Your Will Be Done

by Charlie Plaine, Director of First Edition

28th September 2020

In early 2019, the community participated in Will of the Collective VI, a community-driven card design process. At the end of the day, you made Yarnek and Examine Morality, two cards which are finally seeing print in A Private Little War. These two cards were slotted for Project Londo for some production reasons that aren't very interesting, and there weren't any plans to do more Excalbian content. But your ideas inspired the expansion's design team as well, and today I'd like to talk to you about some of the cards from "The Savage Curtain" you'll find when A Private Little War releases on October 16th, 2020.

The easy decision was adding all of the other characters from that story. If you aren't familiar with "The Savage Curtain," Kirk and Spock beam down to Excalbia and are forced to participate in a battle between "Good" and "Evil." Our heroes join Team Good with re-creations of Abraham Lincoln and Surak. They're matched up against re-creations of some very evil people from across the galaxy: Colonel Green, Kahless, Genghis Khan, and Zora. They are forced to fight to demonstrate which philosophy is superior, on pain of the Enterprise's destruction. With Yarnek (the "game master") and the planet already locked-in to A Private Little War, that made the rest of the re-creations easy inclusions.

An obvious question to the initial designers was if these opposing teams should have opposing Nemesis icons. Nemesis icons are the sideways teardrop shaped icons with colored dots in the center, and they indicate foes that will annihilate each other on contact - Kirk vs. Khan, Data vs. Lore, and the Cravic and the Pralor. The initial designers - James Monsebroten (Orbin), Daniel Matteson (OKCoyote), Michael Moskop (comicbookhero), and Matt Zinno (commdecker) - decided against adding a new Nemesis icons. So for most of development none of the Excalbian teams carried no nemesis icons. But if you've peeked at today's spoilers for Excalbian Lincoln and Excalbian Green, you'll notice they do have new, opposed nemesis icons.

The new nemesis icon was born out of work on the card that became The Savage Curtain. This card was designed to tie the different cards together and give them a bit of an engine. We were having a lot of trouble groups the two teams together; after all, " Honor personnel with 'Excalbia' is lore" was a lot to process each and every time you wanted to reference a member of Team Good. As we kept working on the card, we discussed changing our mind and adding a new nemesis icon; after a quick consultation with Art, we decided to go ahead with new icons for Team Good and Team Evil. After all, these are pretty much the definition of opposing philosophies the nemesis relationship is meant to capture.

And speaking of The Savage Curtain, this is a cool little card that seeds (or plays) on Examine Morality, the mission you guys created. Because we didn't feel we could make a new Kirk or a new Spock that would compare with the existing versions, we used The Savage Curtain to grant them (no matter who played them) - the "Team Good" nemesis icon. Green and Lincoln both name Excalbia in lore, allowing them to be grabbed with Preserver Obelisk, but none of the others do; to make it easier to assemble your team, you can replace a card draw with a download to hand. And finally, you get rewarded for solving the mission - with card draws if you use Geology, with Honorable personnel if you're on Team Good, and with Treacherous personnel if you're on Team Evil

We hope you enjoy these cards, and all of the Excalbian personnel you inspired. And if you missed Will of the Collective last year, don't worry - it will be back in November to give you the chance to design a new card that will appear in a future expansion!

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