Back to that Scroll Game

At the beginning of the year I was toying with revisiting the concept of a game on a scroll. I looked at it first a few years ago, and in the meantime "Fall of Magic" has been released and has received all sorts of accolades. I've let it slide again, while I've been working on my series of paintings, but in the last couple of days I've been thinking about it again.

A fairly simple game, where the players portray recently dead Egyptians in the ancient world...cooperatively trying to reach the Fields of Aaru by passing through a series of gates protected by the sentinels of the underworld, and trying to keep a step ahead of the hordes of Anubis. As players progress through the game their characters explore the events of their life, and the moments that might allow them to pass into the afterlife, or face oblivion.

At the moment I'm working with a bunch of idea components that I know have worked in the past, and they generally seem to fit together as a coherent whole.

• Two part characters - where one part defines a character's occupational role in society before they died, and the second part describes a personality trait.
• Rolling a pool of dice (at least 2 and possibly up to 5) to determine successes, where certain tasks need a certain number of successes achieved before they can be considered "completed".
• A simple combat system.
• A deck of cards to randomise the potential challenges.
• A second deck of cards to provide rewards that might prove beneficial on each character's journey.
• A built-in narrative flow that echoes the past through flashbacks.

It seems to be fitting together, but I'm now struggling through the finer details...the very thing that bogged me down the first time. We'll see how it goes with a couple of playtests.