Cast the cards. Don your crown of lead and silver. Tonight you're going to take them for everything they've got.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Update 05: Never Enough
2 months ago
– Fri, Nov 08, 2024 at 08:35:31 AM
Another week has slipped through our fingers. The nights are darker now, and the world's a little colder. But we still haven't run out of things to silver, so that's something.
It's a short update this week. We've got five days left to make the experience of playing Royal Blood even richer and more multi-layered than it already is, and we've got Big Plans.
We've just updated the campaign page with our next three stretch goals.
1. Tarot interpretation. Grant, who's been reading tarot for quite a while now, will write an additional section in the book on how to use the specific meanings and symbolism of your cards to affect play. Our goal has always been that you can play Royal Blood without knowing how to read tarot, but since we know from the comments that a lot of you do read the cards we want to help you bring that to the gaming table.
2. Digital soundtrack. We really want this. We want all the stretch goals, but we really want this. Seven atmospheric tracks, of ten minutes each, that you can use as an audio backdrop for your games.
3. "Silver" coins. Our final (?) goal is to upgrade the cardboard tokens to real metal (admittedly not real silver) coins. The impact of tossing a real, heavy, gleaming coin onto the table is just different, you know?
We think these will be the final stretch goals but if we're wrong and this thing goes supernova next week, we've got Even Bigger Plans.
Until next week.
Chant
Update 04: Silver for Protection
3 months ago
– Thu, Oct 31, 2024 at 10:10:07 AM
Silver, it is said, keeps evil spirits away. And on this night when the veil is thin and the spirits are close, we’ll take any advantage we can get. That’s what being a Royal is, right? Working every angle, using every edge. So it’s just as well that, in addition to foiling the book edges, we’re now silver foiling the tarot cards too.
This was a big deal for us. From the moment we started talking about this project, silver-edged cards have been part of the dream. And now we’re making them, and that’s all because of you. Stay tuned to see what else we can dip in silver…
NEXT UP: WORDS!
For our next stretch goal, Grant’s going to write some more rules. These will be new ways to design a heist, using different tarot spreads. They’ll open up different scenario styles that play out in different ways, meaning Royal Blood becomes more adaptable and flexible. Still heists, mind. Always heists.
This is the first of our “make Grant write things” stretch goals, but by no means the last. It seems like a solid way to celebrate £100,000.
Telling people who’ve already backed the project what we’ll do if more people back always feels a bit odd. You’ve done your bit. All you need to do is relax and watch the numbers go up. But, to say the quiet bit out loud, we’re hoping that if you’re excited about what’s coming up, you’ll tell other people. Apply a bit of peer pressure, you know? Couldn’t hurt.
FRIEND SPOTLIGHT
If, by some chance, you fancy a tarot-based TTRPG that isn’t about heists (your prerogative, I suppose), you could check out A Fool’s Errand.
A Fool’s Errand is a tarot-fueled science fantasy game built for high absurdity and high drama, set in a post-calamity world of Androids, Humans, and those in between. Fools go forth and explore realms both waking and subconscious. Beware: the Gods are watching, ready to manifest their love and rage as boons and calamities. The more powerful you get, the more calamities are visited upon the planet, drawing the world ever closer to the biggest calamity yet – the next Big Oops.
A Fool’s Errand is predicated on some of my (Chant, not a universal RRD perspective) favourite TTRPG elements: there’s always another catastrophe; bad decisions make great stories; there’s a lot of neon; and 6–8 sessions is the perfect length for a story arc. Oh, and you get to collaboratively design the most recent apocalypse before you even start playing.
Have a wonderful weekend, all, whether you’re celebrating All Hallow’s Eve or simply enjoying the long autumn evenings.
Producer Chant
Update 03: The Mirror-Shine of Silver
3 months ago
– Fri, Oct 25, 2024 at 09:55:42 AM
At the time of writing this, there are a rather remarkable 1,351 people receiving this email. That’s a nice way to start the weekend.
SILVER SILVER SILVER!
Thanks to our latest stretch goal we’ve now unlocked silver page edges for the Royal Blood rulebook. In my eternally humble opinion, this is going to be magical.
Like all of our stretch goals, if you’ve already pledged for the book or the Magnificent Box, you’re getting this upgrade. If you’ve only pledged for a PDF and the thought of a glorious silver-edged tome catching the light (as if both beckoning you to explore and obscuring its secrets) gives you FOMO, there’s plenty of time to up your pledge.
While you’re deciding… the next stretch goal is a matching silver treatment for the cards so that all the core elements of Royal Blood look like they were plucked out of the same higher dimension of being.
MULTIPURPOSE CARDS?
An interesting conversation has been bubbling away in the Kickstarter comments about how to best number the cards of the Major Arcana, and one point of view was that the Royal Blood deck should be usable for other tarot-based games, as well as tarot reading. And that got us thinking: what are you planning on using your cards for? Just Royal Blood? Other games too? If you’re using them for readings, are you using the same set to read and play with, or are you picking up an extra deck?
Answers in the comments, if you’d like to share with us.
SO, YOU LIKE TAROT?
We reckon if you’re at the sharp corner where interest in tarot meets interest in TTRPGs, you might want to know about this next thing.
Publishing Goblin (who made The Alleyman’s Tarot, among other wonderful things) is crowdfunding Confluence: The Living Archive, a TTRPG where the many worlds of Seven Dane Asmund collide. The game is illustrated by Shan Bennion and built by a team of international designers.
Use a unique d6 system, choose between 20 lineages, and play as locals finding your way in a world built through collision. Over 25,000 years Confluxes (anomalies which Pull in pieces of other times, worlds, and universes) have altered the world of Ajurea. Whole regions of land, cities, magics and technologies, even ideas and dreams have been Pulled, creating a world of many peoples and ways of life.
Backers receive six books in either PDF or physical form and a free code to Confluence’s Alchemy RPG Content Universe.
Explore The Atlas and Sujatha's Journal filled with world information, art, fliers for jobs and events, handwritten notes from Ajureans themselves, and mechanics that bring the world into your story.
Use The Confluence Guide to the Living Archive and The Catalog of Lists to mechanise your game.
Two zines: Calibration, a walk through of your first session, and the So You Want to Build It? guide, a comprehensive key to building your own mechanics.
Confluence isn’t fully funded yet. Help push them past their goal and you’ll unlock stretch goals bringing you dice, expanded lore content, actual plays by groups like queerRPG, Three Black Halflings, and Transplanar RPG, and custom digital tools by Pixel Table.
That’s all for now! Wishing you a wonderful weekend, and a happy lie-in for those whose clocks go back on Sunday.
Producer Chant
Update 02: Silver, Secrets, Friends
3 months ago
– Fri, Oct 18, 2024 at 09:23:19 AM
Hello there, 1,119 lovely readers! Thank you all for being here. Obviously, we hope many more backers will be joining you by the end of the campaign but we, and you, will always know that you were here first.
Thanks to you, we’re going into the first weekend of the campaign on the verge of unlocking our third stretch goal: a set of digital tokens you can use to play Royal Blood in the VTT (virtual tabletop) of your choice. This is going to be a pretty extensive set of assets: all the cards and coin graphics, just for starters.
WAIT, THIRD STRETCH GOAL?
Oh yes. We unlocked the second one a couple of days ago. We’re adding a silver ribbon bookmark to the Royal Blood book, and this is just the beginning of our silver-tinted ambitions. If we were being entirely true to the game, we should also be adding lead but our lawyers have advised me that that poses certain logistical and administrative challenges.
HAVE YOU SEEN OUR VIDEOS?
You might already know Grant has kindly put together a short summary of how Royal Blood plays. You probably don’t know that the video also contains some hints of his ambitions for updating and upgrading the rules and gameplay. Worth a watch.
Alternatively, since it’s Friday, this one is more my level:
HAVE YOU SEEN OUR COOL FRIEND?
If you’re a long-time friend of Rowan, Rook and Decard you might know ROLLINKUNZ. He illustrated ORC BORG, the loudest game we’ve ever made. Rollin’s not only a spectacular artist, he’s a game designer too and his latest project DUNGENERATOR: DIE in a Dungeon is live on Kickstarter now.
Like Royal Blood, it uses beautifully illustrated cards to tell a high-stakes story, but that is admittedly where the similarities end. In it, your polyhedral dice (the same ones you use for other RPGs) become doomed adventurers attempting to save and rebuild a village that sits on the edge of a labyrinthine, ever-shifting dungeon. I particularly like that I can finally punish my low-rollers in the way they’ve always deserved: CERTAIN DEATH.
DUNGENERATOR is easy to learn, procedurally generated, solo or co-op, and it can fill anywhere from a session to a whole campaign.
Update 01: Royal Blood is Funded!
3 months ago
– Wed, Oct 16, 2024 at 10:47:08 AM
THE PARTY STARTS NOW!
Thank you all so, so much – there’s no rush quite like seeing a crowdfunder hit its goal on day one, and knowing that hundreds of people are starting to share our excitement. Kickstarter have named us one of their “Projects We Love”, and that’s all down to you showing up and supporting us.
Actually, there is one other feeling that good: funding and unlocking a stretch goal, as we did this morning (THANK YOU! AGAIN!). The first one was a set of cardboard tokens to represent the silver coins the game uses in its mechanics.
The tokens go in the Magnificent Box, which you get in the Majestic pledge. So if you’ve backed at this pledge level, you’ll get this upgrade automatically.
There is no other way to get these tokens. If you want them, you’ll need the box. This is going to be a repeating motif with our stretch goals: any brand new item we make, as opposed to an upgrade to the book (including extra rules, etc.) or the cards, will be in the box.
In other words… if you want everything, you want the box. Look at that box. So sturdy and full of lovely things.
WE HEAR YOU!
Thanks to everyone who’s left us comments and questions on the Kickstarter page. Not only is it nice that you’re paying attention, it tells us what we forgot to tell you. Like, for example, how to play the game.*
Grant’s recorded a short video explaining in more detail how Royal Blood works, and we’ve adding it to the Kickstarter page. You can also watch it on YouTube.
And if you asked about future stretch goals, like metal coins and a single-player mode… we can neither confirm nor deny that they’re coming, but let’s just say it would be in your interest to convince several of your wealthiest friends to invest in Royal Blood. Just in case.
Alright, back to work. We’ve got power to steal and hierarchies to topple!
Producer Chant
* we did not forget, we just underestimated how much detail you’d want. You lot are smart, switched on, perceptive, and you’re going to be fantastic at tarot-based heists.
