The Road to Regency – The Concept

Hello. C J here. I’ve wrapped up a lot of planning and I’ve posted all of my finished Minecraft builds. Now it’s time to move onto my next batch of work. I need to finish Regency. Regency is my upcoming card based tabletop RPG in an envelope. There are a ton of things I need it to be able to do and I have plans for most of them. I also need at least the first few editions of it done before I can go forwards with making the level maps for the video game. I’m using Minecraft to practice designing those for both jobs. The game needs the following things.

Faction Cards

Each player in the game plays as an entire military faction represented by 20 cards. As they level up they gain Experience that they can use to buy new cards. The military cards are one named faction each set with art, stats and health boxes. A player can own and control more than one of these but they have to be played in real time. The first expansion will feature Ascala and needs five sets of 20 of these that I’m currently designing. That’s 100 cards. These will also form opponents from opposing nations or organizations.

Spells

Regency uses a slightly different points economy to my other RPG products. It funds all spells with some combination of what I call gems. Gems are cards that can be played and discarded over and over again and are each assigned a colour. I’m still working on the colours but the varieties are Wealth, Resources, Prima, Renown and Corruption. These are paid to play cards with faction characters on them as well as the abilities, combat powers and spells the player can use during the game.

Should a non-combat dice roll or number be needed the player can draw one of these cards and add the card’s cost to the numerical stat that is specified in the effect that requires a number. They can then compare this to a difficulty and see if they beat it by one or more. This replaces dice rolling altogether. There will be more spells with each expansion and I’m trying to theme them by the nation the expansion is about.

Location Cards

These are where the game gets a bit more complicated to design. Location cards detail every street, room, chair, building and landmark in the entire continent of Ascala. They’re divided into tiers. First are region cards grouped into sets of four that each show off a square kilometre out of a defined district, landscape, or wilderness. Then there are cards one level of detail zoomed in that outline street maps for cities or paths and key features for wilderness. Each expansion for each nation will need one of these for that nation and the continent it’s on.

I’m trying to go deeper with this still with a further set of cards that display an individual neighbourhood with its character and buildings. Then cards for the varieties of buildings found on a continent and finally cards for individual rooms. I need equivalents to these for wilderness as well. Out of this you can build a street by street, alley by alley, room by room map of the city without needing to draw or own a card for each individual element of it. I have a lot of the planning done for this in Minecraft already. The Minecraft buildings are practice for drawing the art on these.

Quest Cards

Finally I need cards detailing stories and goals for the players. These are being planned alongside the video game scripts and are going well. They will be unique to each expansion like the video game scripts are unique to each location in the setting.

This is what I know. None of this is unfeasible including the art but it will take time. The planning is still being done on the location cards and not much else. I’m drawing them once I get a chance to design the outfits on the faction cards. Further details, and a sample of the art I’m working on, can be found on the Regency page. This is a long term project but I should have frequent updates about it.

C J Mcpherson