Subscribe to download
Saga: Age of Heroes

Cue up "Immigrant Song" by Led Zeppelin... you're about to embark on an epic adventure of fierce battle, magic artifacts, dreaded monsters, and fickle gods! My Tabletop Simulator mod for April 2017 is TSR's Age of Heroes microgame, Saga!

Saga recreates a mythical time period occurring sometime after the fall of Rome: the age of heroes and vikings! Each player takes a heroic figure and attempts to perform deeds that will generate enough glory to ensure that the hero's memory will live in the sagas composed after his or her death.

To gain glory, the heroes slay monsters, accumulate treasure hoards, recruit lesser heroes as their companions, and establish kingdoms. The hero who gains the most glory is the one whose fame will live on in the sagas, while the others are doomed to be forgotten by posterity. Each player must be decisive and alert to grasp chances and avoid having other heroes gain glory at his or her expense!

To make up for the lack of a character sheet, I've added many elements not in the original game: tokens for home country, kingdoms, and ice spells; fatter tiles that can be Color Tinted to match the seat of the player that controls them; and "paper money" cards for Runes, Luck, Gold, and Glory that can be added to a player's hand.

THE WHAT-I-LEARNED SECTION

This month's mod contains two experiments. The first was importing the game manual as a Unity AssetBundle that can be flipped through using Trigger Effects. To turn the manual's pages, right-click on the manual, go over to Trigger Effects in the contextual menu, and then choose the pages. I may do a tutorial on how to make this kind of manual, if the demand is high enough. (The rules have also been OCR'd into the Notebook and altered to reflect this TTS version). [UPDATE JUNE 2020: Tabletop Simulator now supports PDF natively. The AssetBundle manual has been replaced with a PDF.]

The second experiment was attaching a Lua script to a Tile object that will put the tile information into the object's Name and Description fields -- so that hovering over the tile will create an easy-to-read popup -- but will also remove that information when the tile is flipped face-down, keeping its identity secret until it's flipped face-up again. Honestly, it was probably more trouble than it was worth... in order to keep players from peeking at the tile's Lua and figuring out which one was which, I had to put in this basic encryption scheme... and, after all, ALT-hover also makes the tiles easy enough to read. Still, it was good exercise for the Lua skills. [NOTE JUNE 2020: Tabletop Simulator now has rotational values; however, they're easily readable with a right-click, so I kept this Lua scheme in for now.]