#mysthea

                                       Mockup of the hardback book

An ancient, crystal-encrusted planet is rocked by war. As Kingdom fights Empire and the borderlands are caught in the middle, you are sent to rebuild the liberated city of Montara and make the surrounding lands safe for your Houses. As the years pass and this city makes its mark on you, where will your loyalties lie? With your Kingdom, with your House, with this new city, or only with yourself?  

Mysthea: Legends From the Borderlands is a tabletop roleplaying game about politics, adventure and discovery in a geomantic fantasy world based on Tabula Game's Mysthea Universe.  It fuses the grand strategy of board games like Twilight Imperium, Scythe and Mysthea itself with the tense character-driven adventures of pen-and-paper roleplaying games. With your help, we'll fund a beautiful print run of the game to end up in your hands and in shops worldwide.

Mysthea: Legends From the Borderlands builds on our successes with Legacy: Life Among the Ruins. Adapting elements from the Apocalypse World engine, it's a game system that gets you into the heart of the action, while at the same time allowing your stories to zoom out and take in the broad sweep of geography and history. It's based on the universe developed by Tabula Games for their board games Mysthea, Volfyirion and the upcoming Icaion, and we're delighted to bring it to life at your table. Here's what makes it special:

Legends From the Borderlands takes place on a backdrop of war. A few hundred years ago, the floating continent of Mysthea was home to dozens of independent city-states, with the world-shattering cataclysm an ancient memory. Now, only two major powers remain: the Kingdom of Ahatils and the Kitrean Empire. The Kingdom is aggressively expansionist, lead by a conqueror-king whose boredom with governance lead to him delegating rule of his conquered lands to the ancient Guilds of Ilvash. The Empire is more insidious, letting its territories rule themselves freely only as long as they cast aside their old customs and religions and follow the Empire's doctrine. And between these two monoliths lie the borderlands - a narrow strip of territory whose cities are treated as pawns in the game of empires.

Now a great war has been sparked into flame, and its battles shake the continent. As the war front moves ever closer to Kitrean heartlands, the Ilvashan Guilds send a convoy to control, reinforce and rebuild the newly-liberated of Montara. But as the Guilds meet with local Orders and Cabals, and contend with the perils of the too-close war front, they may find their loyalty to Ilvash and Ahatils tested. Will they stay true to their mission and make this city a vassal of their ancestor guilds, try to secure its independence, or use its resources to gain dominion over the Guilds in the Kingdom's capital?

Your group will have strong world-building tools, letting you make this story your own. Most important is Montara: it's up to you what form this war-scarred metropolis takes, though we will present examples in the book. The wider borderlands can shift and change as you play according to your decisions, and the final state of your city will be unique. Don't worry, though: the game's procedures will give you inspiration and easy choices to make, while making sure that your world remains coherent and full of mystery.

Each player controls a House present in Montara. They may be a Guild sent to this city from the ancient Kingdom of Ilvash, or an Order local to the borderlands. Together these factions form a venture, dedicated to putting the city back together for their own reasons. Your House is your constant as you tell a decade-spanning saga of discovery, conflict and rebuilding. Each will have a certain vocation that defines them, whether that's the Guild of Varorin's focus on commerce and production or the Order of Kyradar's quest to hunt Mysthea's strangest monsters. When they acts in concert, you trigger special abilities that work through the consequences of conducting diplomacy, sabotaging your enemies, claiming vital resources or many other approaches.

You'll jump forward through history, visiting the different flashpoints your venture experiences. At each flashpoint, you'll focus on a particular hero from your House. The hero archetype you pick gives you a particular skillset and role within the House, but it also gives you a new perspective: a gregarious Matchmaker will present a very different side to a House of soldiers than a battle-scarred Veteran.

Once you're done telling the story of a particular flashpoint, you jump your story forward in time. You go as far ahead as the group likes: a few months, a year, maybe even a decade. Over the time skip your House can experience great fortunes or suffer trials, the world can change dramatically, and new threats and opportunities can emerge from the borderlands. Once you've set up your new flashpoint you can make new heroes, still able to call on the powers of those who have gone before. Or perhaps you'll show how an old hero has been changed by the passage of time?

With Legends From the Borderlands, we’re inviting players to dive deep into a world still reeling from a meteoric impact that shrouded the world in endless storms and studded the landscape with shards of crystal. Rising above the endless storms are floating islands and continents, buoyed by shifting tides of gravity: this is the land of Mysthea.

Crystals are vitally important to this world. The strange shards of crystal dotting the landscape – named Qoam – react strangely to gravity, energy and most importantly thought. Each resident of Mysthea has the ability to exert telekinetic control over Qoam, though individuals vary in the strength they can exert and the kinds of crystal the best resonate with. The subtle arts of Qoam manipulation are core to your society – Qoam crystals line warrior’s armour, and resonators communicate across great distances. Qoam prostheses enable amputees to walk with the power of their will, and labourers build structures by exerting their collective will on blocks of crystal-studded stone. The most delicate artisans can even spark life in the crystal, creating servants made of stone and gleaming Qoam facets.

Finally, there’s the inhabitants of this world. None of them have escaped unchanged by the great crystal’s impact. The humanoid folk that make up the bulk of its population have changed the least, growing grey-skinned and pale under the gloom of the endless mists. The awoken automata are rare, often labouring under cryptic ethical codes put in place by long-dead civilisations. And then there’s the monsters, who cannot control Qoam and instead struggle to avoid frenzies when bombarded with its unrefined energy. These ‘monsters’ greatly value cities, where the controlled Qoam allows them coexist peacefully with others.

Legends From the Borderlands has 9 Heroes and 8 Houses for you to try. Look below for details!

                          Click through for full-size Heroes preview

                            Click through for full-size Houses preview

If you'd like a closer look, check out our quickstart.  This document gives you a jumping-on point for Mysthea: Legends From the Borderlands, letting you try out the core game rules and pre-generated player options before breaking open the full suite of options available in the main book.

                            Click through to download the quickstart

All backers will get access to the game as a digital PDF, with hyperlinked bookmarks and indexing.

                               An example page spread from the book.

Mysthea: Legends From the Borderlands is planned as a full-colour hardback book,  8.5" x 11"/21.6 cm x 28 cm/US Letter in size. We're estimating it'll extend to 240 pages, and it'll be packed with Travis Anderson's gorgeous art.

                                      Mockup of the hardback book.

Kickstarter campaign ends: Thu, April 11 2019 6:00 PM BST