#unbundled

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This week's Unbundled game is Tricksters by Kurt Potts, from the TTRPGs for Trans Rights in Texas bundle.

Tricksters is a game where you play, as the name suggests, tricksters. Specifically folkloric-vibing tricksters--fey, gods, foxes, coyotes, etc.

You protect a village, teach lessons, and generally trick and outsmart your enemies.

You create a character by deciding their true form and their human form, their special tricks, their favorite villager, their enemy, and their desires.

In addition to creating jumping-off points for stories, many of these details also matter when determining your dice pool during a roll.

There are three types of rolls: Teaching a Lesson, Fulfilling a Desire, and Tempting Fate. Teaching a Lesson and Fulfilling a Desire both have grades of success, Tempting Fate (everything else) is a straight coin flip. (Personally I love when games really care about what actions matter for rolls.)

Also this may just be my layout side talking, but this is a very pretty game. It's simple and elegant, with great use of Arthur Rackham's illustrations (Golden Age of Illustration artist, look him up!)

You can find Tricksters over on Itch:

Tricksters by Kurt Potts

A ttrpg of tricksters, lessons & desires.

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This week's Unbundled is Breakup on Re-Entry by Riverhouse Games from the TTRPGs for Trans Rights in Texas bundle. BoRE is a game about rival mech pilots and unknowing lovers in their final battle.

This game is only five pages long (I guess technically four if you don't include the cover) but is remarkably efficient in its design. But I know Riverhouse Games for minimalist games, including a one-word RPG, so I guess four pages is easy mode.

The game is about a battle between two mech pilots, known to each other only by their callsigns. Unbeknownst to either of them, they are lovers in their civilian lives (side note, while the text is gender neutral, I kept using "girlfriends" for this writeup because I associate mecha with transbians)

The resolution mechanic for clashes is a trick-taking mechanic reminiscent of any number of card games and which primes you for the competitiveness of the battle. At the same time, each card played poses a question that fleshes out the characters.

A King of Hearts reveals the identity of the rival pilot, adding a new dimension to the game. Pilots can also decide to stop fighting at any time, ending the game as they decide what happens next.

You can find Breakup on Re-Entry on Itch:

Breakup on Re-Entry by Riverhouse Games

You just discovered your lover is secretly your mech-pilot rival!

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Hi everyone! For this Unbundled I'll be talking about Fractured Kingdom by House Dok Productions found in the TTRPGs For Trans Rights in Texas bundle.

Fractured Kingdom is the largest and trad-est game I've looked at so far. It uses the Open Action System, which I'm more familiar with from another House Dok game Metahumans Rising.

It vibes somewhere between urban fantasy and post-post-apocalypse. Player characters are lucids, people who have touched one of the four supernatural realms that have touched the waking world--the Dark, the Grave, the Slumber, and the Dreaming.

Character creation is semi-siloed based on realms and skills, but largely character attributes are chosen a la carte in a way that might seem familiar to players who have previously played certain Savage Worlds or Cortex Plus games.

Whenever you do something, you roll a d6 plus additional dice equal to the number of characteristics your character has that apply to the roll. In a stressful situation, you also spend from your pool of energy for each characteristic that applies.

The world of Fractured Kingdom is a distant version of ours, but with future politics, intruding magical realms, and functional superheroes. The most interesting elements are the Baronies, radical Lucid factions that can serve as enemies or uneasy allies to players.

You can find Fractured Kingdom on Itch:

Fractured Kingdom by House Dok Productions

Conspiracy and mysticism in the dark future.

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This installment of Unbundled is World Maker by Not Writing Games in the TTRPGs for Trans Rights in Texas bundle.

World Maker is, as the game suggests, a worldbuilding game. What makes it unique from other types of worldbuilding games is that players start by creating characters, and the worldbuilding flows from the details of character creation.

The player creates a number of characters (no set number, but think about how many "main characters" would be in a work of fiction). Then, using a deck of cards, the player draws cards that give the character skills, heritages, relationships, and traits, with prompt questions for each.

Then, the player interrogates what those randomly generated features of their characters and the answers to the prompt questions mean about the world as a whole.

It's an interesting game that blurs the line between TTRPG and writing exercise. I can see it being played in the mode of game qua game, or to jumpstart ideas for a work of fiction.

You can find World Maker here:

World Maker by NotWriting

Single player world making game

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First game I'm talking about as part of the Unbundled series is Pigsmoke by potatocubed from the TTRPGs for Trans Rights in Texas bundle!

I truly am doing these in order--this was the first game in the first bundle I bought on Itch--but it just so happened that this was a PbtA game about wizard academics, both my favorites!

Pigsmoke is a magical school game, but rather than being about the students like most games in the genre, it focuses on the academic faculty. You navigate teaching, publishing, research, and workplace politics as you work your way towards tenure.

The game has two sets of playbooks, role playbooks and department playbooks. Role playbooks cover archetypes that you might see in your own coworkers, from the glad-handing Networker to the Slacker who has made a science of working as little as possible.

Department playbooks draw from a lot of magical school media and fantasy media more broadly. Here's where you decide if you want to be a necromancer, oracle, demon-summoner, etc.

(A lot of these would be at home in MtG's Strixhaven. It would be a better game to run Strixhaven in than dnd definitely.)

One of the central mechanics is struggling against burnout, which acts similar to a resource track/healthbar.

You can get physically hurt as well, but only as a trinary "fine/hurt/taken out" switch, which I think is fun. You're all squishy wizards. Academic wizards, even, which are even squishier.

But back to burnout, you can mark burnout as a consequence, or you can push yourself to burn yourself out to use certain moves. It seems like a pretty elegant system that fits the academic vibe well.

I started the Unbundled as a way to read and talk about games I was probably never going to play. But the thing is, I kinda want to play this game. I don't expect to play all the games I read (especially because it's not practically feasible to do so) but this was a good start.

You can find Pigsmoke here:

Pigsmoke by potatocubed

A Roleplaying Game of Sorcerous Academia

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This week's Unbundled game is This Party Sucks by Beating the Binary from the TTRPGs for Trans Rights in Texas bundle! It's a game about badly coping with a recent breakup.

This Party Sucks is a three-player, single-protagonist game. Gameplay takes place across three parties that the character attends, and the players trade off playing the protagonist, the venue, and other people -- essentially the PC, the descriptions of the setting, and NPCs respectively.

At the start of each party, the Protagonist for that party decides what type of party it is and how they're trying to cope, the Venue describes a party complication, and Other People describes another guest at the party.

At each party, the Protagonist has moves they can take, but External Moves take a resource since interacting with others drains your social battery. After three parties, players choose Epilogue moves to explore how the Protagonist has changed and will continue to change.

You can find This Party Sucks on Itch:

This Party Sucks by beatingthebinary

This Party Sucks is a game about being a queer, trans twentysomething who is (badly) processing a recent breakup.

There's also an in-browser character generator for the game here:

This Party Sucks Character Generator by beatingthebinary

generate a queer+trans 20something story game protagonist

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This Unbundled is Orizuru: a half-formed thing by Marx S from the TTRPGs for Trans Rights in Texas bundle.

Orizuru is a solo game about transforming into a bird, either metaphorically or literally. It uses folding an origami crane as a resolution mechanic.

The player Reflects on prompts by writing the answers on a piece of paper. Whenever they take an action, they fold the next step of a paper crane, count the answers that can be read on the current paper, then either Reflect again, fold again, or do nothing, and narrate the respective fictions.

Play takes place over 4 stages: Unshaping, Unmaking, Remaking, and Reshaping. Each corresponds to a different prompt and a different set of folds for the paper crane. When the player finishes that set of folds, they move to the next stage.

When the player finishes the last stage, they narrate an epilogue based on what reflections are visible on the completed crane.

You can find Orizuru: a half-formed thing on Itch:

Orizuru: a half-formed thing by Marx of High Water

A solo origami game about transforming into a beautiful bird

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Today's Unbundled is Seedling by Law of Names Media, from the TTRPGs for Trans Rights in Texas bundle!

Seedling is a 4-player game about turning into a plant, played over the course of four seasons of an in-game year. The roles in the game are the seedling and the voice of the world. You can either play with one seedling and three voices of the world or with everyone taking turns playing both roles.

Players play through 4 seasons: Spring, the seedling begins to change and the world is receptive or not; summer, the seedling is welcomed by a group or not; autumn, the seedling decides whether to provide resources to the world (willingly or not); and winter, the seedling decides their future.

I try to refrain from editorializing in Unbundled, but Seedling invites interpretation. The transformation serves as not only a metaphor for transition (among other things) but the way that trans people interact with their peers, community, and the capitalist world as a whole.

You can find Seedling on Itch:

Seedling by Law of Names Media

A short role playing exploration about people turning into plants.