A Question of Dragons - a Cold Case Mystery set in 999AD

STRETCH GOAL ACTIVATED

On hitting £40k - all backers who've pledged for the Kickstarter Edition and above - will get a unique "Question of Dragons" dragon pin badge.  These HAVE NOT been manufactured - as we won't be making them unless we hit our stretch, so I've had the firm mock up what they'd look like.  (Ai will have been used for this - so don't shoot us for that!)

Please do share the project with friends and lets see if we can hit our stretch goal!  (Last year's project finished around £35k - so we've created a realistic stretch.  If you want the pin - share the project with friends!)

Do you love solving murder mysteries?

Do you love dragons?

Do you love ciphers?

Do you love Celtic design?

Then welcome to A Question of Dragons.  Because this project hits all your buttons!

THE FACTS:

At the turn of the first millennium, dragon sightings surged all across Europe.  And, in much the same way UFO sightings are reviewed by investigators in the 21st Century, the church was quietly dispatching trained investigators to separate the fact from fiction and to determine which reports were true. 

THE FICTION:

A dragon has been reported near the small hamlet of Ashmere.  Sheep and maidens are missing, and the nearby caves show signs of fire and scattered bones. 

 Reeve Hereward has written to Chester to appeal for dragon slayers, claiming the menace is  affecting his ability to collect taxes.

Living at the edge of Ashmere is a monk, known as Brother Osric, who has been working on biblical illuminations (the illustrated pictures and detailed capital letters that accompany the text).  He was welcomed by the hamlet and has grown close to several of the residents.  But when his home is consumed by fire, the locals are too frightened to approach.  This leaves Prior Leofsige with the grim responsibility of investigating his death.  

Is a dragon responsible, or is the reality far more serious?

Who can he trust in Ashmere to tell him the full story?    

YOUR ROLE:

You have been hired by the Vatican to help them make a determination as to whether Brother Osric of Ashmere, England, deserves to be awarded a sainthood. To do this you must sift through the remains of a much earlier investigation led by Prior Leofsige in 999AD who had been dispatched from the nearest Abbey to investigate reports of dragons in the area. 

Now you've been sent his notes, review the evidence, decrypt the marginalia and decide what really happened to Brother Osric.  Was he murdered, or the victim of the dragon?

WHAT'S IN THE BOX:

• Cover letter
• 1 letter from Osric to the Abbot
• 6 Letters from Leofsige to the Abbot
• 26+ Illuminations (lettering illustrations designed by the team at Karakanaka with other supplementary illustrations and knotwork by Jo Smedley).
• Map of Ashmere
• Modern Forensic report obtained on the contents of the reliquary that was obtained by the Vatican.

Kickstarter Exclusive also includes:

• The Reliquary itself!  Containing a tooth (it's acrylic we haven't robbed a grave or anything), hair and some rosary beads. 
• Wooden Alberti Cipher Wheel.
• A replica coin.

WHAT IS A NARRATIVE CASE FILE?

A narrative case file experience is a murder mystery cold case that provides you with all the evidence needed to solve the crime in a way that's clue and evidence based, while giving you enough of a narrative story via the artefacts enclosed that you feel part of the history.

We love history here at Cosykiller and all our cases are based in real world facts, with a good smattering of fiction wound in.  Our Cosykiller cases also include relevant ciphers for the period (though we've stretched it a little with this one as the Alberti Cipher was actually 400 years later... though it was used by monks.)

Jo (author) has several published books, and loves creative writing and world building.  She immerses herself in her character's lives while writing, and spent some time in Lindesfarne earlier this year to get a good feel for the period and the artwork. 

REWARDS AND ADD ONS

A QUESTION OF DRAGONS

The most obvious one is just the actual box!  But there are two options here.  The Kickstarter Exclusive which contains all the extras, and the regular box that will be available after Kickstarter concludes.  Both are the same game.  So it just depends if you want the extras.  

The regular game has a card cipher wheel rather than a wooden one and NO reliquary.

DELUXE BOXED BUNDLE

• Grab the Kickstarter Exclusive box with the Reliquary and wooden cipher wheel.
• Obtain digital copies of all the dragon lettering so you can use them for personal use at home on projects.
• Get a Lasercut Box to house your game.  ( If you'd rather have this as a DIY self-assembly kit you can include this as an add on instead - it will be $12 cheaper self assembly but you will need to provide your own glue and tools.)  

CELTIC BUNDLE

• Grab the Kickstarter Exclusive box with the Reliquary.
• Obtain digital copies of all the dragon lettering so you can use them for personal use at home on projects.
• Get some Celtic Knot Wooden Coasters to place your drinks on while you solve the case.

DELUXE BOX AND CELTIC BUNDLE

• Grab the Kickstarter Exclusive box with the Reliquary and cipher wheel.
• Obtain digital copies of all the dragon lettering so you can use them for personal use at home on projects.
• Get some Celtic Knot Wooden Coasters to place your drinks on while you solve the case.
• And the Lasercut Wooden Box to house your game.

ADD ONS

You can choose from a variety of add ons at the back of this project.

We have board games, books, Cosykiller series, and Puzzle boxes.  I won't detail it all here, but if you haven't played anything before, grab a copy on this project and catch up with fellow sleuths and play the rest!

There are also some digital rewards lurking at the back which have no shipping costs and can be delivered as soon as the project is funded.

And don't forget - if you love a bit of DIY you can pick up a copy of the deluxe book box to make at home, and additional self-assembly copies too if you wanted to house other games you already own.

SHIPPING

In recent years there's been a move by many Kickstarters to separate Kickstarter rewards from shipping and charging separately afterwards in a pledge manager.

We don't do this.  What you pay is what you pay.  We back a lot of Kickstarters ourselves and all of us groan or swear loudly when the pledge manager hits and we find our recently backed game has just cost us DOUBLE.  WE HATE THAT.  And we know you must feel the same.  So...

We charge shipping during the pledge process so you aren't surprised by additional costs 2-3 months after the Kickstarter funds.  Sometimes this means we haven't charged enough shipping.  We take the hit when that happens.  And trust me it has... our "how to write murder mystery games" book ended up costing twice what we expected on postage and NO ONE was charged any additional shipping fees, even though we ended up basically giving the books away!!

Outside the UK it's a fixed fee for shipping which you pay for when you pledge, so the costs are all above board.  The shipping costs are in no way close to what the actual costs are in shipping.  This is because we know Kickstarter can't separate out VAT properly when it goes outside the UK and because Tax and Shipping get complicated and all "timey-wimey-wibbly-wobbly".  So, as most people are unable to claim tax back as individuals, it's far simpler to just give an inclusive price.  

So for UK residents, Tax is rolled into the UK sales, for overseas sales where you don't pay tax, we've adjusted the shipping fees so they are lower than we are charged by the post office to account for the differential in price.  

We will value items at "cost price" for customs invoices keeping import duties low. (This is because the courier's don't ever reimburse us for the true value if the item goes missing in transit so there is no point billing the full cost on import invoice either. )

If you live overseas and you need an invoice breaking out the actual real honest to goodness shipping charges from the item fees - let us know.  We can create invoices.

EUROPE - we are aware there are issues with European shipments currently.  We have a work around.  So don't worry.  The boxes should reach you.   

WHO ARE WE?

Cosykiller is the casefile brand of Red Herring Games.  We are award winning game creators who have been making murder mystery games for more than 18 years.  

We've been to the UK Games Expo three years on the bounce now (had imposter syndrome for years - but finally found our tribe!)  Jo lost her voice entirely this year and so Joseph had to do all the explanations while Jo just pointed at things and smiled. 

We have over 150 original games and are trusted by thousands of customers internationally to deliver exceptional experiences.

Cosykiller launched on Kickstarter in 2017 and we have taken every new story to Kickstarter since then - with a string of successful campaigns and fulfilments. 

We love designing games that others enjoy playing and spent a lot of time on the narrative world building, setting the stories in the real world (and sometimes when timelines permit - overlapping characters!).

This is our second "Single box" story.  The first was Shadows in the Gallery and for all those who've played that one - you'll know Jo REALLY struggles to get a big narrative story into a single box...

Shadows in the gallery is available in a bundle and as an add on at the back.

We have phased out all but two of our popular 12 episode series Casefile mysteries (Cosykiller used to be an annual subscription but the price of postage made us stop that!!)  We kept the two best loved stories active, and you can pick up Inheritance of Murder, and The Secret of Site Q as add ons to the project, as well as all of Joseph's puzzle boxes and our latest Board Game.

WHERE DID THIS COME FROM?

Jo has loved the artwork from the book of Kells and Celtic knot designs ever since she first encountered them as a teenager.  Living in Orkney it's very difficult to avoid Viking knotwork and she's been using it in crafting projects for many years.  Her love of dragons on the other hand has been there as long as she can remember.  She even decorated her nursery with dragon murals ahead of their first child being born.  But she's picky.  Dragons should have four legs not two otherwise they're wyvern.  A totally different thing in her mind.  Wyrms of course have no legs.  You'll see all three in this project!

There were a few different ideas in the mix for this year's Cosykiller release, from the Pundits of India, to a sequel to Hidden Listener - one of our best loved annual stories - but in the end the Dragons won out.  So we hope you enjoy the theme!

As well as writing the game Jo has also worked on the graphic design components, creating sketches and illustrations for the game components as well as learning how to animate for the Kickstarter video - which owes a lot of gratitude to Brooke in the office who came on board a year ago now to help us with social media and has become invaluable for video editing! 

To help with the graphics on this project (as the lettering was going to be key) we also hired in Karakana studios to assist us.  Karakana are a team of experienced and professional graphic designers based in Indonesia. They have been working as a team since 2010 and have successfully completed numerous projects across various design styles.    

Together we have taken some liberties, as dragons are not natural bed fellows with Celtic art, but we've done our best to ensure the knotwork is accurate ("You've gone over two cords here" is probably a phrase the team at Karakana never want to hear again!!) 

Equally - we wanted to include a new cipher - so the Alberti cipher, while used by Monks, didn't actually start getting used until the 14th century... so we're a bit ahead of our time.  I'm sure our keen cipher solvers won't mind though!

Production and fulfilment

The artwork and story are by and large completed, what's left is assembling the two together and getting it ready for the printers who need things created in a specific way.

After that it's hitting "go" on the print run, and "go" with our supplier in Germany who is creating the reliquary teeth for us, the supplier in Poland who are making the boxes, and our small crafter who is making the coasters for us.  Then it's the longer job of packing it all which we still do by hand in the office with the entire office team running in shifts.

Last year Shadows was out in time for Christmas, and we have every expectation we'll manage it with this one as well, because while the Kickstarter is running slightly later in the year - the project itself is further forward this year than it was last year when much of the design work still had to be done!