Here’s where Wardens of the Blue Rose is at.

By the time of the Backerkit campaign the game was basically designed but not composed or developed. That means we had the Blue Rose setting, notes, and setting development specific to Wardens, and most of the necessary mechanics to run a game, but these weren’t in a publishable state. The adventure generation system was, in fact, a series of strange cursive notes and arrows in my sketchbook.

So, in May the writing team met and talked about turning this into the coherent Wardens of the Blue Rose you’re going to get, with Sian on the Commonwealth of Aldis and Arc Meters, Steve on story generation, and Katherine on the Wardens themselves and a starting adventure site. My job in all of this is the character creation and core rules—SAGE rules, customized for Wardens of the Blue Rose to include such things as psychic arcana, spirit dancers, the varied peoples of Aldis, and so on.

And of course, we released the Slice, with a very provisional oracle system. Here’s where I have to admit to a little bit of theatre. The oracle there is similar to a number of well-known solo RPG equivalents strictly to make it clear that solo play, as well as traditional and various types of collective play, are part of Wardens of the Blue Rose. We’ve since switched to the original oracle I had in mind, which uses the test and Drama Die elements of SAGE.

Now we’re all at our keyboards Getting It Done, and we look forward to sharing the results.

~Malcolm Sheppard, SAGE developer