Pillars of Eternity Tabletop RPG and Card Game to be Announced Soon

In a new interview on PC Gamer, Obsidian Entertainment CEO Feargus Urquhart tackles a variety of questions about the success of Pillars of Eternity, and this leads him to reveal their plans to announce a tabletop RPG and card game based on the crowd-funded franchise in the near future.  Looking forward to hearing more about them:

It feels traditionally that roleplaying games are the ones who end up pushing boundaries on questions of morality. In Eternity, a lot of the moral decisions, there seems to a lot of ambiguity. They’re very gray and murky and it’s hard to tell what’s right and wrong. There doesn’t seem to really be any clear answers. Was that a particular goal of yours?

It’s important to us, and Chris Avellone did a great job of this in Alpha Protocol, of… you’re making choices. Are they right? Are they wrong? But more importantly, you’re making choices that are reinforcing how you’re playing the game and you’re being rewarded either way. Rewarded is maybe the wrong word. You’re being successful either way. I think, prior to Alpha Protocol in particular, there was a lot of roleplaying games, probably games in general, there was sort of the good way and the bad people way. And the good way, you walk grandma across the street, and the bad way, you… throw her across it, I don’t know.

The thing being that, particularly, the bad way was always like you were kind of playing a psychopath. So, when we started focusing on more on, well, you can be a psychopath, but more importantly you just have different ways of accomplishing things in the game, and the game lets you, and it’s not like this is a bad way of doing it and this is a good way of doing it. This is just a way. And when you compound a lot of decisions like that, have the game… I don’t want to say mold, that’s not the right way to put it, but it lets [the players] truly make choices about how their character is expressed within the world. And that’s why. So, when they’re more gray, and they’re not dead-end decisions, then I think players more and more get to really play the kind of character they really want.

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Do you have any plans for an Eternity tabletop RPG or anything like that? I mean, you created this new world and all this new lore, do you see that expanding out to other media?

Absolutely. So, actually one of the things we’re going to announce very soon, I don’t even know if I talked about it. Not in the latest backer update but the next backer update, we’re definitely going to talk about how we’re going to be Kickstarting… not us, but another group is going to be Kickstarting a Pillars of Eternity card game. This isn’t like a CCG or anything like that, but it’s more just a fun, kind of, four people get around and play a single session card game. You have heros, and you have a village, and all that kind of stuff, and you can take your heroes into a dungeon, and you can also take your heroes and armies and attack your friends while they’re playing, so it’s kind a very fun card game and it’s actually designed by Chris Taylor. Not… there’s two Chris Taylors. [Laughs] It’s Chris Taylor, a friend of mine for many many years who was the lead designer of Fallout.

So, that’s the first thing we’re really looking at, and also, absolutely on the tabletop roleplaying. We’re not sure yet how we’re going to do it, we were kind of going back and forth on, do we use the game’s rules, do we use someone else’s rules, do we come up with another set of rules? And it’s something we’re going to be talking [about] soon. But absolutely, we want to expand. New books, roleplaying, all that kind of stuff.