This campaign will fund the production of Chancers, a tabletop role-playing game in which a game manager (GM) and 2-6 players, wielders of magic all, seek their fortunes in the Drifting Kingdoms.  With your support, I'll devise an engaging, exciting, accessible core book, assemble some gorgeous maps and art, and design a set of gaming aids that will empower you to tell extraordinary stories of intrigue and adventure.

The book will be a hardcover edition, 8.5x11" inches, in full color. I am still bedeviling my layout editor by adding art and photography when inspiration strikes, but I currently estimate that the book will be about 175+ pages.

It will feature beautiful cover and some interior art by  André Simões, a world map by Tiffany Munro of Feed the Multiverse, and interior art by Emily Jackson, Bill Spytma of Superhero Necromancer, and A.A. Medina of Fabled Beast Design. I also intend to include some atmospheric photos from Unsplash.

What kind of game is Chancers? I'd characterize it as an optimistic one, the kind of game that encourages and helps players to tell stories about the kind of world they'd love to see. For about 75 years the game world, centered on the island of Aurichor, has flourished, as civic-minded rulers rose to power, replacing a long line of self-serving kings.

The first of this new line of monarchs, Jovolor...

...set in motion cultural changes that have transformed the island:  a form of universal basic income, health care, food support, education, public transportation, and other good things. Players will be invited to contribute to and expand on this popular cultural vision.

The tricky part? Some folks would love to see Aurichor and the Kingdoms revert to the old ways, by which I mean "the time when their families had privilege and power." Much of that power hinged on the banishment of the earliest Chancers, Chancers who accordingly left the Kingdoms and set them adrift in time and space:

Now the people of Aurichor must mind the Misted Bridge for periodic connections to the Continent and infusions of newcomers drawn to the Kingdoms by the residual power of this great Chance.  The Wardens who guard the bridge, led by the Warden General...

...find that most newcomers simply want a safe place to call home. The General's job is to decide how to approach newcomers, and most of the time that translates into a warm welcome, immediate assistance, and an effort to see these new folk fed and housed in keeping with the ancient traditions of guest-friendship.

Players will help these new people get settled from time to time.  The lion's share of play, however, will involve exercising their Faculties, Skills, and Graces by rooting out pockets of human wickedness, contending with beasts and monsters, exploring the ruins of the old world, hunting down lost artifacts, and finding ways to reconnect and coexist with the spiritual powers of the Kingdoms:

I'm terribly fond of grimdark gaming, but Chancers ventures into the uncertain space where players aren't wholly focused on holding corruption at bay, where they can see how far help, hope, and more than a little bit of magic can rebuild and reshape a world worth believing in.

One of the joys of designing games in the modern era is the perfect certainty that diversity must be one of the cornerstones. The first character I created for the Drifting Kingdoms was Solor the Beloved, the Black folk hero featured on the cover of the book, and having him in place (as a figure the people of Aurichor would want most to take the throne when the Sonian line met its end) led naturally to Jovolor, Solor's kinsman, a transgender man who would become king and reshape the way the peoples of the islands understood power.

With Solor and Jovolor locked in, I began commissioning art to capture the representative richness of Chancers as a whole. I leaned on Bill Spytma with a long wish list, and here are a few of the folks players will encounter in the launching-pad adventure of the game, The First Chance:

In The First Chance, PCs will also run into gay couples, neurodivergent kids, and nonbinary characters in a city designed to be accessible to folks who need mobility aids. I didn't want to relegate diversity to the distant past or to a couple of incidental corners of the game--inclusion is at the heart of the game world's thriving vibrancy. 

I asked Emily Jackson to work up images of the folks who occupy pivotal positions in the revised political scheme of the Capital, too:

There are some fantastical figures in the mix as well, but for this specific update I wanted to give you a glimpse of the human pluralism I tried my best to capture.

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An early backer was also kind enough to note that some of the fulfillment and delivery info, tucked away in the FAQ, was hard to access on her phone. I thought I'd move that out here to the Story, too.

The digital version and community copies will be distributed through DriveThruRPG and their coupon code system. I'll be using Backerkit to collect shipping costs closer to fulfillment for the hardcover and to manage fulfillment after the campaign has ended.

Most books of about the same size weigh in at two pounds; I'll double-check rates when the time to ship arrives, but the media mail rate stands at less than $6 in the US for under three pounds. I don't anticipate scads of international interest, but I'm game to ship overseas; I do not have a fulfillment partner for worldwide orders.  I do, however, know several folks who have worked out the logistics of international shipping before, so I'll lean on them liberally.

Much will depend on the commitments of the layout editor, but I hope to have hard copies back from the printer in late August of this year, which should put me on target to ship in the early fall.

As another entry in my efforts to streamline the presentation of Chancers for all devices, I thought I'd tackle two subjects today. 

The first concerns mechanics. One of my friends over at Superhero Necromancer Press urged me to load info on mechanics into the introduction to the game on the day we launched, and Carl Congdon helpfully brought that imperative back into focus with a discussion question on Tuesday.

Like most designers, I thought first about how I wanted Chancers to feel and move when it came to mechanics.  I settled on a variant of the Storyteller System for the use of skills, which will be familiar to folks who've sampled the World of Darkness family of games. In brief, players generally roll several ten-sided dice--a few dice attached to an ability score, a few attached to a skill score--for most regular actions, with results in the 7-10 range counting as successful rolls. It works for combat cleanly, with fast movement and a good dicefeel, and it can be adapted to races and competitions with just a little finesse.

Here, for example, is a Chancer using the Coax skill:

As for Chancing magic itself, I wanted to slow the movement down just a bit to simulate the work of corralling ambient magic and turning it to the intentions of the wielder.  As with skills, I wanted the act to be intuitive and fairly simple, even though Chancers can improvise magic on the fly in addition to drawing from a sizable catalog of well-known spells.

The mechanics for Chancing accordingly involve a simple 50/50 proposition: the caster articulates what they want to do, and if the plan is within the reach of their ability scores, they roll a single Chancing die.  Chancing dice vary, and they can improve over time, usually beginning with a d20, a twenty-sided die, and improving to a d12, d8, and d4 step by step. Roll an 11, 7, 5, or 3 or higher on the corresponding Chancing die, and the spell works just as the player intended.

Because Chancers are Chancers, they can tinker with chance itself.  Wielders of magic can add extra oomph to a spell attempt, spending from a pool of dedicated Current points to improve the odds of the spell going off as they'd imagined. Overages, however, might exceed the caster's intentions.  Let's say, for instance, that Charles the Chancer adds ten points of Current to a spell, then rolls a natural 20 on his d20.  He's overshot the mark, so the magic will go just a little wild.

I hope that covers some of the central mechanics in a way that everyone can easily read on their devices.  And here's an image from the Chancers bestiary for you to take a gander at:

Finally, I thought it would be helpful to give folks a glimpse of the layout of the game.  Below you'll find a link to a PDF of Chapter Three, the Concise Guide to the Drifting Kingdoms. People who've followed Chancers from the very start will have seen this document before, but I hope new backers and prospective backers will benefit from a better look at the actual layout of the game.  That link will pop you away from BackerKit for a moment, I'm afraid, and over to my blog, but I can't persuade the Story page to load more than the first image of the chapter from my sample file.