You’ve got old blood in your veins.
Sorcerer-King. Witch-Queen.
Royal Blood is a tabletop roleplaying game about heists, tarot cards, magic, fate and desperation. It uses a deck of tarot cards to build characters, plan a heist and determine opposition, and to resolve every risky action the players make in an attempt to claim power.
Players take on the roles of Royals, desperate modern-day magicians with wizard blood left over from the time of sorcerer-kings and witch-queens. Each court card in the deck comes with its own player character concept, such as the cruel mask-cutting Queen of Swords, the wild and impetuous Princess of Wands, or the unsettlingly calm Knight of Pentacles.
They’re going to take down one of the major arcana, or the Arcane. The Arcane were once human just like the player characters, but vast power and long centuries have twisted them weird and iconic. Death starts revolutions, the Hanged Man builds border walls, the Sun sells serotonin supplements and the Magus installs spyware on company laptops.
If you want to steal the power from a demigod you’ll have to be clever about it. You can’t go in all guns blazing: Royal Blood deals in heists. Using a spread of tarot cards, you’ll determine what stands in the way of the player characters and what they can subvert to their own ends. No preparation is required, and you can go from zero to game in about half an hour.
Then it’s a simple matter of stealing power from the most dangerous people in the world – but they’re old, and complacent, and set in their ways. They’ve been in charge for too long.
Time to get to work.
Revised and expanded, Royal Blood has doubled in size since its original publication in 2016. Now 172 pages long and beautifully illustrated by Silvia De Stefanis, Royal Blood includes:
- A whole rules-light, diceless TTRPG where outcomes are decided by the turn of tarot cards
- Full rules for creating a Royal, one of the half-human, half-magic protagonists
- Rules and advice for generating a magic heist through the medium of a tarot spread
If you’re familiar with the original Royal Blood, look out for:
- Expanded Royal abilities: more options, more evocative, more detailed
- New Royals: the Stranger of each suit, an outsider who warps and inverts their royal family’s powers
- Alternative heist setups, based on different spreads
- Guidance for interpreting tarot cards
- More detail on turning each of the Major Arcana not only into Marks for the heist but also into obstacles and opponents.
- Expanded rules, including rules for playing Jokers (which we’ve added to our tarot deck, because we can)
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Alternative settings to transpose Royal Blood’s action into different places and genres
You will need a deck of tarot cards and a handful of coins to play.
Hardcover
