To put you into context, I tried to upgrade my Eldritch Express game to a steam punk theme. From a thematic point of view, it made no sense to have wandering monster on the map as a map space covered a whole continent. It made no sense that killing a monster would eradicate monster in the whole area. So I tried to remove the monsters and instead make them spawn when trying resolve an encounter.
Now the problem with that is that it hides the information, making it impossible to analyse the consequence before taking action which was one of the core feature of the game. I tried to abstract the threat into the resolution of the encounter and now it changes the game too much ( you do not really fight anything) which now becomes more complex to design then a simple retheme + upgrade in the rules.
I got an idea yesterday, in order to make the new game not diverge too much from the original while still beign thematically logical. The idea is: what if monsters were recurrent?
The idea is simple, monsters spawn in an area of the board. When players have an encounter in that area, they face off all the monsters. If they kill the monsters, characters will have less casualties. But if they do kill monsters they still remain on the board. In fact the monster token on the board indicates which creatures are in an area, but they remain there once killed.
Now the only way to remove those monster tokens from the board to help other players is to have an encounter to the monster's lair and erradicate the threat entirely.
The first advantage is that it makes thematically sense that a type of monster roam an entire area, but killing a few of them won't remove them from the area. Second, it should require much less components and the board will be much less crowded. Third, of course, it will be more compatible with the rules I already have.
Tell me what you think?
Do you like the idea?
Somebody on BGG suggestes "Darkest Night" which has that kind of mechanism where monsters haunt an area, and they must be faced at the end of the turn. But they never die, it's like if they informed you of the bestiary in the area.
So Having destroyable lairs could be optional, but if an area gets too much crowded with tough ennemies and a lot of critical encounters to complete are in the location, you could have some interest to destroy lairs to reduce the threat level. Still, destroying lairs cost precious time that could be used for other purpose.
The monster tokens would somewhat determined the bestiary available in the area. When the game progress, new tokens will be added on the board making the encounters more tough. According to the scenario, I could make for example a certain monster always present in all encounters. So that you always have 1 monster to fight (it also uses less tokens. It could also be dependent of the location, if you close a rift, you don't fight the same creature as if you solve a mystery.
So that is the idea. It seems interesting, and could be portable to other theme like my Cyperpunk theme where there could be "threat" in the digital plane.
Also, it's possible that all monsters in an area does not trigger in all situation. So you might not necessarily encounter everything all the time. For example, certain creature only activate when visiting cities.