The stories are the oldest we have: the wolf in the grandmother's bed, the glass slipper on the stair, the beanstalk into the clouds. This is how the second MORANA set turns them into a card game, using only the public-domain tales and never a single studio's character, and why that rule made the whole set better.
MORANA's launch set, The First Turning, is built on Slavic folklore: Morana herself, the Wardens, the drowned and the deathless. For the second set we wanted a different well, one every player already knows by heart. So The Old Tales reaches into the wider European fairy tale, the Brothers Grimm and Perrault, Andersen and Aesop, and retells the whole shelf of them as spirits, sites and charms.
That sounds simple until you notice the trap in it. The tales everyone pictures are usually not the tales as they were written. They are the films. And a film's version of a character is not free to use.
Here is the line we drew on day one, and it decided the look of all 119 cards: the story is public domain, the studio's design is not.
Grimm published in 1812, Perrault in 1697, Aesop before Rome. Those tales have been out of copyright for lifetimes; anyone may retell Cinderella or Hansel and Gretel or the Tortoise and the Hare. What a modern studio owns is its specific Cinderella: that face, that gown, that palette, that film. Borrow the tale and you are on centuries-old public ground. Borrow the studio's character and you are borrowing something that is very much still owned.
What surprised us is that the rule did not just keep us safe, it made the set better. The pre-Disney tales are stranger, older and a great deal darker, which is exactly the tone MORANA is built for. The original Red Riding Hood ends in a belly; the original Cinderella has doves and severed heels; the sisters in the Six Swans sew shirts from nettles in silence. That is folk-horror, not a sing-along, and it belongs in a game called The Open Grave.
The tales sort naturally into the same faction shape as the first set, so the two play the same but read as different worlds:
Each Warden is a storyteller rather than a hero, sitting face-up all game and bending the tale toward its own moral. The eight Sites are the places where stories turn: the oven, the well, the tower, the thorn-hedge.
The rule is easy to state and hard to hold, because an image generator, left alone, drifts toward the most famous version of anything. Ask plainly for a fairy-tale princess and you will get something that looks like a film still. So every card carries the same discipline, baked into how it is drawn:
Human figures are steered to a dark-haired Slavic-folk look: embroidered linen and wool, a headscarf or a braid, painted in the storybook tradition of Ivan Bilibin, not the gloss of a modern animated feature. The prompt itself forbids the studio words outright.
Then the real safeguard: every single illustration is checked by eye. Anything that drifts toward a recognizable studio face, gown or palette is thrown out and redrawn until it is unmistakably its own thing. The princesses are done last and most carefully, exactly because they are where the pull is strongest.
Wherever a tale let us, we leaned on the object or the creature instead of the person: the glass slipper alone on the steps, the spinning wheel spilling gold, the huffing wolf, the goblin torn in two. An empty slipper carries the whole story and belongs to no one.
The Old Tales is a concept preview, not the set that funds first. We are showing it now, mid-build, because that is what building in public means: not a finished trailer, but the actual work.
You can browse all of them, illustrated or not, in the Old Tales gallery, full rules text and all.
Two reasons. First, it is the same honesty the whole project runs on: no random packs, no blind boosters, and no borrowed characters dressed up as original design. What you back is genuinely made, not assembled from other people's icons.
Second, the constraint is the character of the set. By refusing the film versions we were pushed back to the older, darker, folk-horror originals, which is the exact reason these tales still frighten and delight after three hundred years. If that is the kind of world you want to exist, you can play the First Duel free to feel the game, then join the founders list on the home page to help bring both sets to the table.
The Old Tales is a concept-preview second set for MORANA: The Open Grave, built entirely on public-domain fairy tales; cards, factions and art may change before any campaign. It references no other specific product and uses no studio-owned character designs.