Story Realms Preview: Adventuring Kits Part 4

If you haven’t yet, check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of our Adventuring Kits preview to learn all about Story Realms’ fun take on basic adventuring equipment.   Today we’ll be finishing up our preview of Adventuring Kits by revealing the final two starting Adventuring Kits for the game.  First off, we have the Daredevil Kit!

The Daredevil Kit

The Daredevil Kit is for the hero that isn’t afraid to take big risks and doesn’t let dangerous terrain get in the way.  This kit is well suited for a player that wants to feel like a classic, high fantasy rogue that scales walls and performs amazing feats of acrobatics.  Of all the Adventuring Kits, the Daredevil Kit is probably the best suited for the player that just wants to seem cool.

The final Adventuring Kit we have to reveal is a favorite amongst the Growing Up Gamers crew.  It’s fun and a bit silly, but it has still proven very useful.  It’s the Fancy Pants Kit!

The Fancy Pants Kit

The Fancy Pants Kit is for the hero that likes to look good, smell good, and eat well.  Of course, it’s not all flashy accessories, that shiny, silver dagger can do a lot more than just look pretty.  Though it may seem a bit odd for going out on an adventure, the Fancy Pants Kit is actually the only kit that’s worked so well it hasn’t been revised since its inception.  It’s because the Fancy Pants Kit is one of the best embodiments of what makes Story Realms so different.

The Philosophy Behind Adventuring Kits

Story Realms is not a game filled with complex rules systems that have a hundred different ways you can stab a monster with a pointy stick.  The rules are designed to be relatively simple.  The reason for this is not to remove options, but rather to open them up.  The game is designed to accommodate and encourage players coming up with creative solutions to problems.  In this way, that Bottle of Perfume is just as effective as the Grapple Launcher or Climbing Gear.  It just depends on the situation and the player’s plan for how to use it.  With this in mind, we tried to fill the Adventuring Kits not just with classically useful items, but items that players would have fun using in interesting ways. 

This game needs more delicious pie!

The best example of this is the Fancy Pants Kit’s Delicious Pie.  When we first started testing the game beyond our own design team, we still had a lot of kits filled with more straightforward items.  However, we saw people having way too much fun with that Delicious Pie and coming up with some amazing uses for it.  A short and incomplete list of what I have seen done with that pie includes: using it to cheer someone up, using it as a bargaining chip, tricking a foolish monster into diving down the wrong hole after it, splattering it on enemies faces to blind them, and even filling it with dynamite as a nasty trap.  It led to a design catchphrase that we’ve bantered about and someday I want to get put on a T-Shirt.  “This game needs more Delicious Pie.” 

We realized that we needed to focus on creating as many moments of pure joy for the players as we could.  We went back over all kits and made sure each one had an item that we thought was just pure fun.  Something to draw a smile.  In general, we’ve used that phrase to guide our thinking across the entire game.  At every turn, we are trying to make sure that we are giving the players and the Storyteller the tools to do something exciting and creative.  We don’t want to railroad them into solving every challenge by bashing the problem with weapons or using the same gear that’s in every other fantasy themed game.

So That’s All the Adventuring Kits?

We hope you enjoyed this preview of our Adventuring Kits.  However, these are not all the Adventuring Kits that come with the game.  These are just the ones available at the start of the game.  If you glance at the side of the card back, you’ll notice that it says Wayfarer’s Kits.  This is to designate it as a particular set of six kits.

The game comes with an entire second set of six more Adventuring Kits that become available when you reach the main hub city of the game.  If the game is successful, you can also bet that more Adventuring Kits will be included in future expansions to give the players lots of cool choices about how to equip themselves.

A Final Note to Growing Up Gamers Fans

We are super excited about Story Realms, and we are obviously eager to talk about it.  We will be doing even more Story Realms previews in the near future.  However, we don’t want Story Realms to run away with this blog too much either.  To that end, we are currently revising the Escapade Games website so that it will have its own blog to host future Story Realms previews.  We will still let all our Growing Up Gamers know when those previews are available to view, but we will keep the bulk of that content off this site.  We want to get this blog back to focusing more on what it’s meant to be.  We’ll be bringing back a lot more of the game discussions and reviews, educational topics, and wacky family antics real soon.  If you’ve been missing that stuff and craving more of it, hang in there and thanks for sticking with us!