Cantrip Games

here’s a fun sneak peek at an almost-finished Story War...

Tue, 13 May 2014 04:53:11 -0400

here’s a fun sneak peek at an almost-finished Story War project :^)

Woo! The custom backer cards just arrived! ALSO: we’ve...

Tue, 13 May 2014 03:40:00 -0400

Woo! The custom backer cards just arrived! ALSO: we’ve heard from the printers that Volume 2 will arrive in America on May 20th! However, it’ll still take a little while longer for the game to arrive at the shipping center and be processed and sent out to everyone. But this is great news! We’re ready to start collecting addresses for the final Story War shipment now!

So the story war cartoon over on CartoonHangover completely sold me on the game's style and feel, and I've put down for a copy of it! That said, there wouldn't be a chance that the next kickstarter would be for a full blown series? ;V I'd love to get more awesome adventures with goblin and fairy!

Fri, 09 May 2014 13:40:00 -0400

It’s definitely something we’ve thought about! The Story War cartoon was a collaboration between a lot of talented people, and part of the reason those talented people were down to work on it was because it was a one off and not something that would consume a year of their life - only half a year - ha ha ha.

We might do another cartoon, maybe. Or maybe everyone involved will go work on other cool things, like for example, our animators are running their own kickstarter right now to finish their web show Baman and Piderman.

But yeah, I feel you! I keep thinking about how much potential their is for Fairy and Goblin’s characters. There’s a lot of implied tension between them that we haven’t explored. Like, historically fairies and goblins are portrayed as inherently good and inherently bad, but our characters are inherently neutral.

I’d like to explore the idea that goblins are basically a way the fantasy genre is allowed to show human deaths that aren’t morally bad and don’t matter - it’s kind of like the shadow of some weird 18th century racism, like, it’s okay to kill these people, they’re green. I also like to explore the fact that fairies are given inherent elemental duties - we talked about how Fairy was a spring fairy, and you’ll notice there’s some flower special effects in her magic (like whens he picks up coins off the ground, the sparkles bloom in a flower formation.) I’ve thought about doing a plot about her family (summer, winter, and fall fairies) visiting and passive-aggressively trying to get her to re-join the family business; but she doesn’t want to spend her life making flowers bloom, she wants to kill stuff and go on adventures.

I think the core conflict with Fairy and Goblin is the tension between what their fantasy tropes imply about them and who they are as individuals.

I also wrote up a script at one point that was about Fairy getting annoyed that people bigger than her are constantly making her life harder - using size as sort of a stand-in for discrimination. She gets mad that Goblin steps on her on accident and uses the Mega Mushroom and it makes her bigger than Goblin and gives her a body builder frame. But while she’s big she keeps accidentally crashing into Goblin and hurting him. She realizes she hates being big and uses the Shrinking Spell to go back to being small. Afterwards Goblin makes an effort to be more considerate and aware of his spacial surroundings when interacting with her, but she also realizes it’s really easy for him to step on her on accident, and she is a little more forgiving for his shortcomings.

They love each other, and I want any stories involving them to involve them both learning and changing for each other - similar to how Finn and Jake or Dipper and Mable’s relationships work. I wouldn’t want it to be a situation where one of them is always the dope and the other one is always the good person - I think a relationship like that would be unhealthy and it wouldn’t make sense that they work together so well if one of them was always making the other one unhappy.

Anyway these have been Fairy and Goblin thoughtz. I’m talking to some people about maybe doing a comic that focuses on Fairy and Goblin, but, you know, economics, supply and demand, time, opportunity cost, etc.

So do all of the Kickstarter backers get Volume 2, or just people above a certain tier?

Mon, 28 Apr 2014 02:05:00 -0400

Everyone who backed at “HERO PACK” level or higher will be getting it. Everyone else can buy it once it’s for sale on Amazon, which should be shortly after it’s shipped out to backers.

i'm a backer and i should be getting the expansion deck but i need to change my shipping address. how do i do that

Mon, 21 Apr 2014 01:23:12 -0400

We’ll collect a new address from everyone before we send it out!

Story War is 1 year old today! Here’s a celebratory...

Sat, 22 Mar 2014 20:24:00 -0400

Story War is 1 year old today! Here’s a celebratory Blingee! Which is more a gift for ourselves than anything. Oh, you wanted something? Well actually I did get you this 25 song album that you can download right now for free:

The Story War Battle Album is an album of ambient loopable music designed to match each Battlefield in the Story War card game. It’s a pretty sick album in it’s own right, cuz we commissioned it from Infinitefreefall and he’s a pretty sick musician!

But if you loop the appropriate song while playing Story War fun gameplay things happen! For example, the song for the Volcanic Island card has a volcano explosion sound that’ll probably affect your story in real time. It’s sort of like musical chairs combined with roleplaying!

We’re working on a bunch of other cool stuff, check updates for more info!

Is it possible to buy more blank cards? Thanks in advance!

Fri, 21 Mar 2014 19:50:50 -0400

We definitely have plans to release a full new blank box! The cover is blank, all the cards are blank (except for a handful to show you how to draw it) and then you just take to it with a sharpie. But we’re not quite ready to release that! We gotta finish all the stuff we promised in the Kickstarter first :/

Grumpy Cat reviews Story War

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 23:13:06 -0400

Grumpy Cat reviews Story War

Just because Fairy and Goblin don’t spend every day...

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 22:53:00 -0400

Just because Fairy and Goblin don’t spend every day outside of their apartment doesn’t mean they’re not adventurers.

We just sent the last bit of Story War vol 2 to the printers!...

Wed, 05 Mar 2014 19:55:00 -0500

We just sent the last bit of Story War vol 2 to the printers! It’s done! The whole darn thing is done! To celebrate, I wanted to share some cool original artwork by Ned Hugar that will be included in the instruction booklet!

Finishing volume 2 (which had to be finished before we could mail out custom cards, which have been finished for a while) was the last big high-priority milestone from our Kickstarter that we had to hit! First a cartoon, now this! We’re chippin’ away!

Up next: Finishing the online game, the app, and the alternate game modes! We should have everything totally fulfilled by this summer! :D

zygodactylous: we are playing story war (kiss and make-up mode)...

Wed, 05 Mar 2014 04:10:00 -0500

zygodactylous:

we are playing story war (kiss and make-up mode) and king midas’s parents are three dogs and six rats

I’ve heard that royal family trees can get convoluted but this is ridiculous!

I see what you’re saying! Mathematically, there should be...

Mon, 03 Mar 2014 15:26:56 -0500

I see what you’re saying! Mathematically, there should be slightly more items. But this only becomes an issue when you’re playing with a 4 or 8 players which means you’re going to play 8 rounds, which means you’re consuming around 30 cards total (starting cards + redraws each turn, minus redraws for the final turn.) Because this only happens in the later half of 4 and 8 player games, it’s not a huge concern.

Additionally, adding more Warriors doesn’t mean we need to add incrementally more Items, because the number of turns stays the same even if there are more Warriors. It just means both Warriors and Items are more varied now. The 6 to 8 turn limit is not imposed by the number of Warrior cards, but by human attention span.

Doubling the Warriors doesn’t actually double the Item consumption. Does that make sense?

Hey maybe I haven't been following closely enough, but is there a rough date for Vol 2?

Mon, 03 Mar 2014 15:10:15 -0500

We’re sending it to the printers in a few days, it should get to backers in maybe 2 months or so.

Howdy! I kickstared the game, and finally got a chance to play it this weekend. The one thing that stood out as an issue is that we went through the item cards really quickly, so we had to reuse them. Any chance of seeing an item-only expansion in the future? It would be nice to be able to use new items each round.

Mon, 03 Mar 2014 15:09:55 -0500

You’re only supposed to use one item per team per round! But yeah, once volume 2 comes out there will be 50 items total - as many as there are Warriors, currently! That should help mix it up!

I backed the kickstarter, and i got my game and I love it! But, I also backed other kickstarters with the promise that i'd get cards based off of the other kickstarters. Am I just not going to receive those cards or ?

Mon, 03 Mar 2014 15:08:15 -0500

You are! We didn’t have enough Deluxe packs to send to both Deluxe backers and cross-promo backers during the original shipment. So the cross-promo cards are going to be sent out alongside Super Story War, which should be shipped out in a few weeks!

Hey, we’re about to send the new Super Story War rule...

Mon, 03 Mar 2014 03:44:00 -0500

Hey, we’re about to send the new Super Story War rule sheet off to the printers! We’re still making a few final tweaks, but we wanted y'all to check it out!

One thing that’s unfortunate about making a mass produced print game, as opposed to a digital game, is there is no going back when it comes to the rules. Though the old rules convey the concept of Story War well enough that most people are able to play the game as it was intended to be played, there are occasional instances where some players don’t “get” it.

Hardcore Story War fans (like for example, Matt, who has blogged about this in the past) will get around this by introducing the rules in a slightly different way. For example, it helps to play down victory points and play up the judge’s infallibility. Now that we get a chance to re-print the rules for Story War, we’ve decided to make a few minor but important tweaks that should improve the overall experience for everyone:

The biggest change in terms of actual mechanics is that the judge can now declare a new victory condition at any time. This is something that players tend to do anyway, so we decided to canonize it. It also helps to more clearly set up the goal of the game before you jump into battle, as most people tend to read the rules as they execute them.
The back side of the rules has been broken up by fan art. We realized when people unpackaged the rules they’d unfold the whole thing, look at a two sided rule sheet, and get immediately frustrated. We got around that by cleaning up the FAQ section (and splitting it into a new ‘tips’ section) and pacing them with big chunks of art. You now don’t feel like you have to read the back side until after you’ve started playing.
The “tips” section now includes less rulesy-sounding advice on how to have more fun. This advice is both for judges and the players. Since the rules are so mechanical, we wanted there to be a little more straight forward explanation of the kind of vibe we’re going for.
The last page no longer says “VICTORY” and instead it says “THE END” - the step where you count your victory cards has been entirely removed. Now, the game simply ends. Hopefully this will help with obnoxiously competitive players. Victory cards are looked at, and you pick your favorite, and you put them in the middle of the table and tell a final story where everybody wins. This step can, of course, be skipped. But it’s similar to the “haiku” step in Cards Against Humanity and acts as a fun palate cleanser.
The Credits page now does a better job of emphasizing Story War as a multimedia experience, and even has a pretty visible plug for the cartoon.

Hopefully these new rules will make Story War just slightly more fun each time you play it with new people. We’re going to retrofit these rules onto the next reprinting of volume 1, as well as provide a printable version that you can slip in to your existing game if you like.

The one on the far left is the mothman, btw. Got drunk and...

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 01:33:57 -0500

The one on the far left is the mothman, btw. Got drunk and felt super inspired to fill out my blank cards.

Much love from tx <3 <3

Haha, these are great!

pixelatedcrown: pixels of the steam dragon from story war! lots...

Wed, 26 Feb 2014 16:11:00 -0500

pixelatedcrown:

pixels of the steam dragon from story war! lots of really great designs in story war, it’s been really inspiring seeing the game grow… this might end up in the booklet for volume 2 that’s coming out soon, which is awesome! :O

You rock, Chelsea!

can you explain to me whAt story wars is and going to be?

Sun, 23 Feb 2014 21:33:49 -0500

Story War already exists and you can find out more about it at CantripGames.com !

Will story wars online be available on like steam, or is it going to be browser based?

Sun, 23 Feb 2014 21:05:24 -0500

It’ll be a browser-based game for Google Hangouts. You’ll use Google Hangouts to talk and stuff and then we’re programming a visualization of the Story War stuff that everyone manipulates and collaborates on with their mouse while they talk with their voices.