Thunderfolk Hands-On: Cooperative RPG Streaming Table Top Magic that Comfortable in Everyone’s Home

My adventurer’s party steps into a spider-infected cave, and my friends and I begin to talk about their respective hero’s strategies for attack plans. And we dive into the fight by controlling the action through our mobile phone.

This is Sunderfolk, a new role-playing game and debut title for Studio Secret Door. Created by veterans from Blizzard, Riot Games and Fantasy Tabletop, Descent: Legends of the Dark, Sunderfolk, brings a night of board games to modern video games. Available for $50 on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch.

The game looks traditional, with up to four players choosing to have six animal adventurers packing different skills to protect the town. The game’s combat and action plays on a shared screen, but the novelty is novel in pulling up your phone to move characters and looking into combat information.

“(Thunderfolk) is already built in this space for people who are genre enthusiasts. This space wants to bring people who are not genre enthusiasts,” said game director Erin Marek. The game is designed to intriguate fantasy tabletop veterans, but is accessible to those who postpone in complex board games that require deep dives into the manual.

To that end, the Secret Door team began with the concept of “TV DND.” As studio chief Chris Sigaty explained, “It’s like (dungeons and dragons) encountering Jackbox.” It’s a party game where everyone jumps in to play on their phones, and it properly describes the medium Thunderfolk is trying to fuse with. The team wanted to bring sofa friendship into digital games.

Secret Door was kind enough to invite me to mismatch to connect with other players, but I knew I had to go through this game with my own tabletop group. The hardened executives of my dice-swaying battlefield have worked on campaigns with RPG systems such as Dungeon World, Sprawl, Blade of Darkness, Quiet Year, and Stonetop. That made them a great sample player for Thunderfolk.

I tried to get the game face to face, but like all classic RPG campaigns, we were faced with scheduling, the biggest tabletop villain of all. No one could find the same night they met. However, the Thunderfolk setup allows anyone to play remotely. We are logged into the game on our mobile phones sitting in each house, all looking at the same screen.

This is also a genius of Thunderfolk. All players share one big screen. At any time, players can treat their phone screen as thumb pads and move their cursor to examine enemy details and battlefield features (such as healing shrines and explosion rocks). However, players can gesture around the map to plan and adjust movements. We may have sat dozens of miles apart in each house, but it felt like my friend and I had gathered directly around the table.

Stream Thunderfolks throughout the party

However, since my party wasn’t in the same place, I used a clever workaround, ran the game on the PS5 and streamed it through a disparity of a group of friends.

Certainly, this was a bit challenging on the PS5. This prevents native inconsistency streaming from the console. Instead, I had to use a workaround. Found it online Run your PS5 on your PC using the Remote Playback app and stream that window through discord. complicated! There are alternatives, such as streaming to YouTube or Twitch, but additional steps are required before it starts broadcasting to the masses. Note that with Xbox Series X you can stream directly to Discord. The PC player is fine.

This shows a bit of the double edge nature of the Thunderfolk’s unique setup, but at least the trouble was at my end, and my friends didn’t have to download additional copies of the game – one copy works throughout the party. All they had to do was download the free Thunderfolk app, watch my stream, scan the on-screen QR code on my phone, logged in to the campaign, and headed out to the race.

How Thunderfork’s phone-controlled RPG is deployed

When I logged in to our campaign, my three friends and I chose a character quartet from the choices of six animal heroes. One friend chose a Barbarian polar bear (named the Bearzarkar), another Ramranger (Biggram), and a third Raven Spellcaster (Ravnabtmagic), and I chose a Bat Bird (Bat Stevens).

Like great tabletop RPGs, the campaign opens at the pub. Here we learned the basic mechanisms and performed early movement selection. Local ogres were descending into town to raid and loot, but our brave heroes dodged them.

Fantasy RPGs are familiar with fantasy RPGs, such as using a variety of attacks to defeat enemies, but Thunderfolk focuses on moving around the battlefield. Our spellcasters teleported (and similarly “were ported there with the enemy). I used the Bat Bard to swap locations and drop power-ups around the area, encouraging different playstyles without staying at all.

It all led to an instant. If you’ve ever played a tabletop RPG, you’ll probably remember the first time you suddenly realized that you could do anything. When you tried something very grand and succeeded or failed, it was vivid and memorable. At Thunderfolk, the next encounter was chasing us over the bridge. And each party member was able to find the ability to attack or move, and push the enemy out of the rim.

“The moment we’re stealing a bit from the tabletop game is when things happened that never would have happened,” Marek said. “You have storytelling with your friends who try to get through with you and explain it to others at the moment, and they don’t get it because they weren’t there.”

That a regular tabletop game would have been allowed may have been unable to try to talk to the egg or be fed to leave. Thunderfolk exchanges it with less but powerful possibilities – ask my party of men in their 30s and cheer them up to blow your enemies into the wild blue Yonder with willingness – and a streamlined system with molded rules that video games allow. From personal experience, it’s a joy to deal with all the monsters, quest progressions and more in the game. This means that regular dungeon masters can also participate.

As we concluded our first adventure, we chatted with Townsfolk, developed a relationship, shopped a bit and unleashed new abilities – the standard RPG stuff, all wrapped up in a two-hour session. We had a great time with the game and were impressed by how smoothly everything worked.

Design new ways to play old games

The Thunderfolk team is full of people who have taken the game from other platforms and media to adapt to play on humble smartphones. Before joining Secret Door, Marek worked on Wild Rift (League of Legends on Phone) and Sigaty worked on Hearthstone (a digital card game for PC and Phones). Thunderfolk campaign designer Kara Centell-Dunk has over 10 years of experience working with Descent: Legends in the Dark and Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Dearth.

In the interview call with the three secret door creators above, the one who didn’t work at the intersection of mobile phones and tabletops was Darren Bader, Secret Door art director who submitted monster manuals and magical fantasy art, but did not play dungeons and dragons and tabletops – did not submit gathering cards. “I was the perfect guinea pig for my team,” Badder explained as someone who needs to be dragged into the game. Thunderfolk’s developmental transformation into a tabletop gamer is proof of concept.

“My favorite thing is that I created a game I want to play so that I can tell you the truth and be honest,” Badder said.

As Sigaty explained, designing a game that would become “TV DND” was a process. Gamers don’t look down at the controller, mouse, or keyboard while playing, but Thunderfolk has a lot of important information in the phone app. What the team found was that players were staring at the phone instead of on-screen actions. The solution was in a different TV implementation.

“Hasiba Arshad, one of the designers of UX/UI, was actually watching how Apple TV uses remotes and paradigms. Marek said – it’s like drawing with a drawing pad.

It took years of evolution and lots of playtesting with friends and family. Get controls properly (even in release format, the phone app tells players to look into when important gameplay is happening on the main screen). The rest of the design took time to refine, as if the player was arranged side by side with the player tapping and swiping, just as the player held the card’s hand.

All of this is a new proof of concept if the game isn’t fun to play, but that’s true. It’s not the most complicated RPG to start, but it’s designed to rise. As Centell-Dunk explained, gaming philosophy is a simple part that becomes complicated when combined. So did you find the spiders I found, turned into terrible things on top of the merchant loot that littered as I struck them? You can combine it with other athletic abilities to gain tactical benefits.

My friend and I put together a second session and delved into a vibrant underground world, filled with bright mushrooms, friendly animals and vicious eggs, so we called it the night. But it wasn’t before my tabletop tested friend gave me a seal of approval by asking when he would next play the game.

Before us there was something that Centell-Dunk was most proud of. Boss battles and the system she created for them.

“I hope players also enjoy being crushed by their boss,” Center Dunk said.