The River

The core element of the scroll game, not surprisingly is the scroll.

I've been trying to think of a good layout for the scroll and this has required drawing up a range of options. At this stage, I'm tending toward a layout like this...

...but note that this is not the final image, and the scroll will be styled to look far more like a piece of Egyptian antiquity.

The point I'm trying to make here is the way the scroll is divided into 7 segments with 3 sections each. Scattered locations exist along the two sides of the river, and there are a few locations which are a bit more difficult to reach (marked with the white dots). As a reward for visiting these less accessible locations, a bonus treasure would be made available.

The basic mechanism of the game has the characters starting at the river delta and working their way upstream (though I might need to do a bit more historical research here...it might be more culturally appropriate to have the characters travelling downstream). They would each get a movement action, then draw a card each turn. That card might offer an extra move, a challenge to confront, or a memory from the character's past that will need to be resolved before the character can move on. Along the way, characters might gain access to camels which allow an additional movement (but can't be carried across the river), or might gain a bag of ferry tokens that allow extra movement along the river (ever time they use the bag, they roll a die; if a certain result comes up, that was their last token).

I did the calculations in a previous series of posts, and it typically takes about 20 turns for the game to play through, so with a single move each turn there needs to be some kind of effect that accelerates movement because this map has a minimum of 28 steps between the first location and the last. To move from one of the seven segments to the next, a character will need to face one of the guardians of the dead. There is only a single location marking the boundary from one segment to the next, so the characters are specifically funneled into these locations as they journey along the river.

But playtests will have to be done.