Metatopia 2024

By Alex White

- 15 minutes read - 3149 words
Metatopia continues to be a brilliant convention for game designers who want to alpha- and beta- test their game designs with smart, capable people from the design and playtest community

Before the Season Ends

by Jen Adcock Alpha test

A game about young Regency-era debutantes coming of age in London as they navigate new social waters, make friends, and look for the means to make their own happiness. The game uses a system of flower-language-inspired tokens to represent the growing friendship and influence between the player characters, as the friends enable each other to find new ways within themselves to face challenges and achieve their goals. This session will include character creation, a brief excursion to a ball, and the memento-making debrief phase of the game.

This was probably my favourite new game that I played at the con.

I played the Rose, who had a focus on love - either love she was looking for herself, or matchmaking for others. The other players included (I think) the young and impetuous Lily, the Peony who was breaking away from parental control, an artistic one, and the daisy who was all about social networking.

We each had about five flower tokens of our own flower, and they represented the ability to do something special (which was different for each of us - for example, the Rose could use a rose token to shut down an annoying suitor. The Peony could use a peony token to brashly speak her mind.) We also each had a special token associated with our matron which we could use in certain circumstances - such as 'the key' which our artist friend used to exit an uncomfortable situation and find some pleasure in the peace of the garden, and where she made a new friend, bonding over art.

We had some scenes of our preparation for the ball, arriving at the ball and scoping out which men were likely prospects (or otherwise) and some dancing at the ball as we were invited to dance by our chosen beaus.

Jen had prepared a number of interesting supporting characters whom we interacted with.

At the end of the ball, everyone donated one of their tokens permanently to another player (this is done evenly so that nobody is left out!) Other flower tokens unlocked new capabilities which reflect your own core abilities and also something of the flower that the token came from. As the game would progress through "the season" our debutantes would become more adept at handling themselves and others as they have learned to trust each other more.

Their Fearful Teeth

By Mary Rose Valentine

Alpha test

  • Bluesky: timeformars.bsky.social

In the long, storied history of vampire-centered roleplaying games, vampires have been many things. They are creatures of the night to be feared, or they are the eccentric nobles living in the castle on the hill that never seem to age. They are disgusting, predatory creatures, or they are alluring supernaturally-powered almost-humans. They represent inherited power and prestige, or they represent illness, disease, and depravity. Humans are companions at best, livestock at worst, but they are always prey. Vampires are known for getting what they want, through force, persuasion, manipulation, or fear.

Their Fearful Teeth wants to know: What if they just… asked?

Their Fearful Teeth is a two-player roleplaying game about a human and a vampire having a conversation. At some point during that conversation, the vampire will ask the human for permission to feed; the game ends when the human delivers or denies consent (or the vampire revokes the request).

It was interesting being able to revisit this game a year on from the last time that I saw it. The introductory questionnaires have been rationalised into a pair of character sheets - one for the vampire and one for the mortal. They had some private questions on one side, and public questions on the other.

We had six players, in three pairs. One pair played a contemporary vampire meeting a human over zoom, because this vampire knew that in person no human could refuse him, and having the conversation over zoom gave the human a genuine choice. Another pair was using a vampire from a very different tradition - somewhere in the far east, I think. This vampire appeared as an old lady and was travelling around with another old lady whom it wanted to turn for company.

I played with Robin Bennet. I was a victorian age vampire, Mr Lupine, who was having the "coming of age" talk with his 18 year old step daughter. They discussed her desire to study palaeontology, and make a name for herself, and he committed to pulling strings to get her into Oxford. They discussed the stories he had told her as a child, and she particularly liked the ones about Arthur and his knights. I had hoped that she had liked the roman tales, but she had found them too brutal.

We talked about the sudden loss of her nanny a few years ago, and I explained that it as a terrible accident and she had bled to death. My daughter pushed on the question though and I had to admit that I had, in fact, killed her and drunk her blood.

The daughter is horrified, as you might imagine.

She discovers that I need to do it again, and I vouchsafe that I need to take just enough, but not too much. And if she would allow me to dine on a mere pint of her blood, then I would be able to keep my baser urges in check out of my love for her. We bargain some more, and the daughter reveals her own secret - that she loves women, not men. I'm proud of the way I've raised her to make her own choices, and she then makes the choice to allow me to feed.

So - the game has developed somewhat and I think there are opportunities to provide additional helps to people who are starting out a game. Concrete suggestions on the page about types of vampires, types of relationship and so on would prove helpful.

The nicest addition was some cards that could be subtly passed to the other player in order to give suggestions for a direction of conversation without breaking the immersion of the conversation you are in. Examples include "Offer me something", "Slow down", "Disagree with me about something" and "Ask me why". The last of those was the one that I passed over to Robin when I had talked about the nanny's disappearance, which opened up a fun line of discussion in a natural way.

Sapiens: Uplifted Earth Animals Exploring Exoplanets

By Patrick Watson

Alpha test

Sapiens is a hard sci-fi, shared-GM TTRPG about uplifted earth animals exploring exoplanets.

For Millenia a great interstellar ark has sailed the western spiral arm of the Milky Way, accelerating to near the speed of light. Aboard the ship are four genetic lineages: orca, loxodon, corvid, and octopod. These species were uplifted by an extinct precursor primate species, and they're on a quest to understand the beauty and terror of their universe, and perhaps to find clues to their own cultural heritage.

A subversive and counter-colonial take on Star Trek inspired by worldbuilding games like Microscope, Sapiens unfolds over a single "season" of the "show." Mechanics emphasize collaborative map-making, opening secret envelopes, describing alien species and ecosystems, storyboarding action sequences, and roleplaying exciting, sometimes campy, scenes of space exploration as genetically engineered, cybernetically enhanced, animals.

Sapiens explores the tension between personal narratives and changes on a cosmic scale. Each "episode" examines the complexity of alien minds, bodies, and minds

This was very much an alpha test, and I don't think it matches up to the ambition as yet - but I have hope!

The concept as I understand it is that the game broadly progresses on two phases.

  • The first phase is a one of writing and drawing artefacts of play. Alien species, geographical maps, clues to mysteries, crises. The latter is far and away the most significant for the game - if you think of each game session as an episode of a TV show, then each crisis is the main "A-plot" of that episode. Or at least it should be. As part of creating these artefacts, some blank cubes are put on them to represent that there are interesting things to be investigated.
  • The second phase is one of role-playing investigation of the artefacts. The person who created a document is the person that answers questions or reveals additional information. Cubes on the document are transferred to another 'discovery' placeholder, and when there are three cubes on there a 'planetary secret' is revealed which might be new information or a new thing you can do. During the second phase you may change things about the world, and this causes entropy (which is marked on an entropy card) and which also affects you. During our game entropy changes were on the order of 2 or 5 points, but the scale apparently goes up to about 1000 to make big changes in the game. I'm not sure how that would be attained mechanically in the game!

We ran into a few problems in the game. An earlier playtest had created a whole set of documents and we were supposed to be 50 years later; but we didn't see their documents and have a chance to look at them until after we had created our own from blank pages. It would have been much better to have built on the previous groups work.

The game also lacked focus. I'm not sure if it is supposed to be GMless, but in the event we barely spent any time investigating the crisis before it had engulfed us. There were several points when all the players at the table looked at each other - nobody being sure what we should be doing at that point.

I think in normal use there is an expectation that the first phase happens offline via discord or some other mechanism, to set things up for the play sessions when they occur. Difficult to replicate that in a 2 hour con slot though!

It is an alpha test stage at the moment, so I'm sure the designers will be addressing these kind of points. It feels like it would benefit from quite a bit more structure and guidance - both about the structure of play and the implied setting of the game.

Darquehaven Manor

by Craig Hatler

Beta test

You have been retained by the owners of Darquehaven Manor to investigate strange occurrences that are turning away potential buyers. What's causing these occurrences, and can the cause be eliminated? The aim is to playtest chorus (aka the GM) resources to help balance prep and improv, in particular a "macro-level" mystery solving layer that takes cues as play unfolds.

We were playing what is essentially a new Call of Cthulhu module, but using Craig's system and tools.

Sadly the adventure ended up becoming a bit of an accidental railroad because a lot of attempts to use skills to find out information failed in one way or another (the problem "Gumshoe" identified). One of the reasons that this happened is that the GM had statted up the uber-villain behind the haunting, and used his powers to oppose us at each turn. That plus great rolls from the GM and rubbish roles from us translated into a level of 'learned helplessness' in the adventure. For example, when we couldn't remove a portrait from the wall, we couldn't lever it off with two of us and a plank, and bullets bounced off it, we didn't even bother interacting with a bust in another room and other similar situations. We made some of our own fun by roleplaying quirks of our characters and our interactions with one another, but I don't think it was the experience that was desired.

Discussing it afterwards, we suggested that it might have been beneficial to have created and used more of the GM resources to stat out minor threats in each of the rooms which we could have tackled, all the time making us more prepared for the main foe (or weakening him for the final confrontation).

We deduced some things ourselves, and were able to solve the haunting, but I'd venture to say that it was in spite of the system rather than because the system supported us in what we were trying to do.

Vileborn - Embrace your Darkness

presented by Camilla Zamboni; by Horrible Guild

Beta test

A nobledark tabletop role playing game about young heroes exploring their corrupted heritage in a world shrouded in darkness and plagued by its creatures, the Reviled. Written by Claudio Pustorino and translated by Camilla Zamboni, the game thrusts players into a conflict between the Empire of Egas and the Luminarian Church. You play as young recruits of the ancient Order of Dusk, and as vileborn—half-human, half-Reviled—caught between these antagonizing factions. As you explore your heritage and investigate the world's fate, you'll decide where your allegiances lie. Featuring streamlined and accessible rules, an agile game system (d6, d8, d10, and d12), captivating character sheets, gorgeous art, and engrossing worldbuilding, Vileborn will appeal to lovers of dark fantasy, emotional journeys, coming-of-age stories, and YA literature. The playtest focuses on pushing characters to their limits—and seeing what happens when they succumb to their dark side.

The purpose of this playtest was to examine what happens when the player characters get to the end of their metaphorical tether. They are all connected to one aspect of the darkness or another. One is part vampire, one is part were-creature, one controls hungry shadows and one sees and hears ghosts all the time. They have special powers they can tap into by marking them. As the number of marks you carry increases, so the demands of your monstrous self upon you increase too. And the only way to rid yourself of the traumatic desires of the marks is to give into one of your urges and gain respite for a while through doing something horrible.

So all our characters are set up with 3 marks already checked off, putting everyone in a very tense state already. We were then investigating the possibility of a vampire on the loose within a noble court, perhaps associated with a countess.

Of course, being in a duke's palace, we need to do all this on the down low.

Of course, being teenagers plagued by aspects of the darkness it all goes horrible wrong, horribly quickly!

it was really interesting to see how the different character types were driven to different kinds of excess by the heritage. I was playing the Ghostwalker on this occasion, and the idea that the clamour of the voices of ghosts around her was growing and growing until in the end she just starts doing what they demand without thinking about it was chilling on the one hand, but excellent role-play fodder on the other.

The playtesting did raise a couple of questions to go back to the designers - specifically how much agency do the PCs have when they reach 4+ marks (are they forced to conform to their problem, should they have a means of resisting it, etc.) and also how do surprise attacks work, especially in a PVP situation.

This game is kickstarting as of the time of writing. I backed it as a result of this playtest, and it is worth your consideration if you enjoy dark fantasy and strong feelings! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/horribleguild/vileborn

Blades-Star Galactica: Ghost Fleet Offensive

by Sidney Icarus

Alpha test

Command the Battlestar Valkyrie and the covert Ghost Fleet to turn the tide of the Cylon War. A Band of Blades 2nd wave hack attempting to capture more personal growth and connections amidst a covert war against extinction.

In this two hour slot we didn't do anything involving characters at all, but focussed on fleet combat and the process by which things were set up for the next game. As a result we didn't actually tackle any of the things which were mentioned in the blurb for this game!

For the space combat, the basic idea is that there is a list of six things that might be at stake in a conflict. From memory I think these are harm, time, information, gear, attention, (and one other). You placed one or two dice on each of these, indicating how much you were prepared to risk (two dice rather than one dice) and the areas you cared about. The dice are rolled, and a 1-3 is a failure, a 4-5 is a success and a 6 is a success plus roll an extra dice too. These are then placed on the areas of interest one at a time, so you can choose where you want your successes and where you want your failures to be.

We had little cards with what looked like check boxes beside things like guns, engines, emergency kit and so on. I thought these were to record damage against those areas, but that wasn't the case, and I'm not sure what they were there for!

Overall it felt like an interesting table top boardgame with some narrative elements of describing what was happening. I would like to have seen more character involvement in the actual dogfights, so that there was a sense that I was a PC in the cockpit who was making decisions and facing consequences. It was all a bit too abstract for my liking.

After the combat was resolved we each took a card (commander, CAG, Chaplain, Engineering) and undertook a series of decisions or operations. The commander chose the threat level, which affected how easily the CAG could manage repair and resupply of the ships, meanwhile engineering was identifying internal crises which were developing in the fleet and the chaplain was healing the wounded and setting prophetic guidance, while the commander then determined the parameters for the next mission. This worked well, and the decision making spotlight flowed nicely between the the different roles. Again though, it felt very much like a board game rather than a role-playing game at this point.

I hope that as this moves from alpha test to beta test that there will be opportunities to bring in more 'RP' to every aspect of the 'G' in RPG here. Perhaps hewing a little closer to the inspirational material, as Band of Blades the game seems a rather nice thematic fit with Battlestar Galactica

Overall

Once again Metatopia has been an absolute delight. It is wonderful meeting so many enthusiastic designers and playtesters, both around the game tables and in the many conversations during the day and late into the night. Smart people, talking passionately about the subjects they love is very invigorating!

All credit to Avonelle, Vinney and their friends at Double Exposure who make it all possible. Find out more about what they do here: https://dexposure.com/home.html