Volcano Looming High

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[edit]

SETUP

Put 1 Presence and 1 Badlands on your starting board in a mountain of your choice. Push all Dahan from that land.

PLAY STYLE

Benefits more than most Spirits from getting Presence onto the board; in addition to the usual benefits, it can fuel an Explosive Eruption. This can result in a huge turn, but if overdone the following turn or two may be very constrained.

Bigger eruptions are extremely powerful, but cause Blight, and the Invaders may not provide the luxury of enough time to build up the desired pressure - judging the timing of when to erupt and for how much is a key part of playing this Spirit.

COMPLEXITY

MODERATE

GROWTH (PICK ONE)
Reclaimall.png
Reclaim Cards
Gaincardicon.png
Gain Power Card
Energy Plus 3.png
Gain 3 Energy
+ Presenceicon.png

0
Range

Add a Presence
+ Presenceicon.png

0
Range

Add a Presence
Gaincardicon.png
Gain Power Card
+ Presenceicon.png

4
Range

Add a Presence
Plusonecardplay.png
+1 Card Play
Energy Plus 2.png
Gain 2 Energy
PRESENCE
Energy 1.png

Energy/Turn
Energy 2.png

2
Earthenergy.png

Earth
Energy 3.png

3
Energy 4.png

4
Energy 5.png

5
Cardplay1.png

Card Plays
Fireelement.png

Fire
Earthelement.png

Earth
Cardplay2.png

2
Airelement.png

Air
Cardplay3.png

3
Fireelement.png

Fire
Cardplay4.png

4

SPECIAL RULES

MOUNTAIN HOME

Your Presence may only be added/moved into Mountains.

COLLAPSE IN A BLAST OF LAVA AND STEAM

When your Presence is destroyed, in that land, deal 1 Damage per destroyed Presence to both Invaders and to Dahan.

VOLCANIC PEAKS TOWER OVER THE LANDSCAPE

Your Power Cards gain +1
Range
if you have 3 or more Presence in the origin land.

EXPLOSIVE ERUPTION
SPEED
RANGE
TARGET LAND
Fast
0
Range
ANY
Destroy X (1 or more) of your Presence in target land; Destroyedpresence.png checks how many you destroyed. This Power does Damage (separately and equally) to both Invaders and Dahan. Ranges below can't be increased.
2 Fire 2 Earth 2 Destroyedpresence.png In one land within 1
Range
, X Damage.
3 Fire 3 Earth 4 Destroyedpresence.png Generate X Fear.
4 Fire 2 Air 4 Earth 6 Destroyedpresence.png In each land within 1
Range
, 4 Damage. Add 1 Blight to target land; doing so does not Destroy your Presence.
5 Fire 3 Air 5 Earth 10 Destroyedpresence.png In each land within 2
Range
, +4 Damage. In each land adjacent to the target, add 1 Blight if it doesn't have any.
POWERED BY THE FURNACE OF THE EARTH
SPEED
RANGE
TARGET LAND
Slow
0
Range
ANY
3 Earth Add 1 of your destroyed Presence.
3 Fire
Cost
Pay 2 Energy
Gain a Power Card.
4 Earth 4 Fire Move up to 2 of your Presence from other lands to target land.
5 Fire Return up to 2 of your destroyed Presence to your Presence tracks.

SUMMARY OF POWERS

 
         
         
         
         
         
Offense Control Fear Defense Utility
 
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Volcano Looming High.png

From the Spirit Panel

A spirit of fire and earth stretching upwards to the sky, casting a long and dangerous shadow across the land. The deeper Spirits of vulcanism are too powerful and slow, too removed to respond to the Invaders - but not so this one.

It doesn't dislike humans per se, but neither does it have much use for them, so the Dahan tend to keep away from it as much as possible and will not quarry stone in its shadow. Of course, larger eruptions can impact a good chunk of the island, so they sometimes end up dealing with its temper whether they want to or not.

Design Lore

There is more than one Volcano Spirit, and many others partake of volcanism in some manner or other, but Volcano Looming High may be the most prominent of them all: while its core essence is born from the deep fires of the earth, it exists where that molten stone reaches high into the sky, peaks looming overhead and explosions blotting out the sun. It is extremely visible, and the Dahan take care not to live too close: it’s not hostile, but nor is it a friend. Sooner or later its power will rise, the stone of the mountain will swell upwards, and an explosion - perhaps large, perhaps small - will follow.

It’s a mostly felsic volcano, so it doesn’t burble highly-liquid lava the way Hawaiian volcanoes do - its lava is thick and viscous, sometimes visually indistinguishable from stone save for a red glow visible only at night. As a result, pressure builds up in the earth over time, and the mountain grows larger as a lava dome rises upwards. This may subside naturally or be alleviated by smaller blasts of pyroclastic activity here and there, but can also culminate in an explosive collapse of the built-up lava dome, like the eruptions of the Soufriere Hills or Mt. St. Helens.

Volcano Looming High is tall, and proud, and rejoices in its strength. It’s aloof from most Spirits more due to location than any desire for isolation, though it’s also entirely unbothered by its relative paucity of visitors - it has a magnificent view, after all, can see what transpires virtually everywhere, and is grounded by a pillar of molten stone coming straight out of the earth’s heart. Maybe it has a hard time perceiving down to the scale of individual humans, but it doesn’t see that as particularly important.
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Important note: If playing as Volcano Looming High, you start the game with these Unique Power Cards in your hand.

1
1
No SunMoonFireNo AirNo WaterEarthNo PlantNo Animal
Exaltation of Molten Stone.png
SPEED
RANGE
TARGET
Fast
No Range
ANOTHER Spirit
Split 1 Energy per Fire you have between yourself and target Spirit, as evenly as possible.

Target Spirit gains Range Plus 1 with their Powers that originate from a Mountain.
ArtistSymbol.png Moro Rogers
Jagged Earth complexity 3.png
1
1
No SunNo MoonFireNo AirNo WaterEarthNo PlantNo Animal
Lava Flows.png
SPEED
RANGE
TARGET LAND
Slow
1
Range
ANY
Add 1 Badlands and 1 Wilds.
Or

1 Damage.
ArtistSymbol.png Moro Rogers
Jagged Earth complexity 3.png
3
1
No SunNo MoonFireAirNo WaterEarthNo PlantNo Animal
Pyroclastic Bombardment.png
SPEED
RANGE
TARGET LAND
Fast
Sacred Site2
Range
ANY
1 Damage to each Town / City / Dahan.
1 Damage.
1 Damage to Dahan.
ArtistSymbol.png Moro Rogers
Jagged Earth complexity 3.png
2
1
No SunNo MoonFireAirNo WaterEarthNo PlantNo Animal
Rain of Ash.png
SPEED
RANGE
TARGET LAND
Slow
1
Range
ANY
2 Fear if Invaders are present.

Push 2 Dahan and 2 Explorer / Town to land(s) without your Presence.
ArtistSymbol.png Moro Rogers
Jagged Earth complexity 3.png


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Spirit Spotlight

Notes from Eric Reuss

I’ve wanted to do a volcano spirit since the very early days of Spirit Island, but held off for a long time due to underlying mechanics: I felt lava flows should be represented by Barrier tokens, cutting off the Invaders. As it turns out, there are no Barrier tokens (that’s a story for another day), but the decision to hold off still worked out well, as Badlands tokens are also thematically useful for it. (Wilds, too, which is now the game’s representation of a barrier-to-exploration that endures until a way is found around it.) But I put a shout-out to it on the panel lore for Serpent Slumbering Beneath the Island so folks would at least know that yes, there’s volcanic activity on the island, and a Spirit of that sort might come along someday.

(This is one of two Spirits in Jagged Earth that a very early playtester has been hoping for / looking forward to for a very long time. The wait is over, Ricky!)

Every iteration of Volcano has centered around an eruption mechanic in which you build up Presence, then remove it in a blast (big or small, your choice). Early versions did some damage, but were more an explosion of Powers - Volcano had phenomenal energy income, but not very good plays, so when it's explosions let it play an extra Power Card per Presence destroyed it could blast out some phenomenal turns. But testers said this didn’t feel thematic enough, and indeed - if the power cards you drew weren’t very Volcano-y, you’d erupt for a huge blast of Open Blossoms and Accelerated Rot, which kind of funny the first time, but not very volcano-y. Successive versions have shifted further and further from that, so now it just does Damage and Fear - and possibly Blight.

Early versions also returned some or all of the Presence to your Spirit panel, both so that erupting carried a cost to your infrastructure, and so that you didn’t run out of Presence to erupt with if the game went long! That proved not super-fun, though, as well as really making small explosions a bad choice even when they were tactically useful, so it slowly got revised into a system where Volcano can renew from its self-destruction with the right elements.

One question that’s come up is how Blight - usually indicative of farming/colonization - can destroy a volcano. The answer is: it doesn’t! It wrecks the connection between the physical feature of the land and the Spirit, destroying the Spirit, whereupon the physical volcano has no volition and subsides into quiescence. For a Spirit like Volcano Looming High, it might yet survive by retreating to the cradle of the deep earth’s fire - but it’s knocked out of the fight with the Invaders, which means that they will eventually triumph.


Rulings for Volcano Looming High

Explorericon.png There are no rulings at this time. Explorericon.png