The Portal Witch, a Kids RPG Primed by Cortex

The Portal Witch Wants You!

In a world-between-worlds called The Cauldron, the enigmatic but friendly Portal Witch is recruiting kids like you to travel to distant worlds and help out people with problems that they can't fix.  Pick one of her magical costumes—they give you magical powers—and help people find solutions to their problems.  And don't worry, the Portal Witch can whisk you back to safety if things get too scary.  So let's go see some incredible sights, lend a helping hand, and maybe learn a thing or two: it's an adventure!

The Portal Witch is a simple roleplaying game of do-gooder kids exploring fantastic worlds and helping people in need.  The game produces quick, fun stories that wouldn't be out of place in the afternoon cartoons and comic books enjoyed by children the world over.

The game can be played as a one-shot of two to three hours or you can string together a series of worlds in a long-running chronicle.

The Portal Witch is Primed by Cortex and uses a streamlined build of the Cortex Roleplaying Game to deliver gameplay that is about character and choices, not combat rounds and violence.  Game design is optimized for gamers around 8-10 years of age, and the book includes guidance for running the game for children.

The Portal Witch is presently 60 pages long (11,000 words on 5.5x11" pages), although that may change if we hit some of our funding goals.

Instant Gratification: get your Ashcan edition today!

All backers get immediate access to the Kickstarter Ashcan edition of The Portal Witch, a fully-playable, simply-laid-out PDF of the game.  60 pages, illustrated, color and black and white variants.

If you manage to run or play a game using the ashcan, I'd love to hear about it (and if you want to take some pictures you're willing to share, I'd love to post them here).

I'm also always eager for feedback and would love to hear what you think about the ashcan version and how it can be improved for final release.

Costumes of Power Cards

Because characters swap their Costumes of Power from one adventure to the next (and sometimes within the adventure, too), the costumes and their magical powers are presented on cards that are placed on top of each player's character file.  If the circumstances of the story shut down the Costume, the card can just be flipped face down until it's ready to go again.

All reward tiers get access to print-and-play cards for the Portal Witch's wardrobe of magical costumes, and can select the "Add the Cards" add-on to get printed cards (presently planned to fulfill through Drive Thru RPG).  The print-and-play cards are also in the kickstarter ashcan edition, ready to go!

Funding Goals

$500: Funded!  The initial funding goal of The Portal Witch covers all costs already incurred, which is mostly writing time ($275, 2.5 cents per word), stock art for the ashcan ($75), and amortization of the hardware and software used in its creation ($100), plus 10% for kickstarter and payment processing.  This goal essentially funds the ashcan edition.

$1000: Development Editing.  I'm pretty confident that the ashcan edition is clean copy—clear explanations and without too many typos—but beyond copy editing, the fresh eyes of a qualified development editor will point out things that can be improved, expanded, and reshuffled to make better sense.

$1500: Custom Cover and Snazzy Layout.  I've already lined up Evlyn Moreau to make some of her signature art for the game, starting with a great cover at this tier.  Having that cover will then guilt me into sitting in front of Affinity for a few days making the inside of the book as pretty as the outside will be.

$2,000: Bespoke Spot Art.  Listen, I love the cheeky little costumed kids running around the ashcan edition—and honestly they may stick around in whole or in part—but let's see some art made specifically for The Portal Witch, where kids in mismatched costumes confront weird challenges in fantastical worlds.  This is the kind of off-the-wall art that I love commissioning, stuff that can't really fit anywhere else (and therefore can't be found on a stock art website).

$3,000: More Art, More Troubled Worlds!  In addition to more art sprinkled throughout, at this funding threshold I will create four more trouble worlds (and that will be in addition to howevermany Troubled Worlds I make collaborating with backers who picked that Add-On in their tier rewards).  I'd love to see a goodly stack of worlds included so folks can just crack open the book and start playing immediately.

$5,000: Chapter Art.  The ashcan has got a bunch of blank pages in front of each chapter.  This threshold will fill those blank pages will full-page pieces of weird, bespoke art.  The art will also be made available as a digital download to all backers.

$8,000: Wardrobe Upgrade!  The fourteen costumes included in the ashcan will get new art, plus I'll add six more costumes, for a total of twenty costumes available for minions to go gallivanting through the multiverse in!

$10,000: Animal Companions.  This threshold will unlock an expansion of the Animal Companions mod, including six example animals which will appear on both Print&Play and physical cards.

$12,500: Menagerie.  Oh, you liked the Animal Companions?  Have some more!  I'll add a huge mix-and-match list of species distinctions and animal traits and add four more animal companion cards, to boot!

$15,000: Cake. If we hit 3000% funded, I will make myself a cake.  Because—check my reasoning, here—cake is good.  Sadly the mail-carrying professionals of the world tell me that I cannot mail you all cake.  By the time it got to you, the cake would no longer be good.  And that is a tragedy I think we can all agree to avoid.

$25,000: The Troubled Worlds Anthology.  At this absolutely ludicrous funding goal, I'll make so many new Troubled Worlds that they'll need to overflow into their own separate book (ringing in somewhere around 48 pages).  This anthology will be part of the PDF download for all backers and print copies will be made available as an Add-On.

$30,000: Art of Troubled Worlds.  The day that this page says 6000% funded, I will laugh and laugh and laugh and then go commission a whole bunch of righteously weird art depicting kids making fantastical worlds better places for their inhabitants.  The art will go into the Anthology and also be available as a digital download for all backers.

$50,000: Cam Gets Paid!  By the terms of the very generous sublicense that allows me to publish Cortex games, the creator of Cortex—the illustrious and debonair Cam Banks—gets a cut only after my revenue crosses the threshold of $50,000.  So all we have to do is hit 10,000% funding.  Easy peasy, right?  We can do it.  I believe in you! ;)