Today we bring news as our legendary voyage enters its next great chapter.
Over the next few days, BackerKit surveys will begin making their way to all who joined us aboard the Argo. Before the full release, however, we will first be sending a smoke test survey to approximately 5% of backers. This allows a small portion of the crew to journey through the survey process first, helping us uncover any unexpected issues before the remaining 95% of surveys are sent.
If fortune smiles upon you and you receive one of these early invitations, we kindly ask that you complete it as soon as you are able and let us know if you encounter any problems along the way. Your feedback helps ensure the voyage is smooth for every Adventurer who follows.
Once we are confident everything is working as intended, the remaining surveys will be sent to the rest of the crew shortly thereafter.
The Achievement Still Awaits
Do not forget that an active achievement still stands before us!
Should Jason and the Argonauts receive 500 Thumbs Up on the BoardGameGeek Gen Con Preview List before Gen Con begins on July 30, 2026, the mighty Argonaut: ⚔️ Periclymenus shall finally answer the call.
Even better, this achievement will become the first unlocked reward for our next Greek mythology adventure, Achilles and the Trojan War, and every backer of that future campaign will receive the Periclymenus Argonaut Card.
At this moment, we stand at: 428 / 500 Thumbs Up, only 73 more stand between us and victory!
If you're excited that an early demo copy of Jason and the Argonauts will be showcased at Gen Con, please take a moment to visit the BoardGameGeek Preview List and leave a thumbs up. Every vote brings us one step closer to unlocking another legendary reward.
Progress Continues
Behind the scenes, the voyage continues at full speed.
File preparation is progressing well, and we are continuing to refine the rulebook as we move ever closer to production.
When your BackerKit survey arrives, please complete it as soon as you are able. Every completed survey helps us determine final quantities for manufacturing and keeps the voyage sailing smoothly toward production.
That is all for now, Adventurers.
Until next time… may the winds remain favorable, and thank you once again for helping bring this legend to life.
Jason and the Argonauts is now on the BoardGameGeek Gen Con Preview List! If we reach 500 thumbs up the Periclymenus Argonaut Card will be unlocked. Click below and give it a thumbs up and help unlock it! Must hit goal before July 30th!
Goal: 500 reached! — We did it! This project reached this goal!
Hey all, I'm cruising right along with the card designs, and settled on something I really dig. At the same time, I wanted to talk a bit about how cards work in the game.
Cards in General
In Deeds Drawn, most of the moment-to-moment follows this pattern:
Read the card's prompt.
Choose your approach to solving it (using character cards.)
Roll for the outcome.
Pretty straight forward, if you're comfortable with some interpretation.
Foes
Below, is an example of a "Foe" card, front and back. As you pass (or fail to pass) challenges, you'll rotate the card a certain number of times. If you would ever repeat a challenge you've already passed, you instead flip the card over. At this point, the mob becomes desperate, and has a new set of challenges. Beat them here, and you defeat them. Defeat them, and you get their reward.
An example Foe, front and back.
In the mix, are "Stat" icons (left of the prompt,) and "Risk" icons (right of prompt.) Stats help determine the DC of a check (which we'll talk about in a later post,) and the Risk determines the effects if you fail a check. Fail softly, and you eat the first risk. Fail hard, and you suffer them both.
Risks can cause you to exhaust your cards, making them temporarily unusable... or they might disarm your weapon, poison you to prevent healing during downtime, flee from the fight entirely, and so on. The goal is to reflect change the entire feeling of a fight... not just beat them down until their health is zeroed.
We'll talk more about stats and rewards later.
Let me know what you think of the current design. Thanks, folks! -Wrel
Hey there, folks. Quick update on Deeds Drawn for you.
It took a bit more back and forth than I was expecting with the manufacturing company, but I've just been notified that a sample deck is in production now -- after that, they can flip the switch and get the rest printed out. It'll take 10 business days to finish the sample, by their estimates, and then they'll ship it my way for approval.
That does, however, firmly place the timeline for shipping in October. Sorry for the delay, folks.
Turns out there are at least 142 of you who want to bundle Deeds Drawn with Gossamer Frontier and ship them both out at the same time, which is great. There also isn't a super great way of doing this on the system backend, so here's what I've come up with:
1. If you purchased Gossamer through the Deeds Drawn campaign, no problem. You'll still get charged shipping through this campaign once I lock down orders (which will likely be early September.)
2. If you purchased Gossamer through the Gossamer Frontier campaign, I'm going to credit your Deeds Drawn account so that you aren't charged for shipping when I lock down Deeds Drawn. Instead, you'll just pay shipping through the Gossamer Frontier campaign once that's locked down, and I'll suck it up on any extra shipping costs related to the card decks themselves.
This will require me to go through and cross-reference all the pledges by hand, and thus be more error prone. So if I make a mistake, just let me know and I'll get it sorted.
Hope that's not too confusing.
Work on Gossamer Now that Deeds Drawn is off to the side, Gossamer Frontier is chugging right along again. I did recently make some fundamental gameflow changes that I'm filing the rough edges off of now, but I do really like the updated direction, and don't think it'll take much longer to get it across the finish line. That said, production will likely kick off in September, which also puts it in the same boat as Deeds Drawn with delivery likely occurring here in October.
Final charges have been made for shipping and add-ons. The final orders for publication of the add-ons and books have been made. Here's a sneak peek of prototypes for the enamel pin and Spirit Cards (you'll notice the design has been changed; the prior designs left the spirit illustrations too small and I like these better anyway).
The project is so close to completion! We can't wait to get the game in your hands and hear about your adventures.
Just wanted to give you a little heads up that we plan to charge cards for shipping and add-on items you purchased on Thursday of this week. We intended to charge for it earlier, but we ended up only locking orders, since charging would have caused a bevy of unforeseen issues with collecting shipping properly.
Please make sure that you have the correct card information on file. If any issues arise with your payment you’ll receive an email letting your know to correct your payment information.
If you need to review payment information, you can return to your survey by clicking the link in your survey email or requesting your survey link under "Lost your survey?" on our BackerKit project page at: https://my-very-own-forest-spirit.backerkit.com/
In addition to working on the rules for Wardens of the Blue Rose as adapted from the SAGE System (but with many other elements, especially for story generation) we’re taking a new look at Aldis itself. You might have noted a hint of it when we called it the “Commonwealth” for the first time.
Aldis and its world, Aldea, are over 20 years old, and haven’t been updated in a decade. There are a number of areas where we think, at least for Wardens of the Blue Rose, it’s time to evolve things a bit. But don’t fear! No Time of Troubles, Judgment, or Other Epic Event will happen. But here’s what’s going to happen:
Name Shifts: We’re going to rename a few things for clarity and atmosphere. Aldis has a whole lot of things called “councils,” for example, and a few places with unnecessarily gendered language. Note that no actual name changes have happened in Aldis! Instead, we’ve retranslated the original Aldin for clarity.
Aldis Is Not a Park: There’s a tendency to look at Aldis as a sort of golf course of a country with the odd problem spot, but the original intention was to emphasize that it makes up the former heartland of a Shadow-haunted technomagical empire. The Blue Rose setting isn’t just post-apocalyptic in the Shadow Barrens. Yet this is not Blue Rose 40K (but imagine, eh?); people live, love, thrive, and build better ways of living. For three centuries, they’ve turned ruins into homes.
Aidis Is Not Utopia: In the present time, in our real world, it’s relevant to remember that Aldis isn’t shallow liberal fantasy wish fulfillment where some magic doohickies keep people honest. Aldis is the state created by the winners of a revolutionary war against a literally soul-destroying enemy, and even while they shook off the blood and ash of their accomplishments, they were determined to never let the Shadow reign again. 300 years later, with the obvious remnants of the enemy in remote Kern, debates have arisen about what it means to be on guard against Shadow. Should adepts bear a special burden? What exactly might risk the rise of a new Shadow power? Aldins aren’t paranoid, but they’re the children of the Great Rebellion, and will never forget it.
Aldis Is Magical! Aldea is a world of spirits and arcana phenomena, of lost magic and dangerous secrets, sorcery, and Shadow. I want to make the “metaphysics” a bit more flavorful and cohesive without eliminating too much mystery.
General Updates: We’ve wanted to make some definitive changes to the Roamers, Night People, Vata, and other places where developers have long wanted to make some changes but didn’t want to be overly disruptive.
So, it’s not going to be much in the way of factual changes, but more in presentation. However, keep in mind that Wardens of the Blue Rose is a compact book, so this stuff will be described concisely compared to classic Blue Rose. For an epic treatment of Aldis, see the current AGE edition of Blue Rose, or think upon the possibility of games to come . . . .
Anyone else planning what pins and patches they are going to add to their bag, or is that just me? I like to add various things I like (Godzilla, Power Rangers, Sailor Moon, etc) in pin form. I'm excited to add patches to the mix now too!!
The news is mostly in the title. There is plenty of activity here getting all the add-ons ready for backers. The book design is done and initial prototyping is complete, so printing will be under way shortly.
For those who haven't filled out their surveys, please do so soon. We'll be locking orders and charging cards on Tuesday. Just a heads up so no one is surprised.
I can't wait to get the game in your hands, along with the goodies. Thanks for your support. Be well.
Hey there, folks! Been silent on Deeds Drawn for quite, but I've got some updates to share.
Entering Production
In a few days I'll be sending Deeds Drawn in to the manufacturer to get it produced. This is my first time working with partners overseas, so I don't really know what to expect beyond the dates they've given me. 15-20 days lead time after the sample approval, then 20-25 days on a boat to reach us. Frankly... that's a lot of days, and might mean orders don't actually ship until October. But hopefully not, we've still got a lot of August left. Fingers crossed!
The Game Itself
A lot has changed about Deeds Drawn since its earliest iteration. The medium, cards over paper, altered so much of the feel of the game that it just never sat right as a TTRPG experience. I had continually run afoul of there feeling like there was too little "game" there, compared to the interpretation of the experience.
It's an interesting problem... given that between a pen, paper, and rules lite system, you can basically play make-believe all day long and it feels fine. Cards, and the solo nature of the game, just flatly feel different. Hard characteristic to quantify.
At the end of it, I moved a little bit closer to a deck-builder model in an effort to make the game punchier.
You still have your core character pieces, (Lineage, Class, and Traits,) but also incorporate "Rewards" into your deck as you play through a Deed. In a Scene, you'll choose which challenge you want to solve, exhaust a card to do so, roll some dice, and get a reward... or the opposite of that.
In each Scene, there are multiple challenges you can attempt, and you'll be pursuing the right kinds of rewards you need to complete your Deed, based on the requests of the story.
For example: You might need to earn a Favor to progress in your Deed, and if an opportunity to do so appears in your current scene, you can take a shot at it. The favor itself is a card, maybe something like "Quid Pro Quo," which gives you some equally thematic keywords to spend. Using it might represent cashing in an owed debt to get you a Lead on something else.
Based on the juggling of card types I did, a lot of the classes, lineages, and foes were ripped out of the game to fit into the 72 card limit. The result feels a bit like a "base experience," kind of like a Starter Deck in a TCG. Adding more lineage options, classes, traits, foes, scenes... all of it, really, would be easy enough to pull off, but only if folks dig what's there now.
Preorders Closing, Surveys Incoming
With that said, I'm going to be closing the pre-order shop here fairly soon so I'm not juggling any more work. If you want to make a purchase, this will be your last chance for a while. After the cards get here, and orders for everyone go out, I'll be able to put remaining decks back up in the shop, or sell them via my own website alongside Distal.
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Whew, okay. That was a lot. But just to recap -> Production starting, surveys sending, preorders ending.
