That's All, Folks!
3 months ago
– Tue, Aug 11, 2026 at 08:01:08 AM
It feels like only yesterday that we launched the campaign, but time waits for no one and here we are at the end of our funding period.
We've come a long way, and we even managed to squeak in one final stretch goal before the end, meaning that the Time Capsule upgrades are locked in. You can expect gorgeous printed liners and greyboard on all physical Time Capsules.
Other than that, all that’s left for me to say is a heartfelt thank you from myself, Adrian, and everyone else at RRD. We couldn’t make this game a reality without you. We’ll be in touch soon with details on the pledge manager, but for now, we’re all off to take a well earned rest.
Stay curious!
- Elaine & The RRD Team
Words from the Fire
3 months ago
– Mon, Aug 10, 2026 at 07:15:00 AM
We're entering the final 24 hours of the campaign, but that doesn't mean we're tired of talking about the game! Minærva recently sat down with Adrian in the RRD discord server to talk about Children of Time and this project. After lots of requests for notes on what we spoke about, Minærva has kindly penned some of the main takeaways.
Words from the Fire
One of the best parts of working on a licensed IP is working with the creators of my favorite stories, talking with them about their writing process and story goals, and working out how to make a game that tells stories in their style. That’s why I celebrate every opportunity I have to sit down with Adrian Tchaikovsky and chat about this game.
I had one such opportunity a couple of weeks ago, in our fireside chat in the RRD discord where Adrian and I sat down to answer community submitted questions about the game and the wider Children of Time universe. We made the decision to keep the discussion a transient thing and not record it, but there were still some fun moments I wanted to share with you!
How do you turn an animal into a society?
Adrian’s main advice was to look at the animal’s senses – how do they perceive the world? That’ll give you an initial hook to get inside their mind. Sometimes that’ll be more restrictive than Homo sapiens – for example, the Portiid spiders ‘hear’ and ‘speak’ by sensing vibrations through their feet. On the other hand, sometimes they’ll be far more expansive. For example, blue whales can send messages across vast distances with their songs – how would non-technological access to mass communication affect the development of society? Finally, he recommended not stressing too much about how accurate to real biology you are – after all, these creatures are infected with the uplift virus, which is working in its mysterious ways to make the creature increasingly more humanlike.
As for me, I suggested thinking about the life history of the animal. How are they born? What do their family units look like? How do the generations interact, and how does that change with age? And: once the animals start developing things like tools, medicine, and housing, which of those things will they try to change?
I also mentioned creature size to think about. Think about the calorie needs and structural support a brain big enough to support human-like cognition requires. Do you make your creature bigger than they were before, or do you do something weird with their cognition – having them split brain functions between different individuals, acting as a swarm, and so on.
This flowed into a question about how to thread the needle between providing enough tools, support, and detail to create interesting uplifted creatures, without it being too complex/overwhelming. I mentioned how our creature creation process is more about defining the social issues that arise from the creature’s biology, and the traits that set individuals apart from the herd. Go to the Planet Focus in design blog 2 to learn more!
Will we play the game once it’s done?
For my part, the answer’s a hearty yes! I love playing my games; the main issue I face is getting someone else to run them so I can try out the player experience, and thankfully that’s not an issue here. Perhaps you see now the logic behind some of my machinations. Muahaha, etc.
Adrian was interested too – not in terms of finding new ideas for books, but just to enjoy the collective world building experience. He did express a worry that he’d need to find some way of stepping back and avoiding controlling the flow too much, though. In discussion, I suggested he could maybe claim the Historian role full-time, simply relating how the group’s actions will be remembered. Waving that away as too much work, he instead suggested he might set up a group and then not play with them, instead sitting in the room listening in from behind a screen!
Why pick Pangolins as the new uplifted species?
This is a pretty common question we get! The first answer is: why not? They’re extremely interesting creatures, but you can find fascinating traits for every animal on Earth with sufficient wiki-diving. We picked pangolins as a pretty off-the-cuff thing, and found ourselves quickly drawn into speculating about their society and adaptations. That’s one of the times when we really felt the gameplay of this RPG clicking into place – we kept finding ourselves simply playing the game even as we made decisions about the production of the book!
As for our core reasons for these particular creatures:
- Elaine talked about how most of the creatures the Children of Time novels have depicted have been hunters of some kind – the book’s jumping spiders, octopi, corvids, stomatopods are all drawn to hunt, to search, to attack. And so, the extremely defensive nature of Earth pangolins – their strategy of ‘curl up and hope the threat goes away’ – made for a fun contrast. Especially when scaled up to a societal level.
- Adrian talked about how he found himself jumping deep into speculation as soon as we mentioned the idea. For example: pangolins have no jaw or vocal capabilities, so how would they talk? Answer: belly gurgles and scents, with resulting difficulties talking in wide open spaces. Where does their dexterity come from? Answer: their extremely long tongue, anchored all the way back in their hips, which they use for painting and drawing. How do their anteating behaviours change their society? Answer: they’d make underground ant farms, cultivate different ant vintages, use ants for computing like the Portiid spiders do, even use ants to convey scent-messages over long distances.
- Finally, I mentioned how I’ve been a fan of pangolins since studying them in my zoology degree. First, they’re very charming – they always look slightly apologetic in an extremely cute way. Next, they’re very strange mammals, with hair follicles turned into scales, weird jaws, and very little research performed on them. They’re also endangered, which was important to me: I wanted the iconic uplift in our books to be an animal who would benefit from the attention. If you want to know more about how you can help the conservation of these strange creatures, check out the Pangolin Conservation and Research Foundation.
What inspired the Nodan organism?
Spoilers for Children of Ruin follow!
In Children of Ruin, the characters encounter a fungus-like alien creature they term the Nodan organism (as it was discovered on the planet Nod). This creature acts like an assimilating force, infecting individuals and absorbing them – body and mind – into its mass collective consciousness, and drives much of that book’s plot.
It’s a pretty out-there concept, especially as Nodal characters turn up in later books! Adrian gave a surprising answer about their inspirations: he’d been reading up on split-brain surgery, where the connections of the two hemispheres of the brain are severed. As he read about the things the corpus callosum does for us by connecting the hemispheres, he had the thought: what if an invasive creature took up that space instead? By passing messages between the two halves, it’d be able to learn everything there is to know about the individual it’s infected. And it’d be able to modify the signals it passed on, controlling the host’s perceptions and behaviour without them even noticing. A great concept for a horror story – and in standard Children of Time fashion, a really interesting perspective to see the world through once the creature had learned not to just eat everyone it meets!
That’s all for now.
Stay weird and keep evolving!
Minærva
£120,000 Stretch Goal Unlocked: The Plague Content Pack
3 months ago
– Sun, Aug 09, 2026 at 01:18:47 AM
Stretch Goal Unlocked: The Plague Content Pack
We’re entering the final few days of the campaign, but that doesn’t mean we’re done with our stretch goals. Now that we’ve hit £120,000 funding, we’ve unlocked the next expansion for the corebook set. This time we’re adding content to the Your Planet book, focusing on the theme of 'The Plague', featuring a new social cohort and a dramatic crisis to bring to your tables. What happens when a strange and alien disease spreads through the planet's population? How do the infected find a new place in society in the generations to come?
Next up at £140,000 we’ll have the opportunity to upgrade the Time Capsule box set with a gorgeous printed liner featuring additional reference materials, and reinforced greyboard to make it even more durable.
As we progress, we’ve also revealed our £160,00 stretch goal! If we hit this goal, we'll add another expansion of new content to the Your Ship book, focusing on the theme of ‘Ships in the Night’ and featuring a new social cohort and a dramatic crisis to bring to your tables. The ark picks up a signal from another astral body – human-made, but unknown to them. How do they make contact, and how does contact with another refugee from Earth change the stakes?
With the final days upon us, let’s see how far our little ark ship can get!
Stay curious,
Elaine
