We here at Fool's Moon have been hard at work behind the scenes, conferring with the Fates to bring you a brand new collaboration with Fiona Shade Stories! Their project, Dungeons & Datemates, offers romancable NPCs, roleplay and romance guides, 5e compatible mechanics, and more! Anyone backing both campaigns will receive another free pin - this time of an animal companion from Datemates! Meet Trip Cornbread, the Cerberanian 🐶 [preliminary sketch of pin design]
The team behind Fiona Shade Stories is a nonbinary, neurodiverse freelance game designer, editor, and sensitivity reader. Ze collaborate exclusively with a queer, neurospicy team to bring you Datemates.
Are you enticed by the companion romances in Baldur's Gate 3? Do you also have a player who believes "D&D is a dating sim"? As a player’s character invests in other characters, their player invests in the game world. Intimacy builds conflict, depth, and motivation into a character's story and a player's roleplay! Many gamers want to simulate stories they love, or roleplay within the worlds they adore, and those settings include all kinds of relationships. Many players use games as a way to explore all aspects of life. Dating and romantic feelings are a BIG part of life. Stories about romance are fun and dramatic! Let's bring this genre to tabletop games!
Dungeons & Datemates includes: ▪︎ 12 romanceable NPCs, system neutral roleplay and romance guides, and D&D 5e compatible game mechanics that reward love on the battlefield. ▪︎ Each Datemate has a compelling backstory, a commitment hangup to overcome, a Game Master guide to general roleplay and to romance, and optional 5e mechanics. ▪︎ 5e mechanics: level-scaling stat blocks so the Datemates can support the party at any level; signature items or animal companions; Heartfelt Devotions - a system similar to Eldritch Invocations which rewards romance progression.
When Paragon Tarot Pins reaches 125 backers, thre additional tarot options will be automatically unlocked featuring three characters from Datemates:
Death, featuring the Warforged The Lovers, featuring the Minotaur Judgment, featuring the Changeling
Card designs are being worked on to match the rest of the major arcana already designed. In the meantime, here's an introduction to two of them from the Datemates side!
Meet Bond "Bonne" Tender. Bonne was created to be the perfect playmate, maid, and guardian for a Princess. This Warforged was specially designed to blend organic and inorganic parts in such a way that she might offer genuinely soft hugs and that she would age in tandem with the human Princess. As an adult, she has elected to end her contract, turn her specialty with mending clothes and powdering cheeks into an ability to conceal herself and blend amongst the aristocracy, and begin a campaign of wealth redistribution. She maintains good relations with the Princess, who promises to be an egalitarian ruler and occasionally delivers Bonne juicy intel about the powerful elite who do not. Bonne will be Death in the Paragon Tarot, the signal that a major phase in one's life is ending but a new one begins. The card can often be associated with the scariness of transition as a version of self fades away to make room for a new, transformed self.
And Billford Bonegeinder. This minotaur is excited to find a new path to truth outside the labyrinth where he grew up, followed a divine code of debate until consensus and total classification of everything, and eventually lost his faith. When people don't act fast, lives can be lost. As an adventurer, Billford hopes to find new family - but he worries whether he will be able to act fast enough to save anyone he comes to love. He also yearns to once again find a new community that accepts him and embraces his beliefs, or at least his search for new ones. Thus, he fits The Lovers, a card that can signal a need for the development of a personal belief system, following after The Heirophant and that card's representation of a standardized belief system.
That's all for now! Stay tuned for the Changeling reveal! We're excited to share these additional options with our backers!
