A friend shared the Kickstarter of Jack Rosetree’s Tales of Pride, an adventure anthology for the Pretty Fairy Princesses RPG, and I was interested. The concept and art spoke to me enough to reach out to Jack about an interview. What follows are some details about the game, the anthology, and the amazing list of creators that are participating in this project.
EGG EMBRY (EGG): Jack, thank you for talking with me about this project! What is Tales of Pride?
JACK ROSETREE (JACK): At the moment, Tales of Pride is a campaign to create a collection of adventures, all of which are contributed by members of the queer community. Moving forward, I’m hoping this will be the first in a line of annual projects for a variety of systems, stories, and people – all of which support and uplift diversity and inclusivity.
EGG: These adventures use the Pretty Fairy Princesses RPG. How does this system work?
JACK: It’s a fairly simple narrative-focused game where your primary stats are Pretty, Fairy, and Princess. Mechanically, it uses a wholly original resolution system. It uses poker cards and is focused on finding a specific type of card to match your skill with the action at hand. So if my scrapbooking skill is hearts, then any hearts card would work. That means I’d succeed about 25% of the time.
The twist to this system is that players will have some face-down cards set out in front of them which they will have seen, but then shuffled. If I need a hearts card, you might say, “Hey, I have a couple in front of me, I think I can help you.” So I might reveal one or more of your cards (depending on my governing stat). This boosts that success rate while also really embracing the idea that we’re working together in world.
EGG: What made pretty fairy princesses the right subject matter for this RPG?
JACK: Well, the title and mechanics are pretty inseparable. I’m actually working on a small revamp using the same system but called Evil Little Witches with a few fun twists. For the Tales of Pride campaign, it just seemed like a good place to start. It’s a fairly simple system, I own it and can avoid any copyright issues, and everyone I’ve invited seemed super excited to write for a setting they hadn’t played with previously.
EGG: It’s a tabletop roleplaying game anthology? What will that entail?
JACK: Mostly it will focus on the adventures. That’s the real potatoes. A major goal for the content is facilitating play with minimal to no preparation. I’ve got a few extra snacks of lore and maybe a small variant to throw in, but most of the world’s juice is going to come as a byproduct of the stories each of these individual adventure contributors decide to tell. Was that enough food metaphors?
EGG: I feel I sent these questions to you around lunch time… hmm… Moving on [to the kitchen]… How long are these adventure?
JACK: We’re shooting for 2,000 to 3,000 words each. In [this] world, that could be a day or two’s worth of adventure or whatever more. At the table, I could see knocking out each adventure in a single session or spanning them out to a few sessions. It depends a lot on the group and the storyteller.
EGG: Who is contributing adventures to it?
JACK: As of right now, myself, Alastor Guzman, Danielle Thomas, Emma Larkins, Ezekiel McGee, Fiona Howat, Kate Bullock, Luka Carroll, Matt Fantastic, Sadie Lowry, Spider Perry, and Steffie de Vaan. Depending on the success of the Kickstarter campaign, I may squeeze some more in there. There’s bios for everyone on the campaign page. I’m super excited to be working with such an awesome list of people!
EGG: That’s an amazing collection of creators! Who is handling the art on this?
JACK: I have two artists in tow right now. Nurt is an illustrator that will be doing the vast majority of art for the anthology itself. They do some incredible character work. Their focus is going to be on creating a big pile of diverse depictions of fairy princesses. In producing the first edition of the Pretty Fairy Princesses RPG, I used free-for-commercial-use art to fill the pages. Finding diverse representations was rather difficult. I’m excited to solve that problem by having a paid artist solve it for me.
The other artist is Jabari Weathers. They’re set as the cover artist should we hit our stretch goal for it. Jabari has done some mind-blowing surrealistic stuff. I’ve asked them, should the time come, to really do whatever they want for the cover. I can’t even imagine what to expect.
EGG: What format will this project take?
JACK: This cycle, it’s just going to be a digital PDF release. I don’t have experience with print publication and didn’t want to risk the future life of the project on what I might be able to figure out when the time comes. That said, there may be a print release down the line if the campaign does well and it seems like a good option.
Formatting-wise, the adventures are most likely going to be presented as standalone chapters that can be run in any order. I really want the contributors to find and use their voice in this project. I don’t want to force an over-arching narrative or put my own sheen to these adventures. If it ends up a disjointed mess of ideas and voices, and fairy princesses visit the ancient land of badgers in one adventure and downtown Fargo in another, I’m okay with that.
EGG: This was originally intended to kickstart during Pride Month but you moved it, correct? What motivated that move?
JACK: It’s been a rough year. There were a lot of reasons to postpone. I honestly couldn’t give any one of them the time they deserve in this response. I will say that Black Lives Matter and my heart goes out to those that lost someone this year.
EGG: I get that’s a heavy question. Having read your Facebook, I fully support your reasons behind the move. What other projects are you working on?
JACK: So many. So many… RPG-wise, there’s Evil Little Witches which I’m hoping to put out in October as a fun little Halloween aside while sorting out Tales of Pride. I have a few tabletop board and card games I’m working on, but there’s no telling when any of them will become publicly consumable. And my wife and I are looking at buying our first house.
EGG: Thank you for talking with me about this. Where can fans find out more information about this project?
JACK: The campaign is right here (Going live Tuesday the 4th)! For anyone that really wants to know about the system, the entire first edition release with an adventure is available for free. You could get in a session and play it before the campaign is even over and make your backing decision based on that if you like!
Tales of Pride: An RPG Anthology For Pretty Fairy Princesses from Jack Rosetree
End Date: Fri, August 28 2020 8:00 PM EDT.
“Tabletop adventures by pretty people for pretty people set in an unapologetically dainty world.”
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