While old-school TTRPG players are looking for a VR experience using the imagination and narration as an interface, Storygames are interested in creating an emotionally satisfying story at the end of the day that met the expectations of the players going in based on the conventions of the genre and pre-game expectations they set up. To facilitate this, the game rules are often set up very differently from a more traditionally-designed TTRPG.
Because the goal of Storygames are very different, they are often designed to make world-building more collaborative. they tend to take agency away from the GM, and have mechanics allowing the players to take control of the narrative and make Metagame adjustments.
I like Storygames just fine: I think many of them are clever and innovative in ways an more traditional TTRPG cannot be. But, as my players are not interested in the experience, I have had less reason to collect or learn them. Which in turn means that I haven't got much cause to write about or review them here, but as I went through an extensive list of both classic and OSR SciFi games, I think it is interesting to share these games to offer some comparison and contrast.
Lasers and feelings
One of the earliest games offered to us by Blades in the Dark Creator John Harper, Lasers and Feelings has become the basis for dozens of other in the storygames. It's extraordinarily simple mechanics and fast rate of play make it great if you just want to sit down and play something without any prep. (It, in turn is a derivative of Ron Edward's Trollbabe.)
In Lasers and Feelings you play the crew of the starship Raptor, a vessel that is currently cruising outer space without her captain, who has had to be put into cryogenic stasis after receiving a strange injury or disease.
Your characters hard to find by a single number from 2 to 9 with extremely low numbers representing a character who is very technologically inclined, and high numbers being representative of a character who is very emotionally intelligent people-oriented. Anytime a character has to make a roll, you throw a d10. If it is a technical problem, they must roll over their number. If it is an interpersonal problem they must will under their number. If you roll exactly their number, not only do they succeed on the check but get a bonus piece of insight about the situation.
Characters are otherwise defined by single noun and adjective with examples being things like clever scientists and sexy robot. With characters being able to roll twice and take the more favorable result for any role that fits the characters description.
Otherwise the game plays by randomly rolling on a set of d10 tables to determine the scenario of what the Raptor discovers while on its current expedition. Tables are encouraged to take turns being the primary navigator.
Cosmic Patrol
Cosmic Patrol tries to capture the feel of early 20th century pulp science fiction titles such as Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom and Pellucidar series, and the Tom Swift novels. Characters are adventuring within our solar system, but like those early titles, Mars, Venus, and Jupiter are all populated by alien race is already. And terrifying invasions of a psychic mind controlling entity and his robot armies from Jupiter threatens the Peace of prosperous earth, barbaric mars, and mysterious and matriarchal Venus alike.
Play your characters are members of the Cosmic Patrol, a group of Elite space explorers and adventurers from the allied inner system trying to find common ground as they address the threat of Jovian invaders and various disasters and emergencies that the fall of the space colonies of all three civilizations.
The game attempts to be GMless by giving characters the right to spend narrative points to resolve problems and conflicts that are brought up in part by the dice and in part by the narration of the current game-runner, but in doing so they take control of the narrative until the next person attempts to use their characters abilities to resolve the problem. Ideally, cosmic patrol will pass narrative control from player to player once every 15 minutes to an hour.
I've not seen the gameplay structure work very well. The attempt I have made and I have seen all tended to hand The narrative spotlight over to the default GM of the group, and made players very hesitant to use their abilities or really engage with the game for fear of being put on the spot. However, as a game to capture a mix of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Flash Gordon you can't go to wrong with it.
Scum and Villainy
Like Blades in the Dark, the kind of crime you get involved in is based on a group choice and the group progresses as a whole by performing tasks according to a playbook. But while Blades in the Dark, focuses on building up influence in the underworld and territory, the group choice in Scum and Villainy is expressed as the starship, they begin play as operating period They may choose from:
- The Stardancer (smugglers, thieves, and blockade runners)
- The Cerberus (extraction, finding missing persons, and bounty hunting)
- The Firedrake (open rebellion and guerilla warfare)
As the group progresses they gain ship upgrades to expresses that progress (rather than new contacts and territory in BitD.)
The first adventure for each ship is pre written period and 3 follow-up jobs are offered for each of those first adventures, taking a lot of guesswork out for the GM, in true storygame fashion, giving the players a chance to play the exact sort of story they are expecting with most of the beats and conventions laid out ahead of them.
Scum and Villainy offers a pretty solid science fiction mirror to Blades in the Dark. It even has its own detailed star alliance with many star systems already, filled with contacts and locations of interest. It is structured very much like the section on the city of Duskwall in BitD.
Tales from the Loop
By default, the Player characters of the story are kids who discover some leaked piece of technology or escaped it test subject, and get wrapped up in the wonders of the technology. The loop has created, and their devious attempts to hide it period It very much tries to capture the kids on bike magic of movies like Mac and me, super 8, and E t, the so-called kids on bikes genre, but with the darker vibes of Fringe or stranger things.
Inspired by concept art by Simon Stålenhag, This game embraces a specific esthetic of cassette futurism. And retro futuristic technology, Mysteries, intrigue, conspiracy, and super technology gone wrong. And, as Fria Lagan is the passion project of the Paradox corporate family, Cabinet Entertainment, used and boosted the popularity of the game to make a television series based on it available on Amazon Prime back in 2020.
As usually the case with Fria Lagan and products, there is a paywall even around the quick start rules. , so I haven't had much of a chance to look at it mechanically. However, watching actual plays shows a game that plays pretty fast and simply.
Kids on Bikes.
I picked up the original quick start rules before the game's major release back on free RPG day a few years ago period I'm told that the rules have significantly evolved since that release.
Kids on Bikes was a massive hit, with a lot of actual plays released for it shortly after it hit the shelves, but was quickly overshadowed. By Tales from the Loop which, was accompanied by a media blitz.
Coriolis
As a starship crew of adventurers, you can end up doing everything from carrying freight to hunting pirates, to playing bodyguard, or espionage. In many ways, it feels like Traveler meets Dune in that regard.
There is a mystical element to the story: a group of Icons, divine entities, watch over the PCs, and they can reroll failed rolls by saying quick prayers to one of the icons, Religious service taken by the player characters at the beginning of the story in preparation for their undertaking grants a bonus to reroll. However, the void between the stars is populated by an evil Djinn-like force called the Darkness, which is angered by prayer. Every time the PCs make a reroll, the GM gains a darkness point that they can spend to create mishaps.
Darkness points take the place of tracking NPC special abilities, player ammo, and supplies. The GM can choose to spend darkness points to have a gun wind up empty, or allow an N PC to use a special ability.
The Expanse
I have only been able to lightly peruse this game's manual, but have a few other games that use the engine. Focused on a mix of gritty, noir-infused drama and hard science fiction, this is one of the better choices of you want a game that poses realistic perils in space travel.
Eclipse Phase
I have played quite a bit of Eclipse Phase over the years, and I am very fond of the game system. It is excellent at testing your tolerance of the squick factor of transhumanism.
Eclipse Phase is the brainchild of Rob Boyle, who worked on the groundbreaking 4th edition of Shadowrun. By several accounts, Boyle was interested in pushing the envelope on what cybernetics and nanotech could do in the Shadowrun continuum. When they put the brakes on some of his ideas in the 4e manual, Augmentation, Eclipse Phase was his way of taking those same ideas and taking them all to their logical conclusion.
What was left of humanity fled to the stars: a few alive, but many only as copies of their personalities kept in diamond-cased implants that record synaptic activity cut from their bodies or transmitted upon their death to databanks in space.
Now a fractious solar system is filled with different political blocs from corporate feudalisms to social democracies, to anarchist collectives, to libertarian experimental states. Human personalities, as well as limited Artificial Intelligences and the minds of uplifted animals are uploaded and downloaded into new cloned or robotic bodies designed for specialized tasks. These "sleeves" change a character's stats and even cognitive abilities, making characters highly flexible.
Eclipse Phase's PCs are members of Firewall, a secret society determined to deal with existential threats to the tenuous remains of humanity, hunting down remnants of the virus and the killer AI's it spawned, using alien stargate technology to explore exoplanets, and sabotage terrorists and military conflicts.
Eclipse Phase was a fascinating game, especially its political landscape, which explores a myriad of ideas, utopian, dystopian, and strange. Complex social and political theories from the 19th and 20th century saturate the book. And the ideas of the Transhumanism movement are always front and center.
The game has its own leanings, dividing humanity in to clear Left/Right divisions and making Moderates and Right-Wing cultures into clear bad guys, and anarcho-socialists into heroes. Its online community was often tribal, toxic, reactionary, and totalitarian in tone, and my interactions with it ultimately soured me on the game. It was worse in 2014 than X is today. But, separating the game from the discourse and toxicity around it, it is a pretty interesting game.
Apocalypse World
Like many other games that have descended from it, Apocalypse World works very hard to make sure people stick to the conventions of the genre, and hands a lot of its power to the players as opposed to the game master.
This is not just reinforced by the structure of the rules, but also a style of play that is taught by the Storygaming community in which the GM doesn't just ask the PCs what they do, but what they know. The PCs can state truths about the world that become canonical unless the GM has a compelling reason to override it. The world is built through open questioning. I find it is important to see how Apocalypse World is played beyond what is written in the manual to get a clear idea of what was intended by its design.
You can read my contextual review of Apocalypse World here. Suffice it to say that it is a pretty important game in the history of the role playing hobby
Numenéra
In this Earth Nanotechnology so saturates everything that humans born with bio-engineered computer components in their brains can learn to network with and control nanites to create miraculous magical effects. Adventurers plumb ruins of a thousand different civilizations collecting up shiny bots of material ("shins") to use as currency, and high tech components they can cobble together to create incredible nearly magical effects ("cyphers.")
The current crop of humans have only been on Earth a couple of hundred years, and are still essentially Medieval in their social structure (the most concentrated collection of human cultures are taught lore of the past by an Amber Church, whose Aeon Priests teach technology and lore revealed to them by a founder who had incredible ancient knowledge beamed into his head by an ancient space station.
Numenéra is a game of the kind of weird science fantasy you might see in movies like Forbidden Planet, City of the Lost Children, or Zardoz - with a particularly impressive dose of Heavy Metal Magazine and the art and creations of Moebius.
The Cypher System engine is incredibly fast and simple, and gives the players the ability to spend XP (earned on the fly) to negate GM rulings, rewrite plot, and retcon characters.
Numenéra is interesting in TTRPG culture for introducing manuals for including sex in TTRPGs and introducing the checklist approach to safety tools, both created by Monte Cook Games staff writer Shanna Germain. While Numenéra may not be the widest played storygame, it is definitely a major influence on current storygame culture.
You can read my detailed review here.
The Strange
In The Strange's setting, the dark matter in the universe is slowly being virally reorganized into a single galaxy-sized supercomputer. This computer is designed to be controlled by thought mixed with quantum computing technology, and creates virtual realities in response to thoughts.
As the supercomputer ("The Strange") has encompassed Earth the collective imaginations of humankind created a vast collection of virtual realities based on religious beliefs, mythology, and eventually popular fiction.
Some people are gifted or altered to be able to translate themselves into these realities, making it possible to visit anything from Heaven and Hell to the ancient Egyptian underworld to Victorian England, to Post-Apocalyptic Wastelands, to Hyperborea, to Superhero-guarded cities. When they do so, their abilities shift to match the local paradigm.
These realities can also open portals and allow objects, and even creatures from other realities to leak through onto Earth.
Earth's Virtual Realities are exceptionally solid thanks to the presence of ancient alien tech hidden beneath the Earth's core combined with the power of human imagination. This has saved Earth from the fate of almost every other sapient civilization that has been exposed to The Strange: as all other workds have eventually imagined up a Cthulhu-like horror that has broken into reality and destroyed it. These world-eaters now drift in The Strange waiting for the signal created by quantum computing technology to descend en masse on the planet that has begun using such technology to devour it.
In The Strange, the PCs are agents of the Institute, a collection of secret agents who sabotage attempts to create quantum computers, hunt down cryptids and dangerous reality bending artifacts that leak in from the virtual realities, and explore them looking for clues and technology to allow them to defend Earth from otherworldly threats. This allows PCs to move from X-files Intrigue, to James Bond-like spy thrillers,or translate into The Strange and adventure in any imaginable setting. In time, they can even find the means to create their own world and literally play god.
The Strange comes with two huge, fully fleshed out parallel worlds: an ancient Egyptian-feeling fantasy world, and a bizarre biotech-driven cyberpunk reality, along with several smaller but equally unusual worlds, each are designed with a pretty unique flare and twist from standard fantasy or cyberpunk.
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