The Story of Anesidora

Alfheim by Siba Gasse

Anesidora is a tabletop role playing game where a game master describes and makes choices for a world and the characters in it, while a group of players each portray a hero and their followers within the world. During the game, the success of actions and moments of conflict are resolved with die rolls based on the difficulty of the action and the character’s skills. The goal is to use communal storytelling and random chance to experience adventure, exciting moments, and character development.

Anesidora started with wanting to try something new with friends after decades of Dungeons and Dragons. I created a game called Winter for my gaming group to play together about a world trapped in endless winter where people worshiped crashed ships as gods. I used pools of 12 sided dice to determine success and failure. Over time, the setting of Winter grew from only Greek mythology to a variety of influences, and we created dice with symbols based on the mythology that inspired the setting. We named the game after the planet and one of the two major religions in the setting, Anesidora.

We played the game with more people and eventually decided to try making it available to a larger audience. This meant expanding on the setting and playtesting the rules. Our first set of minis we collected from other games for play tests and to take to conventions were painted by Nox Berf. Unfortunately, this was all in early 2020.

Thanks to Covid, we weren’t able to attend conventions as planned and had to rethink our production process. During this time, we learned about a new technology called Siocast, which is a system intended for small batches of miniatures. We experimented with 3D printing prototypes and decided to produce our own miniatures.

Even though Covid caused the process to take longer than we had hoped, I think the game is better because of it. We also have art from some great artists and painted custom miniatures to showcase. We can finally bring this game to the world!

I’m excited to share Anesidora with you. Over the next few weeks, I will be posting about Anesidora each Thursday to talk in detail about the game. If you want to stay up to date and learn more, you can follow Hard Sand on Facebook and Instagram, sign up on our Kickstarter page, or check here each Thursday!