AUGUST 3, 2024

by Keaira

<aside> 🔖 This is my contribution to Autocratik’s event happening during the month of August aimed to talk more about the hobby of table top roleplaying games.

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Anyone who has ever come into contact with me in the last 5 years knows this - it is only a matter of time until I steer any RPG related conversation towards Good Society. Annoyingly - at least for anyone on the other side of such conversation - it became my solid benchmark for narrative play and therefore any other RPG will always be automatically subconsciously compared to it. The easiest answer in the RPGaDAY 2024 list. Most often played? Yes, mylord/mylady - it is truth universally  acknowledged, that there has been barely a month during the last years without this game.

Good Society: A Jane Austen RPG is as the authors say “a collaborative regency rpg that seeks to capture the heart, and the countenance, of Jane Austen’s work”. And it does that gracefully. Created by the Storybrewers (Hayley Gordon & Vee Hendro), this GMless RPG simulates structure of a novel - player-driven scenes build separate chapters (either during one single event or as series of visitations) that are followed by letter-writing and scandal-spreading interludes. The multilayered stories with the Major Characters, each following their desire, in the center are complicated by clever use of secondary characters (Connections). The mechanics are generally quite simple and there are following elements that make the game unique and click for me:

• Playset. While the game can work without, it is better with it. A combination of character desires, relationships, family backgrounds and roles, that creates starting drama. It just works, sit back and follow the story currents and it will get where you need to be.
• Epistolary. Writing letters between characters is magical. It changes the pace of the narrative and moves the story forward, or adds layer to it, that would not be otherwise possible. And it stirrs player’s creativity - from writing poetry to designing ball invitations.

• Resolve tokens. Main mechanic in the game is moving tokens with narrative power around the table. Do you want it to suddenly start raining? Make a servant spill coffee over your rival? Overhear a private conversation? Make your aunt change her will? Pay a resolve token. The best thing is, it cannot be forced upon someone. Discuss, negotiate. Best story comes from collaboration.

• Monologue tokens. I wish every game had these. At any moment a player can pause a game and give monologue token to someone else and that person will narrate inner thought of their character about a topic chosen by the giver. Have you just met your former lover after 5 years? Just learned about your family crushing financial problems? Tell us what your character thinks.
• Connections. During the character creation every player creates their Major Character, the protagonist. But also 1-2 secondary characters - family members, friends, lovers, enemies. And… then they are played by another player. This supporting cast is there to cause trouble, to complicate things and help/hinder the heroes and heroines on the way to fulfill their desires.

While base game is great on its own, expansions add many tools for playing in different genres. Masked vigilante fighting corruption in Venice and hiding from beautiful bounty huntress who works for the Duc? Regency Knives Out? Politics of Fae Courts? Arcane arts students from good families fighting for attention of a mysterious wizard? Downton Abbey-like scandals in the servant quarters? Grab some of the expansions. And if it is not enough - do you like a novel? A TV series with interpersonal drama in center? There is high chance the creative community around Storybrewers’ discord already made a hack about it. Just have a look into the library of Penned to Good Society games - hacks, supplements, expansions.

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Index

Day 4 —>