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These are all great plot hooks for a campaign!

Rules of The Fairy Market

Everything has a cost. Do not assume that, simply because there is no price tag, that things will be freely given. Make yourself aware of what you will owe before agreeing to a bargain, as more often than not, the asking price will exceed your means: a diamond from the crown of Mab, a shingle from the roof of your childhood home now long demolished, your eyes, a kiss.

If you purchase food; meats, cheeses, plums, bread, and the like, I would advise you to not eat it until you are safely back in your home. Of course, the food of the fae will never taste as rich or wonderful if it is eaten elsewhere, but neither will you be tethered by its thrall.

Troupes often move through the Market, either stocking up on rations or preparing for a quest. Do not get in their way. Should you see someone you recognize among the ranks of goblin soldiers, or in the company of strange, hollow kings, do not approach them. Not only would it be considered rude, but you are surely not prepared for the outcome should you insert yourself into their narrative. You are here to buy pears, butter, and perhaps a finely tailored pair of pants, so do that. You may start a quest on another day.

Buying rings at market is...inadvisable. Much can be communicated in a ring; you can never be sure what it is you are buying. Indeed, it could always simply be a ring, finely crafted from wood or stone, a light enchantment placed upon it. But then again, I've heard many tales of elated brides and grooms and their...more than unwitting human betrotheds.

Your Name would go for quite a bit, if you were in the Market to hawk it. It is a fine name, good and strong, whether it was given to you or one you have chosen for yourself. Each interested party would assure you of how well they would care for it, because of course, care of a name equals care of an individual. But do not forget, if you sell your name, the name you have chosen, you may one day hear it being called, and you will have little choice but to follow, wherever that may lead. But if you need the money...

There is a well at the centre of the market. It is old and overtaken by moss. You may hear a voice or feel a pull calling you towards it. Your hand may go to your pocket to pull out a coin. Its a well, you have to make a wish, right? Well, I will tell you now, you will receive your wish, and much more for you have paid for it. But be warned, with the well, you cannot recant, you cannot withdraw. Your deal was made and until your dying breath, the well will uphold it.

Such pretty things line the stalls, jewels, jars of gold dust, gems, pearls, and crowns. You may find yourself all too overwhelmed by the splendour of it all. Perhaps you would like to stay, forever surrounded by the richness of the market. But as the sun begins to set, casting shadows across the pleasant faces of the merchants, you will see another kind of clientele enter through the archway; more frenzied, frightening, crazed. If you are here passed dark, what is it you are selling, they ask, for they wish to be tempted, they wish to buy. What is it you are selling? They will pay any price. What is it you are selling!?

Stealing is not prohibited by the Market itself, but I would hope you are not fool enough to try. Make no mistake that the fae will take every advantage of you that they can and once you have entered the Market, you are on your own. No is there to defend you, as heroes are not allowed within its boundaries. If you are caught, and you will be, you will be at the mercy of your victim, and I will tell you, each merchant you see before you is worse than the last.

I should not have to say this, but do not offer yourself as collateral. I understand you all crave adventure but I fear you do not understand what is at stake. You know not to what hoard you will be taken, or to whose service you will be put into. Who you will be made to kill, or what you will be made to kiss. Do not. DO NOT put yourself into that position, for I will not be there to save you.

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Watch "Starting My Dream Game" on YouTube

My brothers are making a video game! If you want to support a new indie ip that actually gives a shit take ten minutes and watch this video, take a few more and share it!

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Crafting A Fantasy Culture, or the fallacies of using culture in the singular

The world is an interdependent place.

A lot of Western writers will look at the need to diversify their writing and try to cherry pick outside cultures to add. They then come to us with a laundry list of questions about what they’re allowed to change about those cultures because, well, they didn’t pull from a broad enough context.

The thing about researching individual cultures is: you’re never going to be researching just one culture. You’re going to be researching all the cultures they interacted with, as well.

Cultures are made by interacting with other cultures. So you can’t simply plop a singular culture into a fantasy world and expect it to work. There is too much outside influence on that culture for you to get a holistic picture by researching the culture in isolation.

Instead, you need to ask yourself, “what environments made them, and how much of their surrounding contexts do I need to add to my fantasy world to make this genuine respectful representation?”

And before you say that you can’t possibly do that, that is too much research, let me introduce you to the place you’re already doing it but don’t realize:

Stock Fantasy World 29

Aka, fantasy Europe.

It gets ragged on a lot, but let’s take a minute to look at the tropes that build this stock fantasy world.

Snow

4 seasons

Boars, pigs, wolves, dogs, pine trees, stone

Castles

Sheep

Knights

A king

Farming based economy

Religion plays a pretty big role in life

All fairly generic fantasy Europe tropes. But if you look more closely, you’ll notice that this is painting a picture of Fantasy Germany/the Netherlands, with perhaps a dash of France and/or England in there, all of it vaguely Americanized (specifically the New England area) because there’s usually potatoes and tomatoes. The geographic region is pretty tight, and it just so happens to mesh with the top three superpowers of upper North America, and arguably the English speaking world.

But let’s keep going.

They import stuff. Like fine cloth, especially silk, along with dyes & pigments

These things are expensive from being imported, so the nobility mostly have them

There’s usually a war-mongering Northern People invading places

If brown people exist they are usually to the East

There might be a roaming band of nomadic invaders who keep threatening things

There is, notably, almost no tropical weather, and that is always to the South if it’s mentioned

There might be an ocean in the South that leads to a strange forgien land of robed people to survive a desert (or did I just read too much Tamora Pierce?)

And, whoops, we have just accidentally recreated European history in its full context.

The Northern people are Norse, and their warring ways are indicative of the Viking Invasion. The imports hint at Asia, namely the Ottomans and India, and the silk road. The roaming invaders are for Mongolian Khanate. The ocean and tropical weather in the South hints at Spain, Greece, and the Mediterranean. And the continent of robed people indicates North Africa, and/or Southwest Asia.

Suddenly, stock fantasy world 29 has managed to broad-strokes paint multiple thousands of years of cultural exchange, trade, wars, invasions, and general history into a very small handful of cultural artifacts that make up throwaway lines.

Europe As Mythology And You

European history is what’s taught in Western classrooms. And a lot of European history is painted as Europe being a cultural hub, because other places in the world just aren’t talked about in detail—or with any sort of context. Greece and Rome were whitewashed; the Persian and Ottoman empires were demonized; North Africans became the enemy because of their invasion of Spain and the fact many of them were not-Christian; the Mongolian Khanate was a terrible, bloodthirsty culture whose only goal was destruction.

But because all of these parts did interact with Europe and were taught in history class, writers crafting a fantasy Europe will automatically pull from this history on a conscious or subconscious level because “it’s what makes sense.”

The thing is, despite people writing European fantasy subconsciously recreating European history, they don’t actually recreate historical reality. They recreate the flattened, politically-driven, European-supremacist propaganda that treats every culture outside of Europe as an extra in a movie that simply exists to support Europe “history” that gets taught in schools.

As a result of incomplete education, a lot of people walk away from history class and believe that cultures can be created in a vacuum. Because that’s the way Europe’s history was taught to them.

Which leads to: the problem with Fantasy World 29 isn’t “it’s Europe.” It’s the fact it’s an ahistorical figment of a deeply colonial imagination that is trying to justify its own existence. It’s homogeneous, it only mentions the broader cultural context as a footnote, it absolutely does not talk about any people of colour, and there’s next to no detailing of the variety of people who actually made up Europe.

So writers build their Fantasy World 29 but they neglect the diversity of religion and skin tone and culture because it’s unfamiliar to them, and it was never taught to them as a possibility for history.

While “globalization” is a buzzword people throw around a lot to describe the modern age, society has been global for a large portion of human history. There were Japanese people in Spain in the 1600s. Polynesians made it to North America decades if not centuries before Columbus did. There are hundreds more examples like this. 

You can absolutely use fantasy to richen your understanding of Europe, instead of perpetuating the narratives that were passed down from victor’s history. People of colour have always existed in Europe, no matter what time period you’re looking at, and unlearning white supremacist ideas about Europe is its own kind of diversity revolution.

Travel is Old and People Did It Plenty

Multiculturalism is a tale as old as time. And while some populations were very assimilationist in their rhetoric, others were very much not. They would expand borders and respect the pre-existing populations, or they would open up networks to outsiders to become hubs of all the best the world had to offer. Even without conscious effort, any given place was building off of centuries of human migration because humans covered the globe by wandering around, and people have always been people.

Regardless, any time you have a group of people actively maintaining an area, they want to make travelling for themselves easier. And the thing about making travelling for yourself easier is: it made travel for outsiders just as possible. By the time you reach the 1200s, even, road, river, and ocean trade networks were thriving.

Sure, you might be gone for a year or three or five because the methods were slow, but you would travel. Pilgrimages, trade routes, and bureaucratic administrative routes made it possible for people to move around.

And also, soldiers and war did really good jobs of moving people around, and not all of them went back “home.” Hence why there have been African people in England since the Roman empire. When you have an empire, you are going to take soldiers from all over that empire; you aren’t going to necessarily pull from just the geographic region immediately surrounding the capital. 

Yes, the population that could travel was smaller than it is now, because land needed to be worked. But Europe isn’t the be all end all in how much of its population needed to be in agriculture in order to function; the Mughals, for example, had 80% of their population farming, compared to over 90% for Europe in the same time period. That’s an extra 10% of people who were more socially free to move around, away from their land. Different cultures had different percentages of people able to travel.

This isn’t counting nomadic populations that relied on pastoralism and horticulture who didn’t actually settle down, something a lot of history tends to ignore because cities are easier to discuss. But nomadic populations existed en masse across Eurasia, and they took cultural traditions all over the continent.

Just because it wasn’t fast doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. And just because a lot of Europeans couldn’t travel because of the agricultural demands of the continent, doesn’t mean every other culture was as tied to settlements. 

Multiculturalism and Diffusion

While each individual culture is unique, and you can find pockets of difference anywhere, cultures exist on a sliding scale of broad customs across the globe. Greece and Turkey will have more in common than China and England, because the trade routes were much closer and they shared central rulership for multiple hundreds of years.

This is why we keep saying it’s important to keep cultures with other cultures close to them. Because those are the natural clusters of how all of the cultures involved would be formed. The proper term for this is cultural diffusion, and it happened all the time. Yes, you could get lots of people who had their own unique customs to set themselves apart. But they had the same natural resources as the dominant group, which meant they couldn’t be completely and totally alien.

Even trade influence wouldn’t produce the same results in two places. When Rome imported silks from China, they rewove them to be a different type of fabric that was lighter and more suited to their climate. Then the Romans sold the rewoven silk back to China, who treated it differently because they’d woven it the first way for a reason. They didn’t talk to each other directly because of how the Silk Road was set up at the time, either, so all they had were the goods.

And people automatically, subconsciously realize this whenever they write Fantasy World 29. They put like cultures with like cultures in Europe. Because even if they weren’t really taught to see the rest of the world as anything more than a footnote, they still transfer those footnotes to their fantasy.

The problem is, people don’t realize the gradient of customs. In the modern day, Greece and Turkey are different countries, with histories that are taught in totally different frameworks (Greece as an appropriated white supremacist “ancient land” that all Western European societies are descendent from, Turkey as a land of brown people that were Muslim and therefore against the Good Christian Europe), so it’s really easy to ignore all of their shared history.

People often fought for the right to rule (or even exist) in a place, which deeply impacted the everyday people and government. Ancient Persia is a fantastic example of this, because it covered huge swaths of land and was a genuinely respectful country (it took over a deeply disrespectful country); had it not been for Cyrus the Great deciding that he would respect multiculturalism, the Second Temple wouldn’t have been rebuilt in Jerusalem. 

You can’t homogenize an area that was never homogenous to begin with. Because there was a ton of fighting and sometimes centuries-old efforts to preserve culture in the face of all this fighting (that sometimes came with assimilation pressure). Dominant groups, invading groups, influencing groups, and marginalized groups have always existed in any given population. See: Travel is Old above. See: people have always been people and wandered around. Xenophobia is far, far older than racism ever will be, because xenophobia is simply “dislike of Other” and humans love crafting “us vs them” dynamics.

This lack of unity matters. It’s what allows you to look at a society (especially one with a centralized government) and see that it is made up of people that are different. It leads you to asking questions such as: 

Who was persecuted by this group?

Did the disliked group of people exist within their borders, or were they driven away and are now enemy #1?

What was their mindset on diversity?

How did they handle others encroaching on what they saw as their territory?

People do different things across different households, let alone hundreds of miles away. You wouldn’t expect someone from a rich, white area of California to behave the same way as someone from a middle-class immigrant neighbourhood from NYC. I’m sure, if you looked at your own city, you would scoff at the concept of someone mistaking your city for one five hours away, because when you know them, they’re so different.

So why do you expect there to be only one type of person anywhere else?

Cultural and Geographic Context Matters

A region’s overreacting culture (either determined by groups of people who mostly roam the land, or a centralized government) and their marginalized cultures determine the infighting within a group, even if the borders remain the same.

Persecution and discrimination are just as contextual as culture. Even if the end result of assimilation and colonialism was the same, the expectations for assimilation would look different, and what they had been working with before would also look different. You can’t compare Jewish exile from various places in Europe with Rromani exiles in Europe, and you definitely can’t compare them with the Hmong in Southeast Asia. They came from different places and were shaped by different cultures.

A culture that came from a society that hated one particular aspect of them will not form—at all—if they’re placed in a dominant culture that doesn’t find their cultural norms all that persecution-worthy. And the way they were forced to assimilate to survive will play into whatever time period you’re dealing with, as well; see the divide of Jewish people into multiple categories, all shaped by the resources available in the cultures they stayed in the longest.

You can’t remove a culture’s context and expect to get the same result. Even in a culture that doesn’t wholesale have an assimilationist agenda, you can still get specific prejudices and scapegoats that happen when there’s a historical precedent in the region for disliking a certain group. 

Once you start cherry picking what elements of a culture to take—because you’ve plunked the !Kung into Greece and need to modify their customs from the desert to a tropical destination —you’re going to end up with coding that is absolutely positively not going to land. 

Coding is a complex combination of foods, clothing, behaviour/mannerisms, homes, beliefs, and sometimes skin tone and facial features. A properly coded culture shouldn’t really need any physical description of the people involved in order to register as that culture. So when you remove the source of food, clothing, and home-building materials… how can you code something accurately from that?

And yes, it’s intimidating to think of doing so much research and starting from 0. You have to code a much larger culture than you’d originally intended, and it absolutely increases the amount of work you have to do.

But, as I said, you are already doing this with Europe. You’re just so familiar with it, you don’t realize. You can get a rundown of how to code the overarching culture with my guide: Representing PoC in Fantasy When Their Country/Continent Doesn’t Exist

Takeaways

Writers need to be aware of diversity not just as a nebulous concept, but as something that simply exists and has always existed. And the diversity (or lack thereof) of any one region is a result of, specifically, the politics of that region.

Diversity didn’t just exist “over there”. It has always existed within a society. Any society. All societies. If you want to start adding diversity into your fantasy, you should start looking at the edges of Fantasy World 29 and realize that the brown people aren’t just stopping at the designated border and trading goods at exactly that spot, but have been travelling to the heart of the place for probably a few hundred years and quite a few of them probably liked the weather, or politics, better so they’ve settled.

Each society will produce a unique history of oppressing The Other, and you can’t just grab random group A and put it in societal context B and expect them to look the same. Just look at the difference between the Ainu people, the anti-Indigenous discrimination they face, and compare it to how the Maori are treated in New Zealand and the history of colonialism there. Both Indigenous peoples in colonial societies on islands, totally different contexts, totally different results.

If random group A is a group marked by oppression, then it absolutely needs to stay in its same societal context to be respectful. If random group A is, however, either not marked by being oppressed within its societal context and/or is a group that has historically made that move so you can see how their situation changed with that move, then it is a much safer group to use for your diversity.

Re-learn European history from a diverse lens to see how Europe interacted with Africa and Asia to stop making the not-Europe parts of Fantasy World 29 just be bit parts that add flavour text but instead vibrant parts of the community.

Stop picking singular cultures just because they fascinate you, and place them in their contexts so you can be respectful.

~ Mod Lesya

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Some DM's can be so arrogant. " ooooh I created this world and they want to do something I didn't plan. Whaaaaaa." Fuck off. The player IS participating in your world by making that business. Help them make that business into a reputable company for npc's to shop at. Help them join your world's version of a merchants guild, maybe get them involved in a business rivalry. Just because they ignore your initial plot hooks doesn't mean they don't care or acknowledge you hard work. It may be "your" world, but when you invited them in you made it part theirs as well. Moral of the story, don't be a whiny piece of shit when the players don't want to do exactly what you planned. Instead, maybe take a second and appreciate your player for be imaginative and contributing to your world. Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.

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People, especially games, get eldritch madness wrong a lot and it’s really such a shame.

An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.

Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.

It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then…

It’s an ant again.

Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.

This is madness.

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“They call us now, before they drop the bombs. The phone rings and someone who knows my first name calls and says in perfect Arabic “This is David.” And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass-shattering symphonies still smashing around in my head I think, Do I know any Davids in Gaza? They call us now to say Run. You have 58 seconds from the end of this message. Your house is next. They think of it as some kind of war-time courtesy. It doesn’t matter that there is nowhere to run to. It means nothing that the borders are closed and your papers are worthless and mark you only for a life sentence in this prison by the sea and the alleyways are narrow and there are more human lives packed one against the other more than any other place on earth Just run. We aren’t trying to kill you. It doesn’t matter that you can’t call us back to tell us the people we claim to want aren’t in your house that there’s no one here except you and your children who were cheering for Argentina sharing the last loaf of bread for this week counting candles left in case the power goes out. It doesn’t matter that you have children. You live in the wrong place and now is your chance to run to nowhere. It doesn’t matter that 58 seconds isn’t long enough to find your wedding album or your son’s favorite blanket or your daughter’s almost completed college application or your shoes or to gather everyone in the house. It doesn’t matter what you had planned. It doesn’t matter who you are. Prove you’re human. Prove you stand on two legs. Run.”

—

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Running Orders                                            

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/143255/running-orders

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no, i don’t have a “dream job.” i want to spend my days reading and writing and lazing in the afternoon sun. i want to bake bread and brownies and apple crumble. i want to grow my own vegetables and plant a rainbow of flowers. i want to be with nature. i want to be at peace.

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as a general rule. if what we’re calling ‘cultural appropriation’ sounds like nazi ideology (i.e. ‘white people should only do white people things and black people should only do black people things’) with progressive language, we are performing a very very poor application of what ‘cultural appropriation’ means. this is troublingly popular in the blogosphere right now and i think we all need to be more critical of what it is we may be saying or implying, even unintentionally.

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                    Mock up of the book. Cover design not finalized.

Coyote and Crow is a tabletop role playing game set in an alternate future of the Americas where colonization never occurred. Instead, advanced civilizations arose over hundreds of years after a massive climate disaster changed the history of the planet. You’ll play as adventurers starting out in the city of Cahokia, a bustling, diverse metropolis along the Mississippi River. It’s a world of science and spirituality where the future of technology and legends of the past will collide.

The game is created and led by a team of Native Americans representing more than a dozen tribes and we’ve built a game that both Natives and non-Natives will thrill to explore and build upon.

More than 700 years ago, a bright purple streak shot across the night sky. Over the coming weeks, the Earth fell into a deep winter, the seas raged and ash rained from the sky. The event became known as the Awis. As resources dwindled, winter became longer and summer shorter, people struggled to survive. Wars erupted, people starved, some fleeing their ancestral homes before creeping ice sheets.

But people survived. Tribes adapted. And in the wake, people began to notice a strange purple mark appearing on people, plants and animals alike. It became known as the Adahnehdi, the Gift, and many took it as a sign that the Great Spirit had not given up on them.

Eventually, the weather began to ease, the Earth began to heal, and new nations arose. New sciences and technologies, born out of necessity, led to a discovery about the Adahnehdi. It wasn’t just a mark, it was a path to abilities and powers, beyond normal human limits.

                       The long walk home. Art by Jennifer Lange

Now, 700 years after the world was brought to the brink, a new chapter has begun. Your characters enter a world that is healing but is no less dangerous. The ice sheets are retreating and the seas are calming, but what lay out beyond your borders? The treaties and alliances that made so much sense during the long winters are now eroding and old grudges between nations are not so easily forgotten. New technologies arise almost every day and the rate of change is frightening for some. And then there are the stories. Talk of spirits, monsters, beings of legend. For so many they were just tales to be told around the fire. But now there is talk that these legends may be far more literal than you may have previously believed. Has something awakened them?

                                the northern continent of Makasing.

Coyote and Crow is an original role playing system built around the exclusive use of D12 dice. Outside of the core rule book, all you’ll need to play the game is some pencil and paper and some twelve-sided dice. While there is some complexity to the game, we are striving to present a system that will allow players to refer to the rule book during play as little as possible, keeping most or all of the critical information on your character sheet.

           Mock up of the front of a character sheet. Design not finalized.

The basic rule system is centered around collecting a Dice Pool, usually around 5-7 D12s and rolling them to determine either Success or Failure and degree of effect. For example “8” might be the number your Character needs to attempt to do something and every 8 or higher they rolled would be a Success. The more 8’s, the more successful they are.

While combat is a part of Coyote and Crow, the game is actually built around the idea of fighting being only one road to story resolution. The game encourages dialogue, building bridges and finding unique solutions to problems that are not always clearly defined by good and evil.

Your Characters have Stats like Strength and Spirit and Skills like Investigation and Charm that are modified by their Stats. In addition, when you create your Character, you choose a Path. That Path determines both certain Stat bonuses you receive as well as which Abilities you have access to. Abilities are powers beyond normal human capability, but not at a level where characters would be comparable to superheroes. There are 15 Paths in the core rule book available. In addition, you’ll choose an Archetype (Whisperer, Healer, Scout, among others) that will give you Stat and Skill bonuses and a general idea of your character’s profession, but will not force your Character too deeply down a specific progression.

Then you’ll choose Gifts and Burdens. These allow you to give your Characters specific bonuses or drawbacks and will help you flesh them out in a way that is flavorful and realistic. It’s important to note that the rulebook does not dictate whether something is a burden or a gift for a Player. For example, a Player might choose to give their Character a sister. That might be a Burden or a Gift (or both!) depending on how the Player wants their Character to see that relationship.

Sample pages from the equipment chapter. Layouts and content not finalized.

There are no experience points in Coyote and Crow. Instead, it is built on the Legends system. Your Character will have Short Term Goals, which will increase various numbers on your Character sheets or give them new Skills. But you and your group will also have Long Term Goals. When those are completed your legend will grow. You’ll write a short story about your adventures, the kind that can be told around the fire for generations to come. These can change your Gifts and Burdens, give you access to new Abilities and more. As you complete more Long Term Goals, your Character’s legend will precede them and your stories will spread.

ARCHETYPES

There are six Archetypes in the game, each acting as a starting point for Character development but not constricting their possibilities. Each Archetype has its own symbol. Here are a few of them.

            The icons for the Tinkerer, Warrior and Whisperer Archetypes

PATHS

In addition to Archetypes, Players choose Paths for their Characters, which are permanent associations they make with an animal and help define what extra human Abilities they’ll be able to choose from, among other effects. There are fifteen basic Paths in the core rulebook.

                       The Path of the Badger, the Stag and the Spider

While this game was created by a Native-led team, this game is for everyone. We’ve taken great care to craft a game that Natives and non-Natives alike will be able to engage in and find themselves immersed in.

For Natives, we’ve crafted both story and game mechanics that will allow you to integrate your own tribal customs into your play. For those who aren’t Native, you’ll have a wealth of options to choose from as well as clear guidelines for understanding the differences between this world and our real one.

The game is designed to be your first role playing game or your latest. The core rule book will walk players through every step of how to play Coyote and Crow, but also how to play role playing games in general, including advice on safety and inclusion as well as suggestions on where to find tools outside of the rule book to make your game both easier and more enjoyable.

Everyone involved in Coyote and Crow is deeply passionate about our game and we felt that it was time for Indigenous folks to have a game that didn’t see them as secondary, as adversaries, or intertwined with colonialism.

Coyote and Crow is not set in a dystopia. The world went through a dark chapter, but the people of these nations rose to the challenge. There’s good food and water, education and meaningful work for almost everyone in Makasing.

But this world isn’t a utopia either. It’s place that’s growing, where old alliances are strained and past slights are not always forgotten. New technology is putting pressure on old traditions. And with the climate becoming milder, there is a whole world of unknowns out there. On top of all of that, there are rumors that some of the old stories about monsters and spirits might just be a little more real than some originally believed. This is a game where science and the unexplained live side by side and sometimes clash.

                              The Wanderer. Art by Kyle Charles.

THE CORE RULE BOOK

We are producing a beautiful 300+ page hardbound book, loaded with illustrations and containing all of the rules you’ll need to play Coyote and Crow. Included in the book (and PDF) will be:

Detailed history of this alternate world

Descriptions of daily life and culture in Cahokia, the capital of the Free Lands

Rules for creating and advancing your characters, including 6 Archetypes, 15 Paths and 27 Abilities for a massive variety of options

Descriptions and stats for mythical creatures, infamous spirits, shadowy organizations and dangerous cults that can challenge players endlessly

A group of pre-generated characters if you want to jump right into playing the game

A starter adventure, Encounter at Station 54, that can act as a stand alone adventure or as the start of a larger campaign

So much more!

                              It still hungers. Art by Jeffrey Veregge

We have a diverse team of folks working on this game, most of whom are Native. Additionally, we are striving to bring in other marginalized voices whenever possible. Our team features people from across the LGBTQIA spectrum, including two spirit folks. It’s not even a question that this game is political. If you have a problem with a game where there are no people of European descent represented, than this game is probably not for you. That said, we’ve truly built this game to be played by everyone. It might seem like a big leap, but don’t worry, we’re going to hold your hand the whole way through and you’ll be so happy you stepped off the edge into this vibrant fresh world.

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Kickstarter campaign ends: Fri, April 2 2021 3:00 AM BST

Website: [Coyote and Crow] [instagram]

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I aspire to have fans direct my work like this, to leave things like this scattered throughout my works, for people to unravel for themselves.

Frodo Laid a Geas (and other invisible magic)

This was so obvious when I realized it, but I think most people miss it, because we’re so desensitized by D&D-style magic with immediate, visibly, flashy effects, rather than more subtle and invisible forces of magic. When Gollum attacks Frodo on the slopes of Mount Doom, Frodo has the chance to kill him, but he doesn’t. Instead, he says:

Frodo: Go! And if you ever lay hands on me again, you yourself shall be cast into the Fire!

Frodo’s not just talking shit here. He is literally, magically laying a curse. He’s holding the One Ring in his hands as he says it; even Sam, with no magic powers of his own, can sense that some powerful mojo is being laid down. Frodo put a curse on Gollum: if you try to take the Ring again, you’ll be cast into the Fire.

Five pages later, Gollum tries to take the Ring again. And that’s exactly what happens. Frodo’s geas takes effect and Gollum eats lava.

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Pure genius. Not mine.

ANCIENT MAGIC - SORCERER SUBCLASS Created by rain-junkieDnD GM Binder and PDF versions You can find more of my work here Artwork by Raphael Lacoste

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I can't help because of my own financial situation, but if this reaches just one other person who can help this person, I will feel much better.

I am relatively young but in final stage renal failure. I have a higher chance of survival IF I can recieve proper medical care AND LIVING ASSISTANCE in a different state. Get me OUT of Mississippi. 8/29/18

The long post w the good explanation is being shared but not inspiring much help. So, I simplified it.

My illness is straight up fatal. Not gonna beat around thatBush, anymore. I seem desperate for help because I AM desperate for help.

My nephrologist has seen enough improvement in my kidney function, lately, to believe someone my age (early 30s) might have a longer life WITH PROPER AND FREQUENT MEDICAL ATTENTION. Sadly, that just isn’t an option where I live.

Please, if you can help me with moving expenses (even just a couple of bucks) I would be grateful. I’m sinking fast in Mississippi and now my doctors are giving me too much hope to ignore. I wanna get out of this situation and I’m working my fatigued, brain-foggy ass off to make it out of here.

If I can undo the damage my heart failure caused to the rest of my body, I want to. I don’t want to spend another month KNOWING what I should be eating, what medicines I should be taking, what tests and treatments I should be getting… and receiving almost none of it because Mississippi lawmakers think people like me have somehow earned slow, painful deaths.

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Excellent ideas. I will be tweaking some of them to fit the themes of my dungeons.

33 Pieces of Weird Dungeon Dressing...

The perfectly preserved body of a humanoid, tied to a throne of charred wood.

The dungeon entrance is a large magical gate that will shut and seal, and not open again until seven days have passed.

Poisonous gas seeps out from nearly invisible cracks in the dungeon’s walls.

A 6-foot-tall, beautifully sculpted man made of crystal and glass.

A circle of obelisks, with a hole in the ground at its centre.

Shelves stocked with rotting food.

The strange powers of this Dungeon Room change Spell Scrolls into other, random Scrolls of the same level.

Scatterings of hay and grass cover the room, building into larger clumps towards the next chamber.

The hallway is lined with mirrors in various states of vandalism, the one at the very end however seems too pristine.

A room slowly flooding with a highly flammable oil.

A gate inside a sarcophagus that takes you to a random location.

A constant feeling of something watching you…

Cracks in the walls seem to suck in the cold air of the dungeon room, almost like the walls breathe…

The walls are literally closing in. the dungeon is getting smaller and smaller the longer the Party stays in there…

Strange bulbous flowers with faces screaming as they come into full bloom.

Coins coated in grime and contact poison!

In the darkness of the underground dungeon room, there exists shadows that should not be…

A fire is spreading from a random room in a lower level of the dungeon, causing smoke to rise up into the higher floors.

A statue hangs from chains, dangling from the ceiling.

All words echo, even a whisper…

It’s almost impossible to breathe here. 

The floor is slanted and covered in a translucent oil.

Two talking goat skulls hang over the door, one speaks of a magical giant, while the other speaks of a dragon large enough to swallow the world…

The items found here spring to life, becoming Animate Objects and trying to harm their new owners.

This hallway is decorated with rows upon rows of granite statues. One of which is alive and begs to be released from “The Stony Shell”.

The Dungeon itself is scorching hot. As you adventure further in, all metals soon melts like candlewax.

Coconuts hang from a large tree. If a Creature breaks open even one of these Coconuts, it releases a screaming white Spectre!

A large withered tree grows in the room, the fruits of this tree are dozens and dozens of identical heads!

A gateway that, when a Creature steps through it, separates their body and soul as if by an Astral Projection Spell.

A room with an enormous mirror that depicts any creature that looks at it as hideously gaunt and emaciated. 

The entire dungeon is slowly sinking into the ocean, causing the lower levels to slowly flood with cold dark seawater.

Food troughs with poisonous mould and fungi growing within.

A large jewel is embedded within the ceiling, if removed, this causes the roof to collapse in, crushing any would be robbers.

This random list was made with help from Members of the CreativeRogue’s Discord Server. If you’re interested and want to contribute, join HERE!

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Dark times all around but there are still people out there who love you

Do not hurt yourself, do not hurt others, get help, talk to someone, anyone. Humanity has survived before and we can do it now if we all just support each other. My country and my people let me down and endangered my life but there’s nothing I or anyone else can do about that so let’s try to spread the love that is so clearly lacking.

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👀👀 not gonna name names but SOME of u are sweet and kind and deserve the world and i am rooting for u