Passion. Friendship. Victory.
All the things you love about sports anime like Free! and Hakyuu!! are at the core of Fight With Spirit, a card-based collaborative tabletop roleplaying game now on Kickstarter. A game of Fight With Spirit will take players through building their characters, connections, and team as well as taking them through the tournament arc of the big game.
Storybrewers Roleplaying is known for their earlier award-winning roleplaying games Good Society: A Jane Austen RPG, Villagesong, and Our Mundane Supernatural Life. We spoke with Game Designer and Graphic Designer Vee Hendro and Game Designer and Lead Writer Hayley Gordon before the Kickstarter campaign launched on September 26.
Feliza Casano: A lot has happened since we last spoke with you in 2019! Tell us a little bit about how Storybrewers Roleplaying has grown over the course of the past two years.
Vee Hendro: It’s certainly been a challenging couple of years for everyone. While 2020 was a tough time to be creative, we were able to keep working on our Littlebox series and recently released the standalone one-shot games Villagesong and Our Mundane Supernatural Life. I’m exceptionally proud of the effort that went into them, and I feel it’s some of the sharpest and tightest design work I’ve done to date.
Hayley Gordon: We also reprinted Good Society after it sold out, and created the Love & Longing deck to add more desires and relationships to the game. I certainly feel like it’s been a very busy few years!
FC: Your next game, Fight With Spirit, looks pretty different from your other tabletop games, including Villagesong, Our Mundane Supernatural Life, and Good Society. How would you say Fight With Spirit is different from other Storybrewers games, and in what ways would you say it’s similar?
VH: We sure do love to make unique systems for each game we do! I’d say the most unique part of Fight With Spirit is the way matches work. We knew from the start it would be challenging: it had to support multiple sports, feel like a sports match, be dramatic, emotional, and work whether players knew lots about the sport or not much at all. After almost two years of tweaking, we settled on a card-based resolution system that ticks all those boxes. Matches are entirely different from what we’ve done before, and I’m really happy with how it turned out!
As for similarities, in many ways Fight With Spirit is built on our learnings from Good Society about how to make a dramatic and feelings-first game experience. It also imports the concept of a cycle of play. However, as you would expect, the phases in Fight With Spirit are very different!
FC: Many Storybrewers games are described as collaborative tabletop roleplaying games. For readers who might not be familiar with that term, can you explain what makes a collaborative tabletop roleplaying game different from other TTRPGs?
HG: I think game designers can mean different things when they use the word “collaborative”. For us, there are two main aspects. Firstly, it means that the players (and the Facilitator if there is one) all have an equal role to play in creating the story. Traditionally in RPGs, the players described the actions of one single character, while the Game Master, or Dungeon Master, invented and described everything else. That idea is becoming more outdated now, and it’s very important to us that every person has an equal chance to invent, and create the story they want!
VH: Every person on the table is an equal and active participant in shaping the story together.
HG: Secondly, when we say our games are “collaborative” we mean they include active tools for collaboration. For example, in different games, resolve tokens, setback tokens, and “planning your day” all play a role in helping players negotiate the story they want to tell.
FC: Tell us a little bit about the inspiration for the game. I’m a huge fan of sports anime, and the concept for the game is so fascinating!
VH: Sports anime is certainly a big and obvious inspiration for the game! But for me personally, whether it’s an old memory of early morning hockey practice or freshly-made ones streaming the Tokyo Olympics with family near and far, gathering together and bonding over sports has always been a big part of my life. It’s nice to be able to share that in a way through this game.
HG: I’ve always loved sports stories, as they are as much about the team and what it means to strive for something together, as they are about the sport themselves. Sports can be a pressure cooker, but they can also be a chance to make a unique connection, and the combination of both those things is amazing story material for an RPG.
The pandemic has caused a lot of changes and delays across industries, and printing & publishing has been especially hard-hit by lockdown conditions. Did the pandemic cause any delays or changes to Fight With Spirit? What is it like to develop a tabletop game during lockdown?
HG: For us, the pandemic hasn’t changed much about the development process, but it certainly has led to a lot of changes in printing and distribution. As I’m sure many folks are aware by now, shipping costs have shot through the roof in the past year, and seem to be continuing to climb. Sadly this makes everything more expensive for publishers to deliver to your door. On the plus side, the pandemic has meant that everyone is very used to playing games online–which is great for us, as we can playtest with people from around the world.
FC: The Kickstarter for Fight With Spirit is running from now through 26 October. Are there any stretch goals you’re super excited to share?
VH: Yes! We’ve initially made this game compatible with synchronous team sports, like volleyball, hockey, or football. However, if we hit our goals, we’re hoping to spend more time developing match games for other forms of sports, such as synchronous individual sports like fencing, and asynchronous sports like ice-skating or even battle of the bands.
HG: A stretch goal I’m really looking forward to is unlocking more playable teams to the game. Teams will be going head to head, with backers voting for the option they want to include in the game. It will be fun to see what teams most capture the imagination!
FC: Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about Fight with Spirit or your other roleplaying games?
VH: Fight With Spirit contains so much stuff to explore! Between the various sports to play, team stories, unique match games and the huge stack of character trait options to choose from, there’s so much there to enjoy for many games to come. Thank you for having us, and if you can, please check out and share our campaign to help us hit those stretch goals.
HG: If you’re new to roleplaying, we create how to play videos for all our games – so you can head to our youtube channel (Storybrewers Roleplaying) and take a look at how the games work before you dive in.
FC: How can our readers keep up with Storybrewers online?
HG: You can back the Fight with Spirit Kickstarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/storybrewers/fight-with-spirit-a-sports-drama-rpg
You can also follow me @storybrewers and Vee @rocketeer_vee , or visit our website is www.storybrewersroleplaying.com and sign up to our newsletter.
Fight With Spirit will be available on Kickstarter until October 26, including a $1 tier for pledge manager access. Digital and physical editions of the game will be available during the campaign, with an estimated delivery date of December 2022.
Check out the video below to learn more about the campaign.
