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Games Geek / Technical

Do You Have $9 to Kickstart Bhaloidam?

Corvus Elrod of Semionaut’s Notebook fame is doing something big: he’s pursuing his dream.

Corvus has done more involving story and play than anyone else I know. He has a wealth of knowledge about games, story, play, and community. He’s worked for decades exploring various aspects of “participatory storytelling,” and he talks about the meaning of game mechanics in his Notebook, among other topics. On his old blog, he hosted the Bloggers of the Round Table, which always had fascinating, thoughtful posts on all sorts of topics related to games. Every time I interact with him, I feel privileged because I always come away with a new idea or thought.

So it is with pleasure that I ask you to pledge to fund his current project, Bhaloidam.

What is Bhaloidam? It’s an open and accessible storytelling platform, but Corvus can explain it better than I can in this short video:

I could say it is like a powerful yet intuitive Dungeons and Dragons, but it is much more than a role-playing game system, and I would be doing Corvus a disservice.

Bhaloidam is the expression of my belief in the power of story and play and my belief in the importance of our communities.

If you want to see Bhaloidam in action and get a feel for it yourself, you can schedule an online game play demo.

The Kickstarter project is, at the time of this writing, 60% funded, but there’s only a week left to get the remaining 40%. Do you have $9 to pledge?

Bhaloidam is the culmination of all my creative, philosophical, spiritual, and intellectual, personal, and professional pursuits. It allows me to be an actor, a cartoonist, a computer animator, a writer, a director, a web designer, a storyteller, and while it doesn’t allow me to be an architect, the application of mathematics to creative expression scratches what I imagine is much the same itch.

So, Bhaloidam (both as a storytelling platform and a philosophy) is it for me. I am Bhaloidam. Along the way I’m sure to design more games (In fact, I’ve three in the works), but it’s Bhaloidam that lies at the heart of my career. It’s Bhaloidam that reflects not only who I am, but who I have been and who I want to be.

You can read more at the official Bhaloidam site. With a $9 pledge, you can help make Bhaloidam happen, and you’ll get an electronic copy of the 72-page, full-color, comic-format Bhaloidam handbook. For $9 more, you’ll get a printed copy.

There are also many other options available at different perk levels. For $45, for example, you’ll get the “skein pack”, which includes 1 printed copy of the Bhaloidam handbook, 4 Lifewheels, set of 360 tokens, 4 timing track pawns, and a set of 3 custom dice. You can also choose to give it to a friend as a gift.

So I’d like to ask you to do two things:

  1. Pledge at least $9 to fund Bhaloidam. There are 12 different perk levels, from the basic ebook to the $900 “Storyteller Special.”
  2. Tell at least one other person about Bhaloidam. Send them to the Bhaloidam site, tell them about the Bhaloidam Kickstarter project, and invite them to the online game play demos Corvus is hosting.

Let’s get Bhaloidam completely funded!