Ride To Dawn

For days you have ridden without stopping, without resting, driven by the news as soon as it reached you. The dragon has risen, and it has laid waste to the lands and castle of someone you cherish, someone that you have not seen in too long. Someone you must ride to rescue..

Alpha Playtest Set:

A game about resisting despair, for 1 Dragon and 2-4 Knights

Step One: Choose your Dragon

Someone must play the Dragon, who has recently, violently overthrown the central kingdom. The other players are going to be the characters this story is about, the Knights riding until sunrise, to face the Dragon head on. But one player will be the Dragon when they arrive, and portray all the landscape and other characters in this story as the Knights ride closer. This player is the Dragon.

Duties of the Dragon:
Read the scrolls in order, laying out the four chapters of the story, and the four parts of the game.
Be familiar with the game before you play it, so you can answer questions.
Push things forward if the game slows down, reign things in if they get too myopic.

Step Two: Knights Choose Their Color

All other players portray one character through the game, they are all Knights in a fantasy realm. This realm will be invented partially as you play, partially by the tropes and familiar ground of fantasy fiction present in the players at the table.

Each Knight has a color: Blue, Gold, Black, Red, or Green. Each has a deck of Regalia Cards that prompt your character's history and archetypal nature.

The weapon, armor, steed and crest of each Knight is imagined in reply to leading questions about these Regalia. The nature of the weapon might already be partially defined (such as a hammer, or a sword) but it's magical capabilities, or personal history, are prompts for your imagination.

Nature of the Knights:
Knights can be as powerful as demi-gods, or as mortal as guardians with enchanted tools. This will be manifest by the tone of each group at each play through. The prompts on the cards do, however, assume some level of magical or metaphysical ability for your Knights. This is a fantasy game, in an imaginary realm.

Also, and i'm sad i have to say this, Knights can be ladies, or gender neutral, gender queer or any other wonderful representation of humanity. They are not exclusively white people. This is a fantasy kingdom that, somehow, forgot to be bigots about who gets to play a Knight. If this is too hard for you to wrap your head around go play something else, like "Historically Accurate Knights Walking Into Traffic And Getting Run Over By a Truck."

Step Three: The Chapters of Play

The game is played in three four chapters. At the start of each chapter the Dragon will set the stage by reading the Scroll that introduces that chapter. The scrolls in the PDF are listed in order, but, this is a beta, so you'll have to just remember that once you've cut them out. Or number them with a pencil or something.

1 - The riders come together, as the players and the Dragon all go through the prompts on their Regalia cards. Chapter one ends once all Regalia cards have been detailed, and, in the fiction, the Knights are riding together as one, at dusk, into the outskirts of the burning kingdom.

2 - The Knights now approach the edges of the burning landscape laid to waste by the Dragon. It is night, and the riders will play through a deck of cards called Memory and Suffering, where the kingdom and it's current plight is detailed, and where memories between the Knights help to detail their relationships and history. This chapter ends after each Knight has played through at least 2 cards.

3 - The Knights have come to this last battle with the Dragon. The confrontation is played out. This uses prompts on the Battle Cards.

4 - The Sun Rises - An epilogue is told by reading through the Final Oracles cards.