Two years ago I wrote a blog post on this site called “An Important Message From Connor” that, to my surprise, received quite a bit more attention than I thought it would. I’ve since been called racist, unhinged, and a lot worse by a particular sphere of folks within the tabletop RPG community. I’m not so worried about that. What does concern me though is that the point of my post seemed to be somehow lost along the way, despite it being in bold letters near the top of the page. Let me reiterate it here before I go on to why I’m writing this.
“White People: You Can Play Coyote & Crow.”
For a recap, Coyote & Crow is a science fantasy tabletop roleplaying set in an alternate future where colonization of the Americas never happened. It broke Kickstarter records, was nominated for a Nebula Award for game writing, won the Diana Jones Award for gaming excellence, along with numerous other awards, and went on to spawn Coyote & Crow Games, a publishing company which has since produced The Stories of the Free Lands, which is a set of adventures for the game, a custom dice set, a story guide screen, Hemlock & Sage, a novel set in the C&C universe, Naasii, a dice game, Wolves, a semi-cooperative tabletop game releasing in May, and a good amount of merch, with more things on the way. We strive to hire Native Americans in as many roles as possible and attempt to make games that are environmentally responsible.
Coyote & Crow, the RPG, was, by most definitions, a success and one that I’m very proud of. But to this day, two misunderstandings continue to dog the game. One, this is not something that non-Natives (read: white people) should play. Two, this fictional world is a post-scarcity utopia, meaning there are no conflicts in the game and therefore there’s nothing for players or story guides to do.
I’m revisiting these pernicious issues because we’re going to be announcing quite a few big things for Coyote & Crow this year, including our first full setting book for the RPG, called Ahu Tiiko -which you can see the first teaser for here. I’ll start by saying that I stand by everything I wrote both in Coyote & Crow the RPG and on my blog about who is invited to play this game. Depending on my mood on any given day, my tone may vary on the subject, and I was certainly frustrated when I wrote that blog post. But I stand by every word written there.
So, let’s just dive into this whole “can I play this game” thing and bring everyone fully up to speed. Then we’ll tackle the utopia topic. Here are some truths. I’ve stated these in various ways in the game, in my blog, on social media, and in interviews:
I want Natives and non-Natives to play Coyote & Crow, equally and for different reasons. It was built for those express purposes. It’s meant to act as a bridge, a gateway, and a sandbox. To give Natives a chance to play in a world that is uniquely theirs, and to give non-Natives a peek into a fantasy world that isn’t built on European lore.
Players should not play characters from a real world tribe that they do not belong to. It’s not that complicated. I’m a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. I would not play a character from the Coast Salish nation. Seems pretty obvious and simple. The game does not require you to insert any real world nations into the game in order to play. And things you might assume about those real world nations are probably wrong and or inappropriate for you to mimic. But I’m not going to pop into your game like the Kool-Aid man if you don’t. It’s an ask.
Don’t be a dick. Don’t wear war bonnets at the table. Don’t make whooping sounds. Don’t paint your face red. Don’t have your character say “how” as a greeting. Not too difficult.
For Natives that have specific cultural concepts they’d like to bring into the game, they’re welcome to speak to the Story Guide about working their heritage into this fictional world in a way that makes sense for the game. I want Indigenous people to feel like they’re seen in this world that they have a way to opt in their culture in a positive and healthy way.
White people and Europe are not discussed in Coyote & Crow. The exact nature of the natural disaster that altered history is left intentionally vague for in-world reasons. The people of Makasing don’t know the full story of why things happened the way they happened. The game isn’t a statement against white people or Europeans anymore than it’s a statement against Asians, who also do not appear in the book. It’s just not about white people. For some, apparently, that’s upsetting.
If you, after all of this, feel like you still aren’t allowed to play this game, or you feel that it would be inappropriate for you to play this game because you’re not “Native enough”, then you might want to do some serious self-reflection on how you view race and how you interact with other cultures. An entire cadre of Native writers and artists have put this book out into general distribution – all over the world. We’ve even gone to the extra lengths to specify that non-Natives can play it in the text. If that ain’t enough, then the problem is likely you.
And if you think any of the above makes me racist or a jerk? Well, this game probably isn’t for you and I doubt this article did anything for you other than give you some woke-porn.
Let’s move on to the utopia misconception. A number of people have claimed that the alternate future presented in the world of Coyote & Crow is both utopian and post-scarcity. And because of these things, the game lacks “conflict” or “things for players to do”. While I wouldn’t laugh at someone who said these things to my face, I do find both of those assertions painfully funny.
I’ll begin my response with one of only three mentions of the word “utopia” in the entire core rulebook. It can be found on page 456, in the “Final Notes” section where I used the word three times in the paragraphs that were some added personal thoughts. Most prominently: “Coyote & Crow isn’t a utopian world. It’s a ravaged world, slowly getting to its feet after having been knocked down hard.” Let’s dive in further.
Another mention comes on page 75, while discussing the day to day living in the city of Cahokia. “All of this might sound pretty easy and straightforward, but it was a long road to get here for the citizens of Cahokia, and doesn’t mean they live perfect lives in a utopia.”
Finally, on page 370, in the chapter titled “The Ethos of Coyote & Crow”, I said, “This world isn’t a shiny happy utopia. It’s not a place where everyone lives happily ever after in a storybook garden covered in rainbows and little birds land on your fingertips, inviting you to sing a song.” I don’t think I can make it much clearer here.
Some people have compared the world to something like Star Trek: the Next Generation. When they do it favorably, they’ll mention that there’s still plenty of drama to be found in a world that doesn’t have conflicts over basic necessities. When they do it negatively, they’ll likely say something like “except there’s no evil” in the world of C&C, somehow implying that everyone in Coyote & Crow has to be virtuous or noble. I’m not a fan of that comparison, partially because Star Trek’s Federation has a mixed record when it comes to colonization and its “equality for all” exterior gloss (I’m looking at you, Journey’s End).
At a certain point, I have to assume a couple of things about these conversations surrounding Coyote & Crow’s setting. First, the person making these kinds of statements might not have actually read the book. Two, if they have read it, they aren’t discussing the book in good faith. They’re coming into the conversation with an agenda and a preconceived idea of what they think is in the book or what they’ve chosen to see beyond my literal words.
Let me be blunt. There’s evil in this alternate world. There is scarcity. There is greed, corruption, malice, murder, cheating, stealing, and lying. None of that is gone. And I’m enough of a cynic to know that even in a city that provided everyone with basic needs, those failings would still exist. We’re all human beings with the same core issues. An alternate history doesn’t change that.
The fictional city of Cahokia treats its citizens pretty well. They have jobs if they want them, roofs over their heads, food in their bellies. Maybe it has to do with our real world and how entrenched many of us have become in the miseries of it, but I think people have a skewed idea of what a utopia is. Cahokia provides shelter, food, jobs, and education. That’s not a utopia, that’s the bare minimum for a civilized society.
I think there are a few things at play here when it comes to this misconception. First, because we at Coyote & Crow had so much world building to do, we decided to give the most space in the book to a single metropolitan city, Cahokia, somewhat an analogue to New York City. But using NYC as a way to gauge what life is like in the rest of North America is a wildly bad idea, right? It’s the exception in so many ways. It’s no different when comparing Cahokia to the rest of Makasing.
Many readers took what we wrote about Cahokia and simply thought it applied to everywhere in Makasing (North America). It truly doesn’t. Cahokia is the exception in Makasing, even while it’s the most obvious choice for players to start their journeys. There are other metropolitan areas, to be sure, but they are wildly different from each other. And the vast majority of people and places in Makasing are not part of a metropolis like Cahokia.
Which brings me to the second thing at play. Americans have a bad tendency to make things monolithic, especially marginalized people. I think it’s why many Americans still struggle with the modern definition of the word queer, for example. It doesn’t fit into a simple box. When you ask an average non-Native American to think of a Native American, the imagery they pull up in their mind is probably strongly influenced by films like Dances With Wolves or Last of the Mohicans. But if you ask an average American to describe any differences between say someone from the Seminole Nation of Florida and someone from the Paiute tribe of Utah, and they’ll go blank.
They might not even know that those are real, actual, distinct cultures.
I’m not trying to critique any one person’s education or understanding of Native Americans here. What I’m trying to get at is that Americans, as a group, have a tendency to think that once they’ve seen one of a thing, they’ve seen all of the thing – in any category. So when we wrote about life in Cahokia, most non-Native readers probably took that as that’s how life is in all of Makasing, even though we did our best to say otherwise.
What we did instead was to give summaries of the other major nations of Makasing and the ones in central and south America. The goal with this was twofold. First, our book was already soaring past 400 pages. We couldn’t fit all of the lore we wanted to in a single book. Second was that we wanted to give players a small taste at just how varied each of these regions would be. The Ti’Swaq Alliance is vastly different from the Keetoowagi Federation and would each require their own book to include individual Paths, Abilities, regional factions, laws, celebrations, and complex histories.
Let’s go back to this idea of there being no conflict in Coyote & Crow. Chapter 16 of the book, called Forging Your Saga, directly offers a number of settings and themes that you can delve into in this world, and offers story prompts for each. From Exploration to Espionage to Horror and beyond, we offered numerous specific genres to play in.
More broadly speaking, the world of Coyote & Crow is ripe for drama. Nations are questioning the value of ancient treaties that made sense when the world was more oppressed by the cataclysmic weather. Myths and legends of yesterday are taking on a very real and literal presence in recent years. The change in weather is encouraging folks to explore beyond their usual borders, allowing players to venture off into a vast unknown. New technological advances are directly clashing with deeply held traditions.
It’s true that there isn’t a central villain that we lay out in obvious terms or stats. You aren’t fighting against a giant robot with an absurdly villainous name or a huge evil eye atop a tower that’s looking to subjugate a realm. However, if that’s the only way you can see conflict in an RPG, might I suggest that perhaps you widen your view? Of course it feels great for heroes to save the world. But can’t it be just as exciting to save a village? Or a single human life? Or maybe just make one person’s life a little better.
If someone comes to me in good faith and says, “I want to play Coyote & Crow but I don’t know what kind of stories I can tell,” my answer to them is to check out our adventures called Stories of the Free Lands. They were designed to be one shots that can help folks adjust to this world and get their Sagas rolling. They’re filled with great art and adventures from ten different Native authors.
But often what I’ve seen is that people who complain about Coyote & Crow are complaining that they aren’t being spoon fed enough; that a 500 page core book, 12 one shots, and a novel isn’t sufficient to get their own stories rolling. That there isn’t enough world building done for them to imagine a conflict. Corrupt governments, shadowy organizations, mythical creatures and spirits, high tech gadgets, dozens of cultures and biomes, and mysterious superpowers just aren’t enough.
Many modern TTRPGs are built with a very specific setting and tone in mind. Kids on Bikes is a great example and you almost immediately know what kind of stories you should be telling with that game, and that’s fantastic. And the system for that game is one that perfectly lends itself to that vibe. It’s the system I’d want to use if I was trying to tell a story about a group of suburban teens trying to steal a horde of pirate treasure out from under some bumbling crooks.
Conversely, Coyote & Crow isn’t trying to tell you what kind of stories to tell. It’s intentionally vague on that topic. Instead, it’s asking you to reframe how you tell those stories. To question your character’s (and your antagonist’s) motivations. That big monster you’d normally just swing a sword at? What do you do if killing it just makes it come back more powerful a week from now? Do you need to kill it at all? Is there something more at play you just don’t see? The system isn’t a statement against classically hack and slash games like Dungeons & Dragons, but it definitely gives alternatives to those traditional types of play.
If the only reason you engage with tabletop roleplaying games is to have your characters go somewhere, kill the things that live there, take their belongings, then rinse and repeat that process for the sole purpose of gaining power for your character by way of increasing their stats and abilities, then maybe Coyote & Crow isn’t the game for you.
But let me tell you who Coyote & Crow is for. Coyote & Crow is for anyone, from any culture, any background, who wants to tell epic stories, with characters who feel real and lived in, but are also destined for greatness. Even if that greatness is just a well-worn tale around the fire a hundred years after they’ve passed on to the next world.
I welcome honest discourse about Coyote & Crow. I think it’s a fantastic game, with amazing fans. And it’s okay if C&C isn’t to your tastes, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not for everyone. We’ve got so much coming this year and I can’t wait to share with you all how we’re growing this incredible, hopeful world full of mystery, danger, science, and spirituality. We’re just getting started.
I have some very mixed feelings about Kahori, Marvel’s new animated Mohawk character and Echo, Marvel’s live action Choctaw hero. I thought I’d write about them here in the hopes of maybe giving some folks a new perspective to chew on. I’ve never read any comics with Echo in them and Kahori is new, so my thoughts here are going to be based only on what I saw on the screen this week.
I signed up for Disney+ solely for these two shows – What If, Season 2 and Echo – and my plan is to deactivate now that I’m finished. With Reservation Dogs wrapping and the recent, incredible, Killers of the Flower Moon, I was excited to see where we might go with Indigenous characters in speculative fiction stories. Even the title of Kahori’s episode, “What If Kahori Reshaped the World” got me all worked up as it sounded like it could be close to some of the ideas I put forth in Coyote & Crow. And while the Hawkeye series where Alaqua Cox debuted as Echo wasn’t my favorite, she was certainly a bright spot in the show.
I’m sorry to say though, that both series, and their respective Native characters, were really a pretty big let down. I know that’s probably going to rile some feathers, but please hear me out.
Let’s start with Kahori and What If…?. As with season 1, I like the premise of the show, the voice acting is top notch, the animation style is fun.
First, the problem, then we’ll get to the solution below. It’s been a long road folks. But I finally have some news on our book donations. This new solution is the least efficient way to go about this process, but here we are. Before I get into what our current/final situation is, let me recap how we got here.
The original Kickstarter had an option for backers to pay for a donation copy of the book. They could also make suggestions on where that book might go. The goal was to get copies of the game to tribal libraries, community centers, and schools – places where Natives might be able to find and access the game where they otherwise might never come across it.
It’s been a hectic year for all of us. So for this Native November, I want to take some time to celebrate everyone in Coyote & Crow’s orbit. I want to acknowledge my business partners, the artists I get to work with, the fans, the super fans, the volunteers, the writers – many of whom are Native.
Over the course of this month, we’ll be adding tons of new things to this list. We’ll publicize each thing as they happen on social media as well as updating this post here. There are going to be sales, contests, announcements, shout outs, and more.
November 1st
Native November begins! All month long, Coyote & Crow games and accessories will be on sale in our webstore and on Amazon! There are huge savings across the board.
If Amazon is your go to, head over to our Amazon page to see all the sales!
Otherwise, head over to our Webstore, where almost everything is on sale, including:
Our “Decolonize Your Gaming” t-shirts
Coyote & Crow core rulebooks
Stories of the Free Lands Adventures
Hemlock & Sage, a novel set in Coyote & Crow
& more!
NOTE: THE DISCOUNTS WILL APPLY ONCE ITEMS ARE IN YOUR CART!
November 2nd
Hero Forge Actual Play!
We’re excited to announce that Hero Forge, will be premiering a Coyote & Crow actual play series, Chaos in Cahokia, on their channel: twitch.tv/heroforge. You can catch the first episode at 2pm PST on Tuesday 11/7! There’s an amazing cast – Anica Seelie, Joey Clift, Kelly D’Angelo, Kitty Heite, and Matt Joro! If you want to see a fun (and funny!) play through of Coyote & Crow, this is going to be the one to watch.
November 3rd
Parternship with Start Playing to Raise Money For Illuminative
We’ve partnered with Start Playing to raise money all month for Illuminative, an Indigneous non-profit focused on social justice issues. You can learn more about the event HERE. This is a great opportunity for Story Guides to run sessions of Coyote & Crow online and raise money at the same time. It’s also a great chance for folks new to Coyote & Crow to jump into a game, make new friends, and learn to play.
November 6th
Today we launch a month long sale through our partners at Drive Thru RPG! You can get all of our digital products – the core book, Roll20VTT, Stories of the Free Lands, and our novel, Hemlock & Sage – at hugely reduced prices. Most more than 50% off!
The Hero Forge actual play campaign of Coyote & Crow, “Chaos in Cahokia” launches on twitch.tv! You can find the episode HERE.
November 8th
We have launched our Moon Six & Hero Forge miniatures contest. You can read more The Moon Six, or head on over to our Native November Contest Channel on our Discord for the full rules and details. You can win free painted minis and you don’t have to buy anything to enter!
November 10th
Throughout Native American Heritage Month, we’ll be spotlighting various Indigenous creatives and their endeavors. Today, we’re focusing on Indiginerds: Tales From Modern Indigenous Life, a comic anthology from tons of great Native writers and artists, and edited by the super talented Alina Pete. Give it a look and support them if you can. They’ve only got a week left to crowdfund!
November 17th
We’ve partnered with POEM, a Native-owned merchandise company to launch some fantastic new products. Three acrylic 3D prints, and a metal sign based on our logo. The Jeffrey Veregge print is a little extra special as we’ll be donating all profits from it to benefit the GoFundMe page for Jeffrey, which is raising money for his fight against Lupus. Check out the new merch in our SHOP. You can also go directly donate to Jeffrey’s GoFundMe.
November 20th
We’ve got brand new Hanawi Sakpi art from resident Coyote & Crow artists Sadekaronhes Esquivel!
November 24th
We’ve made an exciting update to our donation program for Coyote & Crow. For the full details, see our blog post about it!
Thank you so much to everyone who has helped make Coyote & Crow what it is. Let’s spread that love by supporting Native artists, writers, creatives, small businesses and non-profits throughout this month.
Some of our amazing Coyote & Crow crew at Big Bad Con
With my Chief, Chief Hoskin, and his daughter, at a Cherokee Nation at-large gathering
Buckle up folks because this is going to be a long one. But if you’re interested in seeing – or helping create – expansions and sourcebooks for the Coyote & Crow RPG, this post might be worth your time.
Folks, I’ve been wanting to write about this for awhile, but it’s a heavy topic, I’ve been dealing with the Wolves Kickstarter and I just haven’t had the emotional bandwidth.
In short, since Roe v Wade was overturned, I’ve made it a company policy that Coyote & Crow Games doesn’t attend conventions in a retailer capacity in any state where abortion care is either severely restricted or banned entirely. Specifically, I don’t want my tax dollars going to states where people don’t have full access to the reproductive care that they want.
Of course, this leads to a lot of “gray area” bullshit. What’s “restricted”? What’s a “retail appearance”? I refuse to define those things here in a policy format. Instead, I’ll say that I will make personal appearances on panels, etc. at shows where I feel comfortable with the specific situation (for example, I’m planning on returning to IndigipopX in Oklahoma because I’m directly connecting with a largely Native audience and the show is on sovereign Indigenous land). And I’ll make decisions about a booth and retails sales on a case by case basis.
Which brings me around to Gen Con. Gen Con runs from August 3rd to August 6th this year. If you aren’t familiar with Gen Con, it’s the largest annual board games convention in North America. I’ve attended Gen Con every year since 2016 (except for the dark year). Last year’s convention was marred by the failures of our Outreach Coordinator, and our booth situation became a disaster. But I still attended personally, I had some great meetings, and Logan Boese ran some incredible games of Coyote & Crow the RPG.
This year however, it looks as though on August 1, the near-total abortion ban will go back into effect for the state of Indiana. Now, I already wasn’t planning on having a booth for Coyote & Crow Games at Gen Con this year. There’s a lot of reasons for that (staffing is tough for everyone, shipping is incredibly expensive), but it’s important to call out that because of this impending ban, I wouldn’t attend, even in a personal capacity, nor will I be planning on attending in the future.
If you’re not in the know, it’s incredibly expensive to attend Gen Con – even as just a gamer. It’s easy to spend thousands upon thousands of dollars just to wander those halls. And for me, spending that is already a tough sell without it being soured by being in a state where I’m surrounded by people who can’t make basic choices about their health.
I don’t blame any company or person for attending in Gen Con in the face of this ban. That’s totally okay in my book. Many companies rely on Gen Con as a part of the annual marketing push for their games. And few companies out there are getting rich off of board games. But, I’m in a position, maybe for the first time in my life, where I can make a stand with my dollars and my principles.
I’m aware that neither Gen Con nor Indiana will notice my absence. But perhaps I’ll inspire some other folks to take similar stands. Who knows. What I know is that in the world we currently live in, I often have to choose between the lesser of two evils, so it’s nice to sometimes be able to just shut the door entirely and say, “nope.”
On the brighter side, I’m really excited to be attending Big Bad Con this year as well as GameStorm next year, and more to come, hopefully! And, while Coyote & Crow Games won’t be at Gen Con, we’ve got some incredible things happening there:
We’re nominated for the Diana Jones Award – and the winner will be announced at the show!
We’re nominated for a CRIT Award – and the winner will be announced at the show!
We’re partnering with [REDACTED] – and they’ll be announcing the partnership at the show!
We’re also partnering with [REDACTED] – and they’ll be announcing the partnership at the show!
We’re also currently up to 130 donations for our new game Wolves, which will be running on Kickstarter through 8/7!
So, I’ll take what good news I can, where I can, until everyone has the health care and rights they deserve.
Obviously, the big news right now is that we’re almost ready to launch our new tabletop game, Wolves, on Kickstarter. To say I’m excited is an understatement. I’ve been working on the game since 2021 and it has come so far. I’ll have more on that farther down in the post.
But the real news is that the final pieces are in place to announce some really exciting news about our relationship with our Canadian fans that are going to make things significantly easier for them to get a hold of our games.
CANADA
First, our partnership with the amazing Pe Metawe Games is finally at full power! This means some fantastic things:
We can now ship products from our webstore to Canadian addresses!
Pe Metawe Games itself will have a consistent supply of our games and you can order from them or visit their store!
Pe Metawe will help us fulfill Canadian backers of future Kickstarters (including Wolves!)
Pe Metawe will work on supplying games to Amazon.CA as a third party seller, so you’ll be able to get them that way as well. (Currently, Amazon direct has some C&C products, but they are inconsistently carrying them)
Second, and just as exciting, is that we’ve partnered with Library Bound, a Canadian book distributor. They’ve generously offered to ship our donation books to qualifying Canadian recipients – free of charge! For more information, head over to our donations page for more details on that.
WOLVES
In Wolves news, we’ve launched our full video for the game. It will give you a good sense of the components and the feel of play. You can sign up to be notified of the launch HERE. The game goes live on Kickstarter on July 10th, 2023.
AWARDS
We’ve previously been nominated for a Nebula Award for Game Writing. And we won the 2022 Tabletop Game Awards for Best RPG and Rising Star Publisher. But the hits just keep coming! I’m so proud of what the C&C team has done with this game and what we’ve put into the world.
Coyote & Crow has been nominated for a CRIT Award to be announced at Gen Con this year!
Coyote & Crow has been nominated for a Diana Jones Award, to be announced at Gen Con this year!
Other News
Just a few other tidbits to throw your way.
We’re working on layouts for the Coyote & Crow Story, Creep, from Allen Turner. We should have it out to backers and on sale in our webstore and DriveThruRPG within the next couple of weeks.
Two other companies are going to have Coyote & Crow related announcements at Gen Con. While we won’t be there officially, you’re going to hear some good buzz about Coyote & Crow at the show.
We’ll have some VTT news to announce in the next couple of weeks as well!
We have two more tabletop games in development, one of which might even see the light of day before the end of the year.
My only official appearance at conventions this year is going to be Big Bad Con, which I’m really excited about. Sadly, between costs and scheduling, there just isn’t a way for me to afford to do more shows. I hope to change that next year.
I know it’s been a minute since our last news update. Honestly, I try not to flood folks with trivial stuff or news that doesn’t include something that you all can take action on. But, I’ve got so much great stuff piling up that I just couldn’t wait any longer. Let’s get into it!
Wolves
Wolves
Wolves is coming to Kickstarter in June 2023! We’ll have more details soon, but for now here’s the skinny. This stand alone, tabletop board game is for 3-6 players. It’s semi-cooperative and is designed by myself (Connor Alexander) and features art from Sadekaronhes Esquivel and Ovila Mailhot. While the game is called Wolves, the theme is cooperative community survival amongst humans. Players will take on the roles of leaders of their own communities, each of which generates resources and needs them to last through winter. But here’s the catch, if any community fails to meet its basic resource needs, all players lose the game. Consequently, players will be able to gift other communities their excess resources each turn, helping ensure everyone gets their needs met. Along the way, players will gain status by either gifting resources or giving excess to their own people. At the end of the game, if all players have survived the winter, the player with the most status is elected chief of all of the communities and is granted an additional victory. The game takes anywhere from 45-100 minutes, depending on the number of players. It incorporates some push-your-luck elements, hand management, and concepts centered around gifting economies.
In addition, we’re planning on producing this entire game using wood, recycled cardboard, and compostable materials where ever possible. And our goal is to use zero plastics in this game. Not even shrink wrap.
The game is technically set in the world of Coyote & Crow, but no knowledge of C&C is required. The events in the game take place after the Awis, but long before advanced technologies have been developed. So the resources in the game are connected to more traditional ones.
Look for the pre-launch Kickstarter page soon! And in case you’re wondering, after having some great conversations with Kickstarter and BackerKit, we’re going to be moving back to Kickstarter for this next round of crowdfunding. We’ll still be using BackerKit as a pledge manager. You’ll want to sign up for our newsletter and join our Discord to make sure you’re on board for all of the early pledge bennies.
Stories of the Free Lands
Great news on Stories of the Free Lands. We’re currently on track to have these incredible adventures delivered to backers by the end of April. I am so excited to be able to get these all into your hands. We’ll be fulfilling them through BackerKit and folks will get them in two zipped files, each containing one volume of the stories, plus the additional splash art file.
The bonus story from Allen Turner and Tate Allen will be released about a month after that to backers. Following that we’ll release eight of the stories, plus the Allen Turner story, to our website as well as DriveThruRPG and Roll20.
The cover of Creep, by Allen Turner. Art by Tate Allen!
Other News
The rest of my news is a little more vague but I still think it’s worth sharing.
We’re very close to being able to announce our partnership with another tabletop game company who is going to be bringing something very different to the world of Coyote & Crow.
We’re dialing in a partnership with an Indigenous owned manufacturer here in the US that will be able to produce some very cool print-on-demand fancy merch for Coyote & Crow that I think you’re all going to be amazed with. I’ve seen the prototypes and they are phenomenal.
We’re finishing up an agreement with a Canadian library book distributor who is going to help us get donation books to Canadian outlets.
We’re finalizing our partnership with Pe Metawe Games in Edmonton, who will be acting as a distribution partner for us in Canada, allowing us to ship C&C games to Canadian customers (and maybe future crowdfunding backers too!)
Our organized play efforts, called Akinana Circle, are coalescing. Greatest thanks to those who filled out the pre-launch survey! Your input gives us excellent guidance as we move forward in our planning. We are excited to bring you all content as well as a place to play the game together. Please keep an eye out for Coyote & Crow games being run at local cons. We are reaching out and trying to set up as many as we can. If you’re interested in knowing more, check out our Discord and the Akinana Circle channel there.
I am currently hard at work writing the next full Coyote & Crow RPG book. I’ll have more info soon, but what I can share now is that it is a setting book, set in a small fictional town and chock full of mysteries, stories, characters and ideas that will be worth a read even for folks who don’t play the game. This is a passion project for me that will hopefully go to crowdfunding toward the end of the year.
We have three other games tabletop games in the wings in various stages of development. We’ll have more on those soon.
I’ll be appearing at Big Bad Con this fall. Outside of that Coyote & Crow Games will be limiting their conventions to panel and speaking appearances by myself (and writers and artists), and organized play events run by Akinana Circle.
We’ve got some other partnerships in the wings that are really exciting. We want to wait until we have some really exciting things to show you before we announce them, but they are in the works!
From the start, I dreaded working with PayPal. There’s a wealth of reasons to dislike the platform itself as well as its founder, Peter Thiel (Here’s one among many). But we here at C&C Games were using it for two reasons. First, I needed a way to pay contractors easily and in a way that made sense for them. Roughly 80% of my contractors request to be paid through PayPal and I try to be conscious of their needs.
Second, it’s a massive default payment option through most webstores. We currently use Shopify and a large portion of our sales there come through PayPal.
