Anansi’s Tapestry of Lives from NeverEnding features work from Eberron’s Keith Baker, Vampire’s Jasmine Bhullar, Skullkicker’s Jim Zub, I Need Diverse Games’ Tanya DePass and the Forgotten Realm’s Ed Greenwood.
The project has more than $45,000 pledged, so it should deliver 320+ pages of 5e NPCs, magic items, quests and all with stat blocks and VTT tokens. Furthermore, there are even voice-acted monologues for some and over 100 illustrations. You can find out more or pledge on Kickstarter.
With over 100 NPCs, each with a voice-acted monologue, Anansi’s Tapestry of Lives nudges into a realm of tabletop roleplaying well suited to virtual tabletops. There’s more than that in the campaign, though, with 5e-compatible stats and ideas for other systems.
The Shard Tabletop is the VTT that gets a special mention. That said, it’s not all digital, with plenty of physical goodies on offer.
There’s a free to download sample hosted on Google Drive that offers 26-pages of the books you can see if it’s your sort of thing.
How do the voice sound effects work? Through an app. The story pitch says;
An NPC’s voice communicates so much about them, their demeanor, and state of mind. Your players instantly know if who they’re talking to is happy, sad, nervous, flustered, or irritable. But, let’s face it, most of us aren’t professional voice actors.
With the NPC Voices App you don’t have to be – because you have a whole cast of professional voice actors at your finger tips!
There’s a free download for the app and a prototype complete with a few monologues.
As usual, you can support the project by telling people about it, but you can buy into the Pledge Manger by donating $5 to nudge the campaign along.
If you can pledge $32, which is about £29 in today’s money, you’ll get add-on access and PDF of Anansi’s Tapestry of Lives. There’s VAT to pay if you pay VAT on books or cross into game territory by adding dice, etc.
Backers who offer $60 will get the standard edition, the PDF, and 12 months of access to NeverEnding’s own TTRPG and Storyteller Tools. Alternatively, the same pledge gets you the PDF and the hardcopy donated to a library or school in a low-income neighbourhood, and you don’t pay the shipping on that.
The Voices App and VTT goodies are added to the digital rewards at $68, with some other perks.
The deluxe hardcover edition and wallpapers join the loot at $89. After that, we get into the elite tiers with $144, $234, $650 and $1,500. Tempted by the $1,500? Sorry, that’s sold out. There’s only one at $650 left at the time of writing.
These elite tiers come with months and months of NeverEnding access, Tarot-sized NPC cards and softcover editions of the supporting books.
NeverEnding has estimated it’ll be May 2023 to fulfil most of this.
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