Rusalka

We changed very little from start to finish because it was already a very polished product in many ways.

Whereas for other smaller projects like Rusalka, which we'll talk about, or Our Queen Crumbles, another game that we worked on.

It was originally a 36-page zine, staple bound zine, but it's a one-shot game that doesn't involve dice, does not involve a lot of writing, has a lot of materials that are just meant to be printed out and could be easily crossover stuff with an erasable pen and then use the material again.

So we turned it into a box set with reusable materials because that made the game more accessible.

But transitioning to happier stuff, I want to hear about Rassalka, and I want to talk about Rassalka because I think that it's sort of the evolution of, like, you started as a publisher, you got into translation, and then this is kind of a combination of the two kinds of work.

So first up, could you just tell us what Rassalka is?

Rusalka is a masterless set of RPGs about spirits from Slavic folk stories.

And so the Rusalka are spirits of a driven woman, but they don't remember anymore who they were.

OK, I believe this is Dvorak.

OK, this is Song to the Moon from Dvorak's opera Rusalka.

And I think originally had sent you a link to actually the Minnesota Opera and Opera Orchestra performing that.

However, we don't have permission to.

And the Minnesota Opera has performed it.

And it is basically the Little Mermaid, the story of the Little Mermaid.

Rusalka is a water sprite, and she wants to become human.

Moon high above in the summer sky He too is watching you shining Speak to his heart

one,

the Rusalka.

Yeah.

And plus I mix it with, I work at the workshop and then I go back home and work a bit there with a smaller canvas because I just want to work on a couple of paintings at one moment of time.

No?

Because that's a really interesting painting as well.

What did you say? It's Rusalka,

yeah? Yeah, yeah, Rusalka.

And the pattern simply doesn't stop.

In the Slavic tradition, the Rusalkas were dangerous water spirits that took the form of women of deadly beauty.

In Japanese legend, the Ningyo was described as a fish woman whose flesh granted immortality to whoever consumed it.

on the coasts of ireland and scotland the selkies could shed their seal skin and walk among humans as beautiful women always drawn back to the sea every continent every ocean every ancient culture arriving at the same figure feminine supernatural tied to deep water dangerous There's a need to stop and ask, seriously, how this is possible.

And John writes that sentence from exile on an island, surrounded on every side by the very sea he announces will one day cease to exist.

If that's true, if the sea carries a meaning that goes back to the corruption before the flood, then its elimination in the new creation would not be a change of geography or of climate.

It would be the final closing of a door that stood open since the days of Noah, since the Watchers, since the Nephilim, since the Sirens, Mamiwata, Atagatis, the Iara, the Rusalkas, the Ningyo, the water spirits of a hundred cultures that never knew one another and still remembered the same thing.

All of it, at last, sealed.

Th- th- these waterfalls, did we establish if my sister [laughs] runs them?

Oh, if, uh, uh, Rusalka, uh, runs them, I am gonna say absolutely not.

Rusalka must be cut off from this region, because lis- if she was here, she would-

She would-

... have drowned these people dead-