The Kingdom of Prester John
A solo journaling RPG of wandering between the reality of the late 1100s and the dreamscapes of medieval Christian mythology.
The Kingdom of Prester John is a solo journaling game about a journey crossing the real and imagined, between the realities of the world in the late 12th century, and how it was perceived by European Christians living at the time. It draws inspiration from medieval travel accounts, ranging from the real records of John of Pian de Carpine, to the outlandish claims of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville. The Kingdom of Prester John launched on Kickstarter on April 27th, and will end on May 27th.
In The Kingdom of Prester John, the player takes on the role of a member of the Christian clergy, departing Rome in 1177 on the pope's orders, in search of the Kingdom of Prester John, a godly, Christian king said to dwell somewhere far beyond the bounds of Christendom.
With knowledge drawn from bestiaries and mappae mundi, the player ventures into lands they have never seen before. If guided by their temporal knowledge, they will cross a world where some of the most significant events of the middle ages are taking place - Saladin coming to power in Egypt, Gebre Meskel Lalibela overseeing the building of rock churches in Ethiopia, Islam arriving in India with the conquests of Muhammad of Ghor, and the rise of Genghis Khan in Mongolia. If guided by spiritual knowledge, they will find lands inhabited by the peoples that dwell in their illuminated manuscripts - the cynocephali, sciapods, anthropophagi, centaurs and cyclopes, and the lands at the edge of the Christian mind - the lands of Gog and Magog, and realm of the Antichrist. Through trials temporal and spiritual, they will find a journey's end, though perhaps not the one they set out to seek.
The Kingdom of Prester John is played using a d10, which guides the writing of a journal of the player's travels. With each region the player travels to, their spiritual or temporal conviction increases, affected by both their travelling companion, and by the events on this leg of their journey. With this increase, the player begins to swing further in a spiritual or temporal direction, until one takes total precedence, and they emerge at the end of their journey.
The kickstarter ends in just under three weeks, on May 27th. Back it before it's too late!
