An RPG to Occupy Your Wednesdays?
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As I write this email, we are less than a week away from the season finale of my livestreamed San Francisco-set cyberpunk RPG Midnight in the Garden of Chrome & Fog. It’s been a wild ride—and we will return!—but with its ending, I’m left with a number of free Wednesday evenings before the advent of Season 2 next January.
So… shall we play a game?
Each of the games below is designed as a tiny campaign (or, if you prefer, a longish one-shot) that will introduce you to a new RPG system and maybe some new gamers, all while telling a complete story that wraps up in a small handful of sessions. They’ve each got a set schedule over a number of consecutive Wednesdays, so if you’re free and curious and hungry for adventure, click the links below to find out more and sign up!
(If you want to bring friends and sign up as a group, that’s cool too; just send me a communiqué and we’ll work it out.)
Schedule: 9/10, 9/17, 9/24, 10/1, and perhaps 10/8.
This is a world of heroes. See them now! as they fly through the air, performing wondrous feats, defeating scheming villains at ever-intensifying levels of grandiosity. While some operate independently, the best of the best—the fastest, the strongest, the smartest, the most supernaturally gifted—work for the world’s governments, improving their nations’ lot while perfecting their PR campaigns and running vast media/ merchandizing enterprises.
You are not those heroes.
No, you’re the mid-rank almost-somebodies—too weird, too unphotogenic, too underpowered or with too obvious weaknesses—whom major nation-states passed over when creating their rosters. In lieu of such a cush and prestigious job, you’ve taken a mediocre contract at a crumbling Heroes’ HQ in Cleveland*, which you protect to the best of your ability from its dubious foes.
Still, a gig is a gig, right? These people need protecting as much as anybody else. And maybe, just maybe, you can make a name for yourself here, in this benighted city, and one day claim your place in the big leagues.
One of my favorite things about superhero stories is that they’re almost always personal to the characters involved. There is no ‘generic’ superhero adventure: it’s about the hero, their connections, their strengths and weaknesses, their allies and nemeses, their journey through their fantastical world.
That’s the spirit I want to capture in this game, so I haven’t written any plot for this yet. We’ll do (semi-randomized) character creation in session 1, and then I’ll write a scenario tailor-made for the heroes we’ve discovered through that process. As always, I won’t know the ending as we start to tell our story: that’s for YOU to determine through your actions over the course of the remaining 3-4 sessions as circumstances unfold.
Find out more and sign up here!
Schedule: 10/15, 10/22, 10/29, and perhaps 11/5.
There is a garden in the place between places.
It weaves through the Electric City of Bastion, its vines creeping down the sides of forgotten buildings, its brambles pushing through the cobblestone streets, its flowers a smirch of color within the monochrome soot. Where here it is gritty, there the air is clean and fresh. But it is not without dangers, this garden, for it is a perpendicular world: The further you travel from the world you know, the more alien, the less like reality it becomes. Some never escape from that place, far from the smell of home.
It is called the Gardens of Ynn.
You are a nobody, a reject of Bastion, a failed career and a pile of debt to your name. They've sent you to Ynn to redeem yourself, to find a prize on which to stake your name. It is your gilded opportunity to rise from the ashes of your past and become something new.
But growth and death go hand-in-hand in the Gardens of Ynn. Which will be your fate?
The theme I'm hoping to explore in this game is exploration: exploration of an alien world, exploration of the self, and exploration of the intersection between those two things. How do strange stimuli change our understanding of our place in the world, and what do we do as we come to understand who we truly are?
Character generation is semi-randomized, and as an "old-school" style game character death is a distinct possibility—but death is rarely the end in a place such as this. As always, I won’t know how the story will unfold: we'll find out together over the course of our 3-4 sessions.
Find out more and sign up here!