Twilight Sword Available For All On Pre-Order

For those who missed out on The Twilight Sword crowdfunding campaign, the game is now available for pre-order from Free League.

Inspired by classic video games including The Legend of Zelda, Dragon Quest, and Wonder Boy in Monster Land, as well as the animated films of Studio Ghibli, Twilight Sword sends players to the Lands of Radia as Champions chosen to fight an evil Scourge, push back Despair, and bring Hope back to the world.

In promoting the game and their partnership with its designers at Two Little Mice, Free League has produced a great little summary of what Twilight Sword is all about:

In Twilight Sword, players awaken in an unfamiliar world where the Spirits have chosen them to become Champions. To save Radia, they must explore the land, fight the forces of the Scourge, and restore Hope to a world consumed by Despair.

The game uses an original system called CAT (Created at Twilight), built around a simple roll-under d12 mechanic. When faced with a challenge, players choose an Ability and roll a single d12. Rolling equal to or below that Ability succeeds, with 1 always a critical success and 12 always a critical failure.

Champions choose from five Kin and six Ways, which shape their abilities and approach to adventure. Players can combine up to two Ways, mixing different fighting styles and abilities to customize their character.

And yes, one of the playable Kin is a penguin.

Up for pre-order on Free Leagues' site are the core rulebook, Lands of Radia (covering the default setting, with some additional Kin and Ways etc), the starter set (which includes everything needed to start playing, with basic rules, the introductory Twilight Island mini-campaign, dice, pre-made Champions, cards, and tokens), and the card chest (which contains more than 250 cards featuring monsters, bosses, maps, weapons, Kin, feats, and spells).

Twilight Sword starter set

FLY YOUR GEEK FLAG HIGH AS TODAY IS OUR NINETEENTH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY!!!

The only sensible way to settle domestic discussions

Not only is May the 25th (the original) Star Wars Day Towel Day (in recognition of Douglas Adams and Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy), and The Glorious 25th of May for Terry Pratchett fans, but it also happens to be our nineteenth wedding anniversary!

Rachel and I were married in a Star Wars-themed wedding... on the anniversary of the day the original film made its debut in 1977.

The commercial hubbub around May The 4th as Star Wars Day grows every year, especially since the arrival of Disney Plus, and I'm not adverse to any excuse to celebrate all things Star Wars, but, ultimately, I'm an old school, orthodox, Jedi who will always mark May 25 as his Star Wars Day.

Rachel and I tied the knot at Salomons in Southborough (between Tunbridge Wells and Tonbridge), where I made sure all the guests' tables were named after planets from the Star Wars Universe.

Rachel's arrival music was the Imperial March (still her personalised ringtone on my phone... which always makes me giggle when she calls), and Darth Vader was our ring-bearer.

It was such an amazing day.

And the adventure continues... thanks to the love of my incredibly tolerant and understanding wife.

The Force is strong in Rachel, she supports most of my geeky whims and copes incredibly with the dramatic swings of my unpredictably variable physical and mental health.

Always by my side (metaphorically), she's definitely the best co-pilot since Chewbacca.

Nineteenth anniversaries are usually associated with "bronze", so I could have, for example, asked for something to do with Bronze Age gaming miniatures (yayyyy, Ancient Greeks!) or my favourite footballer, Lucy Bronze, but, as ever, our gifts to each other were an even more eccentric mix of our own hobbies and interests.

I got Rachel a collection of miniature weights (that really have some weight to them!) for her current dolls house project (a modern property), while she got me The Legend of Zelda Encyclopaedia.

Not that I play video games, but I thought this mighty tome would be a useful reference for the Twilight Sword RPG campaign I'm thinking about.

And it's a thing of beauty: so much information, so much world building. Perfect inspiration, no matter what fantasy campaign idea I finally settle on.

It's also weird to think - not that it's important because we both love our presents - that those tiny weights (and their stand) cost around the same price as my fully-illustrated, hardback, 325-page book!

Happy Anniversary To Us

TWILIGHT SWORD: One Of 2026's Most Anticipated Games

Two Little Mice's Twilight Sword has ranked tenth in EN World's recent annual community vote to find the most eagerly-awaited games of the coming year.

The Italian games company is also responsible for the Outgunned range of action film roleplaying games, of which the Tuesday Knights are currently playing the pulp iteration Outgunned Adventures.

However, Twilight Sword is a game system I have a financial interest in, having backed its crowdsourcing campaign almost entirely on vibes.

To be honest very little has been revealed about the game, besides the fact that the original games engine (the Created at Twilight system) revolves around a central mechanic involving a 1d12 "roll under" check.

During the fundraising campaign, the designers shared glimpses of  monsters, character sheets, and gaming sub-systems - all of which seemed to optimise simplicity and gorgeous design.

There's a gorgeous, free introductory PDF as well, which is primarily about evoking the desired atmosphere of Twilight Sword with a broad overview of the rules mechanics, setting and the role of player-characters (Champions) in overcoming Despair and bringing Hope back to the conquered lands of Radia.

While this alone might not have been enough to lure me in, my experience with Outgunned told me these people know how to design games, so I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt.

At the end of last year I was toying with some ideas for an anime-inspired fantasy setting for my next campaign - having realised that I work best as a gamesmaster when running a fantasy campaign - and was looking at Break!! and Twilight Sword.

Both are beautifully-designed games, but while Break!! feels akin with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (or even Third Edition), Twilight Sword is giving off more BECMI or B/X "vibes" with its seeming simplicity. This better suits where I am at the moment with my approach to gaming and desire to run something where the rules aren't tripping everyone up every other round.

The EN World post points out that Twilight Sword "is inspired by classic video games like The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy", which makes my interest slightly perverse as I've only played Zelda once and have never played Final Fantasy. I'm just not a video gamer, but I find the worlds and mythologies created for these games fascinating.

I also love the fact that Twilight Sword is set on a world - seemingly - without humans, instead elf-like creatures are the dominant species along with anthropomorphic animals (you know I'll be bringing the ducks) and other fantastical races.

This is a million miles away from the human-centric fantasy world I have been pushing in recent years and I'm more than okay with that. I've definitely loosened up my ideas what makes a dynamic roleplaying game setting in the last 12 months or so... thanks, in large, part to watching a lot of Dungeons & Dragons-inspired anime.

Twilight Sword isn't released until the middle of 2026 (at the earliest), so that's when I'll be making my final decision on whether this is the new system I bring to the Tuesday Knights. But I'm very optimistic that this is a shoo-in.

I have a collection of ideas, names, atmospheric suggestions etc stored as notes on my phone for my, as yet undefined, Twilight Sword campaign but I won't know how applicable they are until more information about the game and its setting (the lands of Radia) comes out.

That also means I probably won't be talking much about Twilight Sword - as it is largely a mystery - either here or "in real life" until closer to the actual time it's likely to be in my hands.