Arise, thread!
After last night playing a Wrath of Ashadarlon game, I got thinking about how cool it would be if Paizo made a Pathfinder board game. Personally, I think it'd be doubly cool if they could team up with Fantasy Flight Games to produce it (I love FFG games - so many fiddly bits to play with).
As for content, I was thinking of a game that is a bit more story-driven than a dungeon delver. With the theme of the Rise of the Runelords arc, I was thinking of something along these lines:
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Main Board is a overland map of the area depicted in the Rise of the Runelords set, with some game arc locations pointed out (big enough to put a game marker on it) and some extra, new places not fleshed out in the original AP.
Player Game Tokens would be the Pathfinder Iconics.
Three game play decks - Challenge, Encounter, Treasure. The Challenge deck is broken into four subsets or "acts".
Two, maybe three player decks - Spells, Equipment, Feats/Abilities. Each character gets 2-3 cards from this deck based on how their character is specced out. They may grant bonuses to certain abilities or otherwise let you bend the rules (for ex., Magic Missile might grant a Fighting bonus for the Wizard character, Leadership might give the Fighter a bonus to Social, while Teleport or Riding Horse may give the character expedited movement.
Basic Play: Each round, a Challenge card is drawn; this is the objective for the turn. Usually this involves going some place on the board and performing some special action ("Go to X in Magimar and collect 3 Clues").
Each turn characters move their tokens towards the Challenge point; each space indicates on it how many encounter cards you draw in a given place (could even color-code the challenges as Easy, Medium, Hard). In the "wilderness", if you draw the encounter card, you have to deal with it. I'm torn whether you'd want to do individual movement or group movement; individual feels less like an adventuring party, but would be more interesting for play.
When you finally reach the Challenge location, you draw a number of encounter cards listed on the challenge card (which in turn, bases the # of encounter cards on the # of players). At the challenge location, characters can decide who will tackled which encounter, but all the encounters must be faced at once (so it's generally a good idea to have everyone at the Challenge location at the same time).
Encounters can be one of several types, that require the use of different character skills - Combat, which uses the character's Fighting; Interaction (negotiating with NPCs or perhaps named bad guys), which uses the character's Social; Hazard (traps, environment effects, haunts, etc.), which uses the character's Wits. Characters could have equipment/spell/feat cards that give them bonuses to overcome certain challenges. Succeeding at an encounter gives you a treasure card.
Treasure Cards would include several things such as Magic Items, Boons, Clues and Mementos. Magic items would grant you abilities, similar to the spells, equipment and feat character cards. Boons would allow rerolls or autosuccess or failure on a check. Clues would be story-based cards that you need to collect to advance from one challenge to the next, like "Albion's Secret"; they could also provide special bonuses or abilities in certain locations or against certain NPCs. Lastly, Mementos would be unique equipment that grant special abilities; Mementos might be only gained upon the defeat of a specific NPC (and may thus be in their own deck or sideboard), and also count as a clue.
The goal would be to complete so many Challenges in each Act and eventually face and overcome the Final Challenge.
You could make expansion packs with boards and/or components for each of the AP lines; the more you could mix and match, the better!
What do ya'll think?