Dark Venture

The obligatory photo album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/3QGcyc8yrHAuUtwC9

Dark Venture is a tabletop adventure game set in a sureal post-apocalyptic setting. It's for 1-4 players, either solo, cooperative, or competitive, the goal being to resolve "quests" to collect Quest Points. In competitive play, the player with the most points after a set number of rounds (6 or 12) wins, in coop play all characters must score some number of points before the end of the game, and in solo play the player essentially tries to beat their high score.

Though i generally do not enjoy point-collection games, Dark Venture has a strong narrative element, providing the outline of a psychedelic adventure and leaving the player to mentally fill the gaps, much like my current favorite adventure game, Dungeon Degenerates, does. Dark Venture's artwork is also vaguely reminiscent of Dungeon Degenerates', while still being its own thing.

It's card-centric, with cards for characters, items, quests, and building the map. Each location on the map (which builds up differently every time it's played) has a narrative entry in a booklet and may have "actions" (scripted events) associated with them, some of which offer choices which change the outcome. The game comes with two independent sets of location narratives and actions, and it is, at least in pricipal, relatively straightforward (though time-consuming) to create custom sets.

My copy of Dark Venture is the print-and-play edition, available from DriveThruRPG. It was easily my biggest and most ambitious print-and-play project up to that point (late November 2020), and getting it printed and assembled cost at least as much as the printed copy cost the crowdfunding backers who funded the first edition :/. The first crowdfunding campaign was US-only, and any remaining physical copies found for sale are based in the US for large sums of money (plus shipping), so it was actually cheaper (though also much more work) to have it professionaly printed and then assemble it.

Custom Quest Cards

Dark Venture has intrigued me enough to port over my custom card creation tools from Dungeon Degenerates and Zombicide to:

https://fossil.wanderinghorse.net/r/darkventure

Those tools, due to lack of energy and capacity on my part, lack the custom editor apps of their Dungeon Degenerates and Zombicide counterparts, but they provide a basis with which players can easily create new Side Quest and Heroic Quest cards for use with the game, provided they're willing and able to edit HTML and/or JSON.