Krodha: A Tale of Vikram & Betaal

Cards first. 96 cards across five elements. Each has unique symbol and number triggers. Draft them, fuse them, sacrifice them. Where you place them on the board affects how they interact — position matters as much as the card itself. Reshape your slot layout as your deck develops, or lock into a formation that stops working the moment the run changes shape.

Then the dice. Roll to match symbol or number and trigger effects. Rig a die to lock in one element and guarantee the trigger, but that die is now committed. It won't cover what your next card needs. Every roll is a small resource decision with compounding consequences.

You choose two elements. Build your deck around them. A third enters anyway, through curses and encounters, not choices.

Dosha cards (curses), enter your deck mid-run through encounters. They clog your hand and break synergies. Most element pairs can't remove them. You work around them or you lose to them.

Enemies signal their moves before they take them. The further you descend, the more it costs to misread one.

Ten element pairs. Each one produces a different deck, different dice priorities, a different Dosha problem.

The map shifts every run. Layout, enemy pool, and available rewards all change based on how deep you go, not just how many times you've played.

24 milestone relics sit across the map. Collecting them changes what spawns below. Enemy types, difficulty, endgame content. Where you go has consequences further down than you can currently see.

The three narrators track run history. Their dialogue changes based on what you've answered before and how far you've gone. Later runs surface things that reframe what happened in earlier ones.

Krodha is built on the Vikram & Betaal tales, a Sanskrit folklore cycle over two thousand years old.
A king is cursed to carry a corpse (Betaal) through a haunted forest. The corpse tells stories, asks a question at the end of each one, and escapes if the king answers correctly. The king retrieves him and it starts again.

Betaal rides with you as a narrator. He holds information about your character's past that your character doesn't have. Three other figures run through the story. A king whose history overlaps with yours, a celestial observer, and a sorcerer who built the situation you're in.

The full picture is spread across runs, not handed to you in one.

96 cards across five elements, Agni, Jal, Vayu, Prithvi, Akasha, each with unique symbol and number triggers
Draw from your evolving deck each turn and manage a limited hand of elemental cards

Played Cards move to your discard pile, but they have to be recovered using the pipe

Your hand size is limited, forcing tough choices about what to play now versus save for later

Your dice rolls determine how many card effects you can trigger each round

Elemental dice with commitment: rig a die to guarantee one element, at the cost of flexibility for the rest of the roll

Positional board: placement affects card interactions; slot layout can be rebuilt across a run

Dosha cards: curses that enter through encounters, disrupt synergies, and can't be removed by most element pairs

Enemy intent system: telegraphed actions that scale with depth and punish overextension

24-fruit milestone system: relics that modify enemy pool, difficulty, and endgame content as you collect them

Shifting map: layout, encounters, and rewards change every run

Mirror dialogue system: three narrators with run-persistent memory; dialogue tracks your answers across sessions

Rooted in the Vikram & Betaal tales: structure and characters drawn from a Sanskrit folklore cycle