Last Train to Bremen: Folk, Theatre & More

Thomas Manuel

I. Dear Reader,

This week, on the Yes Indie’d podcast, I spoke to Caro Asercion about their game about a quartet of doomed musicians, Last Train To Bremen. This is a game that feels extremely approachable. (Though the content can get a bit edgy in the sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll sense.)

  • It feels folk. It’s a story entirely told by playing rounds of liar’s dice, a folk game about betting and bluffing about the dice you’re holding. The entire design – including the visual style and the narrative framing of “musicians fleeing the devil” – gives the whole thing a very strong and familiar modern-but-folk flavour.
  • It feels easy to play – in between rounds of liars dice, you narrate the story of this band with the help of some prompts. The creative lift feels really light – seems like it would be really approachable for new players. I would say this sits quite comfortably alongside For the Queen as a game that I’d take out for someone’s first experience.
  • There’s a very real game here. Unlike For the Queen, which is “just” telling a story, the rounds of liar’s dice has all the tense gaminess you could ask for. There’s skill, there’s logic, there’s bluffing. It’s like playing a round of cards. (And just like bridge, you need four people to play.)

On the podcast, we have an interesting discussion about how the narrative and mechanics seem almost like they’re on parallel tracks – there’s the dice game here, there’s the storytelling prompts over there. They don’t seem to interact very much. It’s not like rolling a d20 to figure out what happens in the story. The only thing the dice decide is who is going to narrate next.

But over the course of the discussion, we talk about how this isn’t really the case. The dice do influence the fiction and vice versa but in a very subtle, almost subliminal way. Caro talks about the how the dice and the story interact through the medium of the person – your brain is the conduit where they spark against each other. When you narrate a story about being screwed over by your bandmade after losing a game of liar’s dice to that bandmate, it’s going to be different! Or at least, it’s going to feel different. There’s a kind of bleed or emotional resonance being leveraged. The dice game makes you feel a certain way and then you leverage the way you feel to tell a story.

It’s a weird idea but a great one and opens up an important part of how we talk about games.

Yours, with feeling,

Thomas

Alright, folks, last time I yell about Rascal News. We’ve been slowly opening up the paywall on some of our best stories from last year. They’re all now free to tread:

  • If you’re interested in the messiness of AI entering the tabletop space, here’s a deep dive into a card game called Wonders of the First, which raised more than a million dollars on kickstarter with AI and NFTs plastered all over it. The team did a lot of work into this one, asking the question, how much of this real? The answer is less than and in some ways, more than you think.
  • If you like Mothership, you might enjoy this piece from Chase about how opening up the deluxe boxed set reminded him of getting video game consoles as a kid.
  • This is a piece about how WOTC quietly demo’d their new VTT, Sigil, in an actual play at Gen Con featuring Brennan Lee Mulligan and Aabria Iyengar. Even as the reporters enjoyed the show, they talked about how once it became a product demo, “the vibes went rancid“.

If you liked these stories, consider signing up for Rascal News. Also, you can still pre-order our “best of” zine!

II. Media of the Week

  • A new youtube channel, Cozy RPG Reviews, takes a look at For Small Creatures Such As We by Anna Blackwell. Inspired by Becky Chambers’ work, this is a optimistic scifi book that offers enough crunch for those who want it.

III. Links of the Week

Actual Play

  • Emily Friedman writes very insightfully about the Critical Role finale and the announcement that the core cast are changing: “How you feel about the finale of Critical Role’s third main campaign hinges a lot on what you think Critical Role — and actual play, and maybe even TTRPGs — is about. Is it an extended worldbuilding exercise? Is it a story told? Is it a game played? Is it just… content made by your parasocial faves?”
  • Jeff Stormer talks about why Party of One, his long-running actual play podcast, could best be understood as non-fiction: :Where the artforms differ is nonfiction AP never shifts its focus from the player to the character. Instead, we emphasize the conversation over the story...Play becomes less defined by big performance than creative conversation. The goal is less about exploring a fictional world than getting to know the people behind it.”

Articles

  • For Them magazine, Lin Codega writes about horny games: “By engaging in a participatory act of playful horniness, you can create frameworks to better understand yourself and the pleasures that the world might take from you.”
  • Sidney Icarus writes about how fascism often emerges in games and ways to avoid them: “You can often find very well meaning players descending into “Accidental Fascism”. This is when those players, with all “good” intentions, end up conducting horrible acts of violence, segregation, genocide, and other horrific wrongs in the pursuit of some justifiable good.”
  • Adam Bell writes a post about why its worth playing games you think you won’t like.

Misc

From the archive:

  • Abubakar Salim, actor in House of the Dragon and also director of videogame Tales of Kenzera, on his role in the Haunted City actual play: “There’s something about being in what feels like the passenger seat, but also with a steering wheel in front of you. […] As a human being, it just keeps you alive.” (Issue 84, Marc 2022)

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

  • 1 page collaborative TTRPG hosted on itch.io named DOMO PLUUME. A dark, post-crisis fantasy world where “rock” worshiping cults take memories from your now future ancestors.
  • Universe At Your Door: The Traveller is Solo and GMLess storytelling game about extraordinary people venturing into space for their community on earth. Create worlds, share knowledge and connect.
  • Strang Beorn is a haunted dungeon delve, compatible with MÖRK BORG and easily adaptable for your favourite OSR system. Fully illustrated and inspired by the darkest depths of Celtic folklore.
  • A Perfect Rock is a planet-building adventure game about finding a new home among the stars. Will you find a perfect rock?

This newsletter is sponsored by the the wonderful Bundle of Holding.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

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