A system-agnostic setting guide to Scotland’s Pictish peoples, for players, historians and enthusiasts of all ages!
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Just a short and sharp update here!
The pre-order store is now live. If you missed the Kickstarter and want to get your hands on a book, you can grab it over at Backerkit.
Here's a mockup of the special pin badge reward! It's a cloak pin engraved with Pictish hounds, set on a bouquet of wild common dog violet, a native wild flower that enjoys wet, stony and mossy conditions 🐕 💜
That's all for now! Catch y'all in the new year :)
-- Brian
Gosh guys, we really did it! The team and I are ecstatic that the campaign funded; it's been almost a year and a half of hard work to get the project to this point, and there'll be plenty more work for us in 2022 to bring Carved in Stone to your doorsteps.
I'm not one to count chickens before they've hatched, so I'll be back with a more significant roadmap of what we've raised, the number of books in the Community Box, how we'll be handling special rewards (and more) closer to the new year after all the pledges have been collected.
For now, we'll be taking December easy (and having plenty of naps!)
-- Brian
We’re enterring the last leg of our campaign, and we’ve had some amazing high points from all of your generous support. Before we bow out, I wanted to leave everyone who’se still on the fence about backing with a little extra encouragement - some mock-ups of some of the papercrafts available to all backers if we hit 30k!
At 30k, we’ll be designing a whole series of full colour Pictish Paper Craft Miniatures! The full set will allow you to construct your own Pict settlements and highland scenes.
The crafts will come in two sets; the larger first will be sized for shelf and desk models, and the smaller second will be scaled to fit on standard inch-grid combat maps, for easy use with any tactical combat TTRPG like Dungeon and Dragons.
A Pictish Long House - often extended families of 10-12 people lived together in large communal buildings. Some interior partitions could have provided nooks and personal spaces, but everyone would have shared the same fires and meals together. They were made out of local materials; stone foundations, wicker and wattle walls, and thatched rooves.
Picture Stones - The namesake of our project, and one of the primary sources for much of our evidence about the Picts. They were erected in all shapes and sizes, and in the 7th century contained a mixture of older more interpretive carvings, and newer more Christianised depictive artwork. They often feature Ogham script along their edges, naming places, events or borders.
At the time of writing, we’re hovering around £26.5k. As with all campaigns, we’re seeing shifts in pledges; some of our exclusive Trove Tiers have opened up again, so if you were eyeing up a set of Antiquarian Tomes or a Personal Workshop on game design, fantasy writing or Pictish archaeology, now’s the time to snag it before someone else does! This campaign will end on Monday at noon.
Hope everyone has a restful weekend!
—Brian
Hello, hello, hello!
We're back with some truly delicious artwork teasing what's to come if we reach £25k by December 13th!
This full-length campaign features stories from across Fortriu, the Pictish kingdom of northern Scotland. Your village's smith, an old friend of the King, is on death’s door. It’s down to you and your friends to travel the wilds of Scotland in search of everything you’ll need to host one hell of a Wake.
Celebration of Blades will be part of the Carved in Stone book, so everyone will get access to it.
It will contain a 3-arc campaign, bringing players on a full circle from their home village of lair around the territory of Fortriu.
A plethora of customisable, open-ended and optional stories await, perfect for new and experienced players. Each story will build on the information in the main book, providing further nuance and license to explore the past through different lenses.
Carved in Stone will also be printed with the award-nominated TTRPG Adventures on a Dime, which celebrated its 2nd edition release earlier this month.
In the middle of Fortriu, in the hills we now know as Fife, lay a span of agricultural villages. From above they seem scattered and alone, but they are united under the protection of Warlord King Bridei and connected through an iron heart; the smith of the village of Lair.
Lair is the start and the end of this campaign. This section will cover topics such as:
Their task assigned, a party of Picts leave the civilised niche of Lair to roam the wild highlands in search of all the components of a great feast.
The largest of the three parts, this section is made up of self-contained stories that take place across Fortriu. Players can explore as many or as few as they like, and in any order. Each story comes with the information needed to help tell it, such as key facts, guiding illustrations, and more.
The start of this section is also packed with advice on how to thread each of these stories together into a grand campaign!
These are just some of the stories you can expect:
Overcoming the challenges of the previous stories isn’t the end of this grand tale; if the party return to their home in time, they’ve still got a wake to prepare and a King to greet.
This final part explores the consequences of the player’s actions and brings them face to face with the charismatic-yet-terrible King Bridei.
Emotions are tense in the village, and these are some of the short stories to explore at the funeral:
After the final story is told, there is time to look back on the entire journey and question what was learned. The end of this section contains tools to help guide a non-roleplayed discussion about the past and consider the future of Fortriu, and how we can see ourselves in Scotland’s history.
With a campaign this large, we'll be spending the additional funds to create amazing opportunities for upcoming illustrators, writers and game designers. Our ethos of accessibility and diversity continues in this expansion, as it does in all of our work.
We hope you're as excited for Celebration of Blades as we are. Honestly, the past year we haven't shut up about cow-based fetch quests, and all the hijinx we have planned.
Tell your friends! Post about us on social media! Share the campaign on Discord! Word of mouth is such an important factor in all publishing projects, but especially for TTRPG books.
We're so thankful for everyone who has already spread the word, and because of your support we've managed to get some incredible press (including major news outlets like National Scotland and the BBC!) We've just gotta keep going; we'll make this new goal for sure!
That's all for this teaser of an update. Thanks for backing us so far, and we hope to back soon with more exciting news!
-- Brian