Steven Hemmesch’s Adventure Calls Entertainment is an indie publisher that has come to Kickstarter to print a hardback. It’s a challenge.
The game, Inkforged, offers a novel system and has a free quickstart, but ACE are looking for $10,000 to fund the project. The Kickstarter runs until the 16th, and you can see progress on their pitch page.
In the world of Inkforged, a magical book of infinite stories can appear anywhere, at any time. To most, it is invisible, but for a select few, it is an irresistible summons. Those who answer its call are pulled from our world into its pages, reawakened as powerful beings known as ‘Ikons’. Their new purpose is to protect this magical reality, known as The Story, from a creeping Corruption that threatens to unwrite everything.
This transformation is total. The old life on Earth fades into a distant, dream-like memory for those who become ikons and fully inhabit their new identity.
This unique premise is reflected in the game’s mechanics. Inkforged sets itself apart from other roleplaying games with its classless system called ‘Defined by Dice’. Instead of picking a pre-defined class, you build your character by assigning a die type, from a d4 to a d12, to each of the five core Traits (Brawn, Agility, Instinct, Mind, Will) and five key Skills (Adventure, Combat, Magic, Social, Sneaky). This combination of dice directly shapes your character’s capabilities and potential, creating a truly customised hero for your adventures within The Story.
Much like the mystical reality of The Story, all true magic in the world comes from a single source, the Author’s Ink. This strange and possibly divine substance permeates the entire world, but can only be accessed when it pools in hidden places and forms into Inkwells and Inkblots. Author’s Ink looks much like real world ink, except that it shifts color and plays with light much like oil floating on water. In a way it is more energy than it is liquid. Making the Ink very impermanent, soaking into the ground, absorbing into nearby objects, or simply dissipating into the air. Special care must be taken to capture and preserve Author’s Ink. Equipment enchanted with spells or Inkforged in order to collect and hold the ink is needed, otherwise it will simply evaporate in moments.
Weirdly, perhaps unwisely, Adventure Calls Entertainment don’t use much text to describe their tiers. Unless you click into the Rewards tab, you can’t see what you’re getting.
The $5 tier offers a PDF of Ashton’s Journals.
It takes a pledge of $15 to unlock the Inkforged core rules as a digital download. At $20, you get both.
There are higher tiers; backers at $25 get both the PDFs and a mini set of Inkforged Dice.
That physical book unlocks at $45, and it comes with both Ashton’s Journals and the Inkforged rules in PDF.
At $65, backers get the dice, the book and both PDFs. There’s even a $100 tier, which adds a rather cute Pumpkin Spider Plushie and doubles the dice.
The estimated delivery is January next year, but the campaign can only ship physical goods to certain countries.
