Kenna Alexander, who first launched Coyote & Crow under the name Connor, has returned to Kickstarter to fund a digital expansion for the game.
Not only that, but Geek Native also has an interview with Kenna to share. First, though, let’s watch the crowdfunding pitch.
Coyote & Crow is set in a near future where the Americas were never colonised. This award-winning science-fantasy roleplaying game was created by Kenna Alexander and a team of more than 36 Native writers, artists, and consultants. In this unique world, science and spirituality coexist, and players are encouraged to resolve conflicts in ways that extend beyond mere fighting.
The Kickstarter is, in part, a direct response to tariffs and shipping costs and includes the Coyote & Crow expansion Ahu Tiiko.
The campaign aims to:
- Fund new Coyote & Crow content for virtual tabletops, making online play easier than ever.
- Launch an official Coyote & Crow actual play podcast series.
- Bring Stories of the Free Lands to print for the first time.
- Offer immersive extras for fans and players to enrich their gaming sessions.
Backers at $25 unlock the Foundry or Roll20 editions of the Ahu Tiiko Expansion.
At $40, supporters are thanked with the high-quality digital art pack, and this is a way for gamers who don’t use VTTs to get involved.
A copy of the tabletop game Wolves!, which suits 4 to 6 players, is the reward at $45, but there are only 200 available.
Then, at $50, backers get either the Foundry VTT or Roll20 editions of the Coyote & Crow TTRPG along with the Ahu Tiiko standard edition.
Lastly, those gamers who still need to pick up a physical copy of Coyote & Crow TTRPG can do so by pledging $60. Once again, though, this tier is limited in number.
There are also stretch goals, which include tea from Friday Afternoon Tea and print runs for Stories of the Free Lands.
Kenna Alexander interview
Kenna was kind enough to answer some questions when I responded to the news of Coyote & Crow Digital. Here goes!
You’ve had incredible success with the physical Coyote & Crow RPG. What was the driving force behind this new Kickstarter, which is focused on expanding the game’s digital footprint on platforms like Roll20 and Foundry?
The Coyote & Crow Digital campaign was a combination of conversations with VTT folks and doing some polling with my fans. Coyote & Crow had the misfortune of coming onto the RPG scene just as Roll20 was in the middle of upgrading its back-end code back in 2021. This not only delayed my content development, but it meant that we were one of the first products with the new code, and let’s just say that it was a little rough. I had gotten the core rules up on Foundry VTT as well; however, what my polling revealed is that roughly half of my fans didn’t use VTTs at all, but that half of those folks were willing to try them, given a good opportunity. So I spoke with Metamorphic Digital, who do coding for both systems, and we agreed that what would draw more folks in is new content. I had completed funding for Ahu Tiiko on Kickstarter last fall, and it had a Roll20 pledge level. But what I didn’t account for is that Metamorphic didn’t want to simply add new content onto that old, less-than-perfect code. So, we managed to get the core rules updated, but my funds came up short from there. I began thinking about how to satisfy those backers who backed for the Ahu Tiiko Roll20 content, and also start to reach some of those thousands of fans who might be convinced to use a VTT.
The second thing that came out of polling was that folks really want both a novel and an actual play series set in Makasing. I’m working on a novel behind the scenes currently, but for the AP, I got in touch with Many Sided Media, and we figured out that we could look at funding a series through a stretch goal on the VTT campaign, and it just started to all come together. I began speaking with other partners, like Friday Afternoon Tea, and figuring out how we could work together for this campaign.
The Kickstarter will help bring your new expansion, Ahu Tiiko, to virtual tabletops. What can you tell us about the horror and mystery themes in this new material, and what inspired you to explore these genres within the world of Coyote & Crow?
For Ahu Tiiko, I really wanted to do something different than some other expansion books I’ve seen for RPGs. In fantasy RPGs you often get a Kingdom, a region, or even a whole other world. In sci-fi, you often get a faction or a large region of space. I wanted to go the opposite direction and zero in on a small place. Part of that is my love and fear of very small towns in the real world. I think the best and worst of people can be seen in small towns and their dynamics. I think in RPGs you often end up meeting a barkeep or a trader or maybe a person who is the key to an important plot point, but all of those other villagers have vibrant, complex lives and are deeply intertwined with each other. I also have a love of Indigenous horror – authors like Stephen-Graham Jones, Andrea Rogers, or anyone who participated in Never Whistle at Night. My hope is that Ahu Tiiko feels like a truly lived-in place and that the people there feel more fleshed out than your average NPC. Each one has their own secrets, and there’s a table of 144 rumors about people and places around Ahu Tiiko. I want players to feel enmeshed in this world in a way that they think twice before they treat anyone there in a way that they wouldn’t treat someone in real life, and that the subsequent horrors that players encounter have a little more weight to them because those lives may be at risk. At the same time, I love woodsy horror and tangles of interconnected mysteries. Throw all of that into a pile and you get Ahu Tiiko.
I still want to do more traditional faction-style books since we have five fictional nations in North America and another seven in Central and South America. But those are bigger tasks that take a long time to put together with the cultural fidelity I want to ensure.
Coyote & Crow Games has a powerful mission to elevate Indigenous creatives. How does making the game more digitally accessible on a global scale through VTTs and podcasts help further that core goal?
This is a question I’ve been grappling with for five years now. RPGs can be niche and inexpensive or they can be broad and costly. Either way, if I’m trying to reach new Indigenous audiences while also maintaining an appeal within normal RPG hobby spaces, I have to aim for a very specific target. I don’t think I did a great job with that with our core rules. The book is $70, almost 5 pounds, 500 pages, and isn’t what I would call an entry-level rules set. It’s certainly very ‘theater of the mind,’ and it plays with very few charts and tables. But for folks who maybe have only fleetingly heard of Dungeons & Dragons, the mechanics are going to be more than intimidating. I’m hoping that through VTTs we can not only lower the price barrier, we can accomplish a couple of other things. First, by automating many of the rules with VTT systems, we help reduce cognitive load on players and story guides. Second, many Native communities have limited access to physical books. They may not have a game store or library that carries the book for hundreds of miles and have frustratingly few ways to come across it otherwise. With VTTs, I can broaden that reach, and future community-oriented plans can include codes to VTT material, which is infinitely more cost-effective for me.
This campaign brings together some interesting partnerships, from the actual play producers at Many Sided Media to Friday Afternoon Tea. How do you go about choosing collaborators for the world of Coyote & Crow?
Sometimes partnerships arise out of demand. I’ve always been a face-to-face player, so VTTs were relatively unfamiliar to me before 2020, when I started talking with Roll20. I realized that tabletop players were shifting to online play more often, and that having VTT material just made sense in terms of branding and reach. But we’ve had other partnerships (many of them failed before they even launched), and what I try to do is find creative ways to elevate another business that I like while finding a way to bring more immersion to the table for C&C fans. The perfect example is Friday Afternoon Tea. I’d been trying to find a yaupon distributor for ages who wanted to work together. Then I met Friday at OrcaCon last year, and we clicked immediately. Our Cahokia blend was a big hit, and it turned out so much better than I could have imagined. Partnerships boil down to a couple of things for me. Are they good people? Do they run their business ethically and kindly? Can they produce what they promise professionally? Do they bring value and immersion for C&C players? I love the folks at HeroForge; they’ve been so great. Metamorphic are amazing. I feel really lucky that I get to work with all of these folks on this campaign.
There are still a number of other partnerships I’m keeping an eye out for. I’d love to find a new merch partner, for example. And I want to work with a Native chef or restaurant to come up with more Coyote & Crow themed recipes. I had a great time working with Chef Nico Albert on the core book, but she’s gotten too busy lately to work with me further. As a company with one full-time employee – me – good partnerships are a real blessing.
With this big push into the digital space, what doors do you see this opening for the future of the game? Could we see more digital-first releases or other interactive experiences down the line?
Well, if the campaign does well, I’d love to revisit Stories of the Free Lands, a campaign we ran three years ago for ten digital one-shot adventures. We weren’t able to convert those to VTT content, and that would be really fun. Maybe a follow-up to that, like a Stories of Makasing, that could be in print, digital, and VTT. As an indie RPG producer, having an income stream from digital products becomes a vital part of your financial ecosystem. But it’s also a world that I’m not intimately familiar with, so I keep up my talks with Roll20, DTRPG, Metamorphic Studios, and others who have solid insights in that world.
Separately, I was all primed to launch a Kickstarter for Primacy, a two-player competitive card game set in the world of Coyote & Crow. But then Trump’s tariffs hit, and I had to put that on pause. A tariff blunder right now could absolutely sink my company. Since then, I’ve been speaking with app developers and others in the digital space who might be able to convert the game into something that lives solely online. It’s not ideal, but I’ve already essentially completed the game. The rules, art, and layouts are all done. It’s an amazing game that has been a labor of love for me for almost four years. It also adds much more to the world-building of Coyote & Crow. I was a big fan of Android: Netrunner from Fantasy Flight Games, and for me, it’s a benchmark for a complex, deck-building game, with ingenious rules and fantastic diversity in its characters. I like to think that Primacy is my homage to that game.
Regardless, my heart still lies in producing games for folks around a table. A sense of community and that feeling we get when we experience something together, in the real world, can’t be matched in my opinion. So while I’m happy to lean into digital tools for a little income, for accessibility, and for reach, my goal will always be to produce physical goods that bring folks together. I really exist as a business in two equal spaces. The first, as a Native-owned business, pushes me to produce games to bring Natives together, show them positive and accurate portrayals in games, and to encourage Indigenous people to keep telling stories. The other aspect is as a hobby games producer. I need to produce games that speak to the broader, non-Native, hobby crowd, allow them to feel like they are welcome at the table, and to show them what good representation of Natives looks like. I think I have a mixed record on all of those things, but I’m always striving to improve.
Thank you, Kenna!
