Table of Contents

• Events 2.0 Goals
• Event Changes
• Featured Champions
• Flex Slots
• Event Tiers & Rewards
• Quality of Life Updates
• What's Next?

Events 2.0 Goals

Events were the first system we added to Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, kicking things off with our first event, Highharvestide, on September 28, 2017. Ever since then, events have remained largely unchanged – until now!

In the Idle Champions: 2024 State of the Game we stated our high level goals for Events 2.0. Before diving into the Events 2.0 Preview Blog, we want to reiterate our goals:

1. Give players more choice over which Champions appear in events.
2. Increase the depth of events with additional goals and rewards.
3. Give more opportunities to update Champions outside of seasons.

Without further ado, let's talk about Events 2.0!

Note: Screenshots in this blog reflect a work in progress version of the Events 2.0 update. The finalized version may differ in layout or appearance.

Event Changes

Events 2.0 is a significant update to the events system in Idle Champions. Because players will now be able to unlock more Champions, content, and rewards through Events 2.0, we are increasing the duration of events from 12 days to 21 days. Events will typically begin on the first Wednesday of each month and run for three weeks. Content updates for Idle Champions will occur on the Wednesdays outside events.

Along with the Event duration change we are reducing the number of annual events, shifting from 17 annual events down to 12. Long term, we plan to retire the Midwinter, Greengrass, The Running, Midsummer, and Brightswords events. However, as we transition over to the new Event 2.0 schedule, there will be a Greengrass event in April 2024.

Finally, Champions whose events are no longer active will have new homes with other events. Those Champions will be available using Flex Slots during their new events along with other retired Champions from those events.

Featured Champions

Event 2.0 Events will have two Featured Champions. These Champions may be New Champions or Reworked Champions. Most events will have one New Champion and one Reworked Champion, however some may feature two New Champions, and some may feature two Reworked Champions.

All players will have free access to unlock and earn equipment for the same two Featured Champions each event. For our first Event 2.0 Event, Festival of Fools, all players will have access to the Reworked Champion, Dhadius the Scarlet, and the New Champion, The Dark Urge. Champion Spotlights for both of these Champions are coming early next week!

Dismantles will be offered for Reworked Champions for the duration of the event. However, the Dismantle period will end immediately if any Reworked Champion Chests are purchased using Event Tokens.

Flex Slots

In addition to the two Featured Champions for an event, everyone will have access to three Flex Slots. Flex Slots allow players to select additional Champions to unlock and earn equipment for during each Event 2.0 Event, choosing from a pool of retired Champions associated with the event. This pool of retired Champions includes the Champions from previous years of the event as well as some Champions whose events have been retired.

Events begin with one Flex Slot open with an additional Flex Slot opening during the second and third weeks of an Event 2.0 Event. Flex Slots that open during the second and third weeks of the event require 3 Time Gate Pieces to unlock. Between the two Featured Champions and the three Flex Slot Champions, players will be able to unlock and earn equipment for at least 60 Champions each year through Events 2.0.

There is also an extra Supporter Slot available during Event 2.0 Events. The Supporter Slot is an additional Flex Slot that can be unlocked as an additional bonus for making an in-game purchase of specially marked event-related DLC during an event.

Event Tiers & Rewards

Events 2.0 allows players to Tier Up events for individual Champions once all three of their event variants have been completed. This grants access to the next Event Tier and three additional event variants, which have increased difficulty and additional rewards.

There are currently four Event Tiers in total, increasing the number of Gold Champion Chests available from events for each Champion from three to 12. Completing Event Tiers also unlocks Event Buffs for associated Champions, which last for 60 days from the start of the event they unlock in. Some Event Tiers may also reward unique Feats and special consumable items. Not all Champions will initially launch with these additional rewards, however Featured Champions will always have them.

Event Tiers do not reset between events, so you can continue to progress through a Champion's Tiers during future events. Additionally, Event Buffs unlocked through Event Tiers will become active once again if you choose the Champion in a flex slot in a future event.

Quality of Life Updates

As part of the Events 2.0 update, we are also making several quality of life updates:

• Bounty Contracts used outside of events will award Event Tokens for the next event.
• Event adventures, variants, and free plays no longer cost Event Tokens to start.
• Event Tokens are now only used to purchase Event Chests directly (free plays no longer need to be grinded to obtain extra chests).
• Event Tokens left over once an event ends will automatically be converted to Champion chests.
• Retired Champions may come out of retirement.
• Event Boons are granted to players who purchase specially marked event-related DLC during an event. There are four tiers of Event Boons that offer buffs to Champion Damage, Gold Find, Champion Health, Click Damage, and Speed. These buffs increase with each tier of Event Boon. Additionally, the first purchase that grants an Event Boon will also unlock the Supporter Slot.

What's Next?

Barring any last-minute issues, Events 2.0 will go live on Wednesday, March 6, 2024. We're eager and excited to receive your feedback and make further improvements to this system based on how you're using it!

Table of Contents

• Welcome!
• Pausing Seasons for Core System Updates
• Collections & Guide Quests
• Events 2.0
• What's Next?

Welcome!

Hello! I'm Chris Dupuis, the Executive Producer for Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms. In my role, I plan the release schedule and coordinate with our incredibly talented team throughout the various stages of production, from initial concept to final release. It's a genuine pleasure to finally be able to share the exciting updates our team has been tirelessly working on over the past few months.

2023 was a fantastic year for Idle Champions, and I want to thank our dedicated community for joining us on this adventure! We have a small team here at Codename, but we all work together towards the same goal of releasing fun and exciting content for you, our players. Last year:

• We launched 18 new Adventure & Variant updates, 17 Events & Champions, four Seasons, and four Celebration Events.
• We introduced and released four Emergence Events, starting with the Red Wizard Emergence around the release of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
• We featured two Idle Champions Presents in-game events and Dungeons & Dragons 5E actual play campaigns with our community of incredibly talented content creators, introducing everyone to new original Champions: Miria, Solaak, Thellora, and Jang Sao.
• The Idle Champions community came together to raise over $30,000 for some amazing charities, including One Tree Planted, Lambert House, Take This, and Extra Life.
• Last but certainly not least, we worked with many fantastic partners last year including Deerstalker Pictures, Penny Arcade, and Cryptic Studios/Gearbox Software. We'd also like to give an extra special shout out to Larian Studios, who helped us to bring characters from the award-winning Baldur's Gate 3 to Idle Champions!

2024 is shaping up to be another big year for the game. We'll celebrate the 7th anniversary of Idle Champions this September, but before we get there we've got some big updates planned. We've got a lot to discuss, so let's get started!

Pausing Seasons for Core System Updates

We introduced Seasons to Idle Champions in September of 2022. Since then, we've rolled out seven Seasons featuring 35 Champions. However, Seasons are very resource-intensive to design and develop, and even though we have been able to keep up a steady stream of Season content, the time we've had available to work on other major system updates has been minimal. With that in mind, we put Seasons development on pause following the release of Season 7: The Rivals so that we could shift resources towards two major core system updates that we are very excited to finally be able to share with you now.

Without further ado, I'll let designers Peter Lee and Justin Stocks introduce you to Collections & Guide Quests, and Events 2.0.

Collections & Guide Quests

I’m Peter Lee, System Designer for Idle Champions. You may best know my work from my career at Wizards of the Coast, where I worked on the development of the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons and on board games like Lords of Waterdeep. I’ve been at Codename Entertainment since October 2021, where you’ve seen my hand in Champion designs and Adventure Variants. I've endeavored to make each new Champion feature an ability that makes them stand apart from the others, like Dungeon Master's Special Guest Star and Karlach's ties to the Zariel Patron. Today, I’m here to talk about Collections and Guide Quests.

Our revisions to Collections and the introduction of Guide Quests have two goals:

1. Help players to more effectively track their progress within Idle Champions.
2. Guide players (especially new or returning players) through the vast and ever-growing content of Idle Champions.

To start things off, we’re greatly increasing the usefulness of the Collections dialog. The current implementation shows the Champions and Equipment you have collected, but there is a lot more to the game than that! The updated dialog will feature Familiars, Skins, Campaign progress, Patrons, and so much more. There will be progress bars to show your overall completion, filtering to make it easy to search your Collections, and requirements to unlock major features like Trials, Campaigns, and Patrons.

It can be daunting to know what to do next in Idle Champions, especially for newer players. Guide Quests help players to determine what they should do next. These will work similarly to how Quests worked with Seasons, however, Guide Quests do not expire, and you can complete them at your leisure! As you complete these Quests, you’ll unlock additional, more difficult quests which will continue showing your potential paths through the game.

Each time you complete a Guide Quest you will earn rewards. In many cases it will be Corrupted Gems, but you’ll also find various Gold Chests and even some Scales of Tiamat. For our experienced players, there will be a button that lets you claim all the rewards at once, so you won’t have to click through hundreds of completed quests when they go live.

We’ll periodically add additional Quests as new content goes live, and I’m excited to see how this helps players progress through the game!

Events 2.0

Hello, my name is Justin Stocks and I am the Lead Designer for Idle Champions. You can interact with me and my co-founder David Whittaker on our Dev Insights stream every Thursday at 2PM PT at twitch.tv/CNEGames. I am here to talk about the next major system update for Idle Champions: Events 2.0.

The event system was the first system we added to Idle Champions after we released the game in September 2017, and aside from some small tweaks, events have remained mostly unchanged. Events 2.0 is an evolution of this system, using everything we have learned over the past six and a half years.

Our goals with Events 2.0 are three-fold:

1. Give players more choice over which Champions appear in events.
2. Increase the depth of events with additional goals and rewards.
3. Give more opportunities to update Champions outside of seasons.

So how did we approach each of these goals? Well, let me tell you.

Our first objective is to give players more choice over what Champions they recruit and gear up in events. This has become an increasingly important design task over the past couple of years, and even more so now that the number of unique Champions in the game has surpassed 100. Gearing up all of those old Champions is a daunting, time-consuming task! In Events 2.0, players will have the opportunity to customize their event by picking from a list of Champions associated with the event. There will be two Featured Champions in each event that everyone has access to, along with three other "flex slots" that allow players to customize the event to their liking. Flex slot Champions will include previously-retired Champions, going all the way back to year one superstars like Gromma, Strix, and Zorbu. This, combined with the ability to get more Gold Chests by completing the higher event tiers, should make it much easier to fully equip your entire roster of Champions.

Let's talk about goals and rewards next. In Events 2.0, after you finish all three variants, that Champion's event will upgrade to the next tier up. This allows you to replay the variants, each with a higher area requirement and another gold chest reward. Additionally, each completed tier will award a powerful buff for that Champion that will last during the event and continue for a period of time after the event ends. Finally, the highest tiers will award unique Feats and special consumable items. These tiers will reward players who have built powerful formations and geared up their Champions to meet the game's hardest challenges. If you don't quite have the power to beat them yet, don't worry! The next time you pick that same Champion in a future event, you'll be able to start from where you left off the last time and push for those high-tier rewards!

We mentioned that there will be two Featured Champions in each event, and this is related to our third objective. Not all Featured Champions will be new Champions -- some will be reworks of existing Champions! Most events will have one new Champion and one reworked Champion, but some could have two new Champions or even two reworked Champions, depending on what cool designs we've been cooking up.

Now, you might be thinking that having five event Champions to recruit and gear up in just 12 days is a bit much. You'd be right, but we are adjusting the cadence and length of events to account for this! Events in this new system will typically start on the first Wednesday of each month and last for three weeks. Time gate weekends and content releases will occur during the weeks between events. This will reduce the number of events per year from 17 to 12, but it will increase the number of Champions you can recruit and gear up during events from 51 to 60.

To cap this section, here's a quick summary of the changes from Legacy Events to Events 2.0:

Legacy Events	Events 2.0
Recruit and gear up to three Champions per event (51 Champions per year)	Recruit and gear up to FIVE Champions per event (60 Champions per year)
Three set Champions per event (no player choice)	TWO set Champions, then up to THREE additional player-picked Champions per event
One new Champion per event	TWO new or reworked Champions per event
Up to three Gold Chests from variants (per Champion)	Up to 12 Gold Chests from variants (per Champion)
Max variant area requirement of 175 (not scaling based on progression)	Max variant area starts at 175 and increases alongside event tier (scaling based on progression)
Generally no unique rewards (ie. feats/skins/buffs)	Cool unique rewards for the new/reworked Champions, and buffs for all Champions
One event every three weeks (on average, but with confusing exceptions)	One event per month (predictably starting on the first Wednesday)
Events last 12 days	Events last 21 days

What's Next?

Hey, it's Chris Dupuis again! Right now we're working to polish up both systems for their releases on February 28th (Collections & Guide Quests) and March 6th (Events 2.0). However, I'm sure you have a bunch of questions! Tune into Dev Insights over the coming weeks with your questions about Collections & Guide Quests and Events 2.0. We also plan to roll out dedicated preview blogs for each system before their release – here’s what to expect over the coming weeks:

• Collections & Guide Quests Rollout:
• Collections & Guide Quests Preview Blog on Friday, February 23rd
• Collections & Guide Quests LIVE on Wednesday, February 28th


• Events 2.0 Rollout:
• Events 2.0 Preview Blog on Friday, March 1st
• Champion Spotlights for [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] on Monday, March 4th & Tuesday, March 5th
• Events 2.0 LIVE on Wednesday, March 6

Before we sign off, I want to share a heartfelt thank you to all of our players from our team here at Codename Entertainment. Thank you for reading through this blog, playing, and joining us on this fantastic adventure. We look forward to hearing your questions in the coming weeks, as well as your thoughts and feedback once we release these updates in the coming months!

As we helped evacuate Waterdeep, engulfed by giant crystalline vines, we boarded a ship in the harbor, friendly to the Open Lord. But that isn't just any ship; it's a Spelljammer, and we're headed into SPACE!

This week's update brings two new adventures and adventure variants to our Light of Xaryxis campaign. It's time to get back into Wildspace!

Note: you will need to have completed the previous two Light of Xaryxis adventures, Seeds of Destruction and The Evacuation of Waterdeep, in order to access these new adventures.

Who Lurks Below?

Set sail into Wildspace while you determine what's making those sounds below decks.

• Variant: Clowning Around - We've set sail, but now we're under assault from space clowns!
  • Space Clowns appear in each area. They do not drop gold, nor do they count toward quest progress.
  • Every five seconds, a giant cream pie falls from the sky and hits a random Champion, dealing 25% of their health in damage and stunning them for ten seconds.
  • Complete area 350

Xanathaaaaaaar!

Investigate a trading post nestled in an asteroid while you try to secure a new spelljamming helm!

• Adventure Variant: A Whale of a Time - Keep investigating the trading post, but now with a Kindori ally!
  • An Adolescent Kindori joins the formation. They're so big they take up three spots in your formation, but don't do much else.
  • Only Champions with a WIS score of 13 or higher can be used.
  • Complete area 400

You can find all this information, and even more details, in-game!

We would love to hear about your experiences in wildspace on the Idle Champions Subreddit, on the Steam forums, or on the Official Idle Champions Discord!