FissureVerse – Five Cards Get Art

Thanks to Helen Norcott & Dreamgazer for the art!

Click to see the lonely vistas up close.

I see a running theme today: all of the cards have at least one person in them, but they all look quite lonely and bleak.

Excursion was a card I've had a hard time finding art for; I've had it as a 'maybe' for dozens of pieces of art so far, but none have ever quite captured what I was going for. Finally, I got a piece that works out well. The initial flavor text was “If you wander, they will follow,” which was a bit of a play on “If you build it, they will come,” but I guess after my last post and having Wanderlust in it, I'm all wandered out. I went for no flavor text on this one because I like the silence of the image alone.

Trail of Emptiness keeps its old flavor text. For a long time, I wanted to keep the great plains look of the placeholder art, with its lone buffalo and half-cloud-covered sky, because Emptiness is very much meant to be a take on Native Americans. But sometimes it's a little too on-the-nose, and this should be fairly sci-fi/fantasy, after all. So I think this new art keeps with the theme of the game far more, and gives off the proper vibe.

I love how Yellow Fields and Green Pastures are so similar in composition, with a lone figure towards the top left, and sweeping plains following; yet the flavor text says the very opposite of both cards. Yellow Fields is an even playing field, while Green Pastures is very unfair, because it's one man by the rock and an army coming for him. I think these two cards really show how Solidity and The Infinite think.

Romantic, but chilling.

I like how Wedding follows suit with the locations, being bleak and lonely, despite a wedding being a happy occasion. Wedding is unique in that it's the only Rogation that allows the required number of Crusaders in the Field of Play to be split between all Players. I did this partly for the sake of balance (why would you prevent Crusading if you had four Crusaders yourself?), and partly for thematic reasons: the wedding itself could take place between two members of different factions, or the witnesses could be from different factions. I also kinda like how the Rogation is “Lasting”. So sappy!

I've also edited the instructions a little, to clarify the rules a little be more, and I've reduced the term “Field of Play” to just “Field”. The newest version of the instructions can be found on the FissureVerse Google Drive.  I also went through and fixed a few cards that said "Field of Play" on them to be consistent.