Steamforged Games is set to begin crowdfunding for the latest campaign in their Elden Ring tabletop adaptation in just a couple days. Rot & Sorcery will feature two core boxes that can be played completely standalone, paired with each other, or even combined with the previous campaign to send your Tarnished on an incredible journey. While fully compatible with the Realm of the Grafted King, Rot & Sorcery does expand and improve upon that framework to ensure a unique experience. While at Gen Con, I had the chance to get a taste of what the new content has to offer. Please note that since this is a prototype of the game, some components and rules are subject to change.
Domain of Rot
The first core box, Dominion of Rot, features the first poison rot swamp of the board game series: Caelid. Tarnished in this region will, of course, need to deal with the Scarlet Rot. The designers tried to avoid turning this into a standard damage-over-time poison effect, and I think their solution is much more interesting and engaging for the players. Rather, the first time an enemy inflicts a Tarnished with Rot, the player gains one of the status effect tokens. This doesn’t do anything yet, but if a Tarnished is afflicted with Rot while already holding a token, they instead remove the token, gain a Rot Attribute card to their Attribute discard, and advance the Rot Intensity track.
Tarnished face off against some Kindred of the Rot in Caelid
Rot Attribute cards have a random set of Attribute icons on them (generally only a couple) that more than likely won’t synergize with your Tarnished. When drawn, they deal damage to your Tarnished as an extra punishment. Worse than that is the Rot Intensity track. This track changes depending on the encounter, but for the one I demoed, it increased the damage dealt by each Kindred of the Rot I was facing. If the track is already filled when it needs to increase, each Tarnished instead loses two health.
An example of the new Rot Intensity track
However, Tarnished won’t be the only ones facing the consequences of the Scarlet Rot. In Dominion of Rot, the very land itself can become afflicted. Tiles during Exploration scenarios can be afflicted with Rot, and if the Tarnished don’t purify them, they transform into altered versions with different location icons. This change is persistent, and every time these tiles are drawn for the rest of the campaign, they will remain in this blighted state until cleansed.
The same location in normal and blighted form—note the changing location icon
Exploration itself has seen some adjustments present in both boxes. The location icons have been altered for better visual clarity on how Tarnished will interact with them, as the tokens have been dropped entirely. Gone is the fiddliness of needing to fish for a couple of specific tokens each time a tile is explored. This does come at the cost of mid-exploration combat, though. Instead, Hardships will be more engaging, and Effigies of the Martyr will allow Tarnished to assist others as they overcome the new Hardships.
Player boards for the two new Tarnished
Back to Dominion of Rot, the two classes I was able to experience were an alternate Confessor and the new Hero. Instead of access to strong Push synergies, the Confessor gains a stance system. This allows them to deal extra damage on one attack or extra defense against one attack, with the stance swapping each time it’s triggered. Their combat deck provides plenty of tools to either benefit from being in a specific stance or manipulate the stance in a variety of ways (such as staying in the aggressive stance for a better combo). But as much as I enjoyed the puzzle of managing the Confessor’s stance, I think the Hero is the real standout of the box. The Hero’s perk is that at the end of every turn, they draw back up to their hand size of three. They always have options regardless of how many enemies activate between the Hero’s turns. The only downside is that once the Hero’s Combat deck is exhausted, they take four damage. Luckily, the Hero has methods of shuffling cards back into their Combat deck to delay this, creating a flavor of resource management that I really enjoyed.
Machinations of the Witch
In the second box, Machinations of the Witch, Tarnished get to explore the Academy of Raya Lucaria. In this region, there will be secrets to uncover during Exploration scenarios that will change how the final act resolves. The main feature of the region, however, is enemy spellcraft. Encounters with spellcasting enemies will include a special Behavior card that represents their spell, which includes a pattern of icons on the top. Each of their Behavior cards has an icon on the top left, and if the current card positions (ignoring anything between, like Tarnished Initiatives) match the requisite pattern when the spell is resolved, the Tarnished will get blasted with a devastating attack. If the pattern doesn’t match, a much weaker attack is resolved instead. The enemy half of the board will feature row bonuses that can allow enemies to “correct” the current order of cards to set their pattern, or allow Tarnished to “disrupt” the pattern and stop its casting. But one of the new classes excels at disrupting spells even without this positioning.
The Red Wolf of Radagon has a pretty sick miniature
I was only able to try one of the new Tarnished classes, but the Astrologer was plenty interesting to me. The Astrologer specializes in re-ordering the initiative row, enabling their allies to act at the most opportune times or shifting enemy Behaviors to prevent spells from casting. In my combat against the Red Wolf of Radagon, I was able to do both and ensured that my ally could focus on smacking the Wolf as hard as they could. This is crucial, since the Astrologer is much more of a support class and doesn’t hit quite as hard as some of the other Tarnished.
The Red Wolf will successfully cast Glintstone Dash if the Astrologer doesn’t stop it
Fighting the boss also gave me a glimpse at their new board, which helps keep everything neatly organized and assists with tracking the amount and type of cards to draw each round. With the new Spell cards and multiple simultaneous bosses to track, this is a much-appreciated quality of life addition.
Final Thoughts
Fans of the initial game won’t want to miss out on these boxes. The designers of the game have a ton of passion for it and made sure to listen to player feedback when iterating on the previous set. From focusing more on key enemies to reducing Exploration fiddliness, there are several improvements to the game without even getting into the plentiful new content and mechanics. Excited Tarnished can look forward to the crowdfunding launch on August 28th and follow the campaign on Gamefound here: https://gamefound.com/en/projects/steamforged-games/elden-ring-board-game-sorcery-and-rot
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