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It's sometimes remarked that my games offer some very strange playable archetypes, but I feel it's worth emphasising that compared to many published tabletop RPGs, my stuff is prretty restrained.
(Excerpts from Troika!, Patchwork World, Greed, and Warped, respectively.)
Have you played PATCHWORK WORLD
By Aaron King
"All the worlds ended together: heavens and hells, kingdoms and wastelands, and everything in between. As they broke apart, the Heartless Princess saved the bits she could, shoving them together and crowning the resultant Patchwork World with her Icy City to hold it all together."
Patchwork World is a no-playbook, no-stat fantasy game; unusually for a Powered by the Apocalypse game characters are crafted by simply picking moves from a huge list of 70. Your character might be able to turn into cats, or maybe a whale ate their parents, or maybe they own a tavern. It's fun.
Have you played ?
Yes I haver played it
No but I've read it
no but I've heard of it
never heard of it
📖
📖 My favorite class or playbook from a game.
I'm gonna cheat slightly and pick out some stuff from Patchwork World, because any time to talk about Patchwork World is a good time.
Running counter to general PbtA tradition, Patchwork World lacks full on playbooks! You pick out a handful of moves from a large and delightful lists of moves to instead build out your character. Build your own playbook, more or less.
So, in lieu of a playbook, here's a few of my favorite moves (that would make up a playbook);
Anyways, go play Patchwork World.
ask game
My latest essay is on @aaronsrpgs “Patchwork World!” I talk about how in an indie sphere where everyone is struggling to create, this game reminds me that words and heart are the most important part of the hobby.
Transcript here.
Weird fantasy PbtA with no playbooks & no stats
Patchwork World is a weird fantasy game that mixes principles from powered-by-the-apocalypse (PbtA) and old school renaissance (OSR) games. I wrote it for people who prefer or need simple character sheets and rules and for people trying to move away from D&D. I’ll go into more detail about each of the bolded terms below.
1. WEIRD FANTASY is the genre description I settled on because the game is fantastical, it’s about fantasizing about a better world, and it doesn’t draw from the same fantasy traditions as D&D.
Instead, I wanted to recreate the feeling of playing games like Zelda: Link’s Awakening or Super Mario World for the first time. I drew inspiration from books like Hav by Jan Morris, Iceland’s Bell by Halldór Laxness, Circe by Madeline Miller, and A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar. I wanted the game to feel like my favorite surreal comic books, like Krazy Kat by George Herriman, Rudy by Mark Connery, and the works of A. Degen.
In Patchwork World, you can burst into a herd of cats, be haunted by your troll grandma, speak with birds, and tend a crystalline garden.
2. PbtA: Patchwork World draws on the principles and system originated in Apocalypse World by Vincent and Meguey Baker and the “roll with the questions” iteration created by Brandon Leon-Gambetta for Pasión de las Pasiones (one of the finest RPGs ever written).
Players (including the GM) have clear principles to help them get started, like being a fan of each other and being open to change. Players have a lot of power over what a session will look like based on the moves (special abilities) they pick for their characters—a group that owns a castle (the Castle move) and can burst into cats will have a much different approach to problems than a group with a Magnificent Weapon and a bunch of curses.
And rolling with the questions means that every time someone makes a move, they have to consider the state of their character, both emotionally and fictionally. You have a better chance to avoid danger if you made an ominous prediction about it, for example, and you’re more likely to win a fight if you’ve witnessed your enemy acting unjustly.
3. OSR principles are tailored around “old school” gaming and are often phrased as in opposition to newer “story games” like Apocalypse World. But looking at the headings in the classic Principia Apocrypha, one of the building blocks of OSR culture, there’s a lot that aligns! And a lot of stuff I love.
Embrace chaos, telegraph lethality, subvert expectations, build responsive situations. These are all principles I love, and I tried to give the GM advice and tools to do this. There are lots of tables to roll on in Patchwork World to build strange places and drive the strange occupants of those places.
It’s also really easy to make a character in Patchwork World, much like in OSR games, because...
4. SIMPLE CHARACTER SHEETS & RULES! I run games for people with full-time jobs, people with kids, people with ADHD and memory issues. And it can be such a barrier to say to people like that, “We’re going to have a bunch of fun! But we’ll have to reference this big book, and you’ll have to parse this tiny text, and if you want to be a cool wizard, you’ll have to flip back and forth between even more complicated rules.”
Patchwork World has no stats (thanks to rolling with the questions) and no classes. Making a character is as simple as choosing two moves (and if I were richer, I would have printed them on a deck of cards so players could just have them that way) and describing who they are.
(And because I embrace chaos, there’s also a table to roll for random moves instead.)
Other than their two moves, players will need to reference a simple sheet to track their wellness and experience and a sheet of basic moves that everyone has. And you’ll only need two six-sided dice to play.
5. MOVING AWAY FROM D&D is hard! You get invested in those big books and the time and money you’ve spent on them. You’re invested in the stories you’ve told. I get it. But D&D ended up actively pushing against a lot of what my weird friends wanted to do in a game, and we’d either have to follow the rules (meaning stuff was less cool), write new rules (more homework for the DM), or toss the rules away. And if we did that, why bother using them in the first place?
If you’re moving from D&D to Patchwork World, you can still play an elf wizard, a human fighter, a dwarven barbarian, or anything else like that. You can have cool weapons, fancy magic, and roguish charm and stealth. Just choose those moves and get going.
But you can also be an elf barbarian without having to worry about balancing your stat bonuses. Or you can be sneaky and cast spells without having to make it to a level three subclass or deal with multiclassing. And my hope is that once you start getting weird with that stuff, you’ll only get weirder.
6. A FINAL WORD: Making Patchwork World was an intensely personal experience for me. I was writing it in 2020 and 2021, in the rise of COVID and the aftermath of my city’s police murdering George Floyd a mile from my home. I was thinking about building communities in a broken world. I was struggling with the solitude of lockdown, away from my joyfully radical and queer communities. I was thinking about how much I’ve changed and how much I still want to change. So this is a game with rules for building communities, for mutating, for going on dates and making friends.
But you can also have a cool sword that takes memories or an eyeball helmet that sees through walls. Players have been grubby raccoons, otherdimensional children, necromancer puppets, and sullen teen busboys. This game has brought me a lot of joy! Maybe it can bring you some too. (It’s free, btw.)
(Doing a little post here about each of my games so that they’re around for me to reblog or link to. Reblogs welcome!)
Have you played PATCHWORK WORLD
By Aaron King
"All the worlds ended together: heavens and hells, kingdoms and wastelands, and everything in between. As they broke apart, the Heartless Princess saved the bits she could, shoving them together and crowning the resultant Patchwork World with her Icy City to hold it all together."
Patchwork World is a no-playbook, no-stat fantasy game; unusually for a Powered by the Apocalypse game characters are crafted by simply picking moves from a huge list of 70. Your character might be able to turn into cats, or maybe a whale ate their parents, or maybe they own a tavern. It's fun.
Have you played it ?
I made an essay about this
Yes I have played it
No but I've read it
No but I've heard of it
Never heard of it
Patchwork World Sixth Edition by Aaron King
Weird fantasy PbtA with no playbooks & no stats
