Pros & Cons
Gen Con is in just a couple of days, which means I've been deep in prep mode. But the headline is, The Firmament is coming to Kickstarter later this year! Check out the free demo & follow to get notified when it goes live.
What's new?
Most of my games time has been consumed by convention prep, but The Cross Stitch has finally been restocked! In The Cross Stitch, you're sent to investigate after a village vanishes off the face of the earth. Of course, sinister things await.
This award-winning time loop adventure for MÖRK BORG has been featured on Fear of a Black Dragon, and now it can be yours. (I've still got some discounted misprints available in the store too.)
I've prepared some cool stuff for Gen Con, beyond just the character sheets and materials to run my scheduled games! I'll have some free 5 x 7 prints and a home-printed and hand-hole-punched prototype of The Firmament that, even in this janky format, still looks pretty awesome.
Which brings me to: what's next?
What's next?
As you might guess, it's (almost) all Firmament, all the time. I've made a few more edits based on playtest feedback, and I'm very excited to see how the changes are reflected in the games coming up this week. So, how do you actually play this?
I built The Firmament's gameplay on two guiding principles:
- If tarot are involved, they should be placed in spreads and interpreted based on card meanings.
- This may be an esoteric storytelling game, but it should be possible to lose.
Based on the foundation of traditional tarot interpretation, The Firmament proceeds in a series of rounds. Each round is played as a spread of tarot cards, where each card has a specific location and a meaning associated with that location. The spreads represent the levels of the great labyrinth separating heaven from earth, and the cards represent the humans who are trying to break in.
You draw cards from the Labyrinth Deck, made up of the 56 minor arcana, and place the cards into the spread to find out what the humans are up to (with each suit representing a different human faction). Every level you descend, more humans appear. That means the spreads get bigger and bigger as you continue.
But how do you lose?
The final level of the game is played from a separate deck: the Heaven Deck. This deck sits at the top of the play area, and when the game starts, holds only major arcana. It doesn't stay that way for long.
Here's where there's a bit of crunch. Throughout the game, if any suit totals 10 or higher across a spread, it means enough humans have gathered to enact a dastardly agenda. This triggers a little storytelling moment, snatches one card from the Heaven Deck, and checks one box on a 5-box track to your doom.
At the same time, court cards (pages, knights, kings, and queens) enter the Heaven Deck after each round ends, instead of getting discarded like the rest of the cards. So, the balance of major and minor arcana in the Heaven deck is always shifting, and usually for the worse.
Still, using the special powers you get during character creation, it's not too too hard to eke out a victory over the humans. The thing is, you might want to lose.
Although this part is still in development, when one of the four factions of humans triumphs and makes it into heaven, you discover a secret about the nature of the universe and your place in it. If you lose to each suit once, then meet another secret condition, there may even be a hidden level of the labyrinth you can unlock – a level built to obscure a great and terrible secret of its own.
What could it be? Follow the Kickstarter and, eventually, all will be revealed.
Looking to the future,
Ben @ Foresight Studio
Come find me on bluesky or the Foresight Studio discord server.
