Shadows of Esteren - A Medieval Horror RPG: Down the River

🏅 Awards

The most internationally awarded French RPG, Shadows of Esteren has been recognized several times at the ENNIE Awards at Gen Con Indianapolis:

🎖️ Best Production Values, Best Art, and Product of the Year (2013)
🎖️ Best Cartography (2016)
🎖️ Best Accessories for our 4th album, Adeliane (2022)

🌹 An Introduction to the Shadows

Shadows of Esteren is a roleplaying game rooted in tragedy, designed to offer intense and emotional experiences at the table.

We are a creative studio, and our vocation is to nurture human connections. We believe tabletop roleplaying is one of the most modern and relevant media for creating those bonds, by expressing and sharing emotions in a safe and welcoming space.

Esteren emphasizes emotions, deep storytelling, and roleplay. The system is narrative-driven, lightweight, and serves the story; aspects such as combat are secondary. The core rulebook dedicates two-thirds to the setting and one-third to the system. Combat mechanics, covered in three pages, are simple and lethal, while Character creation and mental health chapters are among the most developed.

The line is structured around numerous ready-to-play scenarios, and the Dearg campaign, spanning two volumes and over 500 pages, stands at the heart of this first cycle.

Discover Book 0 - Prologue, which includes everything needed to play, and the core rulebook in Pay What You Want format here. If you like what you see, this campaign is the perfect time to dive in.

📺 Esteren Videos: Tutorials, Reviews & Actual Plays

Are you discovering Esteren through this crowdfunding campaign? Would you like to learn a little more about this world? You can watch these videos, including excellent tutorials from Cynernation Uncensored, a deep dive review from Dwarven Tavern and a great Actual Play on the LadyHollow channel.

🌹 Discover Esteren and get started

We are celebrating 15 years of journeys through the misty lands of Tri-Kazel, and for the occasion we are offering several highly advantageous rewards in limited quantities. Most items from this first cycle will not be reprinted or are already unavailable in stores, making this the best opportunity to obtain them.

If you are discovering Esteren, reward tiers marked with 🌹 are for you. Direct links to these tiers:

• 🌹🦊 Access to private sales ($10): choose your rewards or options after the campaign during the Pledge Manager phase. This tier grants access to private sales, with anniversary discounts and limited offers.
• 🌹📚 Tri-Kazel Library ($210): discover 10 publications that shaped the first 15 years of the cycle: 6 core RPG books totaling 1,100 pages of content, plus 4 additional works: the artbook Dark Romanticism, the gamebook Side Path, the novella Haunted House, and the comic Yldiane.
• 🌹👑 Esteren Saga ($350): a complete collection including everything available in the range, all additional publications, music albums, accessories, and boxed sets, totaling over 40 items valued at more than $1000.

🖤 Down the River and other new releases

To celebrate the end of this first cycle, we are offering several dedicated reward tiers. These new releases are marked with 🖤.

This anniversary campaign introduces a new sourcebook, following The Monastery of Tuath, The Black Moon Handbook, and Occultism. You will also discover a new collection of canvas expanding the Tales of Tri-Kazel series, our fifth music album Down the River, and the first visual novel set in Esteren, following Adeliane’s story.

📘 Manifesto for a New Magience

Like The Black Moon Handbook, dedicated to hauntings and ghosts, a book that Characters could acquire during their adventures, the Manifesto for a New Magience is the work of the Aonadh, a clandestine faction based in Reizh and opposed to traditional magientist lodges.

This 70-page hardcover sourcebook, available in three different covers (one standard cover and two collector covers), is focusing on Magience and includes:

• Lore and game aids about Magience, as well as the tense situation between the people of Bald-Ruoch and the Crown of Reizh
• A presentation of the Aonadh, the first workers’ union of Bald-Ruoch, seeking to raise awareness of the excesses of Magience and the harsh working conditions in the Nòd. The faction is divided between two leaders with opposing visions: Laouénàn, the pacifist spokesperson, and Yarkov, an idealist who believes sabotage and violence are the only way to be heard
• An entry point into the Nòd district of Bald-Ruoch, especially the factory targeted by Yarkov and his followers
• A canvas by Taylor White titled “Strike!”, designed to shake up your player Characters
• New Figures of Tri-Kazel, new artifacts, and dark rumors to enrich your adventures

This sourcebook is also an ideal companion to the Dearg campaign, offering new perspectives on the Ethics arc and the Character Finn.

📙 Tales of Tri-Kazel: Shriveling

This 30-page softcover book contains four new scenarios:

• Craosachd, an insatiable hunger, by Audrey “Louthane” Moreau, will lead the Characters to the rescue of a village whose inhabitants uphold ancestral beliefs and rather strange customs.
• A Magientist's Folly, by Gary Loveridge, confronting Characters with the worst consequences of Magience’s attempts to do good. What will become of Izold, a young woman under influence, burdened by secrets and suspected of witchcraft?
• The Dancers of Saint-Eiriàn, by Ariane Linden, taking Characters to a gwidrite city struck by a mysterious affliction inspired by historical dancing plagues.
• A lonely Path, by James Auwaerter, leading Characters along a haunted trail filled with hostile spirits and deadly ambushes.

🎵 Down the River, the album

This fifth album, composed by François Rousselot, focuses on Adeliane and her inner journey, symbolized by the black river she sees in her dreams. A piano and a string quartet create an ambient, neoclassical style reminiscent of Max Richter or Philip Glass. It complements the previous album, Adeliane, forming an immersive diptych.

Down the River consists of three main parts (Coir, Down the River and Adeliane), each expanding on key pieces from the previous album, with four movements where instruments take turns. Unlike the previous album, there is no singing; it represents Adeliane’s silent, solitary inner journey as she follows the river further, searching for answers and an escape from her endless sorrow, even at the risk of losing herself.

🎮 Down the River, the visual novel

“Experience one of Dearg’s key arcs in a new way: follow Adeliane into the depths of her inner journey, in an intimate narrative experience carried by a haunting original soundtrack.”

Down the River is a visual novel in the pure tradition of the genre: across several scenes, you play as Adeliane and interact with key characters from her story. The game will be available on PC and will be available on Steam.

🧩 Esteren "Finn" Puzzle (500 pcs)

Since last year, we have been producing a series of puzzles for our different universes. This campaign introduces the first one for Esteren.

Play the new album, settle in, and let your mind wander as you assemble one of the key illustrations from the Dearg saga, created by Gawain, an iconic illustrator of Shadows of Esteren.

Here is the art of the puzzle:

🖤 Collector Pack Reward Tier

This reward allows you to acquire the Aonadh box set, printed exclusively for this campaign.

In addition to the Manifesto for a New Magience, available in standard or numbered black collector's edition, and a copy of Shriveling, you will receive a set of four crystal dice representing the four Flux colors: blue, red, green, and yellow. The box also includes a 500-piece puzzle of Finn depicting the Ethics arc, along with a reference poster.

This reward also grants access to the bonuses unlocked during the campaign, which will further enrich this box set.

👕 Zipper hoodie and T-shirt 15th anniversary

💎 Exclusive items

Some of the books and accessories we offer are Kickstarter exclusives. These are products offered:

• during this crowdfunding campaign, and possibly, depending on remaining stock, during other crowdfunding campaigns or Pledge Managers;
• at conventions;
• through retail stores that backed the campaign.

Exclusive items will not be available through regular distribution channels. In this campaign, the Limited and Kickstarter editions of the books, as well as the T-shirt and hoodies, are exclusives.

🐦‍⬛ About Dearg

If you missed it, this campaign also allows you to order the collector's edition of Dearg Vol. 2 as an add-on, including a booklet with around fifty game aids and maps, the Dearg tarot, the Dearg Saga campaign book, and a collector's box.

Dearg is the dark heart and essence of Shadows of Esteren, demonstrating what this roleplaying game aims to achieve.

Its themes include love, grief, ethics, death, but also beauty and hope. This campaign focuses on drama, was designed for strong emotions and aimed at a mature audience.

• How do you survive your greatest love?
• How far would you go for your family, your clan?
• What would you be willing to sacrifice to complete your quest?

Dive into the secrets of Esteren

Dearg, especially Vol. 2, marks both the end of one cycle and the beginning of another focused on the secrets of the universe.

One of Dearg’s goals is to reveal some of Esteren’s mysteries. Experiencing these revelations and surviving them is part of the original intent, initiated in the narrator’s diary in the core rulebook.

But even if you survive, who will believe your characters? Was it only a nightmare? The idea is to evoke a Lovecraftian experience: sensing unknown forces at work without ever gaining a clear understanding of them.

Across two full seasons and more than 20 scenarios, Dearg brings Characters closer to the darkest secrets while confronting them with their inner demons. The main objective is to place player characters at the center of the story and use their personal arcs as dramatic drivers. To achieve this, Dearg introduces unique mechanics, including two types of scenarios: Focus and Modular Scenarios.

🎧 The Music of Esteren

Esteren is a transmedia project in which music plays a central role. Our label has produced four albums since 2011, available on Bandcamp.

Thanks to community support, we have worked with talented artists, the Hungarian Symphony Orchestra, and performed concerts in France, England, and Germany.

This campaign will fund the final production stages of our fifth album, Down the River. Composition and recording are complete; remaining steps include mastering. If successful, we hope to release CD and vinyl editions of Down the River.

🎨 The Art of Esteren

The visual identity of Shadows of Esteren has always been essential. Here are several key illustrations from our publications.

🎁 Stretch Goals

Crowdfunding allows us to bring to life a project that could never have existed otherwise. As a spearhead of transmedia RPGs, Esteren began in 2011 with its first album release, and today its universe expands across many different media. Esteren is a project carried by an incredible community.

Beyond simply sustaining our studio, every Kickstarter campaign allows us to improve the project, fund retreats, and thank our backers with many rewards. To unlock them, we need to reach specific milestones. Together, we can do it!

📆 Delivery Schedule

This Kickstarter campaign will help fund the printing of the new books and the new album.

The PDFs will be sent out in autumn 2026, and physical rewards are expected to be delivered in spring 2027.

Before backing this project, please bear in mind that you are taking part in a crowdfunding campaign, and that this is not a standard purchase from an online store. Our project is currently in development and may experience delays. The visuals shown on this page may be subject to change, and the announced schedule is always an estimate. Please know that our team is fully committed to bringing this project to life and delivering the best possible result. In return for these risks, our backers benefit from preferential prices and exclusive bonuses.

⚠️ If you don't want to run the risk of waiting for your rewards, please do not back this project. You can instead wait for the public release, scheduled after all backers have been delivered. Thank you very much for your understanding and kindness!

🏪 Retailers

Do you want to stock our product? Contact us :)

📦 VAT, Shipping, and Customs

⚠️ Please read carefully before backing this project :)

VAT and Customs Regulations

VAT rates depend on each country's local laws and regulations. VAT will be collected during the Pledge Manager phase. Any customs taxes will be presented to you by the carrier upon delivery.

🇺🇸 USA

• No extra taxes will be collected.
• All US orders will be shipped from within the US, so no customs fees will apply.

🇪🇺 EU

• In accordance with EU regulations, all rewards will be taxed at the reduced VAT rate applicable for books in each country.
• All non-book add-ons will be taxed at the regular VAT rate, depending on the country.
• All EU orders will be shipped from France, so no customs fees will be applicable.

🇬🇧 UK

• All books, box set, and PDF rewards will benefit from the zero-rated reduced VAT for books in the UK.
• All other rewards and add-ons will be taxed at the regular 20% VAT rate.
• All UK orders will be shipped from within the country, so no customs fees will be applicable.

Rest of the world

• All orders outside of the zones mentioned above will be delivered from our French hub.
• No extra taxes will be collected during the Pledge Manager.
• Import taxes and duties may be applied depending on your local customs regulations at delivery. Unfortunately, we don't have any way of predicting these charges.

Shipping fees

This project offers friendly shipping for the US, United Kingdom, and EU.

Physical rewards will be sent from our US, UK, and French delivery hubs. If you live in one of these countries, you won’t have to pay additional customs fees or duties upon the arrival of your pledge, and you will pay much lower shipping fees.

The exact amount will depend on the weight of your parcel. Unlocked stretch goals and your choice of carrier may increase shipping costs. Here are the estimated costs for shipping the two new books:

• USA : $16
• EU : $20-$30
• UK :  $15
• Australia/Canada: $35
• Rest of the world: $40-$90

During the Pledge Manager phase, you will be able to enter your shipping address and add extra books or options to your pledge, subject to availability. This is also where your PDFs will be accessible.

🇬🇧 🇫🇷 This project is available in English and French. You will choose the language of your rewards during the Pledge Manager phase. Check out the French page on Ulule.

👬 The Team

Studio Agate is a creative studio specializing in imaginary worlds. We publish the internationally most-awarded French roleplaying games, including Shadows of Esteren, Draconis, Fateforge, Tainted Grail and 7th Sea.

This project is directed by Nelyhann and coordinated by Ariane Linden. The music for the new album is composed by François Rousselot.

⚖️ Legal

Shadows of Esteren is published by Studio Agate. Copyright: The illustrations, texts and logo are registered trademarks of Studio Agate. All contents are protected by the World Intellectual Property Organization and the laws on Intellectual Property.

Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork presented herein is prohibited without the express written consent of Studio Agate.

Since 2010, our productions have been created by humans. By supporting this project, you are supporting original creation. Thank you!