Runebound meets Midnight Volume 3: Goods and Covenant Items

Wealth in Runebound
Ahh, gold. A successful adventurer welcomes glory, demands honor, expects power . . . but of all the rewards for vanquishing a foe, can anything compare to bright, gleaming, weighty gold? Glory does not fill a belly, and honor does not repair weapons or armor. Power is elusive and ever-changing. But wealth can be counted, measured, used. It is the means to ever-greater weapons and magic, and it is the only way that a hero can be sure he can purchase healing enough to be strong and hale when facing his next challenge.

So why don’t we just use gold in Runebound: Midnight? First of all, gold has little value in the Midnight setting. The war shattered the economy, and everything works on a barter system now . . . a bunch of gems are more useful as sling bullets to hunt down dinner than they are as wealth.

Goods vs. Coins
We could have just said, then, that each “coin” represents a pile of goods. From a setting consistency point-of-view, that would have solved the problem. But thematically, nothing says “high fantasy adventure boardgame” like piles of gold counters in front of you . . . and nothing says “low fantasy” like Midnight! All the epic action and adventure is here, sure, but heroes don’t slay dragons to get their treasure, and they’re not rewarded by lords for rescuing kidnapped princesses. Instead, the heroes fight a desperate guerilla war against an occupying army. Survival and overcoming evil take precedence over accumulation of wealth, and we thought that having a pile of gold next to your character card would detract from that feel.

On a related note, there were all these market cards that had no place in Runebound: Midnight. The Mace of Kellos (a god from Runebound who doesn’t exist in Midnight), the Runestones (magic works differently in Midnight), and the various explosives (yep, you guessed it . . . no explosives in Midnight!) are all examples of items that wouldn’t fit the theme and setting of Runebound: Midnight. And none of the Allies at all made sense in a different setting than the base Runebound world!

We filled the void left open by these cards in several different ways . . . to counteract the lack of Allies, as well as to promote individual heroism, we tweaked the rules so that a Hero could attack during multiple phases in a round, depending on his level. The removed Items were replaced by, of course, new Items. So the question then arose: what to do with all of these unused cards? And how should we represent goods and items in a barter economy? The answer to both questions turned out to be the same.

When a Hero in Runebound: Midnight defeats a Challenge and earns a reward, he takes the goods that the foe was carrying, whether the weapons and armor he made use of in battle or those he carried for trade. These goods are represented by the cards in the original Runebound market deck. So if a Hero earns 3 goods, he draws 3 cards from the Runebound market deck, keeping them facedown. Then if he finds something he wants while bartering, he discards those goods to purchase it, just as if it were gold.

You can look at what you picked up, if you like. On the one hand, it doesn’t matter what’s on the face of the card; they’re all just goods to be spent. On the other hand, though, the storyteller in me likes checking out what’s on the face of the card. If it’s a Charming Flute or a Mirror of Shael, I imagine that my character found a battered old artifact, perhaps once valuable and powerful, but now more valued for the metal for which it can be melted down. If it’s an Ally like the Burning Priest or Brother Frakas, I envision my character finding the long-dead adventurer’s bones or boots, his mighty deeds reduced to a few potential bone arrowheads or a pile of patches for a leather gauntlet.

As your Hero advances, however, there is a game mechanics reason for looking at the face of the goods cards you’ve drawn: you never know when a piece of rubbish you’ve picked up might turn out to be a Covenant Item, a powerful weapon for the Heroes of the resistance! To find out about Covenant Items, and to get a glimpse at one of the Night Kings that will attempt to thwart your Hero, stay tuned for the final volume of "Runebound meets Midnight."