Rachel Atwood, Jonathan Davidson and the Society of Rafa team have hit their funding goal for the heartfelt RPG of healing and spirits. There’s time for stretch goals.
Inspired by Jewish folklore, sometimes obscure, the game casts the PCs as healers in a village who have moral dilemmas to confront rather than angry orcs. You can see the stretch goals unlock on Kickstarter.
Society of Rafa is a Kickstarter with plenty of online samples. There’s a short story, an except of the Book of Spirits, the stat-less character sheet and a medicial record example.
Yes, characters in this game have no stats and are defined by their relationships instead.
Backers will get access to a wiki of the rules (presumably not one they can edit!) and PDFs. The latter have the usual accessibility challenges and are following behind the wiki.
The project includes the full game with rules and mechanics, character generation, history for the setting, which is the village of Kahal, the Storyteller’s Guide and several starter scenarios.
The game will also be published until the new ORC license.
So many roleplaying games and modern fantasy in general are based on the “Hero’s Journey.” Yet, rather than “crossing the threshold” and leaving one’s home to adventure, what if characters grow and develop within a community?
Instead of mechanics about destroying and looting, we want players’ toolsets to facilitate healing, growing, and organizing community. Players should interact with fully dimensional NPCs who have personal relationships and motivations that make players feel clever for reading their moods and persuading without dice rolling.
Can we learn to imagine a more perfect world through fantasy? Instead of reductionist good vs. evil, we offer confronting complex moral problems with no singular solution. We want to inhabit a world like those in our favorite slice of life fantasy comics and anime.
Backers can join the community Discord with perks like music access for just $1. Those who can afford $25 to support the project will get digital access to the RPG, which means the wikis before the end of the year and the PDFs as soon as they’re done.
Physical tier? No. After that, super backers who pledge $250 will get to play through with the co-founders, while those at $300 will get a character portrait drawn to specification.
Physical book later? Yes, that’s the aspiration.
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