This post is a part of the #RPGaDAY series for 2024. For more information, see this post at AUTOCRATIK.
Today's prompt is "RPG with good form." I don't really know what that means, but I like it! Where would we be without room for interpretation? Since the prompt didn't go to great lengths to explain itself, I don't feel the need to, either, but the first game that popped into my head was Dialect (Kathryn Hymes and Hakan Seyalıoğlu/Thorny Games). The edition I have comes in this cool little cloth bag. It also has a set of game cards, but really the book itself is an RPG with good form, too, as far as I'm concerned. Great layout, very clear to read and understand, and a great game to play, to boot. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I also have an honorable mention for another Thorny Games game, Xenolanguage. This one I haven't played since a playtest years ago, so I've never experienced it in its final form, but at the time, it involved, like...an audioscape and a Ouija Board. So...high marks for novelty on that one, but I can't speak to it primarily since I haven't seen or played what wound up getting published. It's probably cool, though.
Today's alternate theme is "Forgotten City," and today I actually rolled a new number, 4, for "Invent an item." Hmm.
| In this room spilling over with disused oddities, toward the back, tucked away on a shelf sits a large platter topped with a tall glass dome. Brushing away a swath of the thick layer of dust that has accumulated on it reveals the interior to hold an exquisitely detailed miniature model of an entire city. The architecture evokes a time long past, several hundred years ago, and the city appears centered on a grand citadel, massive (at least on a miniature scale) and forbidding. The model lacks any representation of living things, but some trick of the light or magical effect makes it appear that the flags and banners are stirred by wind, and the river forming one border seems, if stared at long enough, to lazily flow some endless course and even turn the few water wheels built along its banks. It would seem important enough that it should be familiar, but no structure or landmark or geography inside seems to match anything present in the larger world. Perhaps this is a work of pure fiction, and the city depicted never existed. Perhaps this is the last record of a place long-destroyed, erased even from the pages of history. Perhaps it is something else. The dome turns out to be one single piece with the platter it covers, and so the lid cannot be removed without breaking the container. If the barrier between the smaller world and the larger one is ever broken, who knows what might happen. |
Okay, I didn't so much "invent" this as get heavily inspired for it from a Sandman comic. IYKYK.