Tomb Guardians: Showcasing the Tricube Tactics combat system

Last month, I finally finished and published Tomb Guardians, which I'd been working on for about nine months! I'd mostly finished (and even shared on my Discord server) the main one-page RPG version back in August last year, but as a "tower defense" scenario I felt it had a very different setup to the other one-pagers and could greatly benefit from an example adventure -- and while working on that, I realized Tomb Guardians would make a great Tricube Tactics tie-in, showcasing the expanded combat rules.

I used the first page of the adventure to explain how to modify the characters and customize the scenes (based on the results of the adventure generator from the main one-pager), with the scenes themselves described on the second page. My usual Six-Scene Scenario didn't seem a good fit for this one-pager, so "Tomb Guardians: The Invasion" has only three scenes: Entrance (when the intruders enter the tomb), Exploration (when they explore the tomb), and Showdown (the final battle). The first and second scenes use regular Tricube Tales challenges, while the third scene is a Tricube Tactics combat encounter.

The main reason Tomb Guardians took so long to publish is that I wanted to thoroughly playtest it before release, and I initially found it far too deadly. Eventually, I settled on giving the PCs three minion tokens to increase their survival rate, along with a second knack to help showcase more of the character abilities from Tricube Tactics, and that seemed to hit the sweet spot; combat was challenging, but not insurmountable.

I created character cards for Tomb Guardians, as I've done for many other one-pagers, but these ones have a new design with sections for minion tokens and knacks. I also added a second side for each card, with gameplay advice tailored to each character. The PCs in Tomb Guardians don't have names, so I used the name section at the top to describe each character.

Finally, I originally wanted to create a tutorial video, but I realized I lacked the skillset to do it justice. I even tried creating some PowerPoint slides, thinking I could add a voice-over and then turn it into a video, but the results were embarrassing, so in the end I decided to stick with what I know: I created a 12-page example playthrough PDF, serving as a full walkthrough of the adventure from beginning to end.

I even had the opportunity to play Tomb Guardians as a player last week, GMed by Skeffington Liquorish (from the Zadmar Games Discord server), and that was good fun! I played the wraith, the other two players were the construct and the vampire, and we had to fight off a necromancer who had broken into the tomb with his apprentice and an undead army. The final combat was quite tough, but we emerged victorious!