Wrapping up my tutorial series on Occult Chronicles, I’ve saved the most important system for last: Combat.
Tricky:
As we’ve talked about over the last two entries, Occult Chronicles is made up of encounters that will make use of your attributes. Every encounter belongs to different categories based on what’s going on. This in turn affects what attributes will be used when you are deciding your actions.
For example, swords or physical action won’t help if you’re trying to convince a ghost of something or having a strong mind will not help you break down a locked door. The type of encounter also affects what edges and feats will be applied to it. For instance the sprinter feat which I mentioned in part one only affects traps, fleeing and evade encounters.
Every encounter is decided by a simple card game. Your objective is to use the cards in your hand to match them by suit with the cards on the table and be higher than the table card. The card’s suits are the same as the attribute types.
So for example, if there is a ten of cups on the table, I want to match that with any card in my hand from the cups suit that is higher than ten. Each suit goes from Ace to King along with a major arcana card which acts as a special trump card.
Using face cards will give you more points when matching compared to numerical cards. When you start a card game, all the cards on the table will be faced down and you will have to flip them over one at a time. If you flip over a card that you have a matching suit for in your hand, then you must play that card before turning over any other cards.
Determining how many points you need and available cards is done before you enter the card game. Take a look at this screen:
This is an example of one the encounters you will find during the game. The box at the bottom of the screen with the three attribute symbols in them represents a possible action for you to take. Because this encounter is a sanity check, you only have one available option. But other encounters may have multiple ones with special ones based on items that you may have.
Once you’ve mouse over an action, the flavor text changes to what you see at the top below the picture. The three symbols on the box at the bottom each have an important role.
Starting from the left, the first attribute affects the difficulty of combat and you want the target number to be as low as possible. The second value affects the tricks rating; this determines how many cards are going to be on the table. The final attribute determines how many cards you will have in your hand for the encounter.
During the card game, one of your inventory tabs may turn green to indicate that you have an item or feat that can be used for this encounter. There are a variety of uses, from raising a value of one of your cards, getting or losing cards, adding points and a lot more. Mousing over a card will tell you what it does and what situations it can be used for.
I used the handgun in this screenshot to boost my 3 of cups to the six that you see there.
If you meet or beat the target or fail, the next screen you’ll visit is the results screen. There are ten face down cards to choose from.
Based on whether you win or lost the encounter, you’ll either draw from the reward pool or the failure pool respectively.
The further past the target you went will increase the number of cards you can flip over for the rewards. And the opposite is true for the failure pool. Rewards can be anything from more health and sanity, new items or edges, expertise points and more. Failure can take away health and sanity, inflict wounds that lower stats and far worse.
The nature of the encounter also determines the pool of cards as well. Completing a quest will net you a greater chance of better rewards than just beating a random encounter.
This is also where the artifacts come into play. Each artifact (once found) has a chance of showing up if you fail an encounter and act as a get out of jail free card. You can turn over a card with an artifact over it and know that you will not be affected if there was something there.
However every time you use an artifact, you have the chance to lose it from your inventory forcing you to weight the choice of using it.
The reward screen can be hit or miss but important nonetheless
The reward system is one of the areas that I’m not a fan of in Occult Chronicles as it can be exploited if done right or make the game harder.
If you get enough feats or items to raise your point total way above the target, you’ll be able to flip over a lot of cards and get a better chance at finding expertise tokens.
But if you’re just scrapping by, you won’t be able to flip as many over and most of the time you won’t find anything.
Now I know that most tutorials will guide you through to the end of the game. Unfortunately I met a different kind of end:
Occult Chronicles is not an easy game but hopefully these tutorials will help at least push someone in the right direction of conquering it.
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