town_mechanics

The first part of the game is the town, Blackthorn.

The town have a couple of important gameplay elements the player can participate in which are the,

Nightfox Inn - here the player can restore and rest.
Gambling hall - here the player can gamble to earn some random cool reward or lose it all.
The Guild Hall - here the player can find the bosses to fight.
Graveyard - a mini challenge game just for casual challenges that earn a little stuff to restock.
The Market - here the player can buy equipments etc.

Basically, it's the rest-stop for whatever they need.

Hmmmmmm

Possibly skip the entire town idea.

The ide of searching for items and rewards for kills might be a better approach, since items are fun, problem is how to let the player have access to items when there is no real records keeping, unless the items are directly on the page or adjacent page or limited to that page only so they don't need to keep track of what they have.