Parley Hatch 2abfe4abd1 Initial commit: design docs

Working title 'tgame' is provisional. Top-level samples/ and
docs/samples/ are gitignored; visual/art pipeline lives outside
this repo.

2026-05-17 11:16:07 -06:00

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Expeditions

How materials, recipes, and trouble enter the game. AFK timer-resolved, no real-time gameplay.

Mechanic

Pick a destination (zone).
Pick a team (1 minion solo, or up to N for team expeditions).
Set off. Time passes (minutes to hours depending on distance + risk).
They come back with a report — loot, events, possibly injuries or worse.

Risk tiers

Safe — predictable, modest rewards, low variance, no real risk.
Standard — some variance, decent rewards, occasional minor injuries.
Dangerous — high variance, premium rewards, real injury and (rare) death risk.

Riskier missions need better gear, better team comp, and Soldiers as escort. Soft-gating: you can send an underprepared team into the Mire, but they'll come back hurt or not at all.

Team composition

Soldiers required for hostile zones, otherwise penalty.
Beastmasters can pacify creature zones, reduce hazard rolls.
Scholars boost recipe-find rate.
Gatherers boost yield by biome subspec.
Merchants boost found-coin and trade-route bonuses.

Team comp is its own puzzle separate from gear loadout.

Resolution: procedural event log

No LLM, no runtime AI. Templated text snippets with slot fills:

[hazard, biome=Mire, severity=medium]
"{minion} stumbled into a {creature} nest. {teammate} pulled them out, but {item} was lost in the muck."

Selected by zone + risk tier + team composition + trait rolls. Templates have conditional branches (different snippet if a Brave minion is present, etc.). Authoring the template pool is real work but standard work.

Drops

See 14-materials.md for the materials taxonomy.

Raw materials (primary) — biome-appropriate; ore, wood, botanicals, bone, hide, etc.
Refined / components (occasional) — when expeditions encounter abandoned camps, ruins, or merchants
Recipes (occasional) — sometimes specific to the zone's flavor
Trophies & curiosities (rare) — relics, artifacts, named weapons, lore items
Trait shifts (sometimes) — minions return changed by what they saw
Relationship changes (always-ish) — who saved whom, who was reckless
NPC encounters (very rare) — recruitable adventurers met on the road

Wounds vs. death

Working position: wounded by default, true death only on catastrophic failure in the highest-tier zones.

Wounded → infirmary for X hours, can't expedition during that time.
Wounded with Brave trait → shorter recovery, gains scar (cosmetic + flavor).
Death → permanent loss, with a memorial entry in the Library.

Reasoning: losing a leveled-up portrait you've grown attached to is brutal. Permadeath everywhere makes players resent the game. Permadeath as the worst possible outcome of the worst possible expedition makes it dramatic.

Open questions

How granular is the destination picker? Region → zone → encounter, or just region → zone?
Do players watch a real-time progress bar, or does the report just appear on completion?
Should expeditions chain (a successful expedition opens a follow-up that's only available for 24h)?

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