Tangled Blessings:
Echoes of Lost Electives

Pitch

Released in the summer of 2023, Tangled Blessings captured fans of horror and dark academia with its easy approach to roleplay and evocative writing. Tangled Blessings: Echoes of Lost Electives expands on the lore and world of the original game, adding more than double the content of the base game. The expansion allows for even more diverse stories that that span epic encounters at the magical school setting.

To bring the digital expansions to print in one bundle, Echoes of Lost Electives is coming to Backerkit September 3, 2024 and will run for three weeks.

Description

Created as a companion book to the original Tangled Blessings gamebook, Echoes of Lost Electives adds nearly 150 new prompts to the tarot-powered roleplaying game. Themed around a cursed school built for the magically inclined, the base Tangled Blessings game guided players through four years of classes with three open-ended outcomes.

Echoes adds Winter Break activities centered around the Rival, 16 new horrifying descriptive endings, and 14 new prompts for each of the existing five houses in the base game. Some of these expansions have had a a digital release only. Tucked within Echoes pages are additional extras like roll tables, new houses to join, and contradicting origins of the academy’s founding.

Playable as either a solo journaling game or a two-player tabletop roleplaying game, Echoes of Lost Electives takes the original inspiration of ghost stories and the author’s time at graduate school to deliver a cunningly dark experience that challenges players to get the best grade… or else.

The originalTangled Blessings game is based on the ENnie-nominated Anamnesis system by Samantha Leigh and released after a successful Zine Month 2023 crowdfunding campaign on Crowdfundr. In Tangled Blessings, players first draw from the Tarot deck to discover who of 22 possible Rivals will shadow their time at the academy. In two-player games, players rival each other, working together to unravel their shared and complicated history at the academy shrouded in darkness.

Features

Tangled Blessings: Echoes of Lost Electives is a new supplemental gamebook that will include… 

• The Winter Break Expansion
• Twisted Endings: 16 terrible and dark endings for Tangled Blessings
• House expansion 
• Two new houses
• Unannounced expansion
• (secrets)

Guest Writers

To add new voices to Echoes of Lost Electives, 10 writers were invited to give their take on the universe. Each writer took an existing house and wrote 7 prompts inspired by the house’s themes for either a student’s first two years or their last two years.

House of Dahlias

1-2: Candace McAfee (they/she)

3-4: Kyle Tam (she/they)

House of Panthers

1-2: Rori Montford (she/her)

3-4: J Strautman (they/them)

House of Celestials

1-2: Samantha Leigh (she/they)

3-4: gothHoblin (she/her)

House of Elementals

1-2: Sebastian Yūe (they/them)

3-4: Kendrick/Kendo (they/he)

House of Spires

1-2 Seb Pines (they/them)

3-4: S. Kaiya J. (she/her)

Kendrick stayed on to contribute an additional seven prompts to the new House of None, and Candace stayed on to contribute another seven prompts to House of Divines.

Media

For more information, art assets, or to schedule an interview with game creator Cassi Mothwin, email cassi@mothwin.com. To stay up to date on the project, subscribe to the mailing list here.

Free preview available on Itch: https://cassi-mothwin.itch.io/tangled-blessings-preview

About Cassi Mothwin

Cassi Mothwin is an award-winning indie tabletop RPG designer, illustrator, and writer. When it comes to her games, she’s most interested setting up emotional columns and seeing how players knock them down or use them as foundation. When she’s not reading or playing tabletop roleplaying games, she can be found playing Beat Saber or petting her cats.

Website: https://cassimothwin.com/ 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CountessCassi 

Itch: https://cassi-mothwin.itch.io/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsJ5pmY0ww4uA2_mUiAAHdQ