The Long Road Home on Kickstarter
What happens after the quest is over? Tell an epic story of friends who are returning home, remembering all that has happened!
The quest is completed, the victory is won, and you are returning home. Along the way you tell your tale in flashbacks, creating the stories of your quest, the friends that you made and lost along the way. And at the end, discover whether your hopes and dreams have been fulfilled or dashed!
Almost everyone is familiar with the story of The Lord of the Rings. What if we focussed on the four hobbits, returning from Gondor to the Shire? Remembering to each other the stories of their adventures: How they met Strider, how Frodo was wounded at Weathertop? How they took the secret paths through Moria and lost their friend and mentor Gandalf?
The kickstarter which will launch on March 6th and run for four weeks will bring to print The Long Road Home. It is a GMless game for 2-5 players. A book of rules and prompts which will help you to create an epic fantasy together. You can choose from a number of genres. You can be inspired by children’s tales such as Narnia or The Hobbit, Young adult stories like Shadow and Bone. Standard heroic tales like The Lord of the Rings or The Belgariad. Grim tales like A Song of Ice and Fire. Or even horror stories like Shadowland.
You create your characters, their unique home and the connections between them. Most importantly each character identifies their touchstone, the reason why they are on the quest and the person or environment they are longing to see back home - like Rosie for Sam Gamgee, or the Shire itself for Frodo.
It is written by the ENNIE-nominated designer Alex White. It uses his Retrospective system, using playing cards to inform the emotional content of the scenes you create in each of the chapters of your epic quest.
As players you collaborate to create a compelling world, with locations, treasures and threats inspired by your choice of Realm and choice of Great Enemy. You lift up each other’s stories, cooperating as you embellish the details of each character's flashback stories.
At the conclusion of the game is Homecoming—the point where you find out whether your touchstone was preserved by your quest or not. Or perhaps you have been changed too much by your adventures and you can no longer find peace with what once you loved.
Game cards can be used to simplify the process of choosing the elements for each chapter, or to inspire you to greater wonders.
What epic stories will you tell together?
