to have here, and I'm curious if this was somehow pre-ordained by the game. :tinfoil:

I appreciate that the game mechanics and resource management allows for different kinds of success and failure through runs. Even though in a previous run I bought off a gold-leeching curse to help me keep my gold up, here I don't have any gold at all, and it's not necessarily the end of a run! You're forced to get a little creative like in more full-fledged roguelikes. Though it may prevent you from getting certain encounter tokens, you can survive for quite a long time if you play your cards right. Hah! Cards. Gettit?


The Jack of Scales

Their latent magical abilities mean these lizardmen are feared by all, even their own kind.

The Jack of Scales doesn't take us too much by surprise as we saw the Suit of Scales before their official introduction in Story Mode.

The Jack does more damage than the standard lizardman, and has three attacks. His sword attack can be countered, but the tail swipe and tail smash cannot! I read that you can interrupt the tail attacks with a shield bash before the attack indicator appears—like some other attacks in the game—but I've never tried to do it consciously.

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This video's a bit longer, so grab a cup of tea.

Part 8 - Endless Mode, second run (YouTube)

aka MISTER LIONEL!!!! :argh: part 2

Holy Forge is a card that I've never personally completed. For some reason I either always encountered it before Metal Ore, or I died in the run before reaching the forge. You have to visit the Metal Ore card first, then visit the Holy Forge. I think it's just bad luck on my part. You can still think of this pair as breather cards, though, since you're in no danger when you encounter them. They also synergize extremely well with the Iron Hunger fate, as they are a use or source of the Ore resource the fate enables.

Traps on combat maps can be deadly, so why not use them to your advantage? The maps—and enemy pathfinding—can be fairly simple so when there's any opportunity to herd or trap enemies, they'll pick themselves off for you. The downside is that when enemies are right in front of you, you don't necessarily feel like exploring in case you get trapped.

A note about Explorer's Gift: I had no idea Explorer's Gift let you heal when visiting previously-seen encounters with no food. I'm guessing that when you move onto visited cards, the game engine first checks either your food count or Explorer's Gift being the active Fate to determine whether to modify your health. It's a fantastic bug! Not gonna lie, part of me wants to do future Endless Mode runs like this on my own.

The Dragon Relics are a full set of equipment that are unlocked by a later questline of which we haven't even obtained the first encounter. The questline is long and can only be completed over multiple runs. If anything is a postgame set of equipment, this is it. In other words, that Dragon Ring is just there to taunt you and keep you searching. For us, it's mostly a paperweight.

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Part 9 - Queen of Skulls (YouTube)

The dungeon is set up to try and lure you in with all those sweet, sweet item deals... only to curse you until you're just too hobbled. It's a trap! The Nomad fate is unintentionally appropriate, as that fate teaches you to make the best use of whatever you get.

Dark Dwellers are annoying, but there are a few artifacts that can make you bypass the encounter. Spirit Walk is one of them—kinda obvious when I think about it—and so you could stack the deck and try to go for it... or just try your luck and live with the pain cards.

The Nomad's Desert encounters have something to their solution, but I'm going to hold off on officially mentioning it until we complete the fate.

The Queen of Skulls

Few necromancers possess the skill or courage to attempt the creation of such a creature - any misstep during the ceremony could result in a hideously painful death.

The Queen is not too difficult, really. Her main attacks are ranged and unblockable: she will use either her rifle/musket or a grenade. Both are easy to dodge, so focus your attacks on the totem that will continuously spawn new skeletons. Once you get close to her she has an unblockable melee attack that is easy to dodge as well.

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Part 10 - Queen of Plague (YouTube)

I hate Cursed Gamblers. I hate curses. I hate the idea of losing equipment when I can only carry one at a time. If you're not a Nomad and you hoard equipment and money, the Cursed Gamblers may be less of a challenge? I think they'll suck no matter what you do.

Otherwise, the run was lucky in quite a few areas. We got the right kinds of weapons at exactly the right times, we did amass some gold, and the icing on top of the cake was the Self Righteous blessing. Rat Cleaver was very nice, but that's why I made sure it was in the equipment deck!

Aside from the... uh... spectacle that was the fight with the Queen, this dungeon further showcases that you can work around the encounters you have if you prepare ahead of time. Almost all combat is, to some degree, manageable. Chance events are still a matter of chance, but you can follow cards around to a limited degree. And if you fail a dungeon, you can try again with a bit more understanding of what it takes.

help the game is breaking around me

The Lich

The Lich seems like a menacing enemy, but you'll fight it in an arena where you can put a sarcophagus between the two of you. Do that, take out the skeletons, and then just make sure to dodge or reflect the Lich's attack. If you're confident enough to dodge roll into the Lich just as it reforms, you can get more hits in. Keep at it until it dies.

If you do get hit by all its ranged attacks, that'll start hurting a lot more.

The Queen of Plague

The Ratman Queen can birth thousands of her foul kind, protecting them with her prodigious spear skills.

The Queen of Plague has one primary attack in two parts: the energy attack will draw you towards her if you get hit, afterwards she will try to swipe at you with her claws, though that can be countered. This seems trivial, but losing your mobility is a great way to get overwhelmed especially if she stays near her unblockable totem. In fact, the totem is the real problem of this fight. If you don't deal with it rapidly, it will bring in a lot of hurt.

I suggest staying far away from the Queen and her Totem to pick off her entourage first. After that you can take out the totem while dodging her, preferably when she's lured away. Without any kind of backup the Queen isn't much of a threat.

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Have I mentioned how much I love the Hag's Wraps?


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Part 11 - King of Skulls (YouTube)

Mass Achievement unlock time! The game has quite a few achievements, but I hit some accomplishment-based achievement conditions during this run, so it's good to show them off.

Curses have been much somewhat of a nuisance, but the King of Skulls' dungeon ups the ante. The Hanged Man encounters can overwhelm you if you get some particularly nasty curses. I would have loved to remove Corrupted Soul if I had the opportunity. And as much as I talked up stacking the deck, I got slapped by the RNG gods by making slightly inferior equipment/gold decisions; I thought there would be more maces to grab. Oh well. The Rat Cleaver was a decent consolation prize thanks to its damage output and speed.

About the Nomad's Desert:The solution to every encounter is to go SEESS.

I don't get the decision behind making this Fate's special encounters this way. Maybe the solution is a reference to how the player sees the path forward, but I have no idea how you would figure it out. Were the developers hoping you would try and try again until you found the right solution? Please tell me if you actually know.

Like the Soldier's Training Fate, the encounter card we unlock is identical to the previous Nomad's Desert cards. Get through it in the same conditions, receive gold and equipment.



Mages

A special Suit. They have a force shield, and can attack in one of two ways: a burst of multiple homing projectiles (that can usually be partly reflected), and a "triple line" attack that will damage you if you cross them.

As mentioned in the video, having multiple mages on the field is a liability: they will line themselves up as the points of a triangle when doing their line attack, which makes the pattern more elaborate and thus more dangerous. Two mages is pretty bad, but three mages makes the full pattern. The saving grace is that they are locked in place during said attack.

Lava Golems

Another special Suit. Their attack patterns are extremely predictable and thus not too hard to dodge if you pay attention. Bear in mind their swings will track you somewhat, and don't get overwhelmed when they're in groups. Multiple lava golems can be overwhelming.

Minotaurs

Yet another special Suit. This one's a first for me, too! The minotaur will either charge at you if you're far enough away, or do a four-combo attack. You can't block anything it does, so stay close and do chip damage in between combo strikes.

Thankfully, special Suits never get upgrades, so the combat will remain the same.


The King of Skulls

The most fearsome undead warrior ever seen. He carries on one arm, a shield that would crush most men and the other, wields a two handed sword with deadly ease.

The king has a few attacks. He's got an unblockable swing, he can summon extra skeletons that will stick around a while, and he has a burst as well. His most devastating attack fires a beam from his shield, so you may want to stay behind him and let the beam damage his allies. Unfortunately the shield that unlocks from defeating him does not get the beam.

I remember this boss as being a bit more memorable, but he's not too difficult to deal with. The main thing to remember about Kings is that their specialties are designed to make you want to focus on them. They are the King, after all.

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A third attempt at Endless Mode, with Goblins and Lava Golems and Mages, oh my! As we're getting closer to the end of the game and the videos get longer, I'm going to be cutting out more fights where nothing of note happens rather than just doing speedups.

Part 12: Endless mode, third run (YouTube)

Hoarder's Desire is fun to play around with if you can get past the initial hump. I wasn't doing badly, aside from being resource-constrained; even the curses were not my end. By the later floors in this run, enemies were dying noticeably faster to the axe and the mace. It's just that the mace was slow enough to be an impediment again. Seriously, the allure of high damage is hard to resist.

My understanding of the combat queue deepens a bit, since a lot of Ratmen were able to leap towards me in short succession. Special attacks seem to be their own special deal; maybe the game only expects so many special attacks to be on the field at once.

Metal Ore came first this time! ...and Holy Forge did not appear. But the Metal Ore did allow us to pay our way past a DLC encounter gate.

Although I skipped past many older encounters, it's good to remember that quite a few encounters will penalise you for trying to ignore them. In Story Mode you can try to keep them out of your deck, but Endless Mode doesn't have that luxury. Plus, you'll almost certainly have some annoying cards no matter what run you're in. The failures are good for this LP, not necessarily for your runs.

And you know, I might have survived that final encounter had I done some savescumming. Which brings me to a note about...

The Save System

I debated whether I should add this section or not, but I had so much difficulty when searching for this information, I hope someone else will benefit.

Hand of Fate has an automatic save system which saves to a file named player.profile. If you're not in an active run, the game will save your current equipment and encounter decks, and your currently selected Fate. Reloading the game brings you to the start screen. If you are in a run, the game will save your progress right when an encounter is finished, or when you move back to a visited card. Within a run, all card decks will also stay in the same order, and reloading an old save file will not change the layout of further floors. A few dungeons such as Maze of Traps won't be the same because they get generated when the encounter loads (we'll see that later in the LP).

If you start an encounter and don't like the way it's going the game might not let you quit from the menu, but you could force-quit and reload the game if you really want to go that route. However, you could just make copies of the save file and quit/restore them as needed. If you're going to do that, you need to know a quirk of the save system with regard to Steam: there are two save file locations!
  1. The official location, in a folder like "[user files]/unity3d/Defiant Development/Hand of Fate"
  2. The Steam Cloud sync folder, which looks like "Steam/userdata/[user id]/266510/remote/HandOfFate/"
If you're playing the Steam version, both locations might contain the player.profile file, and both will update it... but the game might only read from the Cloud Sync location, even if Cloud Sync is turned off. This tripped me up early in the LP until a post about an unrelated game clued me in on the problem.

Like with any other game, playing around with save files might make the game less enjoyable; the challenge is part of the fun! I think that as a first-time player, you should give the game a fair shot and play the game without resorting to messing with save files. Part of the point is the failure of death. However, I think it is good to know this information, and I like showing you a bit about how the game does what it does.

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Since we're talking about the game internals, it's time for a double update!

I like seeing what makes a video game tick. In this extra update, I want to show you a highlight of some of the assets that make the game what it is. Those of you who have done media editing/3D modeling/game development should be familiar with what you'll see here. We'll start with...

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(all images below shrunk from their original sizes)

We'll start by taking a look at a screenshot from the game:

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There's a lot going on here! The foreground is an overlay with cards on it, a glow effect, a number, and banners. There's also a 3D area that our avatar and monsters can run around in. You've got sun rays, a sun, and a sky! Let's take a look at the sky.

Very briefly, a Skybox is a way of creating backgrounds to make a video game level appear larger than it is; you enclose the level in a cube, a sphere, or a hemisphere that you then apply a texture to. Hand of Fate has two sets of textures for skyboxes, with the two main ones represented below. I stitched them together to show you how they can be laid out.

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Appropriately dramatic, isn't it? The fifth image in the first skybox is an alternate version of the first, just to have a sun effect. There are also more images to these skyboxes, including a top cloud cover, and some images that have sun textures. These were just the ones that are easiest to stitch left-to-right.

If you think about it, two sky textures is quite enough. We fight indoors way more than we fight outdoors.

Speaking of fighting, how about a look at our enemies?

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The humble ratman, reduced to a wireframe or sculpted toothpaste. But what kind of stuff goes on it?

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A texture, of course. Above you can recognize a skeleton, ratman, lizardman, and bandit; those are the Suits we keep fighting against. Mind you, there aren't just four textures per enemy. There are many variations of skeletons and lizardmen, for example, and speaking of our ratman, I could find three main variations his skin.

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The game internally refers to the three ratmen textures above as mangy, scarred, and plague, and you can see that enemies actually have at least three texture maps:
  1. Showed in front, a color texture. Standard color information
  2. In the middle, either a reflection or a gloss map, to add some shininess.
  3. Behind, a normal map, aka bump map, to give the model more relief.
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    Bear in mind I resized these textures and laid them out in a convenient way. That said, many objects in the game follow this three texture setup, though anything with metal might have a metallic texture map instead of a reflection/gloss map. You can see that from this texture set for the basic shield:

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    The color is on the left, normal map on the right, metallic map in the center. The textures have also been resized, but are proportionally correct—the metallic map is half the length and width, as not all textures are the same size. The transparency is not a mistake, either; the textures files are really like that.

    There are a few other miscellaneous textures that stood out to me, such as little critters:
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    Sprite sheets for fire animations:
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    And all the different markers to show you an attack is coming. These must be colored by the engine.
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    Unblockable on left, blockable on right.

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    Unblockable, blockable, and a warning cone for offscreen attacks.

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    A reflect marker, which appears over your own head.

    And finally, the tokens we get at the end of a session. Both of them have a normal map, but only the latter has a metallic map that I could see. Maybe the former uses a generic metallic map I don't know about.
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    There are way more textures than I'm showing off, but you get the idea. I want to move on and show off a bit about...

    The cards

    I think it's fair to say that the most prominent, memorable visual elements in the game are all the cards that get played and encountered during a session. They all have a distinctive style, a kind of tarot deck of their own. Did you know how the game engine constructs them? It's pretty cool!

    First, the game loads a 3D object and gives it a card texture. Each texture has a front, back, and an unused area. There are twelve designs.
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    From left to right, top to bottom:
    • Upgrades
    • Shop cards
    • Pain
    • Monster
    • Gain
    • Equipment
    • Endless mode
    • Encounter
    • Failure
    • Chance
    • Blessing/Curse
    • Archetype, the internal word for Fate
    Yes, this list is in reverse alphabetical order. It was my fault it happened when stitching the photos.

    The game can then overlay one of various other textures. For instance, you have borders:
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    Centered elements like the icons for fates:
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    Or in the case of encounters, the entire encounter with its border is the overlay:
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    The game also adds text towards the bottom of the card. It uses the Behrens Schrift font, saved as a texture.

    Keeping elements separate like this makes it a little faster to create new cards, and a grayscale design can save on storage space if you take advantage of the low color.

    One thing to note is that the game uses PNG images for all its textures. It's not an awful idea: PNG is a lossless format with wide support that has an alpha channel and a bit of compression. What's not immediately obvious is that many (if not all) of the textures did have some other compression applied before being converted to PNG. Remember the Encounter card examples posted above? If you zoom in, you'll notice some interesting visual artifacts:
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    The left side of this image shows what happens if you zoom in on one of the card overlays. There is some antialiasing, and it looks clean-ish, but you can also see faint splotches of color. On the right I enhanced the image levels to show you the color blocks. There was definitely compression pre-applied. It's neither bad nor good... it just is.

    Interestingly, I haven't found the icons used to create the "X of Suit" cards such as 2 of Dust, 4 of Scales, etc. Either there's something special about those icons, or maybe the cards are using the Suit Curse icons with a special mask applied.
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    The card art was created by Jesse Gillespie, who also goes by gladlad. He worked with Defiant Development on both Hand of Fate 1 and 2, and created more art for the Hand of Fate: Ordeals board game. I reached out to him on Discord while doing this LP. He seemed pretty happy to have people interested in his work! :) You can read a bit more about his role, and the drawing process, in an interview he gave (archive link here).

    You can find more of his work here.


    When thinking about the game's art style, I don't want to forget its beginnings. Have a look at this Kickstarter page with early screenshots. Though some of the assets look the same, it progressed quite a lot!


    To finish off the art section, the coolest image you might never see...

    The placeholder.

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Part 13 - Queen of Scales (YouTube)

This is where the deaths start happening, practice or not. Descent into the Underworld's last fight is what did it for me, as that Lich's ranged attack is no joke when combined with lava golems and hellbeasts. If I were to try the fight again, I would likely kill the Lich first, no matter how difficult. Frost Fang was an extremely fortunate weapon to get early, even better than Feathered Ice here; I would stack the deck in a heartbeat to get that kind of crowd control.

What are also no joke are Wrath of the Old Gods (I think I get the name wrong once) and Guardian Angel. Instant kills on one enemy in the battle field can turn the tide of the battle, especially if there's a single monster on the map. And then being allowed to re-try a chance draw is extremely beneficial. You saw! See, some Blessing benefits border on ridiculous, and I'm glad the Demon Trader Encounter didn't get rid of the really good ones. Just bear in mind that while Wrath of the Old Gods may seem broken, there are a few fights where it won't work.

Merchant Guard showed its utility. Fighting more fights than you need to is a bit of a pain, but a single enemy card is easily dispatched, and the better gold prices may help you get food more easily. Food and gold were both needed to deal with some Encounters, and Lost in the Swamp can use either (but you can get one version without a kind old man).

Charity/Demon Trader/Blood Auction

We've seen the first Charity, and we're getting a glimpse of the third in the Demon Trader and Blood Auction line of quests. These three sets of cards are unique in that each of them has six versions that unlock progressively better equipment, at a steeper cost every time. Completing the sixth encounter nets you an Achievement for each set. I'm going to try to get all of these.

Mage/Skeleton King/Dragon items

We also got a glimpse of at least one of each of these equipment sets. The devs must have considered these the closest to true equipment sets in the game, since wearing all of one's items at once also nets you an Achievement.

The Queen of Scales

It is said that if you destroy a queen's totem, its spell will be broken and any surrounding lizards will be damaged. It is not known whether anyone has successfully achieved this.

The Queen of Scales has two main attacks: a fire ball and a stream of fire. The fire breath will only damage her minions if the fire totem is defeated, so it's not a bad idea to get rid of the totem. Then you can take advantage of friendly fire and use that fire breath against her minions if you want.

But in my case, I came into the fight ridiculously overprepared. I had: a weapon lizardmen are weak to, an artefact that hits everyone with lightning, a shield that reduces their cooldowns, a blessing that will just off an enemy at the beginning of the fight, and even more blessings that didn't get used.

Even without my ridiculous setup, the Queen isn't really that threatening by herself. In fact, that's a little theme in the Court:
  • Jacks are stronger variations of the regular Suit enemies.
  • Queens have slightly unusual attacks, and come accompanied by a totem that somehow involves a Suit ability. They tend to be pretty weak on their own.
  • Kings are generally strongest and have more complex special attacks.
Two kings to go!

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Part 14 - King of Plague (YouTube)

This dungeon expects that your muscle memory will do you in. Fighting without countering is hard when you have things like the Mages' homing attacks coming at you, ratmen leaping at you, or a Lich coming back to burn your face off. If you don't fight the urge to counter, you'll starve yourself to death. The curse interacted badly with the Skeleton King sword, as countering is all but essential to build up the combo and start stealing life. And that global speed/damage boost? 10+ damage taken per hit when I'm wearing heavy armor is scary, so imagine if the adventurer were starving!

Stranger in the Shadows ended the way it did because I had Holy Touch and forgot about it. That blessing will cause the vampire's blood sucking attempt to fail, giving you a chance at either a grab bag of gold or a curse. Or you could just leave, but where's the fun in that?

Fun Fact: In a test recording I forgot to equip the White Minotaur mace before stepping on the Collector card, stopped, and facepalmed when I lost out on the 75 gold. The Collector card had also covered up the Call for the Priest store, so I'll never know if my outcome could've been better...

I also want to leave a little note about blessings. I passed up some blessings in the Priest's shop, but if you have so much gold it's burning a hole in your pocket, you may not want to copy me. At this point in the game the deck contains a non-insignificant number of "Gain x resource per blessing" cards, they have occasional interactions, and of course you have Self Righteous to help you dish more damage. A blessing in your inventory is also removed from future pulls; if at first you don't get the one you wanted, it might appear in later shops or encounters. You can also apply this advice to equipment if you're really holding out for something. Bear in mind the equipment pool is greater overall.


The King of Plague

Only the most savage and cunning of the ratmen rise to kinghood among their rank.

The King of Plague has three attacks. The first, a leap attack, will damage you if you stay underneath him. The second releases three shadow clones around you that close in on you; just touching them hurts, so you need to dodge either away or through them. The third attack is a three-part unblockable combo that lunges towards you on the third part; he'll perform the third attack between the other two based on how you're attacking him.

I've seen advice that suggests staying close to him to prevent him from doing the shadow attack more often, and if the Time Distortion curse were active, that would be good advice. The strategy would be similar to the King of Skulls. Buying off the curse lets you treat the encounter as a slightly more deadly ratman fight.

Don't worry, we'll see the King of Plague again later.

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Part 15 - King of Scales (YouTube)

I went back to showing some of the fights so you can appreciate just how hard things have gotten! Bandits or mages? No problem. Game decides to throw a King and Queen at us? Uhh... yeah no that's pretty hard. This is us being tested. Hard.

Of the 12 Court dungeons, I think the last one best exemplifies risk vs. reward. There is no good way (that I know of) to stop the ticking time bomb that is the Skin Rash curse, and you're already up against starvation; if you hope to get a windfall, or enough resources to survive, you can't really avoid difficult encounters like the Lizard Dome, or the Crucible, even if they might mean your death. You must focus on your goal and do whatever it takes to win.

If you have a chance to remove one of the two dungeon curses, removing Skin Rash is by far the best one to remove. You can live far longer without weapon abilities than without board movement.


The King of Scales

He has lived since before humans came to this place, mighty and lonely and dangerous beyond measure. This creature has battle things that slithered from the Outer Darkness, from the hells themselves.

The King's main threat is not from his attacks. No, it's that as long as he is alive, his minions cannot be killed. The protective aura he projects commands you to focus your attention on him, while his minions keep trying to close in on you. Truly, this is a King.

All his attacks are unblockable. He can do an overhead sword strike which tracks you, a kind of shoulder check, and he can put down his shield to have it shoot spikes at you. That last attack creates an opening for you to attack him, if you somehow came into the fight without a shield to stun him with.

Great runs so far!

Since you haven't mentioned it yet, the 4 treasures we've taken off the Dealer are the suits of the Minor Arcana of the Tarot-Cups, Staves/Wands, Pentacles/Coins, and Swords.

Looking forward to seeing what else The Dealer has up his sleeves.

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Talisriel wrote:
Wed Dec 08, 2021 3:12 am
Great runs so far!

Since you haven't mentioned it yet, the 4 treasures we've taken off the Dealer are the suits of the Minor Arcana of the Tarot-Cups, Staves/Wands, Pentacles/Coins, and Swords.

Looking forward to seeing what else The Dealer has up his sleeves.
Defiant's choice of symbolism is pretty well thought out. I also appreciate that it's not a straight Tarot deck, as that would just have made things a bit too obvious. I feel this works for everyone.

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Before we move on to the last dungeon, we'll take a detour to take care of a few things...

Part 16 - Fate roundup #1

Apprentice (YouTube)
Explorer's Gift (YouTube)
Hoarder's Desire (YouTube)
Monk (YouTube)

In these bonus videos, I showcase some of the modifiers the game allows us to play with that we didn't get to clear in story dungeons. I'll go over their encounters and give you a brief look at their their rewards. I'm starting with four easier ones:


Apprentice

Apprentice is easy mode. Playing this Fate adds extra Gain cards to your deck, makes you stronger, makes enemies weaker, and locks a couple of achievements (but not many—I only found one so far, but someone will probably correct me).

The Apprentice encounters are all about teaching you how to play the game better by making you focus on one single mechanic in an easy setting. Finishing the final token encounter gives you two cards: Battle Practice and Nymphs of the Sweetwoods. Battle Practice is a very useful deck card as it makes you fight a small amount of any monster unlocked so far in exchange for a single Gain card; it's practically a freebie. Nymphs of the Sweetwoods only appears in the Apprentice Fate, resets your avatar status to exactly as he was when the run started (equipment, curses, blessings, health, and food), and gives you the Sweetwood Blessing aka a Gain card every five steps.

If you're just trying to play a chill session through the game, just use this. Everything unlocks quickly.


Explorer's Gift

I showed off Explorer's Gift during an Endless Mode video. It's all about exploring every nook and cranny of a map, it adds food Gain cards to the deck, and revisiting spaces costs no food. The inability to wear heavy armor seems like a downside, but it also means events which depend on your armor class will be easy. I would call this Fate a pseudo-easy mode; it's not necessarily easier, but if you know what you're doing, it's hard to kill you.

The Lost Island encounters attached to this Fate are a balance of gathering resources, chance events, and fighting. The requirements are not very steep though you may find yourself doing the second encounter quite a few times to get a good result. It might be worth doing it in an earlier dungeon where few things affect your chance pulls.

You're rewarded with a generic Lost Island card, letting you pay some gold and food for a series of chance events which can lead to many gain cards, and with a ring which grants food for revealing all encounters on a map.


Hoarder's Desire

I showed off Hoarder's Desire in an Endless Mode video. It's about managing equipment, loss, and Goblins. You start off weak and low in health, and need to accumulate equipment to be strong.

The Treasure Trove encounters attached to this Fate force you to wear the Fate's helm, then give up all your non-default equipment in exchange for a token. This is a huge inconvenience in the middle of a run, as it resets your stats to the default. All three encounters are identical. You're rewarded with a generic Treasure Trove card, which has the same mechanics but lets you pick one of four pieces of random equipment, and the Fate's helm, which is only really good with goblins and the aforementioned encounter.

I'm not a huge fan of this Fate. It seems a bit underdeveloped, and I don't find its equipment of significant use.


Monk

Monk is all about Undead as your only Gold source. Its helmet gives you health when you gain a Blessing.

The Holy Quest encounters attached to this Fate are a mixture of combat and chance, forcing you to fight against increasingly difficult combinations of the Court of Skulls, and also find a tomb where said monsters are. However, you need to have defeated the relevant Court member in the story before you can actually finish the Fate properly. By the way, the last fight can be brutal: the Jack, Queen, and King of Skulls together in a trapped chamber can be pretty tough (I died twice). The last fight used the King's explosive buddies against the others to great success.

Finishing the final encounter rewards you with the Monk helm and its corresponding health gain, and a generic Holy Quest encounter. This encounter is a chance event that can lead to Pain, monsters, Gain, or a piece of the Skeleton King's equipment. I don't like the Monk helm that much myself, but the encounter could be useful if you like your chances.
Last edited by Anaxite on Fri Dec 17, 2021 1:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Part 17 - Finishing Murder at Sea and Getting the Dragon Relics

Murder at Sea (YouTube)
The Dragon Relics (YouTube)

These bonus videos are all about finishing two major quest lines, wrap up a few loose ends, and make life against the Dealer much easier. You may be tempted to leave at least the Dragon Relics for the post-game, but the payoff is great.

There are still encounters left over, which we'll be clearing post-game... and our next video will be back to the story.


The Murder at Sea DLC

You know what? I really like this DLC. It opens up progressively, has some very neat encounters, and quite a few branching paths:

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That's not to say its encounters never fake you out, or there's no difficulty. There is. It's just that I think it's the most fleshed out of the DLC.

The rewards are mixed, but overall I'd say great:
  • The Help the Locals card is the worst reward for me. You have to visit the card multiple times over multiple playthroughs to do favors for the villagers, and the rewards are proportionally minimal. Its usefulness increases in Endless Mode.
  • The Elder Lizard card is useful if you visited Metal Ore, or are playing the Iron Hunger fate with lots of resources. At the very least the card won't hurt you.
  • Sunken Treasure can be nice if you're good at Chance events and want to go fishing for equipment, but I'd say Ghost of the Sea is better. When resolved, Ghost of the Sea gives you some nice bonuses depending on your current Fate.
  • The Kraken Unleashed. If you get good at the fight, it's a good place to grind anything you might get from killing lizardmen (Lizard Eater, Test of Pride) in future runs... and it gives the great, the one, the only...
  • Kraken's Wrath Mask! It's a great insta-death Mask for everything that doesn't have a combat phase, with the drawback that you need to take hits before it works again.
  • And then the Kraken Claw. This weapon just ignores Lizardmen's shields and can deal damage around the target. It complements the mask well.
Seriously. The Kraken equipment is neat. If you can get it, do it.


The Dragon Relics

You can start this quest line after defeating the Queen of Scales, after which you have a long and arduous journey over many playthroughs. It's a big step up in difficulty compared to most of the game, so you'd be forgiven for ignoring the quest entirely. For shame! The Dragon Relics you're rewarded with are a fantastic equipment set that is all about fire. Your damage output jumps dramatically by having just one or two pieces, so imagine what happens when you have more.

The video really explains this encounter best. Have a look.

I could have waited to defeat the last boss before doing this quest line... but the Dragon Relics aren't so good that they'll ruin the dungeon, and the game does want you to grab every advantage you can give yourself.
Last edited by Anaxite on Fri Dec 17, 2021 1:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Part 18 - The Dealer (YouTube)

The adventurer has gone up against bandits, skeletons, ratmen, and lizardmen. He went up against a Kraken and lived to tell the tale. He found some mysterious Dragon relics and survived a dragon's fire. Now, at last, he faces the one who has been pulling the strings of the adventure all this time.

Most of the commentary in the video was done in post because I wasn't about to try recording over every single attempt.

The Dealer's dungeon is nasty! You're almost guaranteed that you won't see a single blessing along the way, as the dealer tries to curse you into oblivion. Just remember that, as the dealer has repeatedly said, he may challenge us but will ultimately be fair. This dungeon is daunting, yet doable.

I had to change my deck multiple times before I settled on something that took me to victory. Here are some strategies you can use.
  • Put cards in your deck that give you items easily, or that have low penalty. Food Wagon is an easy gain. Battle Practice is low gain but easy to fight.
  • Put cards that you can back out from. Peasant Woman or Holy Forge may sound limited in use, but they become breather cards.
  • Remove blessing-granting cards from your deck. You can live without them more than you can live with some of the curses.
  • Remove all low-tier equipment from your deck, but have multiple well-rounded options of each type. The Dragon Relics are great if you have them. All non-default shields are decent, and Innocence will always be useful. Gauntlets are protection in case of one curse. Helms are so varied, you probably want ones that are useful in general scenarios rather than just a specific one (Oracle's Diadem is a favorite of mine).
  • Favor equipment that has frequent useful effects, rather than in very limited scenarios.
  • Only remove the worst curses. I wouldn't bother with Time Distortion, for instance, as it can be in our favor. Yes, I know I removed it in an earlier video. ;)
The Dealer

There have been Dealers before but none so adept at the game as him.

The Dealer has four distinct phases. Each phase features all the Court monsters of one Suit, going from weakest to strongest. After you kill them all, the Dealer has a few attacks.

Phase one pits you against the Jack, Queen, and King of Dust. When they go down, the Dealer slams his fists and creates some explosions.
Phase two pits you against the Jack, Queen, and King of Skulls. The Dealer then creates some static lines that will damage you if you step in them.
Phase three pits you against the Jack, Queen, and King of Plague. The Dealer create explosions, then creates some lines that will rotate 45 degrees from his hand around the table, first counter-clockwise, then clockwise.
Phase three pits you against the Jack, Queen, and King of Scales. The Dealer create explosions, then creates some lines that will rotate 90 degrees from his hand around the table, first counter-clockwise, then clockwise. Make sure to be on the far edges of the board to avoid getting hurt... like I did a few times.
It's possible the Dealer will create more explosions depending on where you're standing, but I haven't figured out the mechanics for sure.

After his initial attacks, the Dealer forces you into a quick time event as he throws a ball of energy at you. Hit the reflect button at the right time to throw the energy back at him, at which point you can attack him until he gets back up. If you fail to reflect the ball, you have one chance to hit the dodge button to stay alive and try the event again.



Optimizing your deck for the dealer
So you want to attempt the dealer yourself? Here are some tips on stacking the deck you may find useful.

Card choices
There are specific cards I like to have. Some of them haven't been unlocked yet, and some of them I already mentioned above, but I want to go over my short list:
  • The Maiden
    You'll get a freebie of whatever you need.
  • Peasant Woman
    In the event you can spare the food, the equipment and information gain can be of use.
  • Food Wagon
    Again, a food freebie.
  • Goblins
    Goblins will give you more food and gold than you started with if your resources were low. They also don't fight back. Not necessarily the best card, but not the worst.
  • Treasure Chest
    Aside from the chain at pain, it's a good chance at gain.
  • Soul Gem
    Soul Gem can be obtained from a chain of cards that starts with the Lizard Dome, after the Jack of Scales. You can pay a small amount of food to get rid of a random curse, which may just remove one of the greater ones. This is at the top of my list.
  • Battle Practice
    Low gain, but the combat is extremely easy.
  • Metal Ore, Holy Forge
    In the best case, you get a good weapon. In the worst case, it does nothing.
  • The Elder Lizard
    Like Holy Forge, you're unlikely to get the Lizard's treasure, but it costs nothing to add.
  • Ghost of the Sea
    The worst case won't give you anything, but you stand to gain something almost every time.
  • The Lizard Dome
    This choice may be a bit weird to some. In the Lizard Dome, I know exactly what fighting conditions I'll be in, and it will only be against one enemy card. The rewards are big enough that if I'm going to be fighting enemies, I want it to be under conditions I control.
  • Shop
    I treat it as a breather card with potential extra benefits.
Your list may vary, but I at least stand by the non-combat cards above. Since you can't avoid combat, pick the options that work best for you.

Equipment choice
Let me first say that the Dragon Relics are an obvious choice. They are that good. But what about everything else?

I like faster weapons that have high damage. All the non-hammer weapons with 30+ damage can stay in the deck. I would also pick Frost Fang, for its effects, and the Kraken Claw (which we haven't seen) for its ability to ignore Lizardmen shields. Shieldbreaker may be good, but I haven't gotten a good feel for it.

Shields are limited, but the old standbys Innocence and Fortitude's Breath are always useful. The Skeleton King shield is useful as well.

Armor becomes tougher to pick. Mithril and Immovable Object are in by virtue of their advantage vs relative protection level. Depth of Night's ability to redraw monster cards could be useful in some combats. If you feel like you're good at dodging, Wilderness Armor is a good choice; I spoke up against it in an earlier video, but its speed and damage boost are great for dodging.

Helmets... ugh. So many helmets. I have difficulty choosing, but there are a few I would use:
- Oracle's Diadem, for telling me where to go.
- Explorer's Helmet, for direction and bonuses.
- Fate's Folly, for giving me gold on good success.
- Healing Cap, for walk-healing (though I don't always use it).
- Herne's Antlers, for the boss.
- Scavenger's Cap, for the food gain
There are other good choices depending on your play style.

There aren't many gauntlets, but I will always love Hag's Wraps. Assassin's Greed and Mage Gloves can be good to give you more gold or faster combats, respectively.

I also have a hard time choosing artefacts, but Lightning Crash, Inferno Potion, Feathered Ice, and Mage Strike are nice. I would not say no to Mercenary Contract if I'm planning on going shopping.

Rings will be the hardest equipment to arrange in your deck. My main advice is to avoid picking rings that activate less, or have a lower chance. For example, the Trader's Ring (sell equipment to get food) sounds nice, but there are curses that prevent you from selling items. The Ring of Poverty making you lose all your gold for Max Health is a tough sell when I want the gold. And any ring that requires a blessing is automatically out. There are three I can think of that I do like, though:
- We haven't yet seen the Occult Ring (unlocked from the Cursed Treasure), but that's a good choice. It gives extra damage for each curse you have.
- The Master Ring gives you gold per ring you have after every encounter. It can reduce the fear of food loss, or gold loss if you got affected by the curse that makes you eat gold.
- The Plunderer's Ring gives you gold and health on Gain. There isn't always Gain, but it will happen throughout the dungeon.

Optimizing shop choice
One thing I didn't really touch on much in the LP is how shops have different costs. A regular Shop will always be a bit more expensive, for example, and of the two curse-removing shops, the Priest is cheaper than the Healer. There is a bit of risk in holding on to resources in favor of finding a cheaper shop, but it's not a bad idea to do so.
Last edited by Anaxite on Fri Dec 17, 2021 1:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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I'm renaming some of the episodes for consistency. We're on to Part 19: Final encounter roundup.

Finishing Charity, Demon Trader, and Blood Auction(YouTube)
Final Generic Encounters (YouTube)

A shorter update as we add even more cards to the deck.


Charity, Demon Trader, Blood Auction

These encounters all work in similar ways, and almost all give rings with their token. They're useful for rounding out your deck.

Charity gives you more Success Chance cards to work with the more food you donate. Charity 1-3 have lower requirements, 4-5's are higher, and 6 requires the most food. Notes suggest donating more than 30 food guarantees at least one blessing even on failure.

Demon Trader takes Blessings. The first one takes one blessing, 2-5 need two, 6 needs three. Demon Trader 3 is also how we got the Secret Society encounter.

Blood Auction is simpler, as all six encounters work the same: bid more health, get more Success Chance cards to work with.


The Last Encounters

These aren't the last encounters with a token that can appear in our deck, but they're the last ones that need to come from the generic deck. The others are involved with the Warlord Fate.

I like all of these cards for what they bring to the table. Some of them are downright useful, others are strongly risk/reward scenarios, and ultimately it's just all options.

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Part 20, Bonus 5 - Fate roundup #2

Shadow Agent (YouTube)
Iron Hunger (YouTube)
Curse of the Lion Prince (YouTube)
Warlord (YouTube)

The last four fates I'm showing off are a bit longer. One is a bit easier and very suited for the start of the game, but the others definitely require more effort and late-game attention. It's up to you, but you might be at them for a while.


Shadow Agent

The adventurer's already a bastard, so why not make it official? You trade away a bit of offensive capability, but gain a small modifier to luck in chance events, which could increase the number of success cards or slow down the shuffling. And the encounters are all about chance events.

The Fate's helm is the only reward you get, and it will show you chance events on the map when you start a floor. This isn't the best of effects, but it's not useless, and the Fate's encounters are enough of a breeze that it's a proportionate reward.

The low combat ability is the only reason this Fate isn't outright easy mode, but it's one of the simpler ones to try out.


Iron Hunger

I will be showing off Iron Hunger a bit more before the LP is over, but it's good to get an understanding of how the Fate works.
  • You don't eat food. Instead, the game gives you another resource to play with: Iron Ore. This is your new food.
  • Food gain cards keep giving you food, food loss cards take food, but some things that will make you lose food will make you lose Iron Ore.
  • The Metal Ore encounter gives you 75 Iron Ore outright. Any encounter that needs the Metal Ore will take 75 of your Iron Ore instead. This demonstrates that Iron Ore is a resource for every Fate in the game, but it's just hidden most times.
  • When you gain Equipment that could replace an existing piece you have on, you have to "smelt" one of the two, turning it into Iron Ore. Higher equipment tiers are worth more (there's a chart).
Decoupling food from your needs creates some interesting scenarios in which food yields advantages you may not have had. That Helpful Priest? Basically free blessings. The Trader? Free equipment. Soul gem? Free uncurse. Just gotta have the food.

The helm you get gives you food for gaining equipment, which could have its uses. You also get a generic encounter that requires 50 ore to give you max health; it doesn't seem like a great deal, but it makes the Metal Ore even more useful in some runs.


Curse of the Lion Prince

I like the Fate, I hate the encounters.

You start at 40 health, and every kill nets you +2 health no questions asked. This also works on reanimated skeletons. If you can get past the intial low health hump, this Fate can carry you a pretty long time; a somewhat upgrade from the default mode. The encounters, though... oof. The three Test of Pride encounters start a bit difficult but end downright awful.

Test of Pride 1: Requires you to have above 120 max health. There's different dialogue for having max health between 100 and 120, a kind of "nearly there."
Test of Pride 2: Also adds a condition that your current health shouldn't be too low (possibly lower than half), but it's bugged.
Test of Pride 3: Also adds a condition that you have no curses. This is insane. Any dungeon which is long enough to make 120+ max health easy will have curses, and the Dealer curses ain't cheap to remove. Which makes this about gold, too.

How do you deal with these encounters? You have a few options depending on which encounter you're trying to clear.
  • Endless mode works well for encounters #1 and #2.
  • In story dungeons, prioritize guaranteed health gain cards (such as ghost of the sea, soul gem, or others)
  • Items like the Ring of Poverty, which gives you max health once in exchange for all your gold, will be useful. Stack it with helmets like Fate's Folly, which gives gold for chance events.
  • If it's a story dungeon, pick one that has bad encounters with a chance to fight enemies. For example, the Queen of Scales has Lost in Swamp, which has a chance of fighting monsters. You also have ambushes in others.
  • After you get the pentacle, Skeletons start respawning, which is good for you.
  • The crucible has lots of enemies.
  • Ratmen hunting has lots of enemies.
I'm sure there are a few other ways around these encounters... But by far my favorite way to grind this Fate is to fight The Kraken Unleashed. Until you kill the Kraken, it will keep spawning lizardmen that can take you all the way from 40 to 200 health if you're good. Getting the Kraken card first thing in the Jack of Skulls dungeon is one of the easier—albeit really tedious—ways of clearing the third encounter.

But remember how I said encounter #2 is bugged? If you look in the game files, you'll see the second encounter does have a low health check implemented... somewhere, but the encounter can never trigger it:

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On top of that, encounters #2 and #3 have incorrect finish dialogue. Something didn't go quite right and it wasn't caught.


Anyhow. the helmet you unlock is okay, though some people say it's bugged and has no effect. The generic Test of Pride encounter you get as well is just as hard as the last one the Fate had to do, so I will probably never, ever do it. Ever. If I managed, I'd get a sword that does greater damage against royal enemies (the Court), and that can do a blow that scales with my Max Health.

Ehhh. As I said, I like the Fate, I hate the encounters.


Warlord

The Warlord Fate consists of many encounters, though only a handful are needed to get the Achievement. The rest will be added to the additional Warlord cards when starting a run until they're completed, but can also be done as generic cards.

The quest line will be long, culminating in an encounter that suggests we're breaking all of reality itself.

Seriously, the encounters we unlock by completing Warlord are pretty nice, even if they're punishingly difficult. I'm grateful that there's so much variety; it makes Hard Mode a lot more intriguing. And did I mention hard? Just have a look.

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While we're waiting; I got to show off a bit of the art & visual resources earlier, and there are still a couple of things I want to talk about regarding...

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Music Layering

Did you know there are only three battle tracks in Hand of Fate? They tend to repeat, but they're effective.

Each track has three music files that the game can seamlessly switch between depending on how "dynamic" the action is. There are multiple factors that go into figuring out what "dynamic" means, and I don't know all of them, but your combo meter and how recently you got hit are definitely factors.

You can see a demo of the layering here: https://youtu.be/wdjA700wXzU

The music in this game was composed by Jeff van Dyck. You can listen to the OST on the YouTube playlist he made, which also links to buy the music if you're interested. Most of the OST tracks are a bit different from the game's versions.


The Dealer's Voice

The dealer's audio clips are roughly categorized in the following sets:
  • Achievement audio
  • Generic anecdotes
  • Cabinet text - clips played when viewing a Court card in the cabinet
  • Story card text - clips played when dealing with an encounter or effect added for story reasons, such as the desert with the Queen of Dust, or encountering a 6 of Scales card in the King of Scales dungeon.
  • Court card text - clips played when dealing with a Court card directly
  • Audio discussing the four relics
  • Dynamic responses to game-wide events such as resource amounts, chance draws, taking stairs, winning a token
  • Dynamic responses to events in story dungeons, such as meeting the boss, death, tokens, boss defeats, etc
  • Encounter-specific voice clips
  • Equipment-specific voice clips
  • Miscellaneous clips, including idle voices
  • Tutorial clips
There are just over 1,100 audio clips for the dealer's speech alone. That list may seem either short or long depending on how much you've worked with audio but either way, when you consider just how many different combinations and orders there can be, that's definitely enough to be effective.

There are a few audio clips I couldn't show off in the main LP, but some people who worked on the game gave me the OK to post some clips extracted from the game: https://youtu.be/w4Dxt-2kyzk
  • A few Anecdote-type clips I think didn't play.
  • The various Death clips for combat and starvation... including one that plays when you haven't managed to progress much in the game.
  • Two clips that can play if you manage to make it to the shop with neither food nor money. There aren't many clips for this, but there were more for lack of gold or food.
  • Some voice clips labeled as tutorial clips, for when you keep making a deck you can't play with (too many or too few cards).
  • Some miscellaneous clips, including: A comment that plays if you launch the game a few weeks after your last session, a comment for being really low on max health, a Kickstarter-exclusive clip, and comments if you've had many bad runs in a row.
  • Many idle clips: a few for when you're generally going around pre-dungeon menus, some specifically for when you're looking at equipment cards, and one for when you stick around in your inventory too long.
Chinese VO

The game has some interesting language options; Defiant managed to get a wide variety of translations. What's also kinda cool is that there is an option for Chinese audio. That's right—every single one of the Dealer's voice clips have a Chinese equivalent, probably Mandarin. You can see an example in this video as I run through the game's intro and first dungeon with the subtitles on. You'll see the dealer animations were only ever done for English voices.

The game also has the graphics for a Chinese title screen, so I admit I'm curious about what prompted this particular translation and recording effort. Cool nonetheless.


bacon

There are audio files labeled bacon01 through 05. It's just the sound of bacon frying. That's probably for a fire sound effect.

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Part 21: Endless Mode, fourth run

Warning: The main videos are meant to show you what the game is like at its extreme, and for that reason have been minimally edited so you get the full experience.

Endless Mode, Final run part one (uncut) (YouTube)
Endless Mode, Final run part two (uncut) (YouTube)

Endless Mode, final run highlights (YouTube)


Endless mode got pretty hard last times I ran it, but it's time to see just how cruel the game can be when you push Endless Mode far enough. And since I did want to show off Iron Hunger at least a little bit... I use it to get as far as possible. Past level 30.

Oh, the run starts off as innocuous as the other Endless Mode runs: there are very easy enemy cards, minor curses that you know you'll eventually remove at a Priest or Healer, and lots of gain opportunities. As you keep going down, though, you'll notice that the Gain cards get smaller and smaller, leading to single gold or food increase. Going past the point I got to in the other videos is where the game starts asking you if you've been stocking up on everything you possibly can. Because if you haven't... you'll die from that 50 health Pain Card, take damage just due to having rings, and rage when the Queen and King of Dust appear every single goddamn encounter. I was pretty tired at the end.

Level 30 is the point at which the game gives you an Achievement for surviving this far, and it gets even worse after that. I got what I think is the single-worst curse in the game, Blighted (the one which prevents you from being healed), and it feels like the clock just starts ticking down to your death after that. You can technically keep going but you need to be really lucky.

The irony of doing this run as Iron Hunger is that even though you have to deal with the difficulty of an extra resource, not consuming food negates all cards and effects that explicitly take or cost food, making your life easier than expected. You need a lucky break at the beginning, after which you can keep going very, very far.


Endless Mode is done, though... and there's only one thing left.

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Part 22- The Dealer, hard mode (YouTube)
Part 22- The Dealer, hard mode (uncut) (YouTube)

The Dealer has toyed with us for the last time. Let's not only take him down, but also humiliate him in the process. We're taking him down as the Warlord.

The strategy is no different than a regular run, but the dungeon becomes even less forgiving, so you have to be much better about following it. Good preparations are important; let's have a look at the encounters and equipment I put in. It's not 100% optimized, but it's very close, and has the variety I needed... and there will be no Dragon equipment in this deck.



The Captain, Wheel of the Gods, and Local Peasant, are all safe cards that will, at worst, do nothing. The Kraken and The Tavern are a bit of a gamble, but I at least know how they go, and there is potential for reward (and getting the Kraken set would have been hilarious).

A Winding Trail and Battle Practice are relatively easy to deal with, and I needed to put in battle cards.



Cave Rescue and Dead King's Hall were also needed to round out the deck, but they do have some nice gain. Dead King's Hall also tends to have traps I can exploit. Desert of the Damned and Holy Forge are safe cards at worst. Giant Eagle isn't great, but I didn't hate it as much as other options. Holy Patronage is safe at worst, and might be useful if I can bless myself.



Lost Island has a cost, but has large enough gains I would consider it. Metal Ore and Noble Trader can be useful in the right runs and will cost me nothing at worst. Shop is a breather card at worst, and an expensive way to get supplies at best.

Soul Gem is absolutely crucial. I will want to remove a curse at least once.



I treat Tavern Wager as an easy fight card I can bypass if I have the resources. The Apprentice, Elder Lizard, and Angry Guild master are usually safe and may have benefits. Lonely Bard is safe to ignore. Treasure Chest is not safe, but its pain to gain ratio is very good.



Blacksmith's Gratitude, Loan, and Marketplace are either safe or pure gain. Helpful Priest is safe to ignore. Maze of Traps is a risk, but usually predictable with possible gains. Stranger in the Shadows is also safe considering we're not going to get Holy Touch.



The Lovers is a filler fight card which will give us gains. Trading Post, Wandering Minstrels, and Merchant's Favour are safe with possible gains. Food Wagon is a net benefit at all times.

Goblins was added because of the need to round out the deck, and it's extremely safe as far as fights go, with gold and food benefits.



Mister Lionel is safe and sometimes beneficial, and the Maiden is always useful. The Altar is safe to ignore. Twisted Canyon can be useful, though it's also safe to ignore.





Sword/Axe weapons work best for me, so I favored those weapons that either have 30+ damage, or a nice effect. Thunderstrike is the exception because lightning is pretty useful.



There aren't many shields or armors that I care for. Fortitude's Breath and Innocence are generally useful to navigate the dungeon, whereas the Skeleton King Shield was taken in case I wanted to stun better.

All the armor is heavy, and they either add effects to increase defense in some way, or increase mobility. Anything else is a tradeoff.




Helmets were also hard to pick. Explorer's Helmet, Scavenger's Cap, and Oracle's Diadem are the only ones I care about for easier exploring, food gains, and the ability to plan better. My thought process for Fate's Folly and Golden Mask are that gold gain improvement is better than other things. And the Skeleton King's Helm was just in case I could get the whole set.

Hag's Wraps is just fantastic. Crushing Grips is okay in that I had a chance to stun on counter, but it was added for fun.



I don't know which are the best artifacts, but I took the ones that could either cause fire/lightning damage, stun enemies, freeze them, or boost my resources. I'm less confident about those.




Rings are hard to pick. I mainly split my needs into health, gold, food, and damage.

Incredible:
Occult Ring: The player inflicts 3 more damage for every curse they have. We'll have curses by the end of the run.

Great:
King's Ring: During combat, will deflect any killing blow on the player at the cost of 10% of their gold per blow. No effect on zero gold. You hope you'll never need this ring, but a Hail Mary is never bad.
Master Ring: The player receives +1 gold per ring (including this one) after every encounter. You will almost certainly pick up many rings along the run, and this way you can afford more shop services, or work against gold loss effects.
Ring of Return: The player receives +1 gold per reflected projectile up to a maximum of 10 per combat. Actually pretty nice to build up gold for shops! There will be a lot of combat.
Ring of Reward: After every third combat, the player draws 3 Equipment cards and keeps 1. Again, there will be combat, so have some free equipment!
Explorer's Ring: Grants a food bonus for revealing every encounter on a level. The food effect is a bit better than the Guild Master's ring.

Good:
Berserker ring: Every 6 kills the player makes in a single combat, they receive +30 health. It's useful to have this effect, depending on how bad you are at combat.
Golden ring of pain: The player inflicts +1 damage per 20 gold in their possession up to a maximum of +10. Depends on how the run ends.
Plunderer's Ring: With every Gain card, the player receives +1 gold and +2 health. It's not much, but it's something.
Guild Master's ring: The player receives +1 food whenever they enter a shop. You may not need this, but free food is free food.
Trader's Ring: Whenever the player sells an item, they receive +2 food.

Misc:
Skeleton King Ring: While the Skeleton King Sword, Shield and Helm are equipped Pain cards also give a random gold or food bonus. It was a "just in case" item.
Ring of Experience: After every successful combat, the player receives +1 Max Health per blessing. I made a mistake putting this ring in my deck.

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