Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms is a free-to-play idle game developed by Codename Entertainment. It was released for early access on September 7, 2017.
About[]
The core gameplay of Idle Champions revolves around the player selecting "champions" (such as Bruenor Battlehammer, Minsc, and Celeste, among others) to defeat waves of increasingly difficult monsters, thereby accumulating gold. This gold is used to upgrade the player's champions, or unlock new ones. Each individual champion has its own set of unique abilities that empower either themselves or other champions. The player needs to place these champions in a "formation" that facilitates the overall strength of the party to ensure progress can be made against higher-level waves of monsters. As players complete objectives, or reset their current adventure, they accumulate "Favor" with a specific deity, which increases the amount of gold they find in future sessions. Furthermore, players can collect character-specific equipment that permanently boost their champions further, either as random drops, or through purchasing "chests" filled with random items. Equipment comes in four quality tiers, where "Epic" is the highest. Furthermore, equipment can be further boosted by being made "Shiny" (a rare chance at permanent improvement) or "Golden" (an even bigger improvement but generally limited to real-world currency purchases). Finally, "Epic" equipment can be forged into "Legendary" quality, which does not empower the item itself, but rather provides an additional positive effect for the party.
The game can be automated to a degree using the "Modron Automation" system which allows the game to handle all necessary input to repeatedly play itself, in four separate instances, for a period of up to 7 days.
The game is segmented into several "campaigns", each with its own unique Favor, ensuring Favor progress does not carry over between campaigns. Each campaign has a unique formation pattern, forcing players to rethink how to arrange their champions. Some of the campaigns are permanent, while others are event-based and only available for a short time. Event campaigns reward unique champions that are only available to unlock during their respective events. Permanent campaigns are usually adaptations of a tabletop adventure, such as Tomb of Annihilation. All the campaigns are further divided into "adventures", which are narrative frames for the core gameplay, for example recounting how the champions help rescue a farmer's daughter who has been kidnapped by werewolves. Most adventures also have additional challenge modes, unlocked after meeting various criteria. These challenge modes present the player with new obstacles to overcome, for example through limiting the champions available to choose from. The "Patron" system allows for these challenges to be replayed with even more limitations imposed on the player. For example, selecting the Strahd von Zarovich patron means players are restricted to only using champions with a high intelligence score.
The "end game" of Idle Champions is the "Trials of Mount Tiamat", a cooperative campaign where five players undertake missions to defeat Tiamat. Over the course of a week, players must succeed in daily missions to help reach their goal. Success yields "Scales of Tiamat", which is a currency used to forge "Legendary" equipment.
Characters[]
The Forgotten Realms wiki has a decent basic overview of the game, and there is a whole Idle Champions wiki dedicated to the entire game, that includes pages for all of the playable characters, missions, campaigns, events and more.
This wiki is primarily interested in the inclusion of the Cartoon and LJN characters in the game.
Also if you read IDW's second D&D cartoon comic series, you will recognize several characters in the game, even if you don't keep up with all of the latest D&D fiction.
Cartoon Characters[]
Playable Characters[]
NPCs[]
LJN Characters[]
Playable Characters[]
NPCs[]
Saturday Morning Adventures II Guest Stars[]
Obtaining Player Characters[]
Each of the player characters starts out as unlockable in an event or something. Specific hoop that need to be jump through in order to unlock the character. After the event, those characters become purchasable with the in-app purchasing mechanic of converting real world money into in-game currency.
Dungeon Master[]
In the cartoon, Dungeon Master would give
- [[the kids a mission and then take off. So making him a playable character in a video game is weird, because he doesn't generally get his hands dirty with combat and whatnot. And he certainly doesn't fire Magic Missiles at enemies every few seconds.
How the game handles this, is that Dungeon Master sometimes checks out. He's gone, and Uni is in his spot. This can be confusing the first time you see it, but the game links to a YouTube video explaining it. A 2022 YouTube video that introduces Dungeon Master to the game and features game footage of Venger, Night-Mare and Tiamat.
