Awaken Realms, publisher of Nemesis and Tainted Grail, have announced the upcoming crowdfunding campaign for Lords of Ragnarok the long-rumored and anticipated spiritual successor to Lords of Hellas from 2018. Designed by author Adam Kwapiński, the game has 1 - 4 players vying for dominance over the frozen tundras of Norse mythology albeit with a sprinkle of science-fiction added for good measure. In a recent designer diary posted on Gamefound, author Adam Kwapiński went into detail outlining what differentiates Lords of Ragnarok from its predecessor:

“Lords of Hellas have many fans, people played this game hundreds of times and we collected massive feedback. So we are now smarter than we was (or we definitely should be ;p). To give you an example, lets focus on Monuments for a moment. As I wrote before, there will be Gods Monuments in Lords of Ragnarok. But there was couple of problems with them. Most common was issue was that people very rare see them fully build on the board. Mostly because when one of them was fully build, game ended. So we introduce two changes. First of all this will be no longer game end condition - instead of that we have Ragnarok (there will be some roosters that will crow to announce that this is coming ;) ). Secondly we changed number of levels. Instead of 5 we will have 4 levels of Monuments which let players build them faster. There are a lot of small changes like those.

Second thing is to give you totally new toys and mechanics. Sometimes taking out something that was not fun enough - for example, there will be no quests in Lords of Ragnarok and I thingkmost of you will not miss them very much. But there will be a lot of totally new stuff. Starting from a new way of taking action - maybe in some way similar to the old one but with different interaction between players that change everything. Beside that you will get runes - totally new components that let you make additional activation of your armies, take control of monsters, boosting your hero stats and making alliance with Realms… Realms are also something new.

Realms will be special kind of Regions that can’t be controlled by armies, but can help you in other ways if you have an alliance with them (granting you bonus, every time a monument is being build). Armies also totally changed. There will be less troops for each player but each of your troops can be upgraded multiple times and they strength can grow significantly - so literally they are more armies not troops. There also will be Drakkars - one for each players. After all we are making games about freaking viking so it will be weird with out it, right?

And that is what bring me to the third principle that was in my head constantly when I was working on Lords of Ragnarok. Those who listen to any interviews with me knows that for me connection between theme and mechanic is very important. And I really try to focus on that in Lords of Ragnarok very much. I want you to feel that this game is about that specific mythology and it is differ than greek one. This is why your heroes will have different statistics. This is why you have runes or can visit other 8th Realms that are connected to Midgard. Even the simple action Usurp that you can remember from Lords of Hellas change it’s character in Lords of Ragnarok. In Lords of Hellas you have to had Glory token to use that action - this was the only way to take control using that action. In Lords of Ragnarok you can do that but you also can use Usurp action if your Strength is equal or higher than the Population Strength of a Region you want to take control. After all this is a viking world and they don’t think about their jarls or kings in a sacred way. So if you are strong enough, you just can step into that Region and after beheading a former warlord take what is yours. That was the viking way. At least according to the legends...”

Adding to this mighty list of improvements and features is the recent addition to team of none other than Dávid Turczi who will be collaborating designing the solo mode for Lords of Ragnarok! Look forward to the crowdfunding campaign launching on Gamefound 21st of October.

Source: Gamefound