Hey everyone! Welcome to the public beta and funding period for Call it in the Ring! This game has been in the works for quite a while, and sitting at 90% completion for months. Now that I finally managed to get this all put together and have something genuinely playable, I wanted to do a quick write-up on the game!

Wrestling is one of the many things that I care about deeply enough to turn it into a podcast. Tag team wrestling doubly so. I have spent a lot of time playing a lot of wrestling RPGs as a result. In my playthroughs, no games quite hit the magic of tag team wrestling in the exact way I was hoping they would. By its nature, tag team wrestling tends to be heavy action focused on one person at a time, so it leaves a lot of open and unused time for the player who isn't the current legal man. I found that to be the most troublesome part of the way tag team is presented as an RPG. I've got ADHD if you tell me to stop paying attention while I'm tagged out, I will probably also tag out of that game mentally. So to counteract that feeling/phenomenon, I came up with the idea that is central to the gameplay loop in CiitR (feel free to pronounce this as sē-tər).

Basically there were two unfilled needs in the typical gameplay loop of a wrestling RPG when it was run as a tag team match.  First, something for the tagged out player to do. Second, someone to take a sort of GM-ish role to play as the other team. Those needs synergize in a way that I was shocked I hadn't encountered before. So I set out writing this game, with mechanics inspired by numerous other cooperative storytelling games. I think the way it came together works really well, and in the single playtest I ran with one of my partners, we found a satisfying loop in a game that did not take too long to work through.

I hope you get the same experience, but even in the event you don't, I still value your feedback on this project tremendously. The whole thing is in a very "early draft" version. I haven't had an editor look at it, the layout is only about 50% complete, and my plans for an audiobook version are still in the works. I'd like to fund this game enough through sales to break even on an editor, narrator, and some other custom doodads. We'll see how interest goes as to whether or not that comes to fruition.

Thanks for reading!
Kathleen Hyslop