Pax South was a few weeks back here in Texas. It’s such a great event. I have a large amount of friends I only get to see at pax now that we all live in different areas, and I look forward to it every year. A group of us have been going there for several years just to play tabletop rpg games. We’re currently playing through a 5e campaign that started off as mad mage, and ended up becoming its own thing. This campaign has been a blast. We started in fact last year (2019) at pax, all at level 1. Now we’re level 8 and working our way through the mad mage’s dungeon. After three days of dungeon crawling though, our exhaustion levels were pretty high, but we wanted to keep playing. The expo hall closes early on sunday, so we all left and went to a bar to smoke cigars, drink overpriced beverages, and try some more experimental games.
We had all bought our fill of games. Personally, I think the game of the year at pax is Swordfish Islands. This guy knows how to make RPG books. It’s funny, I didn’t know what a great rpg book was until I saw it. It’s a hex crawl, so the particular pros/cons of that style are self evident. But what I found enlightening was the way the book is organized. It’s as if for the first time ever, somebody made a book that actually helped facilitate GMs running their game. The layout reminds me of Bullet Journals. There’s a big hex map/index of the world on the front, and it references smaller areas. Each smaller area in the book has all the context for the surrounding areas on the page in question, which means you really don’t have to flip a lot back and forth. It’s quite enlightening really. Oh, also every major NPC has a list of desires and conflicts so you can make a game out of your players motivations and not according to some stale plotline about Tiamat’s agents causing havoc.
Well anyway, we’re sitting at this hotel bar smoking cuban cigars and drinking the cheapest quality of drinks at the highest imaginable price, and we want to play more RPGs. My friend Will says, “Paul, why don’t you just make a game?” He is aware of my work here, and figured it would be easy. I thought about it for a second, and said, “OK, here’s how it works…” Thus the game you see before you is born.
The restrictions/requirements were pretty easy to see. Will wanted a fantasy game. It needed to be a one shot, a game we could play without any functional memory (as we were all drinking bathtub vodka mixed with fruit juice and crushed ice), we wanted to play immediately, and we didn’t have a table or paper or pencils or dice or the ability to get any of those since we were just at a tiny bar table.
Thus was born a rather fantastic game on the most simple of premises. It was, I believe, the most fun we had at Pax that year. Everything the player wanted to do was costly and risky, but yet they felt empowered, you can play the game with nothing but your hands (though a single piece of paper or a few bar napkins and a pen greatly improve the game), and it’s a game you can keep the entirity of in your head.
It’s really the perfect game for Nerds at a Bar. In the fashion of bar games, the rules include a sample scenario that you can drop at a moment’s notice without having to think too hard, and it’s written in a way you can make it up as you go. I think this game definitely falls in the “narrative game” camp, but it’s just gamey enough to really draw people into the action. I think it’s actually a real winner, and it’s definitely worth keeping in the back of your mind when you go out drinking with your fellow nerd friends.
