Two really cool little games #PoweredByTheApocalypse have come to me recently.

Originally shared by Jesse Cox

Two really cool little games #PoweredByTheApocalypse have come to me recently.

The first, which I bet you all have heard of by now, is Brie Sheldon's fabulous and well-realized game Turn. He's clearly poured his heart and soul into this thing, and it's surprising, elegant, evocative, and really excels at what Vincent Baker calls self-reenforcing design: there's a particular kind of struggle and story it wants to talk about, and everything in it provides a gentle (or not so gentle) pressure to bring the game back to those themes and feelings again and again.

The second is a smaller offering, with a much more open framework -- but again, one that has a very particular lens, though which to tell a wide variety of tales that focus on a central theme. _The Others, _ by Nell Raban, is a small game set up so that everyone is part of a community that's embedded inside another, different community -- a minority that hangs together and has to define itself, at least in part, in contrast to the majority it lives with.

The game text uses a structure I normally see used in board games: the first 8 pages (In size 12 font, Derrick Sanders take note!) is all the rules -- introduction, setup, play, advancement, what Moves are, all the moves (Look Up, Step Up, Speak Up, and Hands Up), and an overview of the playbooks. The playbooks themselves are a separate document, and and half a page each less complicated than the player mats of some board games I play. The remaining 11 pages of the rules are details and clarifications, perfect for when someone has a question, including about the vocabulary of the game -- and two pages of what I think of as the "GM's playbook."

While it does an excellent job of conveying what it wants in an easily playable format (no familiarity with PbtA required), the thing that really made my eyes light up is how adaptable this is. It's pitched as a suppressed minority living in a neighborhood of a Majority city, and that's a rich vein in and of itself -- but the foundation is there for even more.


Play it as Star Trek Voyager or SG1 trying to work in an alien star cluster: the Book becomes your local guide (native ties, but has clearly thrown in their lot with the crew) or your Xenolinguist, trying to get both sides to bridge the cultural divide. Whoopi's character Guinan, on ST:TNG, would make a great Minister or Provider, depending on how you wanted to play her.

Adjusting the power dynamic could be fascinating: I could imagine adapting this to play a squad of US troops engaged in nation building in the Middle East, needing to work with and clash with local forces.

Chinatown USA? Harlem, NY? An elvish enclave in Dragon Age? This story can be fit into many worlds, and is a simple enough setup to be worth experimenting with, even if some of those experiments don't sing.

OK. I think I'm done here. Catch you all later.