The Angsty Sequel to Crescent Moon No-One Saw Coming: Exile releases digitally
Sharp blades, cutthroat kinship, and Blood—loads of it—crown the anticipated release of the dark fantasy RPG.
What if you wanted to love the world, but the world didn't love you back? That was the premise under which Ema Acosta set out to write Exile, an expansion to the 2021 feelings-delving Crescent Moon turned standalone game of dark fantasy.
In Exile, the whimsical world of its predecessor gives way to a nightmare land through which the players—a band of outcasts—must claw their way out of by means of sorcery, violence, and overall teenage lamentation.
Touting a card-based system that draws equal inspiration from meaty story-games like Blades in the Dark as it does from lightweight systems like Quest, the digital release includes rules for creating and fighting with your own angst-ridden exile, detailed GM instruction on how to run perilous adventures across the nightmare lands of The Below, plenty of material to infuse the game with, and one starter adventure.
The game follows a phase-like structure of play where you alternate between going on action-packed Delves and setting up Camp. Each location you Delve is, in essence, a bizarre landmark filled with strange characters and deadly obstacles, while Camp is all about the quiet moments of recovery where you reckon with the choices you've made and share scenes of mishap with the other players.
All of this falls within a collaborative framework and approach to worldbuilding that will be familiar to anyone who's played a Forged in the Dark or Powered by the Apocalypse game before, but what sets Exile apart is it's heavy use of printable cards to cover anything from a character's backstory, to the items they wear, to their emotional struggles: A fictional mortar that tethers the game's pieces into a cohesive coming-of-age story.
With the digital edition of Exile now out to the public, a physical release—along with a new edition for the original Crescent Moon featuring a similar ruleset—is set to release in the Summer. Both games' books are still available for pre-order on Backerkit.
