Want more TDP canon goodies? Tales of Xadia has got your back!
Today's Role and Keep Twitch stream covered the Table of Contents from Tales of Xadia's upcoming rules handbook, which is scheduled for release in the first 3 months of 2022, before Bloodmoon Huntress comes out. Take a look!
The first chapter, Welcome to Xadia, is for those who don't know The Dragon Prince at all. It covers the basics, and there probably won't be too much in the way of stuff the TDP fandom doesn't know in there.
Chapter II, Welcome to Cortex, covers the gaming system. If you know D&D, try to ignore it. Cortex doesn't run terribly similarly, and the focus of the gameplay in ToX is very different, in a more intuitive way that really embraces cooperative storytelling.
Chapter III, Gazeteer of Xadia, is - ohoho fams - this is the good stuff, this is the grand prize! This chapter is the deep dive into all kinds of lore, culture, locations, myths, and other worldbuilding that we have not learned anywhere else before - and it's all canon, created in collaboration with Wonderstorm.
And there's art in this book. Glorious art. I am so excited!
Chapter IV, Player's Guide, is the meat of the handbook, containing a complete guide to creating a character from scratch and learning how to interact with the tale you're playing. I've participated in one of ToX's online character creation workshops and created a dozen or so catalyst and narrator characters, and it's very simple once you get the pattern.
Chapter V, Mage's Guide, goes more in depth on how magic works in ToX - and it's going to give us shiny new details on how Ocean and Earth magic work! Aah! It sounds like we should be getting a full explanation for dark magic as well as all the primal magics, except for Stars. Because someone has to be a mysterious drama queen in his mirror.
Chapter VI, Narrator's Guide, is all about how to be the person spinning the tale for your friends, and what you'll need to do it. I've been writing and running original tales for a few months, and it's still a bit wibbly without the full ruleset, but the online tools on the ToX website are really helpful and I always have them open for reference.
Also of note: I asked a question in the stream about whether we'd be getting any new pre-gen characters, or perhaps if there were character sheets out there for canon show characters that players might want to interact with or play. Cam Banks (Cortex's creator) responded to say that there are some characters from the show that are available as catalyst characters - I assume that's in this chapter, under Featured Catalysts - and that it's very easy to shift a character from narrator-character to catalyst-character to playable-character. Which, yes, it should be, because there are only so many stats you need for each of those three roles. So I guess we'll see who got into the book as a featured catalyst!
Chapter VII, The Tale of the Corrupted Core, is, I expect, the long-awaited playable tale set in Lux Aurea between S3 and S4. It's been a long time since anyone mentioned this specific setting, but I have been waiting for this for a while, and Cam confirmed that this tale is very much a Sun tale, just like Gloaming Glade was a Moon tale and Lost Oasis was a Sky tale.
The Appendix is where all the glorious lists are, for the good details like Distinctions and SFX, which will be so much fun to delve deep into for nosy nuggets on our favorite characters from the show! See, Cortex's first ever game was based on the TV show Firefly, (which has a Cortex) and its character distinctions were pulled from characters on the show itself. I have been assuming that ToX will do the same, from the few distinctions I've have seen so far - because Cortex has been delightfully coy with sharing these. I'm expecting that all the available character distinctions and SFX will have been created and included in the handbook because they belong to a character we know or will meet eventually. So if you want to piece together a playable version of Nyx, or Callum, or Amaya, or Corvus, or Ethari, or Claudia, or literally any canon character at all, and there isn't a character sheet for them yet, you won't have too much trouble crafting something that feels very much like them!
Also: ToX has released 12 pre-gen characters, thus far, for people to just jump into gameplay with. They're amazing, with humans and elves as mages and fighters and diplomats and adventurers and rogues and more. But in the Appendix, that little section there says a Baker's Dozen. That means 13, guys. Looks like we're gonna get blessed with one more secret playable pre-gen character! OMG WHO IS IT??
I am SO HYPE for this book, I have had it pre-ordered forever! But there's more canon fun to come, and it's just around the corner.
Every Wednesday at 3PT, Role and Keep has a live Twitch stream. And on December 2, 9, and 16, Cam Banks will be running a 3-part ToX holiday celebration ttrpg which will include new canon details straight from Wonderstorm about how various cultures and/or characters around Xadia celebrate - or don't - during the holiday season! That's right, Wonderstorm is gonna dump all the fun fluffy cuteness (and angst? maybe? I gotta go find out) we need for our upcoming holiday fics, right into our arms. Oh, I'll definitely be taking notes while I watch.
Hmmm. Maybe I can write up a tale that starts out as a perfectly innocent travelers' visit to one of the newly revealed locations in the handbook... until......... Bahaha. Whatever you do, don't touch anything.
