Indigenous TRPG Coyote & Crow’s first expansion brings an in-universe dice game to life
10 pairs of authors and artists will craft stories to fill the science fantasy alternate Earth.
Coyote & Crow has announced its first official expansion, bringing a slate of fresh stories and adventures to the indigenous-created tabletop RPG. Stories of the Free Lands, which launches a crowdfunding campaign next month, will also deliver standalone dice game Naasii, which is inspired by the fiction world’s futuristic cultures.
Announced earlier today by creator Connor Alexander, Stories of the Free Lands will collect two volumes of authored stories that will act as adventure modules for the Coyote & Crow core RPG. Each will be written by a different indigenous writer and feature illustrations from as many artists. All ten will aim to take adventuring groups through as-yet unexplored part of Cahokia, a large city set in an alternate Earth where colonisation never devastated the peoples of what’s now called the Americas. Instead, those cultures changed, grew and matured on their own and created something wholly new - though not without its own climate-based challenges to overcome.
The collection will be available first through a crowdfunding campaign on Backerkit beginning September 13th. Players will be able to grab the two collections, along with a physical or digital copy of the core book. Coyote & Crow will also offer a facilitator’s screen and custom dice for the RPG’s d12-based system.
Speaking of dice, Alexander and crew also revealed a standalone dice game called Naasii that they will be selling through the Backerkit campaign. Inspired by a game played by the people of Cahokia, Naasii combines elements of push-your-luck style titles with those that have long been a part of indigenous peoples’ histories in the US. He specifically likens it to classic die rollers such as Yahtzee or Kismet but designed further to satisfy those deeper in the tabletop hobby.
“We really wanted this to feel both familiar to families and non-gamers but also evocative of what we're trying to do with Coyote & Crow Games as a company, which is to get folks to think outside of old paradigms,” Alexander said in an email to Dicebreaker. “We wanted to offer something to play around the kitchen table that the whole family could easily jump into as a counterpoint to Coyote & Crow's hefty 472 page RPG book.”
That tie back to the game is an important element of Naasii, which uses the same 12-sided dice as the tabletop RPG (and arguably the best die). Alexander said the team realised most people likely don’t have nine d12s in two different colours just lying around their house (hush, chronic dice collectors - I see your hands) so transforming a set of dice into a light game thematically pulled from their world hit two targets with the same shot.
Naasii’s lightweight box will come with the dice, a scorepad of tear-off sheets and some rules cards for play. Alexander was coy on exactly how the game plays and said more details would be shared when the Backerkit crowdfunding campaign pushes off next month, September 13th. It’s designed by Alexander, illustrated by Wolf Tomoyaketu and developed by Daryl Andrews.
Coyote & Crow’s team managed to pick up a Nebula nomination earlier this year and is in the process of delivering its original Kickstarter books despite global shipping delays that hit huge swaths of the tabletop industry. That said, the books had found plenty of positive press since its 2021 release. Chez Oxendine previewed the RPG for Dicebreaker and called it a “a joyous, respectful celebration of Native American storytelling”. It’s also included on our list of Best Tabletop RPGs for centering the objectively best die in a standard array and moving collaborative storytelling away from tired Western Imperialist tropes.