Go Play Northwest: 2023
Most of those games are 'traditional', meaning that they have a 'GM' (gamemaster) in charge of the world, every other player controls a player (a 'PC'), and the group of players are generally some sort of heroes, or at least a cohesive group of people wandering around solving problems and levelling up (gaining more abilities, and getting harder to hit).
But another genre of RPGs are sometimes called 'storytelling games', and more generally fall into the category of 'indie rpgs'; games created by one or maybe a handful of people with extremely simple rules that are used to let you play out a specific type of scenario. Some aspects of traditional games are included sometimes, but everything is up for grabs: maybe there's no GM; maybe the players are terrible people; maybe we're telling an emotional story more than an action-oriented one; maybe we're just world-building and not telling a story at all.
Go Play Northwest (http://goplaynw.org) is a 3-day gaming convention here in Seattle that focuses more (but not exclusively) on storytelling and/or indie games. The format is that there's two or three sessions per day, about 3 hours long each, with games you can sign up for beforehand, or games you sign up for on the spot from the options that turn out to be available.
And all that was so that you knew what I was on about when I told you the games I played! So here we go:
Companions' Tale : My first game of the convention! The conceit of this game is that you are telling the story of the Hero of the Realm from the perspective of everyone *else*, their companions in particular. Everyone takes turns telling stories and adding to a collective map, with no GM, and no resolution mechanic: every story is true... at least from that person's perspective. Players are encouraged to tell stories that contradict each other, making the 'truth' of what actually happened subject to interpretation. The companions are foregrounded a bit (there are rounds specifically about telling stories about them, not the Hero), but you also include stories from witnesses to events, and historians talking about the events. The companions each get a Role chosen from cards (thing like 'Protege', 'Lover', 'Oracle', or 'Mercenary'), and you also get a beautifully-stylized picture who becomes that Companion.
One thing I particularly liked about this game was that I would have an idea about Something That Happened in the game, but then I had to additionally imagine who was telling the story, and who they were telling it to. So when I got the Lover, I had an idea about what happened when she and the Hero met, but then additionally decided I was telling this story to our son, years later, which added an interesting dynamic to the story. It was also fun to come up with further-afield 'documents' to share: my favorite of mine was probably when I started my 'Historian' bit with, "Thank you for purchasing your '23 and you' genetic information packet! Before you peruse your results, we would like to remind people that the information herein are for entertainment purposes only. In particular, Locus 23 (the so-called 'monster gene'), while unusual, in no way proves that you are an actual descendant of the Void Monsters; this is pure speculation. [...]"
Another fun bit: at the beginning, Aaron gave me four pieces of paper to tape together to make our map. As a joke, I said I would tape them together all skew... and then thought, 'Wait, that could actually be fun," so I taped them together with two big triangular gaps between them, thinking they could be impassable mountains or something. Those gaps quickly became 'The Void', and were a central theme throughout the story. It was great!The Love-Blind Bird This game is not actually available anywhere, but is 'close' to having a kickstarter for it. It was cool! The game setup is that you get a picture of a flying galleon in three different 'seasons', and ask each other questions about the journey of that ship and its crew. There's also a soundtrack you can play (for each season) as additional inspiration. We found that both the questions and the answers were sources of worldbuilding, or plot advancement: 'when half the crew left, where did they go?' is a perfectly reasonable question to ask, even if this is the first time we've discovered that half the crew left. In our story, the ship sang to us, and steering it was a matter of the crew encouraging it to sing particular types of songs by singing themselves, so in addition to 'Captain', 'First Mate' and 'Cabin Boy', we also had the position of 'Chorus Master'. Who then got eaten by the ship for trying to 'improve' a new song that they didn't understand. It was a crazy story, alright? But it was a lot of fun to create together.
Rebel Squadron: A mostly-traditional game! Only with simpler rules, based on a '24xx' system called 'Super Bandit'. Our GM adapted that system to Star Wars, had a battle mat and a solid basic premise ('escape an Empire prison'). The rules were super simple, and character creation quick and easy. It was fun, though I found myself wanting a bit more from the game, though I didn't know exactly what. I felt like if the system was a bit more complex, I could have enjoyed the strategy wargame aspect more, or if the interpersonal dynamics were a bit more foregrounded, I could have enjoyed inhabiting my character more. Maybe the simple addition of 'describe your attack' more often could have helped? As it was, there was a lot of simple 'I roll X; I get a succeess; I take out one storm trooper' which was a little dry at the end of the day. But overall it was still fun, and the ship combat had an interesting rock/paper/scissors mechanic that spiced up the decision-making process a bit... though I ended up being sad that my character's personality (such as it was) wasn't really well-suited for the tactics her skillpoints pushed her towards. Ah, well.
Meridian: This slot was the Lottery! In this setup, everyone who wants to participate puts their badge into a box, groups of four names are drawn out, and they go pick a game to play. This necessitates people bringing things to play, but this year I was ready and had brought a few. Between the ones I had and the ones one of the other people in my group had, 'Meridian' sounded the most interesting, so I ran it!
This was a game I had played several years ago at GPNW, had gotten a copy via kickstarter, and then had promptly never played for five years. So this was the first time I was actually able to play it! Yay! Since I had brought it as a 'back pocket' game that could be run in a pinch, I hadn't gone over the rules super carefully, and the result wasn't as smooth as it could have been, but we still had fun.
The conceit of the game is that it basically starts as a multi-GM, one-PC game, and can gradually morph into a one-GM multi-PC game. The game is set up to model stories like 'Alice in Wonderland' or 'Labyrinth', where one player plays the 'Journier' (the PC), one player runs the world (the GM; me, in this case), and the other players co-GM by playing some of the various denizens of the place. As the game progresses, the other players can decide that the character they are playing joins the PC on their quest, and become 'Companions', moving through the rest of the story with the PC.
Our game had some rough edges from people (me in particular) not knowing the rules very well, and the game itself used a lot of game-specific lingo in its explanations, which hindered people getting up to speed quickly. But we had some fun scenes, it was a unique experience, and it was satisfying for me to finally get to run the thing after so long. I could run it again much better now, I think.Monster Hearts: Monster Hearts is clearly inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer: players are teenage monsters (of various types), all making bad decisions and trying to work through the consequences. I've been avoiding playing this game for years, as any game with the premise 'angsty people making bad decisions!' is not typically very appealing for me. But for whatever reason, I felt up to the task that Saturday night, and decided to give it a try. And it was interesting! I think part of what made it work better for me might be the fact that the GM ran it with an actual plot/mystery to solve, so the whole game didn't devolve into the PCs sniping at each other. Another part of it was that I was able to play a character archetype I hadn't ever played before: I played a 'Hollow': a 'created' teenage girl (sort of like Frankenstein's monster, or the Buffy-bot) who was searching for her identity. I played her as a sort of goth naif, intently questioning people to 'explain donuts', or willingly participating in harebrained schemes because she was starved for purpose. I agreed with anyone's assessment of me, and parlayed that into future scenes: "Argh; January, you're giving me a headache." "I give people headaches?" "Yes!" [later] "OK, you distract Mr. Cooper while I steal the book." "I will give him a headache." I ended up with great affection and sympathy for her character, and for the others in the group. Of all the games I played this weekend, I'd have to say that January was the character I connected to emotionally the most strongly.
Another reason why I think I picked Monster Hearts this round was the fact that my own teenage daughter had been having Big Emotions the previous night, and I felt like actually roleplaying an angsty teen might help me work through and re-surface what that time of life was like for me. I still think this game might not be quite my thing on a different day or with a different set of other people, but it was really solid this time. Thanks, Jamie-the-GM! (Amusing side-note: the four players were Logan, Luke, Lucas, and Lucian).Crash Pandas: This was a Sunday morning goofy game, and was one of those games that knows exactly what it is, and exactly how to pull that off. You play one of four racoons, collectively driving a car in an LA street race. The map is drawn on a large piece of paper, and you're controlling a HotWheels car vs. other HotWheels cars. You have some basic stats, some sort of motivation, and every round, you each individually decide whether to accelerate, brake, go right, go left, or do some special action. This means that everyone might decide to go right, whipping the car into a tailspin, or everyone might assume someone else will turn, accelerating your car into a wall. Or, in our case, our players literally got right and left mixed up from the perspective of the car (several times! From different people!) and canceled out each other's actions. It was hilarious, zany, and delightful.
Spindlewheel: The first thing to say about this game is that it's gorgeous. It's a short set of rules and a large deck of gilt cards, each with a name ('Revolution', 'Infection', 'Princess') and two lists of associations with that name, one vaguely positive and one vaguely negative. (So 'Princess' had 'sheltered' on one side, and 'diplomat' on the other, for example.) We played the initial bits, going through world creation and character creation. The full game would be too long for a 3-hour slot, but would have consisted of actually playing out the characters' stories in the world you've created. The two people I played with had actually used the game before just for world and character creation, and were now playing through the story with a completely different system (Dungeon World, IIRC), which seemed to me like a perfectly reasonably way to use this game.
World creation comes first, and we added a Microscope-like step of listing things we wanted to see and things we didn't want to see in the world, which ended up pushing us in a semi-sci-fi non-Galilean setting with space junks (partly inspired by Heaven's Vault). Then we started drawing cards, each being placed in a Tarot-like spread with each card representing a particular truth about the setting. We ended up with a post-revolution world, finally freed from oppression, but now exposed to unforseen dangers that the previous royal lineage had protected them against. New technology was developed to allow anyone to launch a junk into the space aether, and one group in particular was making a giant generation ship, designed to go out and greet the very things that could bring doom to the world.
After collectively creating the world, we each created our own characters in much the same way; drawing cards to place in particular spots in our lives. I drew 'deposed prince' and 'princess' as my two core cards, so clearly my character was going to be the last of the royal line, who stepped down for the revolution, but now sought out a way to restore the one good thing her family had done, and protect her people from the dangers from beyond. Similarly, my fellow players ended up creating the lead revolutionary, now conflicted because he wasn't sure he went far enough in breaking the world, and the industrialist in charge of the generation ship, who had grown to hate his sycophants. Spindlewheel itself could handle a game with those characters, we speculated (the main movers and shakers of the word)--perusing the rules, it seemed like even if those three people didn't spend a ton of time together, they could still meet up and interact at times and places over the years. It wouldn't work quite as well to try to cram those three into a DungeonWorld campaign, of course, but that wasn't what we were aiming for, so it's not particularly surprising we didn't land there. Overall, I felt this was a solid, solid piece of world inspiration. Of the worlds I helped create during this con, this was the one that's stuck with me the strongest, so kudos to Spindlewheel.Illimat: I ended the con with a board game! This was another beautiful game, and was designed as a prop in a music video before the band eventually decided to hire a game designer to build a game around it. And the game was interesting! The video featured groups of mysterious individuals, meeting in strange places to play this game, and it kept that vibe: the cards are basically your standard playing cards, but with four different base suits representing the four seasons, and one new 'wild' suit for the 'stars'. Each round, people try to collect as many cards from the board as they can, or try to set themselves up to collect them more easily later. As you pull cards from the board, you reveal 'illuminaries' from a different set of fanciful cards that change the rules of the game slightly while they're in play. The game has a pretty good combination of luck and strategy, where sometimes you just get the perfect cards for the situation, and sometimes you have to play a bad hand as best you can. I stumbled my way to victory in our first game, and after my son joined us for a second game, he won that one. Would recommend!
So that was my Go Play Northwest, 2023! Overall it was a lovely experience, and great to be able to game with people in person once more, after a long pandemic hiatus. I mean, I've been playing more RPGs online during the pandemic than I ever have in my life), but there's nothing quite like gaming in person. I'm glad I'm finally able to do both once more.