Check out this 3D gif of one of our Warrior cards, the Rat King!
3D gif by Dain Fagerholm, original art by Vondell Swain.
(To learn more about our card game Story War, read this post)
Story War is a subjectivity game where you try to convince the judge that the Warrior depicted in your card’s artwork could defeat the Warrior depicted in your opponent’s artwork. So the art is very important! But it’s also important that each Warrior is based on a cultural touchstone, so that players can easily extrapolate what their powers and abilities might be. For example, everyone knows how a vampire or werewolf works.
But I also noticed, while playtesting, that people responded well to cards based on animals - there’s a logic of like, dog beats cat, cat beats rat, bees beat dog - and people can quickly visualize how a fight between those two animals would play out.
So we really needed a rodent card to cover the most common animals but there wasn’t really any rodent in mythology that was prominent enough or powerful enough to work. We were going to just do a plague rat but a plague rat feels like a low level enemy you’d encounter early on in an RPG, and all the Warriors need to be on roughly the same tier in terms of power. So we kinda went a little more “original content” with this Warrior than we did with most of the other ones, who are very much based on real mythological things.
The rat king actually is based on a real mythological thing, but not one that most people are familiar with and also not one that’s very powerful. So we decided to make him a Voltron-like humanoid of rats working together, as opposed to a tangle of uncoordinated rats. He was also partially inspired by the Mouse King from the Nutcracker. And hopefully there’s a little bit of a plague rat implication in there too.
Anyway this guy is really cool and fun to play as! One time the Rat King was in a fight with Medusa, and she turned him to stone - but only PART of him - because Medusa’s petrification curse only works on an individual target at a time, and not a group of individuals. So Medusa really just succeeded in turning the Rat King’s arm into a stone club that he used to bash her face in. It was a really cool battle.
We’re about 75% done with the art for Story War, and we expect to be launching the Kickstarter in mid January. Make sure you follow our blog so we can let you know when Story War goes on sale!
- Brad
