On the past couple of episodes of Boards & Swords, I’ve been hinting at a big project that I’ve been working on over the past few months. Well, its time to pull the rug out from under myself and show the world! Since we launched our Patreon last year, we’ve promised an Actual Play RPG featuring the Boards & Swords cast playing as Cats. I originally called it “Yarnfinder” because I was going to use the Starfinder RPG. However, the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to create something new.

So I am! Sorta. Going off the premise of “Firefly, but with Cats,” I’m going to be working on my own custom version of the Blades in the Dark from Evil Hat Publishing (using their “Forged in the Dark” license). This means you if you’ve never played a RPG, you wouldn’t need to go buy fancy D&D dice, you can use just regular six sided dice (or our Patreon dice if you are a backer)!

The most exciting part of all of this is that I’m not working on this by myself. Knowing there were far more creative people out there that would love to work on this concept, I reached out to a few folks. First of all, Emily Detmer has created the awesome album artwork at the top of this post. In addition, someone is working with me to help create the setting of this world, and that person is none other than Calvin Wong! I’ve been wanting to work with Calvin on a project forever, and when I sent him the idea he immediately jumped on it.

Not only that, not long after agreeing to work with me on this, he immediately sent me a snippet of fiction that purrrfectly (hehe) encapsulated what I was envisioning with this game:

In the long beforetimes, there was a home colony. We don't know where they is, although we really really tried to look for it. Ask anyone at astrofaring or spacewatch. Dozens of years. 

But in those beforetimes, and remember this was very the long before, they sent ships out into the starblack. You, me, everyone who is listening, we was on one of those shippies. And that ship landed here, on Main Colony. And many thousands of us came out of the shi- what do you mean where's the ship? You're sitting in it! Stop interrupt before I forget story. 

Where I. Main Colony! Is here. We came out, our mother and fathercats, and we knew our purpose. Build the towers. Grow the food. Tell Home Colony where we is, so Home Colony can send more cats with more shippies to help  

But the starblack changed. Spacewatch cats saw it happen. All the stars moved, like little flies, dart here, dart there, then suddenly whole sky is changed. And although we all are okay, we cannot no longer find Home Colony I SAID QUESTIONS LATER. 

Whatever is happen, we cats here on Main are okie dokie. We have the starpics from back then. We have towers and food and many planets to live on. For many dozen lifetimes we have lived on Main, and searched for Home. One day maybe we will find the matching starpics and we can tell Home that we are okie dokie, and all of you, me, and us can see our motherfathercats from the long ago time. For now we improve astrofaring, go to Inio or Junpeit, have adventure, maybe run from a Hugeteethsixlegs, come home Main, tell big story, all laugh. 

But we is Home cats. Not Main Cats. Never forget. One day we go Home. Not today. Maybe not next year. 

But one day. 

Interested? Then you need to go back our Patreon (patreon.com/boardsandswords) so that we can make this series happen. While we are still early in this process, eventually we’d like to get to the point that this is a full-fledged project that people can play, so money donated to the Patreon will help make that happen.