Alright guys, I’ve recently grown tired of playing games just to tell a narrative with friends, and I have a group that wants to explore social issues through tabletop games. What are some tabletop games that have something to say, a point to make? For example, I love that Dogs in the Vineyard, at least what I’ve been exposed to, is all about toxic religion.
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I’d suggest these for your group: Sagas of the Icelanders , Poison’d, Monsterhearts, and Kill Puppies for Satan
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Ah! How did I not think of Saga of the Icelanders? Thanks for these suggestions! Any personal preference among these?
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It really depends on your group and what your group wants to explore, I’d go w/ Monsterhearts. but I just watched Adam Koebel and a group of people play it today. So I’m a bit biased, haha.
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Monsterhearts is a beautiful game about being a teenager, being queer and having confusing and sometimes terrifying experiences. I love it very very much.
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I’ll have to watch the roll20 play through of it!
Night Witches is an awesome game just because you play a Soviet female bomber squad in WW2, which is rad enough, but it also has strong feminist themes inherent in the game.
Dog Eat Dog is a cool, rules-light game about the effects of colonialism and how oppressed people are often pressured into turning on each other in order to survive.
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Ironclaw is a commentary about the fall of monarchy and the rise of nation states. Triskellian is run by commoners, and it’s run BETTER. The monarchies aren’t helping the people and they create a specific conflict. We’re seeing the merchant class, the cleric class, the mercenary class, all rising up. It’s also a commentary that in fantasy, things are done by people. There’s no gods, no destiny, no fate, no relics of a bygone age. Everything happens because people do things to other people. Compare this to other fantasy RPGs like D&D, where greater forces manipulate everything.
Being a game feature anthropomorphic creatures… Someone asked me, how do you keep a dynasty together in Ironclaw? You can’t cross-breed. Go through human history, and you’ll see a lot of hereditary empires secured because someone marries someone else. But the very definition of species is ‘breeds true’. You can’t marry a horse off to a boar and start a new line. And the answer is, hereditary empires CANNOT stand. The Avoirdupois civil war was in opposition to the idea of an organization that inherits and holds its own property, not tied to a particular hereditary line – that is, the Church never dies, it just gets bigger. The Bisclavret are aggressively throwing their fortunes in with imperialism, with merchant companies and privateering. Triskellian is commoners and guilds.
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The Quiet Year by Avery Alder (author of Monsterhearts) is an amazing game about community in an apocalyptic environment. http://buriedwithoutceremony.com/the-quiet-year/
The Romance Trilogy by Emily Care Boss has a lot to say about romance and relationships. The games are Breaking the Ice, Shooting the Moon, and Under My Skin. http://www.blackgreengames.com/lcn/2016/7/24/romance-trilogy
Bluebeard’s Bride by Whitney Beltran is a game about an abusive relationship through the lens of adult feminine horror fiction (like Crimson Peak, American Horror Story, The Company of Wolves). https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1921129910/bluebeards-bride?ref=card
Steal Away Jordan by Julia Ellingboe is a game about slaves in the antebellum south. Very powerful, with cool mechanics. It might be out of print, though.
I also highly recommend Sagas of the Icelanders, Poison’d, and Monsterhearts (already mentioned)
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One of the grand-daddies of RPGs-with-something-to-say is “Power Kill,” which was published as a double with “Puppetland.”
https://geekapi.global.ssl.fastly.net/rpgitem/46813/puppetland-power-kill
The premise of PowerKill was that all the players would play one game, but the GM would take notes about their behavior and write up a journal as if the players were delusional. For example, if the players “formed a party and killed monsters and took treasure”, the GM would write down in a journal that they attacked homeless people and stole their glass bottles. If they “were creatures of the night with vampiric powers”, the GM would write down in the journal that they had assaulted people and drained their blood, etc.
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Guys! Thanks so much for all of these awesome suggestions! My group will be checking out many of these over the next few months!
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Oh! I thought of another good one. Kagematsu is a game about samurai and helplessness and gender and the tools people have to convince each other to do things.
It is Japan 1572, the end of the Senguko period of history. Like many transitions of power the country is filled with strife, warring factions pulling any able bodied men into war, leaving villages populated by only women, children and old men.
Now a small, nearly indefensible village is living under the horror of a dangerous threat that casts its long shadow over the village. Without a defender, its people are almost certainly doomed.
Enter Kagematsu, a wayward ronin fleeing a troubled past. Here is a defender for the village, if only he can be swayed from his meandering course. So it is that several young women conspire among themselves to win his affections and steer him to their cause…
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Oh YESSSS, Kagematsu! Such a good game.
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This sounds REALLY cool.
It really is, I’ve only played once but loved it.
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