Kelly Lin
Reborn
Overview
Embark on a story-rich fantasy campaign where your party’s choices shape the world—negotiate with ogres, solve infernal puzzles, and gather shattered artifacts to prevent a doomsday across a modular, open-ended questline.
Genre: Adventure
Type: Multiplayer Board Game
My Roles & Contribution
Modular Quest Design & Player-Driven Outcomes
A modular quest structure that emphasized player agency, decision-based consequences, and class-specific skill use. Each artifact quest featured multiple resolution paths—combat, stealth, puzzle-solving, or persuasion—depending on the team’s composition and choices. For example, in the Duergar Town Hall mission, players could coordinate a stealth operation during a rally, while in the Ogre Lord quest, a successful persuasion check allowed players to recruit an enemy rather than engage in battle.
Quest in Duergars Town Hall
Resolution Paths for Ogre's Quest
Decision gates were often tied to unique character attributes—like Kara’s intellect, Lucien’s charisma, or Agroth’s warrior code—embedding narrative meaning into player actions. These questlines allowed for branching outcomes and moral dilemmas without overwhelming the game’s linear structure, offering replayable depth and personal storytelling moments.
Quest Beats Diagrams
Level Design & Spatial Narrative
Each explorable area was mapped with functional progression, spatial variety, and thematic tone. The modular layouts combining adjacency matrices and spatial diagrams to define player flow and critical paths. Each zone was designed for a distinct challenge curve and environmental storytelling. For example, the layered design of the Duergar Hall allowed stealth routes, false doors, and dramatic confrontations.
Adjacency Matrix & Nested Venn Diagrams & Parti Diagrams
Encounter & Challenge Balancing
A progression of escalating encounters was structured through adjusted pacing, varied challenge types, and multiple resolution options across the main campaign. Encounters were designed to avoid repetition: skeleton hordes tested spatial awareness, mummies introduced stealth alternatives, and devil encounters leaned on logic and time-pressure puzzles.
Underground Palace Challenge Design
Combat design factored player stats, terrain, and NPC behavior logic, while side quests like “Find the Chicken” provided tonal relief. Branching results and fail states were carefully calibrated so that failure still allowed forward momentum, reinforcing the idea of adaptive challenge and continuous story momentum.
Granny's Hut Challenge Design
Progression Through Exploration & Worldbuilding
World progression was structured across increasingly challenging zones. Players gained narrative, gear, and stat progression by exploring areas in alphabetical order, allowing both open-ended travel and gentle guidance. Optional steles hidden across the world served as knowledge rewards, decipherable only by high-INT players.
Level Diagrams
World Map
Narrative Integration with Puzzles & Combat
puzzles, combat mechanics, and narrative beats are integrated to ensure an immersive experience. Each major encounter included story hooks and roleplay decisions—such as whether Agroth sacrifices health to save comrades’ souls, or whether Lucien betrays the group for personal gain.
Side Quest Flow Charts
Puzzle-platforming sequences were designed with embedded story cues—for example, a devil’s puzzle in Hell that tests whether the player understands the devil’s personality.
Devil's Puzzle Design
Item placement and environmental details like cursed rabbits and potion colors subtly reinforced world logic. These touches invited roleplay while delivering thematic tension, resulting in gameplay that blurred the line between mechanics and story.
Witch's Hut Puzzle & Interactable Design
