About Bequest
The first Bequest game event, called Sagas of the Firekeepers, was played over two days in the Cards Against Humanity booth at NerdCon: Stories (2016).
A few weeks before that particular NerdCon, I was invited by staff at Cards Against Humanity to run a tabletop RPG demo in their booth, to highlight one intersection of gameplay and stories. I’m a writer and game designer specializing in storytelling games and narrative worlds. My name is Will Hindmarch.
Here’s the problem with running tabletop RPGs in a booth at a convention like NerdCon (where panels and live shows are the spotlight events): a tabletop RPG might take a couple of hours to fully reveal itself and demonstrate it’s collaborative storytelling depth. I love this about RPGs, but it also means they don’t play well in an exhibit-hall booth when people want to run off in twenty minutes to catch their next panel.
My solution, in this case, was to accelerate development on an asynchronous, long-form game design I meddled with a few years ago. In that design, a game took weeks to play, with players taking turns whenever they felt like it. I borrowed a lot from that design to make this something that plays faster.
So, at NerdCon, each player only needed 10-20 minutes to play, which contributed to an ongoing narrative—a history of play—that lasted the whole weekend. Each turn told the tale of a Neolithic lifetime, discovered and related in a few minutes, that changed the game for the next lifetime, and the next, and the next. Each player inherited resources, learning, and quests passed to them by a previous player, even if they never met. Their adventures and gifts passed along through time.
Hence: Bequest.
It went pretty wonderfully, much to my delight. It’s my hope that additional Bequest game events unfold in the future, near and far, with their own stories and worlds and unique circumstances.
Stay tuned to this site to discover how that might be possible.
Bequest 1: Sagas of the Firekeepers
The first Bequest event was a fantastical history incorporating Neolithic and Bronze Age motifs into a fictional land and the lives of a people that called themselves The Firekeepers.
If you played this first Bequest event at NerdCon: Stories 2016, thank you so much for sharing your time and imagination with us. We discovered a remarkable history—centuries in days—and it exists primarily within us. Your messages, giving us the perspectives and history of the Firekeepers, live on. (And you can read all Firekeepers content in order now.)
This article in Magic Circles looks more closely at this first Bequest event.
I designed this first event in about a week. Icons featured in Sagas of the Firekeepers were found within The Noun Project. The icons used this time were created by Madeleine Bennett, by Nesdon Booth, by Hamish Buchanan, by Mike Endale, by Andrejs Kirma, by Cezary Lopacinski, by Alice Noir, and by parkjisun.