Princess with a Cursed Sword
A downloadable game
A figure stands in an ancient ruin, bare feet on crumbling stone. Her gown far too fine, her sword much too dark. She can not put down the sword until she finds where it came from. So she has come.
PRINCESS WITH A CURSED SWORD is a journaling role-playing game for one player. It requires a tarot deck and can be played in half an hour or more. And it fits on one printed page.
Explore the ruins. Turn over a tarot card and let the game prompts and the card image guide what you find there. Explore stone courts, torchlit dungeons, overgrown gardens and tattered libraries. Play with a different deck for a different adventure.
Face challenges. Throw coins to find out if the princess staggers and stumbles or succeeds with supernatural prowess. Will the princess give her sword what it wants in exchange for its power?
Find the sword's resting place. What is the princess willing to sacrifice to leave the sword behind? Or will the sword offer her something so tempting she cannot rid herself of it?
Chronicle her journey. Write in third person as you play, as though transcribing a fairy tale. Where will the princess' quest lead her, and how will it be remembered?
The princess’ own shadow mocked her, caricaturing her worst aspects. But she had faced far worse ridicule as a poor tailor. She extinguished her torch, and her shadow, and crept forward in the dark.
Designed & written by Anna Anthropy and illustrated by Rayne Klar. Journal photograph by @willnapforbooks.
BONUS MATERIAL: Pay $3 for the game to receive the notes I kept while designing and revising it, including a list of games that inspired Cursed Sword and a terrible variant to play it with.
THE PRINCESS SWORD SERIES: Princess with a Cursed Sword is free, but you can also support it by purchasing my other games that are based on it:
MAKING YOUR OWN GAME: The Princess with a Cursed SRD (System Resource Document) is a free guide to making your own game with the Princess Sword system. Find other games made with this system in this itch collection!
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- SRD now available!Jan 16, 2023
- Now in color!Aug 01, 2022
Comments
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Hi Anna! (Sorry to write this here) Do you have an email I can write to?
Greetings from Galicia!
You can find it on my profile page!
I've spent several months occasionally looking through interviews, various networks, and other things to see if I could find your email, and it was right in front of me the whole time...
Sorry about that, and thank you!
I'll write to you now!
We semi-accidentally started a solo TTRPG book club on the fediverse, and “Princess with a Cursed Sword” was the first game all of us played. It was super super fun to talk about the game and read others’ playthroughs! We had some good conversations with folks about how its mechanics shape the tone of the stories we told. Our own playthrough ended up on the dark end of those we saw, but we had a good time with it.
That's so cool, thanks for letting me know! I feel honoured.
oh btw i'm also on fedi, there's a link on my profile
Hello Anna, I’m Anna too. I’m a psychotherapeut and will let you know that I will use this game with my own young patients. Also, trying to adapt it with a sicilian card deck instead of Tarot. Will defnitely will thankful forever if it works!. Thank you so much
Hello Anthropy,
Thank you again for the game, it was and is a blast to play!I wanted to say thank you for making this wonderful game. The concept on paper seems so simple but it got a lot of writing out of me and had me do some serious retrospection. It was also one of the few games that made me really enjoy coin tosses as a mechanics to further the writing process.
The questions also helped me really get into the head of the princess I was creating. Legit, I was surprised how brief questions gave way to some cool concepts for a princess.
I decided to share my thoughts on the game and the themes via a video review.
thanks for making and sharing this! i'm glad you enjoyed the game. btw, my first name is "anna."
Thank you, I had a blast playing it! And thank you Anna, I was not sure so thanks for letting me know :-D
I was looking forward to play this game as I read some good reviews about it. Today was finally the day and I will definetly play again.
The character creation was something I was looking forward to after reading the game for the first time. The confusing thing for me was how long my entries became for some of the cards. I said to myself to keep it short, but the good thing in playing alone there is only one person to judge you. I liked the tone, especially the advice as if to write a fairy tale. This gave my text a twist which other games do not have.
I did not like the throwing of coins, mainly because somehow I never learned how to properly throw them. I did not want to interupt my run to change to dice, but next time I will find an alternative for it.
The cherry on top was beeing able to read the design notes. Recently I became more interested in how games are designed and it was such a delight to read it after playing it. Thanks for sharing it.
thanks! if you want a dice-based alternative to coins, you can roll six-sided dice and count odd numbers as tails and evens as heads!
You game just opened up to me all the possibilities of using tarot cards in RPGs! And what a wonderful world it is! Might have found a new passion. Ordered the awesome RPG-themed tarot cards. 😄
Which deck did you end up ordering?
What a timely question! The RPG deck, sadly, never got delivered, and I gave up on tarot for a while. About a month ago, though, the passion was revived, and I ordered The Light Seer's Tarot (plus took the intuitive tarot reading course by Astrid on Udemy), and I absolutely love it! The deck even has a web site, so you can check it out. The cards are quite thick and well-made, and the illustrations are beautiful. Even though it tends to display things a bit differently, the symbolism is still very much relatable to the classic Raider-Waite deck.
That is wonderful. I usually only use one deck when I and doing readings for people, but now that I am obsessed with coming up with new ideas for PwaCS games, as well as the Carta-PwaCS hybrid game I am working on each new deck is basically DLC for a new adventure.
I'm loving this game!! Thank you for sharing it with the world! I've been playing it for the past few days. I know it'll be over soon but it's a really fun concept and I appear to be writing a lot.
thank you!! comments like these are so nice to get
Greetings.
I wrote a story based on my play of this game and posted it in a couple of places as a sort of story-within-a-story situation as part of a longer work. Thank you for making this. I had a good time with it.
https://www.tumblr.com/thearchivistsjournal/711720113142956032/day-271?source=sh...
Or
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/504530-the-archivists-journal/chapter/700432/
The draw order of tarot cards was:
Although that last "draw" of Two of Wands was more like accidentally knocking an extra card off the top of the deck and wound up being used for an alternate ending.
Really liked to read through the playthrough of someone else, thanks for sharing it. I also enjoy that you have written which and how many cards you have draw. I think I draw a couple less but felt it might have been more after ending the game.
Hi,
I would like to make you a proposal for a French translation for your games, including Princess with a Cursed Sword.
I sent you a private message on Twitter on November 7th where there are all the details. Since you didn't read it, I'll contact you here to make sure I can reach you.
You can reply on Twitter or on services@laloutreroliste.com
Thank you in advance,
Sincerely,
Christophe Dénouveaux - LA LOUTRE RÔLISTE
https://www.laloutreroliste.com/store/
I really enjoyed my first playthrough of Princess With A Cursed Sword! I've posted the story I wrote with it up on my blog (https://www.fistfulofvalkyries.com/) to share with others.
Thank you for making such a creative and interesting journaling game!
Thanks for posting about the game! I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Really loved this game! The prompts were open/vague enough that I could take the story of my princess anywhere I wanted, and when I couldn't I could look at the image on the tarot card for inspiration as well. I could skip past naming the princess, form a general idea of a personality or let it develop as I wrote, and simply lose myself in the creation process. My princess came to a deathless but tragic fate. Would definitely play again!
Thanks for this! Glad you enjoyed the game!
This was wonderful! I loved how the image of the princess was not only gorgeous decoratiom but also part of the game, so i got to decide why her dress loomed like that or why her feet were bare!
This was my first time playing anything like this and I really enjoyed it. Thank you for making it and for donating it to the Texas trans rights bundle!
I wrote a bit about it (including a link near the bottom to the story I created by playing) here: gemini://gem.billsmugs.com/gemlog/2022-03-24-solo-journalling-rpgs.gmi
(If you don't have a Gemini client, you can read it in a web browser here)
An interesting game to be sure.
As an avid tarot fan, this was such a fun creative exercise! It helped me flex my improv muscles after being in a bit of a rut.
I wanted more games I could play with my tarot cards (I have too many).
This game is intruiging and helped me see that's its really possible to make narrative games like these. Thank you for inspiring me through this
I'm glad you're enjoying it!
wow i luv your work !
Thank you!!
What is the tarot deck featured in the picture?
Lisa Sterle's Modern Witch Tarot!