Yesterday we played a one-shot of Twisted Rifters. It was pretty cool, though I do kind of feel that the book is a little thin.
"A little thin." It's 23 pages, it funded on Kickstarter in February 2020 and made less than $1500 - what you'd call a "zine," which is why I didn't back it (I've warmed to the idea of zine games since, but at the time I wasn't backing them). The premise and vibe of the game is pretty cool - the world has cracked apart, there's this "rift" beneath the floating archipelago making up the last of the land where people live, there are monsters and magics and so forth. The system is very much like Blades in the Dark, but you can add "qualifiers" to anyone's roll (I mean, they have to accept them), meaning you might pick a lock "loudly" and attract attention or bake a cake "messily" and have it come out tasty but look ugly.
That right there is a brilliant enough idea to justify the game, IMO. One of the problems I've had with Forged in the Dark games is that Devil's Bargains can be hard to come up with on the fly, and that's a superb framework for thinking about them. But the rest of the game could really use some fleshing out. There are a million really cool ideas in there, so much evocative stuff, but the book really leans on the "this sounds cool" to do a lot of heavy lifting and ignores the "here's how you play" aspect. And then there's little things like I think there's a maximum dice pool of 4 dice...but that's never explicitly stated. Also the font is not friendly, especially with white-text-on-black:
With all of that said, I ran it, it worked just fine. I think the game and the setting could accommodate a book the size of Blades, easy-peasy, if someone had wanted to put that work in. But here's the session!
The Rift has some sentience and wants to eject all of the lands chained to it into the unforgiving blackness above. It hates the characters because they're drawing power from it - they've become a "False Pantheon" that people worship, except the groundlings, who still revere the Rift itself.
This all started because of J, the Architect Superior. J possesses the power to build things from the world around them, but also to infect minds with ideas and memes. While pursued by enemies, they began the belief that they were the God of Chains and Bindings, and that belief took root and spread. They also worked three others into this new Pantheon...
Fade, the Non-Existent Knight was an assassin and warrior in service to a Queen, but she died and then returned from death as a wraith-like figure. J turned her into the Goddess of Nightmares, and now she intends to earn her death and return to rest.
Gray, the Experiment was looking for true immortality and figured the way to get it was to become indestructible. He wears the skin of a golem and dabbles in alchemy, but wants to go back to the drawing board and perfect the processes this time. And then J helped him become the God of Eternity.
And finally, most terrifying of all, is Prudence, the Contagion. Prudence may or may not have been human at one point, but she's now a walking disease, contained within a special robe and striving to raise the dead not as mindless zombies (which she's already capable of doing) but as pure, living diseases like herself. It's not hard to see why J made her the Goddess of Death.
These four beings, then, are in the city of Mooring, on the continent of Camphor, chained to the mantle of the world above the Rift. J and Fade have arrived from one of the "higher" continents, sliding down a "chute" of Rift energy to escape from a mob of heretics. Now they are are in a temple dedicated to the Pantheon, and collectively decide that today's the day they're going to burn the groundlings off the face of the world.
J summons people from all over Mooring, and disassembles the walls of the temple to raise their throne (and Gray's throne) on high. The population of Mooring listens and the thronging masses await word from their gods...and it comes.
Gray booms out across the city to rise up and smite the groundlings, to march on the Unterwell where they live and kill them all! Prudence infects the faithful - not with a disease that will harm them, but simply with a carrier that she can use later. She doesn't much care if the faithful die, anyway - everything will die.
(Yeah, this game started dark and got steadily darker.)
The citizens of Mooring march en masse toward the Unterwell, but the groundlings are already emerging to meet them. These groundlings also have purple glows to their eyes and mouths, as though the Rift itself is working through them. The army of believers strikes them, pushing them back, and Fade is on the front lines getting her blade wet with the blood of heretics. But then the rift-bats arrive.
The bats rise out of the Rift, huge creatures with wingspans ranging 30-40 feet! They swoop down and devour believers and groundlings alike, but when they devour groundlings they also realize a scream of power that deafens the faithful and drives them back. Gray orders the Mooring-soldiers with muskets to fire and some of the bats crash to the ground, but there are more coming. Fade leaps into the air and lands on one, forcing it to act as a mount by showing it its own primal nightmares.
J fashions a grenade launcher (more like a big slingshot) and fires a gravity grenade, sucking the bats together. Gray charges in, probably with the intent of scattering the soldiers, but the gravity field that J has created is too much and he is rooted to the ground. Prudence focuses her grim powers and infects the bats with a rabies-like disease, and they crash to the ground and start gnawing on Gray - of course, their fangs cannot penetrate his armor. But they bite at anything they can reach, and the disease spreads...
...but it spreads throughout the Pantheon's own army. The groundlings don't seem affected at all.
Prudence, annoyed, alters the disease to make the infect hemorrhage, and they erupt in a rolling wave of gore (ew), which only spreads the disease further. Gray, now that the bats aren't chewing on him anymore, smashes an alchemical reagent and sheds his armor, free of the gravity field but now exposed.
Fade, meanwhile, flies above the chaos on her bat-mount, and sees that the groundlings are fewer in number but still marching and the Pantheon's army has mostly liquified itself. She leaps off the bat and lands as Prudence hurls an acid grenade, which explodes and liquefies more of the groundlings. Gray narrowly dodges the pool of acid thus created, chugs a potion and regrows his armor, bones cracking and skin hardening. The four of them stand together as the groundlings march on them.
J tries to fashion a hand from the earth to throw groundlings off the edge of the world, but the ground cracks and opens and a shaft of Rift-light emerges. Gray throws a couple into that hole, but their bodies disintegrate and become part of the Rift-miasma, and Fade wonders aloud whether that will only strengthen it. J feels their surviving believers start to doubt - much of the population of Mooring is dead and the groundlings still march. J reaches out and carefully starts to close the hole...but the Rift senses what they are doing and a few living tendrils of power slither through.
The tendrils grab whatever raw material they can - acid, dead bat parts, gore, the remnants of Gray's shed armor - and form constructs, which then attack the Pantheon. The one formed of acid lurches at Gray, but Gray is too quick for it. He merges two vials of alchemical solutions and throws it at the being, neutralizing the acid - the construct still "lives", but it's effectively made of water.
The construct formed of Gray's armor attacks Fade, and she tries to dodge and knock it into the slowly-closing hole into the Rift. She miscalculates, however, and it grabs her, and absorbs part of her nightmarish power, leaving her diminished. Meanwhile, the one formed of blood and gore flows toward Prudence.
The Goddess of Death tries to take control of it, since it's mostly diseased tissue, but she fails, and it flows into her, bursting her containment robe and leaving her formless. The last one, the one made of bat parts, grabs for J, but J neatly dodges and finishes closing the hole.
The constructs fall, and the Rift seems to lose some power. The whole continent drops some, and the chains holding Camphor to the rest of the higher lands strain and groan. The chutes of magic connecting them fail, and the Pantheon realizes that the Rift is weakened. The groundlings are dead, but so is most of Mooring, and there is little else on this continent.
But the chains still hold, and the Pantheon regroups and begins considering how they might ascend. There are other islands, and they too have heretics. And the Rift must still be bound.
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