Summary
After nearly a year, I am back with more fan content for Divinity Original Sin: The Board Game. This time, I wanted to expand on the summoning skills. In the official game, players may summon an incarnate (or some other unique summons) to their active summon slot. The summon then follows the player’s character and offers the player a new action to perform in addition to their existing basic actions and skills. Players of the video game will notice that there is something from summoning missing in the board game adaptation: totems. My Unofficial Addendum II adapts totem summoning for the board game, opening up more options for all characters not just summoning builds.
New Components:
- 2 new Summon Totem skill cards. This skill allows players to summon totem entities to the battlefield to act as automated allies.
- 35 totem tokens to represent a totem’s physical presence on the map.
- 35 matching totem cards to detail the effect of a totem and to track its lifespan.
Core Concepts
Players may use the new Summon Totem skill cards to summon a totem in a target space. These skill cards behave like any other and can be freely added to the game. The type of totem to be placed is dynamic depending on the existing surface of the target space and on the statuses of any characters in that space. Targeting a space with bleeding characters will allow the caster to place a Blood Totem, the only one that deals direct damage.
Totems only deal 1 White die worth of damage, but that damage increases with the caster’s level and is, of course, eligible for any bonuses due to surface effects. Perhaps more importantly, totems have a chance to apply statuses to their targets.
Unlike the other summons in the board game, totems do not go into a player’s active summon slot and do not count towards that limit. As such, a player can have multiple active totems and an active summon all at the same time. Totems instead are placed directly on a player’s cooldown track. When a totem slide left on a player’s cooldown, it makes an automated attack against the best enemy. The rules for targeting are written on the totem cards, but generally totems will have the following targeting priority: nearest enemy -> least relevant armor -> least HP. When a totem slides off of a player’s cooldown, it makes one final attack and then destroys itself.
Balancing Considerations
The party is usually matched or outnumbered in the board game encounters, so it was important to keep the totems from becoming too powerful. I attempted to achieve this in a few different ways:
- Totems are weak and can be destroyed with just a single hit.
- Totems expire after just 2 turns, meaning that each totem will only be able to make 2 attacks.
- Totems only apply a status when a special symbol is rolled on the White die, a 1/6 chance.
- Totems only use a single White die to attack, but they do get bonus damage from the caster’s level.
- There is no hard limit for the max number of totems on the board, but the soft limit is 5 (2 for one player and 3 for another with Skin Graft).
Conclusion
You can download the files for my expansion at the bottom of my post here or over at BGG.com. The files include the expansion rules and any print and play components required. If you do check out the expansion, please let me know what you think and leave a thumbs up on BGG.com. If you have any suggestions on how to improve the expansion, please feel free to let me know. Most of my projects are done solo, so there are likely things that I missed. Should there be significant changes made to the expansion, I will release updated version here and on BGG.
If you’d like to check out more of my game development work, take a look at my adventure site Rose Fortress for Forbidden Lands over on DriveThruRPG. You can also check out my Unofficial Addendum I for Divinity Original Sin: The Board Game which adds rules for poison surfaces and barrels to the game.
Video
If you prefer, you may refer to this video for an audio/visual overview of this expansion’s content.
Downloads (Version 1, April 2026):