One Week Until Realis!

Hey everyone, 

If you subscribe to the Possible Worlds Games newsletter (and you should), then you’ve already heard the news. If not, well, you know it now: One week from today, the Kickstarter for Realis, my tabletop RPG, goes live! 

If you have any interest in it at all, please go follow the campaign. And if you don’t have any interest yet, read on, because if you follow me and my work, I think it’s something you’d love.

If you've watched the Realis session I ran with the folks at Nextlander or listened to the campaign we've been running over on the Friends at the Table Patreon, you've probably heard a little about the world of Realis and its blend of science fiction and fantasy.

Maybe you know about the the Thousand Moons, and the Orphan Vessels, strange living spaceships which flit between them. Or you've heard of the hauntings space empire of The Roun or the pretender kingdoms which followed. You've maybe even heard of Those Nerveless Chancers The Krinsky Family Circus And Travelling Curiosity.

If not, well, those links above a great place to start. Today, though, I'd like to talk a little bit about how Realis works, and why it works that way.

The First Sentence

It was just about five years ago when I started work on Realis. After the death of Kentaro Miura, I’d been reading his life's work, the dark fantasy manga Berserk, and I had come to a realization. A lot of great media had taken big inspirations from the series: The relationship between ambition and tragedy. Catastrophic rituals and otherworldly demons. A particular vision of an occult eclipse.

But one thing that I hadn't seen elsewhere was just how elemental its characters were. How they (like the humongous Dragon Slayer sword of the series protagonist Guts) were rendered like giant hunks of iron. They were big and archetypal, almost like stock characters. In fact, some (like Puck, above) would sometimes even describe themselves or their qualties in terms that were direct and simple declarations of truth.

This was the start of Realis.

Not too long after that, I realized what really makes Berserk special is how, over the course of the story, these huge archetypal characters were chipped away at, shaved down, sharpened, and turned into something firmly unique. There are many Berserkers in fiction. There is only one Guts. Ambition has driven many good men to evil. There is only one Griffith.

This, it turns out, is not something special about Berserk. But it is something special about this style of story. And that is when I understood that Realis should be a game about playing as larger than life stock characters who are then shaped by their actions.

So, here's how it works in brief: Instead of having stats or abilities or skills, characters in Realis have Sentences. The Fairy has these +0 Sentences:

• +0 I always escape dangerous situations.
• +0 I always console those in distress.
• +0 I always heal those who’ve been harmed.
• +0 I am always unarmed. (A Class' fourth Sentence tends to be one that can get you into trouble.)

Whenever something uncertain happens, a player has to explain which Sentence they're using to overcome that uncertainty. Someone or something else may interfere with their own Sentence, whether that's another character, one of Realis many factions, or even one of the Thousand Moons themselves. You compare who has the higher ranked Sentence (ranging from +0 to +4) to see who wins—ties go to the Counteractor, as they're called in Realis.

Whoever comes out on the losing end marks the Sentence they used. Once a Sentence has three marks, you can Realize it. When you do, it goes up a rank (From +0 to +1, for instance) but also gains a new qualification or limitation. So, in time, that Fairy might end up with sentences that look more like this.

• +2 In the daytime and with enough room to fly, I always escape dangerous situations.
• +1 I always console strangers when they're in distress.
• +2 In the light of Realis-Itself, I always heal allies who’ve been harmed.
• +3 When someone boards our Orphan Vessel, I am always unable to find the courage to fight.

A whole life has been lived, there. Or at least the life of a character in a story. Players remember how and why they Realized their Sentences in the ways they did, and by the middle of the campaign, they have a version of their Class that is unique to them and their story.

That's Realis.

Well, that and the book itself. Here's what's gonna be int he damn thing, as it says on the Kickstarter teaser page:

This premium, hardcover edition will include:

• 55 Playable Classes across Ten Spheres
• 150+ NPC Classes
• 9 Grand, 8 Major, and 12 Minor Factions
• 20 Example Moon Settings
• 100+ Original Illustrations from 17 Artists
• Extended GM Guidance for Running & Creating Content in Realis

It's a lot! And importantly: I think that even if you end up never playing it, there's a joy in just reading the thing. Not to get too into the weeds but uh, there's some weird stuff going on in Realis! There's a layered history of space conquest, and there are fatalistic fanatics worshipping cursed moons, and there's a sort of cult of mafioso gardeners who serve a giant space plant?

Also sometimes stuff like this happens:

And all of it is written by a monastic order that worships a power that they believe shapes reality into the form of a story. So yeah, some stuff is going on.

The game is written, and it's in its final stages of edits as we speak. It'll be laid out and ready for backers in PDF form once the campaign is over at the end of April, and physical copies will (shipping permitting) reach people by the end of the year. I'm trying to be as simple and clean with this as I can, because I really want to deliver the best version of this as smoothly as possible.

So. It would make my day if you followed the Kickstarter, and make my year if you backed it when it kicks off in a week.

A Few Small Things

That's it for the big update, but I wanted to shout out a few other things in case you had missed them!

Friends at the Table's season of Fabula Ultima continues apace, but the real Friends at the Table news I want to make sure people see is the t-shirt above! We're selling it along with a ton of additional ICEBREAKER merch, and all profit from everything in our shop through the end of March will be going to the Immigration Law Center of Minnesota, which provides free legal representation to immigrants, detainees, and their families.

Over On Shelved By Genre, we're reading and talking about The Lord of The Rings! Meanwhile, on A More Civilized Age, we're revisiting the original Star Wars Trilogy! So you know, really doing Some Iconic Podcasting right now.

Finally, hey, happy Spring to those of you in the northern hemisphere, happy Fall to those of you down south, and happy dry or wet season for those of you in the middle. Most of you know that I’m a coastal city boy at heart, but I’ve been able to spend a little time with my partner out in the deserts and mountains lately, and it’s been pretty grounding. 

I do not think that the Earth will save us from the corrupt and powerful (in fact, we made a whole season of Friends at the Table about that, once). But I do think that being out there in the nature has helped me find the strength to redouble my efforts working to protect our neighbors. So, as everything pulls us closer to the screen, demanding attention and time, try to find some time to be out in the world this season, in whatever way will give you a little energy back.

Peace.