Happy Thursday!

As we move towards our funding goal and the first weekend of this campaign, I wanted to post a small update talking about the origin of the Carrion Lands and how they came to be. This will be a relatively personal segment from myself (Alan), and deal with some personal details regarding my mental health, that I hope will shed some light on how I came to make this game, and why it is the way it is.

So first, I'm bipolar and have lived with the effects of that mental illness for closing in on two decades at this point. The constant highs and lows of bipolar disorder are the most obvious influence on the harsh setting the game posits. In the introduction to the ashcan I wrote:

"Carrion Lands is a metaphor for the mania and depression in my bipolar. The sunbaked hellscape of blood, mighty thews, and iron is my mania, and the nihilistic futility, cruel gods, and amnesia reflect my depression.

The depression bit is the one that drives this book. Depression often feels like the amnesia that greets the Exiles in the Carrion Lands. No matter what the day before held, depression is often a reset, immutable and inevitable factor that renders the previous day irrelevant and its memories circumspect at best.

Depression is lies, much like the Carrion Lands, and it is futility, both from it’s own standpoint in affecting my day to day, and the way the struggle feels against it when it appears to be winning."

In Carrion Lands, the Exiles struggle against the weight of an unknown past, something out of their control that influences their day to day, and forces them to survive in a harsh landscape. The game mechanics reflect that weight, driving a survival horror feel to the world around the Exiles, forcing them to compromise in hard ways to maintain their survival.

While this might feel bleak and a bit misery focused, in the back half of the book, in a section containing secret lore and magicks of the Carrion Lands (away from the eyes of Exiles), the hidden truth of the Carrion Lands exists. In that truth, there's a certain hidden hope, a secret to unlock that will cast the Carrion Lands in a new light, one where struggle and sacrifice, made in futility against an inexorable enemy inside oneself become something different, something that transcends the Carrion Lands.

Of course, it's also a pulpy sword & sorcery game, so maybe I'm waxing poetical and assigning too much meaning to my own intent! In the end, even if my games come from personal places, I still want them to evoke fun, and folks to walk away wanting to play more. To that end, Carrion Lands is designed to be easily playable, with smooth and streamlined rules to handle all the parts of this game in a cohesive format.

It was a bit of a challenge, but tomorrow as we start talking about the various elements of the game (starting with Character Creation), I think you'll be excited to see what we've come up with and where we've landed.

Please remember to share, talk about this game, and make sure folks can back! We want to ensure we fund and give Carrion Lands the deluxe treatment it deserves, so while we're doing the podcast/stream circuit and running our ads, having you talk to your local groups and friends always helps!

We appreciate you joining us on this journey, and we're excited to see where we go from here!

- Alan & The GKG Team

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