It's been a hot second since I last did a review, and originally I was working my way through the hyper-simulationist cowboy game Aces and Eights. Unfortunately, despite having a lot of design elements I really liked A&8 is pretty much terminally boring, so even though I've already read through all the rules I've decided to spare my readers the fate of having to hear about how many inches of tin a bullet has to pass through in order to lose 1 point of attack damage. There are some nice pictures of horsies, though. I love a good horse. I also fucking love western shit so who knows, maybe I'll end up reviewing the book at some point after all.
Anyway, I decided to do a sort of double-feature for this one: they're both games about life in 19th century Britain and and they're both by Storybrewers Roleplaying, an indie studio out of Australia (I think). However, that's pretty much where the similarities end: in setting, tone, and design philosophy, these are two very different games.
First up, let's talk about Alas for the Awful Sea, a PbtA game that's not about pirates, but it's not not about pirates. It gives a really solid and well set-up atmosphere for what it wants to do: it's a game about remote (probably coastal) towns in northern Britain, meaning it's about poverty, the sea, desperation, and the kind of cool folklore that people come up with when they spend a lot of time looking at the ocean.
Let's talk about those supernatural elements first, because it's probably my favorite thing in this book. I'm an absolute slut for the folklore of the British isles, and we've got all the classics here: faeries doing weird bullshit, changelings being a troubling rationalization for the existence of neuro-atypical children, selkies just bein' seal-people, and that weird black dog that hangs out at crossroads in the middle of the night. Speaking of very good boys, this book also introduced me to the "One Day Dog," which is basically a faerie dog who just sits around eating and not obeying orders until one day when he will save you from a horrific fate. I'm super into the idea of some guy bitching about his shitty dog and deciding that the best explanation must be that it was a supernatural gift from the Sídhe. That's funny. The game also gives some information and background info for supernatural things your party could encounter, like the island where lost things go or whirlpools formed by a mournful ghost.
The rest of Alas is... well, it's fine. There's ten playbooks which are really just about as bare-bones as you could possibly do in a PbtA. They're all roles aboard the ship: Captain, Botswain, Stowaway, etc. Each one has slots for your stats (Brain, Brawn, Beauty, Balance, Beyond: the alliteration is fun!), one special move, and some prompts for Bonds. That's all. There's a little more meat in the Descriptors, which are kind of like a second playbook that you pick and tag onto your base role: there's only six of these, but they each give you multiple special moves and a lot of the real flavor for your character (one's The Creature, a monster in human form; another is The Believer, a religious zealot). Honestly, I'd rather see these as the base element of character creation in the system: it would be more in keeping with other PbtA games like Masks or Thirsty Sword Lesbians where your playbook is less about your vocation and more about your archetype.
The game has all the basic moves you'd expect (one for tusslin', one for scarin' folks, one for talkin' to the big spooky Beyond) and some rules for building story arcs based on thematically appropriate conflicts (always in pairs of values or options that create tension: Tradition vs. Progress, Crime vs. Starvation). Frankly, I found Alas somewhat underwhelming. I was left wondering what you were really supposed to do here: yes, you were supposed to grapple with want and hunger and the dark parts of humanity but like... are you bounty hunters? Are you a loose conglomerate of people fucking around together? What's the point? I know that it might sound unreasonable to ask a game to tell me what to do with it, but I feel like if I got together a group we'd finish character creation and not really know what to do next. The more grounded the setting is in real history (and remember, this game is not set in some fantasy pseudo-Britain: this is Scotland), the more I feel like I need the game to tell me what, historically, we can do in this setting. The old "band of adventurers" gimmick doesn't really feel right when you're in a real place in the (relatively) recent past. Overall, Alas for the Awful Sea has some interesting ideas and a pretty killer atmosphere, but I think I would've liked it better as a setting book (or even a hack) than a stand-alone game.
Let's move 500 miles south and talk about the other game I read: Good Society: A Jane Austen RPG. Full disclosure, I have never read a Jane Austen book, nor seen one of the film adaptations. I frankly have pretty much zero exposure to Regency media; I haven't even watched Bridgerton (it seems like some straight people stuff, you know?). Nevertheless, I liked this game quite a bit. It's built for building Jane-Austen-esque stories: there's a lot of aristocratic flirting, deferring to one's duty, "what would good society think???" scandals. One thing I liked to see is that it enforces a sort of session-zero where the players all get together and decide things like the game's tone (Farce, Romantic Comedy, or Drama) and how much they'll care about historical accuracy (particularly in regards to gender: the game's three settings are "Historical Gender," "Inverted Gender" (women have careers and make proposals) and "Off" (gender doesn't matter, anybody can do anything). Though these don't have actual mechanical implications with other rules, I like that A. It forces people to be on the same page going forward and B. It acknowledges multiple ways to play the game.
How does it play? Well, pretty unlike other systems I've read: it's completely diceless, for a start. It's also largely GM-less: one player is tasked with being the Facilitator, but that just means that they run the NPCs. Facilitators don't have any more narrative power than other players, and often times they'll even have their own PCs (called "Major Characters" here as a term of art). Each player gets one Major Character to play, each with its own Role (kind of like a playbook) that represents the kind of character you'd expect to see in stories like this: the Heir, the Dowager, the Meddler, the New Arrival. Characters also get to tag another aspect onto their character: their family's background (military, clergy, new money, etc.) so we can know how they got their money. Each of these give the character different expectations and ways to impress (or disappoint) society with their own reputation. Each character also has a motivating "desire" and important "relationship", each of which come from very fetching decks of cards that I'm sad to see are currently sold out.
It's worth noting that character creation in this game is actually semi-optional: it's expected that you're playing with a "playset" of pre-gen characters (e.g. a "Scandal and Reputation" game would have a Socialite of Ill-Repute who wishes to find wealth and has a rival, an Heir from a Peerage family who wishes to win their parents' permission to marry and has an object of affection, etc.), but you're encouraged to use it only in part, keeping the pairs of assigned desires and relationships but selecting your own role and family background. This is another case where the game gives you some freedom as to how you'd like to play. I like that a lot.
Gameplay consists of cycles which are split into discrete phases, like "novel chapters" for narrative scenes, "scandal and rumour" to see what the gossip mill in town is churning out, and "epistolary" for letters like people used to do in the olden days. The number of cycles in a game is up to you but should be set ahead of time, and the book estimates that it'll take about one session to do each cycle. I've never played a game with such a prescribed schedule to it (although Blades also works on phases), and I'd be curious to see a game to know how the flow works. Overall, it sounds really interesting. The book also devotes a couple of brief chapters to a primer on Regency high society and the tropes of Austen, which I really appreciated. They're not dense or pretentious: they just give you what you need to run the game. I think it's to Good Society's credit that I feel I could play this game even without having much of a knowledge of Austen's work. Maybe that's a bad thing though, maybe I should be gate-kept out of this one.
So: would I play these games? Alas for the Awful Sea... well, maybe. Honestly, I'd be much more likely to just steal some of the setting, themes, and conflicts and port them into a different system that felt more robust and interesting. Good Society I will absolutely play if I can find people to play it with. It's high-concept, so a bit of a tougher sell than something like Apocalypse World or Honey Heist, but a lot of my friends are fucking massive dweebs so it's not impossible.
Thanks for reading! This was a really chunky one so I appreciate you bearing with me. Tune in next time for another game. No, I haven't decided which one. Get off my ass.
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