The dragons disappeared 10,000 years ago. All of them.
Well, not the mindless drakes, the dragonborn, or other derivatives, but the True Dragons, the chromatic ones—red, black, blue, white, green—and the metallic ones—platinum, gold, silver, bronze. As well as all the others…simply vanished. Some people think they never existed. That the Elves and Dwarves have always known the secrets of forging magic weapons or rings. That the wizards of the world learned their spells and alchemy through years of trial and error. That sorcerers and the dragonkin have always had the magic in their bloodlines.
You know better. You work for the Guild of Avalon. You’re a Dragon Hunter, and the guild has evidence that magic is disappearing from the world.
More accurately, you are a proof of Dragon Hunter. No one has actually ever found a dragon, but the guild has been documenting and collecting any dragon-related information for the last 300 years. Even the guild name is an obscure reference to the disappearance of the dragons: The guild discovered an ancient tome shortly after their founding, a journal of sorts written in draconic with platinum ink. Most of it was destroyed or impossible to translate, but one passage at the end, roughly translated from the draconic, said, “We go to Avalon. The birthplace of magic. The birthplace of dragons.”
There aren’t many Hunters left in the world. There are bigger, better paying guilds out there and most adventurers have abandoned the Hunt for greener pastures – the usual stuff: lich kings to kill, rats in basements, the occasional marauding orc horde. The guild covers your basic expenses when on an expedition, but it’s just barely enough for the necessities.
While the other guilds are on caravan protection detail, you’re exploring ancient ruins hunting down clues—dragon forged magic items, draconic writing on dungeon walls, ancient scrolls and books, even stories passed down in kobold tribes. Occasionally, you get to keep a magic item or some part of a hidden treasure horde, but typically everything goes back to the guild for research and to keep it running. Why do you still do it? That’s a story for you to tell.
When asked to describe it, our players say
It’s a fully Immersive Role Playing Adventure. We want to take everything we can out of the tabletop experience
and put it in the real world for players to interact with.
We’ve done 2 weekend adventures as a proof of concept. Players went on quests,
disabled traps,
solved real world puzzles,
competed in ability challenges,
completed class-specific side quests,
interacted with actors playing the non-player characters (NPC’s),
and worked together to solve an escape room that took multiple hours.
Still want more info? Check out videos from our first two play tests:
We want to bring Hunters of Avalon to everyone, not just the people that can afford $1000 for a 4 day adventure. With that in mind, we’re offering several registrations at a loss and hoping we make up the difference on the lower tiers. To make the lower tiers worth your time, we’re including in-game rewards you’ll be able to use when we reach our…
We admit, it’s a long way off and we’ll probably need to find outside investment help, but, as long as we’re running a Kickstarter, we might as well tell you our vision for the next 4-5 years. We want to open a retail space and host nightly one-off immersive tabletop sessions (with real puzzles/traps/interactive terrain), and multi-session campaigns that end in one of our mind bending escape rooms.
We have plans to open up a FREE sneak preview to all our backers if we can
That’s right, even if you just back the Wandering Scholar level, we’ll let you come try out our retail experience (which will likely be priced around $200) for FREE! So, smash that share button and tell all your friends about this project!
We understand people may not jump on the bandwagon and a $150,000 goal isn’t realistic for an unproven new gaming concept so we’ve kept our funding goals low and targeted the bare minimum to host one more weekend event in case this project doesn’t go viral. At minimum we’re still trying to give backers the full Hunters of Avalon experience at a discount for supporting us early on.
Every Guild Master reward includes an event pass. Due to logistical challenges there will only be a limited number of registration spots available each year. As a Kickstarter backer, we’ll give you the first chance to register for the events! Registration just means you’re picking the date you will attend and giving us your character details. Don’t worry about the stat part of making a character, we’ll do that for you. You just provide the personal details and backstory. If you back our project and can’t make it this year, your reward never expires, so you can use it the next year OR you can gift it to a friend.
EARLY BIRDS will receive a Discount of up to 50%.
We like to call this one the “Chadwick Reward” – you get all the good stuff without any of that pesky adventuring. In true Chadwick von Drake fashion, we’ll loot all the previous reward tiers for you and start you off with a resurrection scroll because, in his words, “You’ll probably die.” That’s in addition to a personalized leather journal, white glow “Frost” ring from Excalibur Rings, and an inspiration coaster.
Get your loot soon! There are only 50 of this tier available!
We’re designing a hinged, locking dice box, EXCLUSIVELY for Kickstarter backers. It will be themed for the Orc Moot event and won’t be available in any store or in our online shop. We’ll give you 1 customize “Fuck Avalon” D20 (where the 1 is replaced with the word fuck and the 20 is the guild logo). You will also receive a set of metal dice with blue enamel inlays. In-game, you’ll be starting with a Potion of Healing for when you’re able to join us for an event. Every Greenhorn should have one for emergencies. Unless you’re Ghaarl the Clanless. Then you should have 12.
You’ll get your choice of an Elven or Dwarven Dice tower! These are DIY so you can decorate them yourself. We’ll include felt so your dice have a nice, soft, landing. We’ll also start you with 5 more copper coins when you come to an event. That might not sound like much, but considering the semi-private room at the Inn is 1 silver piece AND you’ll have the innkeeper’s favor (from the Wandering Scholar tier) you could get yourself a nicer place to sleep for a night.
This is really unique in that we are letting you add a piece of lore to the game world that will become canon*. While that in itself isn’t unique, it is notable that we are doing it for only $10 and we aren’t placing any huge restrictions on what you can add. Tabletop RPG players are some of the most creative storytellers ever, why not let you create the world and put your mark on it?
In addition to the chance to influence the mythos of Hunters of Avalon, we’re going to give you an in-game reward in case you ever decide to come play! Due to your worldly status as a wandering scholar, the Inn staff at our events will start with a “Friendly” disposition toward you! This means when you negotiate for better room rates (using in game currency because the event is all-inclusive), you’ll have an advantage.
*Obviously anything that violates copyright law, or is illegal in any way, we can’t accept. Outside of that you can make up whatever you want. We will edit it to fit within context. For example, if two people name a historical figure King Reginald we will call one of the King Reginald the First and the other King Reginald the Second, or we’ll make him have a split personality disorder. In any case we will do our best to stay true to your input and only make changes where necessary. We will have guidelines on the lore entry form and anyone who doesn’t follow them may find their bit of lore in a less than ideal place in the game world… but it will all be used.
If we reach a COMBINED total of group members/followers/subscribers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Discord, and YouTube before the end of the Kickstarter, ALL BACKERS will unlock these in-game rewards! Just as a reminder, the event includes room and board, but you use in game coin (earned in quests) to make purchases in the shops and inn. Don’t worry, we always make sure you have enough for the basics, everything else in-game is your choice if you want to upgrade or hoard your coin like the illegitimate offspring of Thorin and Smaug that you are.
Rewards will apply to a character you designate but can be split amongst multiple characters.
All backers will receive these stretch goal rewards:
We’ve got a few more stretch goals we’ll reveal if we hit these, but we don’t want you to miss out on the best one…
J/K… check this out –
You may be thinking this is impossible to pull off. Well, we have good news! We’ve already done it twice with play test groups. It IS very difficult to do, but for this run, we’ll be repurposing one of the play test events and refining it to make it better. That will mitigate any risk of not being able to produce it. In fact, as soon as the Kickstarter is officially funded, we’ll reserve the venue and get to work! With two events under our belt, our team is very experienced in what it takes to provide an immersive experience for 4 days. We have much of the work documented and completed, it’s just a matter of refining it and polishing the end product.
If you’re asking how we came up with the idea… Todd has had this idea knocking around in his head for the last 15 years or so. It just banged around in there looking for something to connect with until he went to Burning Man and saw how much people could do by fabricating in one location and putting it together in another. You see, the biggest barrier was how to create an entire world without the land on which to play. We build the annual event in his garage (and really the rest of his house too), rent a location, then assemble it on site for the players.
Todd has been GMing games for a long time and found that players engage more when presented with real world, tactile, props puzzles and such. Most of the players he knows are incredibly smart and, with the recent surge in escape rooms, he noticed many of them claiming the escape rooms were too easy. “I’ll make one you can’t solve,” he said… stupidly. 2 years and 2 play test events later he still hasn’t managed it, but the players all agree it’s the hardest they’ve ever done.
Many people in the game industry said Hunters of Avalon couldn’t be done at all. So we did it. Twice. The fact is, with some basic understanding of materials, engineering, game theory and programming, Hunters of Avalon is very doable. To be profitable, we’ll need help and support from the gaming community.
You can check out our How to Play on our website!
Check out our FAQ’s for this information. We’ll generally do everything we can to accommodate you. If what you’re looking for isn’t listed in the FAQ’s. Feel free to contact us.
We’ve done our best to show the actual products and merchandise you’ll receive when you back, but, when production starts, there may be slight variations due to production logistics.
Regarding our annual event, we’ve produced two proof of concepts already, so we’re significantly ahead of most kickstarters when it comes to the production of our game elements. We have a large base of experience to draw from and, for the next event, we’re going to refine one of the previous ones to fix things that went wrong and provide a better experience. All things considered, inclement weather is our biggest challenge. But even that is something we overcame at our last playtest. A snowstorm dropped 12 feet of snow on our venue and we successfully found a backup venue, moved everything, and setup in about a week. The only other major hurdle will be recruiting and training NPC’s. We’ve done so successfully for a single weekend but have never attempted to do more than that. We have a wiki for training and a team member dedicated to the task. Many of the previous NPC’s have offered to come back and do it again so that should also mitigate the risks.