My top artists rendition are these detailed rendered trexes standing on pixels of something watching the meteor hit apparently right in front of them. They’re only really social with family. Fun afternoon at the (beach?) in Yucatán ruined by meteor. Years of nuclear winter to follow. One of the rendered birds looks like. A biplane. This world is beautiful and do is the scientist that made this with love in their heart. Love is real and it is found in a scientists art. Love for these dinosaurs. The tragedy in two watching together. They wouldn’t have had enough time to both turn to look at it in this way but this depiction shows the grief the artist feels for them in how they gave the dinosaurs a moment to see the catastrophe. To stand together watching the apocalypse. The earth would regrow but these two don’t know that. Here they have a respite together before the end of it all. That’s a moment they didn’t truly have.
Flying Circus is a game that looks extremely normal on the surface.
Okay, sure, there are biplanes and dragons. But the overall cover aesthetic evokes red box D&D, and there's barely a hint of the wild design choices lurking beneath.
Flying Circus is also a pbta game. This means Powered By The Apocalypse---broadly, a group of ttrpgs that are more narrative-y and story-game-y and collaborative in play.
So the last thing you'd expect here would be pages and pages of highly detailed biplane aviation physics and moves that model the affect of G-strain on the pilot and fuel burning at different rates at different altitudes.
Right?
Flying Circus is a game about running a biplane company in a post-WWI Hayao Miyazaki aesthetic german countryside. And like a Miyazaki movie, it's not non-violent. There's conflict and dragons and and ancient technology and horrifying things beyond comprehension---but there's also rolling hills and swaying grain fields and the overbearing beauty of a world un-industrialized.
Every player plays a pilot, builds their own plane (out of a *lot* of different component parts,) manages their stress levels between sorties, and engages in highly technical, heavily researched biplane combat where altitude is a currency and there's a million ways your plane can stall out, crash, and explode.
To say that Flying Circus is audacious is underselling it.
This is a high crunch game wearing the shell of a zero crunch game like an octopus in a coconut.
But it's tightly built, *very* comprehensive in what it lets you do while flying a plane, and tricky to learn but fun to try and master.
I am not smart enough for it, but I think it might be one of my favorite games I've read this year.
Flying Circus - Core Rulebook - Flying Circus is an in-depth, highly detailed Powered by the Apocalypse-derived roleplaying game of aviation
