Telling superhero stories is easy, right? Just come up with a name, some powers, a personal hook or two, and you're good to go!

Sure. But what about twelve issues in? Or fifty? Or two hundred issues, three alternate timelines, one death-and-rebirth, and a handful of holiday specials which may or may not be canon? How easy is it THEN?

See Issue X is a narrative RPG about superheroes, where the more you play the more backstory your character accumulates and the more stuff keeps coming back to haunt them.

When the grey aliens threaten the Earth, that's one thing. When they kidnap Aunt Harriet's dog, that's... a little odd, but you can sell it. When they bring the hero back from the grave because of their shared love of board games, you know you're working with high-grade, top-quality cape comic nonsense.

See Issue X can be played as a solo journalling game or as part of a group where everyone has their own character. Even better, you can play solo, take your character to join a group for a team-up event, then go back to playing them solo -- or knock out a few solo adventures between regular group sessions as part of your own continuity!

In See Issue X every player character is represented by a small set of cards taken from a larger deck. As you follow story prompts from one of the game's arcs, you'll mark up some cards with key powers, people, places, and themes, and shuffle them back into the deck. Then on your next arc those themes will come back in a different combination, creating a form of cyclical storytelling where familiar elements keep bubbling back to the surface even as details change. Your character will acquire their own rogue's gallery, their own recurring allies and annoyances, and their own set of important locations.

And then you'll pull a strange hand and have to work out why the demons of Hell are trying to destroy the housing co-operative where your cousin's girlfriend lives.

You will need the game pdf, a regular deck of playing cards you don't mind defacing (or 52 blank index cards), and a good pen for defacing playing cards with. If you don't want to deface playing cards you can use a normal deck, card sleeves, and scrap paper. Or you can use the macro-enabled Excel file bundled with the pdf (which I created because I'm a huge nerd) and whatever computer-based writing tools you like.

If you want to see what the game looks like in action:

Big Gay Nerds recorded a couple of arcs filling out the backstory of Scarlet Macaw here and here.
I wrote a six-arc playthrough using an early version of the game: Flood's story is here.
I also did a couple of arcs as Twitter threads with a little more explanation of how the game works here and here.

See Issue X is a complete game with 19 arcs and a helper spreadsheet in case you don't want to write on actual playing cards -- which, to be fair, can be a little tricky, especially with face cards. When this campaign finishes everyone who backed will get a pdf link straight away. (Well, maybe within a few days. As soon as the money clears and I can get a backer report.)

What See Issue X does not have, is interior art.

I would like it to have interior art.

The funds from this campaign are going to go mostly towards paying Matt (who did the cover art you can see elsewhere on this page) to draw some interior pieces to make the game that much prettier. The rest is going to me, to cover the effort I put in writing, designing, putting together the helper spreadsheet, doing layout, and similar.

I'd like to be able to produce print copies of See Issue X so I'm going to take advantage of Gamefound's built-in pledge manager to handle physical copies of the game. Once I know what print versions are going to look like -- and more importantly, what they're going to weigh -- I can add them to the pledge manager and you can make your own choices about whether you want to pay for one.