Tiny Bit of Black Fortress Revealed

So Mantic has finally revealed something about the Black Fortress for Dungeon Saga.  The Black Fortress was an upgrade option which provided a new set of Dungeon Tiles along with a Door and Furniture set.  The missions to go with the tiles are in the kickstarter journal so every backer are getting those but you had to pay for the tile set.  It was probably the most vapory part of the kickstarter as Mantic was very unclear about the number and types of dungeon tiles in base game or expansions often showing grey outlines like above.  Now the value here is probably not bad since the doors and furniture set pretty much cover the cost of the pack but the question is more about usefulness.



How many tiles do you really need?  From talking to the game designer the mission appear to be built up using tiles designs from the previous Dwarf Kings Hold games so there might not be any unique shapes in the set and if you have the base game plus some of the expansions you can probably build a pretty large dungeon so the only reason to get the set would be the tile setting design.  With out the Black Fortress set my guess is that you would have to build the dungeons for the missions using tiles from difference sets so slightly less uniform appearance.  Random Magma flow or orc nest might pop up.

We finally get to see something of the artistic design that about 7-8 months after the pledge manager closed.

Here is an example tile which uses this design style which is shared across the first expansion Return of Valendor and the Black Fortress tile pack.  Not bad but not something that you could not have probably previewed during the pledge manager to give people an idea of what they were buying.

They clearly have been sitting on this design for a while since the base pledge will contain tiles like this so you are in the area where you are doing controlled information release to cover the large gap between paying and delivery for kickstarters.  On that note the last update did not have any shipping news so I am thinking the expansion backers will be lucky to see the product by Christmas.  It will be interesting to see if Mantic sits on getting the base game to retailers in time for the holidays to fulfill the idea that backers get it first since they decide to do a single shipment type thing.  Or will they relent and do multiple shipments getting everyones base pledges out than shipping the base game to retailers followed up completing the expansion to the backers.  That is not a light decision since shipping stuff has gotten pretty expensive.  Say 3K backers with 15 dollars each in additional shipping is 45K or ~5% of the funds raised.