Seek the Crown
Hi, and welcome to Recusant Crown. Thanks for stopping by.
This project has been quietly growing for seven years. I've built it in the gaps: between shifts at the factory, between errands and chores, between taking care of my wife and kids. It started on spare copy paper and napkins, with Sharpies and whatever pencil was nearby, and it added up a little at a time. Through all of that, it held its shape. Recently I realized I finally had enough material, and with the tools now available to all of us, enough help, to actually finish it.
So here it is.
Where it came from
Like most of my projects, Recusant Crown started as a short comic idea. I wanted to make something inspired by Tetsuya Nomura, Tite Kubo, and other wildly stylish artists. Then it ballooned, the way unfinished projects do, into a sprawling multiverse: a place to tell new stories, show off characters I love, and, most important to me, give new fairy tales somewhere to live.
We live in a world desperate for fairy tales, but most of us pretend we're too old or too jaded for them. I'm not writing silly stories for children. I'm writing faerie tales: stories of humanity against a world of patterns, stories about stories, and the horror of realizing you're trapped inside one that's carrying you far from where you meant to go.
Stories like that need a frame these days. Many of us were never told them, so we don't know how to tell them to our own kids. I hope you'll read a few of these to yours. For the rest of us, jaded adults and teenagers alike, I've wrapped them in young adult action adventure, because no one with a soul can resist it.
What it is
Recusant Crown is a multimedia project: a trading card game at the center, surrounded by short stories, illustrations, anime-style characters, retold public domain tales, and original faerie tales. All of it shares one world, one set of rules, and one dream.
The core idea is that the multiverse is made of dream. Traveling between worlds is called Dreaming, and the card game takes place on a dreamscape.
The board is the dream.
That's the game in four words. Your creatures aren't just your army; they generate the Clarity that powers your plays, so your economy and your board are the same thing. Your Dream Anchors, the top nine cards of your deck, are set out before the game begins, three per lane. Break through your opponent's anchors, and you win.
It's a lane-based game with three lanes, creatures pushing forward, and one action per turn. It plays like a chess match, quiet and deliberate, each move building on the last, until the lanes clash and it erupts into an anime battle.
Underneath, it's about what it takes to create: losing yourself to an ideal, and sacrificing what you like for what you love. Light and darkness aren't good and evil here. They're forces, and the people who wield them are complicated.
The tone is anime with teeth: stylish and fast, with real weight underneath.
Why it's free
I care deeply about open source and the public domain, and I've never liked how tightly copyright locks creative work away. But I'm a working man, and I can't justify making things purely for free. That would cost my family too much.
So I needed a way to make art that's as free as possible, free enough for a community to build around it, without letting a big company swallow it whole, and without begging for donations or chasing investors.
My answer is copyleft multimedia. Everything on this site is free to use, share, and build on. You can make your own things and sell them, including with art from this site. There's one condition: credit your source loud and proud, and keep whatever you make copyleft too. Take what's here, make it yours, and leave the door open for the next person. Recusant Crown is released under CC BY-SA 4.0.
In return, I ask one thing: when cards and merch become available, buy a box. That keeps the lights on, and it keeps me honest, building a game good enough to stay fun for years.
What's next
The card game is in active development, and I'm running private alphas before the end of the year. I'll report back on how they go, along with design notes, new fiction, and whatever else comes up along the way.
Seek the crown. More soon.
— Magi