Grail NFT: Written & Visual Storytelling Where You Can Choose Your Own Adventure

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The Grail NFT Project

Grail is a written & visual storytelling project that involves a unique community voting mechanism inspired by “choose your own adventure” books and Arthurian legends. 

Minting a Grail NFT gives the buyer 1 of 10 random tarot card style character art pieces (with varying rarities) that can be used as a profile picture, but the art is only the beginning! 

As a Grail token holder, you have access to a serialised story and will be able to vote on the main character’s next decision each week, whilst enjoying the beautiful accompanying art from our lead artist Daniella Doodles and our 15+ guest creators.

There are 3,500 Grail NFTs and will only ever be 3,500 Grail NFTs.

Is this a PFP project, or is it more like a game?

Grail is a multimedia story that is heavily driven by the community. It is a PFP project in one sense (the art for the Grail NFTs can be used effectively as PFPs) but it is more of an art project than a game project. 

The community voting mechanic is less like playing a video game and more an act of shared creation. 

The weekly multimedia chapter releases combine story written by our writer with beautiful and expressive art inspired by Grail, contributed by our guest artists. 

What is the gameplay (if any)?
Each week we release a chapter of the story including accompanying art, accessible to holders only. 

At the end of the chapter there is a decision point – the main character must decide their next course of action. The community vote on what the main character’s decision will be.

What is the storyline?

Grail is heavily inspired by Arthurian legend and follows a doomed knight, named “Red”, as he journeys to the kingdom of Camelot. 

Tasked with carrying a vital message to an ageing King Arthur, he must contend with magic, heroes of old, and his family’s own cursed history, as he makes his way through a land  that is reeling in the face of an unspeakable catastrophe. 

How do users create their own story?

Users do not individually create their own stories but instead read our story written by our project writer (Liesel) and then vote as a collective at the end of every weekly chapter on the protagonist’s next critical decision.

The vote outcome will then decide the course of the story. 

This means that Grail is a living story in which the form of the narrative (essentially a struggle for control between the writer, Liesel, and the community), parallels one of the central themes of the story itself, the battle for control between kingdoms and people, and individual choices versus fate. 

Why the name The Grail NFT? what does it mean? 

Grail is a direct reference to Arthurian legend and the “holy grail”, immediately evoking the sense of a vital quest.

It also has a double meaning and is a slight pun on the term “grail NFT” commonly used in the NFT space to refer to the best projects available. 

Is a whitelist? How can people take part now? 

There is no whitelist – anyone can mint grail tokens on our website grailnft.xyz or buy on objkt’s secondary market (though floor price is comparable to mint price as I write this… people love their Grail NFTs!).

Right now people can mint a Grail NFT and can immediately read and vote on our prologue, featured on our website.

We have allowed anyone to access the prologue on our website grailnft.xyz, but once we launch our main story starting 01 April, only Grail holders will be able to read the weekly chapters.

Right now Grail holders can vote on the question at the end of the prologue – the answer the community votes for will become canon in our story and will affect the future of Grail, as well as effectively retrospectively changing the genre of the prologue! 

Could you introduce the team members, where you are based and how you know each

ArtAttacked is the project manager and lives with his fiance, Liesel, the project’s lead writer, in London.

They met studying English at university where they bonded over the medieval texts they studied, including early versions of the Arthurian legends that inspired Grail.

Daniella Doodles is a South-African artist who has been releasing on Super Rare since 2018 and was featured on Nifty Gateway as part of Future Art’s drop, in 2021.

ArtAttacked & Liesel were originally collectors of her work and reached out when putting together the Grail team. As a book-lover herself, Grail immediately grabbed her attention.

Heck, the project developer, is lead engineer for South-America’s largest mobility company. He has nearly two decades’ experience as a software engineer and has recently started working on tezos projects.

The team found him via a Tezos-focused Discord.

Finally, our pantheon of guest artists have all been hand-picked by members of the team. Many of them are known to the team already, but we also approach many of them out of the blue, when we see a particularly inspiring piece that makes us think “wow, this person would be great for Grail!” 

We often deliberately choose artists whose work seems to be an odd match for Grail. This is because we want to produce as many interesting and unique responses to Grail as possible, to push the project to it’s creative limits and create a truly unforgettable experience for holders. 

Do you have any past examples of the artists work? 

Plenty – Daniella has been releasing on Super Rare since 2018 and was featured on Nifty Gateway in 2021. We particularly love her “planets” series. 

Why did you choose Tezos for this project? 

We originally planned to release on Ethereum, but the gas prices were an issue. We also loved the tezos ecosystem/community and thought it would cater better to a project with a more “artistic” and experimental focus like Grail. 

The reduced eco-impact is a nice benefit too. 

ArtAttacked and Liesel have also been collecting on tezos for some time now and are passionate about the chain. 

How is the Grail NFT Project created (graphic tools etc)? 

Daniella primarily draws on iPad using a neon linework style, her signature look. 

Our writer, Liesel, has an overall picture for the various paths the story could take and branches the community can take. As decisions are made she then responds and writes up the full chapter each week, taking into account the decisions made by the community. 

Our guest artists are sent chapters in advance and asked to produce a work inspired by the chapter. They are in complete creative control beyond that point.  

Are you working with any other Tezos teams? 

We do run a lot of collaborations with other projects, including our Twitter “mini adventures” that we run for like-minded projects we are passionate about. 

Most recently we ran a mini storytelling twitter-based game with Vessels, another project inspired by Arthurian mythology, which led to the creation of a fantastic Grail/Vessels crossover piece.

We are always looking for exciting and creative new ways to collaborate/engage with the community and have another two or three in the pipeline with some major tezos projects (we won’t spill the beans just yet!). 

Are you funded at this point, or is it a self-funded project? 

The project is self-funded

Does it involve any DeFi aspects? 

No

Are there any staking mechanisms planned? 

No

Are there similar projects on other chains or on Tezos that you can describe The Grail as being close to? 

Vessels is also a literary project driven by the community and is also inspired by Arthurian mythology, specifically “The Once and Future King”, a book that is highly influential to both projects.

Their project however is much more focused on the community contributing fan fiction whereas Grail has a central writer with the community voting on the path the story takes from various options.

Beyond Tezos, the most obvious point of comparison would be the Jenkins the Valet book writing project, in that the community of holders vote on literary output, however where Jenkins is more of a decentralised publishing house, Grail is an adventure that the whole community participates in. They are the writers room, we are the quest. 

Any plans for Metaverse? 

We’ll see. 

Launch dates? 

Anyone can mint now but our official main story begins on 01 April.

Roadmap? 

You can find full details of our mintmap/roadmap on our website. Our focus is on releasing value quickly and demonstrating our commitment to this project. Our first major story, season 1 of Grail, will begin on April 01 and will run for 16 weeks.

We then plan to run future stories after that point. The next season planned is titled “The House of Fun” and is drastically different to the first season.

Any future season will include a deflationary mechanic that means that holders have the option to swap out their current artwork for new artwork related to the new season.

This will reduce the total supply of individual art pieces in time and introduce an element of game theory. 

Moreover, certain events in the Grail story may impact the number of tokens available. This is a dangerous medieval world – anything could happen! 

What are the next steps for the project? 

Our official story launches on April 01 and once that begins almost our entire focus will be on making sure we produce the best quality work possible.

However, we will also continue to run various fun collaborations to get the word out about ours and other projects and hopefully create some memorable experiences for the tezos community. 

What’s the best way for people to get in touch and interact 

Check us out on twitter, https://twitter.com/GrailNFTProject to see our collaborations and keep up with the project.

To mint and read more about the project check out grailnft.xyz

To chat to the rest of the Grail community and take part in riddles and dungeon crawls with prizes check out our discord https://t.co/lsTsGENLqw

Any final thoughts you would like to add? 

Moving to tezos was absolutely the right move for us. We have had an incredible amount of fun and have enjoyed every collaboration and partnership we’ve been involved in. 

Our guest artist programme means that every chapter of Grail is accompanied by a work of art produced by a guest artist as a response to that week’s chapter.

Many of the artists we are working with have their own cross-chain fanbases, including many collectors from other chains.

The cross-chain exposure this should bring will hopefully bring new collectors to Grail and the tezos space in general, and is a crucial part of the project.

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