Tabletop games

We all know how these stories go.

*"Once upon a time, seven children found an old oak door that only they could perceive.

Stepping through it, they found themselves in a realm of magic and wonder. Trapped in that fantastic world, they found that they were its chosen heroes, destined to save it from the Dark King and bring peace and joy back to the land of Ardenlea.

Though they were scared, they rose to the occasion, finding hidden strengths they never knew they had, forging unbreakable bonds of friendship, and after much adventure (and not a little bit of heartache), they defeated the Dark King, banishing his evil from Ardenlea and restoring the lost Princess - revealed to have been one of their number all along - to the throne, to rule with kindness and grace forever more. And they all lived happily ever after."*

That's the story you told about what happened to you, 20 years ago.

Oh, it wasn't real, of course. The doctors and the police and the parents, they all convinced you it was how you collectively blotted out whatever terrible thing actually happened to you, because seven children don't disappear for several weeks - and one of them forever - without something terrible having happened.

Now you're all grown up, and you have other problems to worry about, other beasts to slay; you have jobs and rent and maybe kids of your own. The fantasies of your youth, whatever hideous and unknowable trauma they covered up - all are distant and hazy memories. You've moved on. That's the story you're telling yourselves now.

Only... what's that old oak door doing on the wall...?

After Ardenlea is a game for 3-6 former chosen heroes confronting the memories - and mistakes - of their childhood adventures, using the diceless Fugue System. Management advises that we can do a serious game once in a while, as a treat. It's allowed.

D.I.R.T. The Defence Investigations and Research... Honestly, no one agrees on what the T stands for. There are a few camps around the floor - some say 'team', others 'taskforce'. I say that the acronym was formed by a public servant with a terrible sense of humour and a strong need to make a terrible acronym. Heavens helps us when we get mogged out of the Defence Portfolio...

Look, DIRT isn't a good acronym, but it's the only one we've got. We're the part of government that seeks out reputable uncanny and paranormal stuffs. We aren't ghost hunters, or the X-Files (the lawyers said we aren't allowed...), we're public servants who just happen to have an affinity for the uncanny.

Anyways, welcome to DIRT.

The Daughters of Elysium are an all-female, high school rock band. They are also all the daughters of goddesses. They balance normal high school issues, their band, and their duties battling the forces of chaos.

For one week, however, they get to forget their ordinary lives and duties as they go off to music camp. They get to hang out with other high school bands and recording industry types and spend a week focusing on their music.

But something haunts this campground. Something ancient, powerful and evil. Lives are in the balance. Can the Daughters of Elysium save the day?

Daughters of Elysium is a table-top game for 3 to 5 players. It will use the setting from White Wolf's Scion: First Edition, but will be systemless. Knowledge of the setting will be helpful but by no means essential; players unfamiliar with the setting are very welcome.

Content note: Suicide and mild horror themes.

Somewhere in the Canadian Wilderness, sometime in the middle of winter, 1993ish.

In the Independent Wrestling scene, it was known as the Death Loop. 12 shows across 14 nights, each show in a remote Native Reservation, only accessible by car/truck in the middle of winter over "winter roads", frozen lakes and rivers. The Loop would have the bare minimum of workers, no ring crew, and a ring best described as "spartan".

But hey, all the Bannock you could eat!

On this tour, the promotor, instead of a bus, got two 4WDs for the talent, and on this night, in a heavy storm, one of them got separated from the other and, more importantly, the ring truck.

Inside the lost 4WD are 5 wrestlers.

The Old Vet, scared of being forgotten. The Firey Young Tag Team, both members scared that the other will stab them in the back. The Female Wrestler, scared she's already been reduced to her sex appeal. And the Green Rookie, scared his career will end before it begins.

In desperation, they find shelter in a seemingly abandoned mansion, but inside find a restless spirit refusing to let them go until they help the others, stuck in a loop for centuries.

If they can, they'll make the heroic comeback. If not, they won't just get blackballed from the industry, but from life in general.

No pressure.

A mystery horror game with 5 Independent Wrestlers forced to confront their own fears, and those of others, in the Year Zero Engine system. Rated MA/R, containing themes of violence, horror, racism, sexism, discrimination, bullying, drug use, and professional wrestling.

By Mathew "Killing The Town" Sforcina.

Welcome to Toriga City, a thriving corner of the fantasy world, where elves, dwarves, birdmen and humans live side by side. The skull-shaped city is suffering from an infestation of a criminal cult. Demons, parasitic creatures which take over the minds of those who lust for power or knowledge, have used their cultists to establish a thriving drug smuggling ring, which is threatening to reduce the city to chaos.

The last line of defence for the city is the brave officers of the Demon Incident Control Bureau (DICB). All DICB officers come from unique walks of life and training. In this world, teens are trained in different temples to different gods, each teaching skills, techniques and, at high levels, magic.

The 8th Team is a 6-member squad of the DICB, tasked with rooting out suspected cultist leaders involved with the drug trade, and in particular, a suspected mole within the DICB itself, all in the midst of a series of suspicious murders.

This is a translated Japanese murder mystery in the Jubensha style. That means this game may be more linear than many Pheno games, and your character's may feel a bit less open to customisation. Please come in to this game prepared for more of a cultural experience, rather than something with full flexibility.

Trigger warnings for: violence, death, murder, corruption, cult-like behaviour, demons and possession, and the gamut of warnings you would expect for a game with all player characters being police officers.

The trenches will take something from you, and never give it back. A great war has ravaged the world since before the dawn of recorded history. Violence tears at the edges of reality, the darkness consuming entire countries as industry and technology become ever more violent. You and your comrades may or may not have signed up to be thrust into the trenches to investigate things no human was ever supposed to see.

Echoes of Yesterday features a unique dark fantasy setting inspired by the First World War and manifestations of hope and grief. Its hybrid design combines a simple, intuitive d20 system with innovations that underscore stories of survival, desperation and hope.

But don't worry about all that, soldier. Even if it's the last thing we do, we'll show those Imperial bastards what the Alliance is made of!

Player Capacity: 2 to 5. System knowledge required: Entirely beginner friendly, system will be taught during the session. Rated MA: Death, Exploitation, Guns, Imprisonment, Indoctrination, Injuries, Mental Illness, Torture, Trauma, Violence, Xenophobia.

Enthralled

                                            by Mike Walker

"You have some power that you will not share." "Call it that, then." "I would do whatever you say, promise whatever you want promised." Julia and Merlin, in Trumps of Doom

Power.

On the darker end of the multiverse lay the Courts of Chaos, where Lords of Chaos create and shape their realms and demonic servants to their own will...

Some Chaosians choose to become enthralled, giving a master ultimate power over their lives and destinies. Enthrallment bonds make it possible to reach other states of consciousness, where time and space feel infinite, while also being entwined with your partner. Some masters are kind, some are abusive...

A close knit group decides to rescue a talented survivor from an abusive master. This new addition to their group brings both new opportunities and interpersonal challenges. The surviour needs time to heal, and to relearn her true self, and perhaps even to learn to love again. Her abusive master is angry, and will stop at nothing to have her back...

A look at love, devotion, Domination and submission...

Insightful Master Submissive Princess Stern Mistress Talented Devotee Warrior Slave

Game Type: Tabletop/Multiform How man players: 5 What's the game again: An interpersonal drama between players in a fantasy setting. Seriousness: 5, This is a cathartic game and contains adult concepts Safety Tool: X card Genre/Setting: Loosely based on Zelazny's Amber System: Amber Diceless RPG (knowledge of the setting and system not necessary or useful to play) Movie Rating: MA. Trigger warnings: Past narcissistic abuse, alternative romantic relationships

http://random.hitpoint.com.au/exitsandman/

You're an alien from the galaxy-wide Federation of Planets, sent to the newest hunter planet - known to its locals as Dirt. You're anything but human, armed to the teeth with the most advanced weapons the Federation can offer, and ready for a fun hunt. Pity the Dirtlings aren't so keen on being hunted... and they fight back. No experience is needed. We will be running the Little Hunt version which only requires 2 to 5 players. If you're ready, we will be there to run a game with our team of CMs! Light, funny, frantic and great fun for players, CM and spectators. Come say g'day, join us, and see why Hunter Planet is so much fun players fondly remember their games from 40 years ago!

Lord Leopard loves parties! And for his annual showoffy to-do, he's sending his invitations to random guests! Keeps things interesting, rather than just rubbing elbows with the upper crust all the time. Everyone would love to see his Ravishing Red Ruby, no matter their station! Surely there will be no repercussions whatsoever!

A silly game of silly mystery for 5 players

You are a loose quasi-familial unit of kobolds: diminutive creatures associated with dragons and possessed of an affinity for treasures and traps. You live in the Fang, mountain home to the great red dragon Furor Corissa. Mother Cori, as you call her, is ancient and unknowable, gobsmackingly rich, and the coolest thing you have ever seen.

One day, you are rudely awoken by the clatter of steel on bone from the tunnels leading in from the surface - adventurers encountering the early warning skeletons, come to steal Mother Cori's treasure and interrupt her beauty sleep! You know what to do about adventurers. Well, you know what you've been told to do about adventurers.

You must flee inwards through the mountain's labyrinthine depths, laying traps and blocking paths behind you as you go, convincing other denizens that you're not just crying "adventurer", again, and ascending always toward Corissa's chamber. Can you slow the adventurers down while the dragon awakens?

Q is up to his old tricks, it's up to the gang at Starfleet Academy in the 32nd century to set him straight! Will SAM make friends with the Borg? Will Caleb brood his way through the Dominion War? Will Jay-den rule the Klingon Empire? Can you find the changes and return the universe to how it was, Or will history be altered forever?

It is 995, and the world trembles at the sight of Viking longships on the horizon. For two centuries now, the Vikings have raided every summer, sweeping in and taking what they want and leaving destruction in their wake, confident in their right to plunder as the chosen people of the gods.

Now, however, there are new longships on the horizon - coming from the west. This summer's raids met with strange men from a land beyond England, beyond even the settlements in Iceland and the failed settlement in Greenland, speaking of stranger gods than the Aesir and sacrificing captives to those gods, cutting their hearts out on altars.

For the Scions who protect Scandinavia, the implications are obvious. If these new raiders are simply men, then battle will be joined with no concern that higher powers are at play. If they're the tools of some other gods, though... then things are going to get complicated.

There is a traveling circus under the Hollow Hills.

It travels by moonlight, small wagons creaking in the night silence. It travels lost roads, where fireflies and whisps hover to watch it pass, where goblins peer down from their treebranch perches. It travels the night world and the day world, fairyland and the living earth, and places otherwise, and no border can keep it.

You are its performers and its crew, its ringmaster, its clowns and tumblers, its lookouts and roustabouts, its planners and problem-solvers, its stars. You are its celebrated headliners and you are the fugitives who travel, opportunistically, with it. You are the mysteries it poses, the dramas it performs; you are music, juggling, acts of death-defying peril, pratfall comedy, you are moments of beauty and moments of loss. You are the circus and the circus is you. You have dangerous secrets to tell.

You go where you go and you perform where you choose. Wherever you perform, you change: you change the seasons, you change the fortunes of those you perform for, you open their eyes, you awaken their hearts, you lull them to sleep. You change yourselves.

This is the game: we change.

A story of five performers (some human, some fairy) in a traveling circus and what they'll make of its audiences, full of drama, action, romance, and comedy (both in the circus rings and outside of them).

Your job as characters is to take the measure of your audience, decide what kind of performance to give them, and figure out how you get along (in good times, or bad). Your job as players is to make your characters vivid, take the bad with the good, play your part in the circus, and make use of your plays.

Each session will choose which stop along the circus' tour to explore:

• Namadgi National Park, decked in golden wattle, where lost mortals trespass upon the circus' intended audience of cockatoos.
• Sophia's Wedding, its weight carried on her tense shoulders, where the groom hopes a surprise performance might help her enjoy the day.
• Thicket Close, busy with the harvest, where a berry-maiden must die for autumn to end, but his stubborn lover refuses to let him go.
• Katabat's Crossing, the river frozen solid, where the eponymous wizard has leashed winter and refuses the coming of spring.
• The Goblin Market, where Granny Gibbet sells fortunes, the goblins haggle, and one furious mortal chases what they've lost.

You've never been to the quiet, country town of Barrowsgate.

But you're happy there. In dreams.

In Barrowsgate, you've got a good marriage. A child who doesn't cry. A job that doesn't hollow you out. In Barrowsgate, you have real friends; not the faceless strangers of the city. No debts. No shame. No secrets that keep you awake all night.

In Barrowsgate, you know peace.

Now five strangers, haunted by the same impossible village, meet online and decide to travel to Barrowsgate, to solve the mystery once and for all.

A game of quiet mysteries and psychological horror for five players. For fans of Silent Hill, Jacob's Ladder, and Midsommar.

Barrowsgate is waiting for you.

Another world, another time, in an Age of Wonder...

Long before the Great Conjunction, in the generations before all gelfling rose up together in resistance, the world of Thra had Champions: gelfling who had learned through Visions of the true evil of the Skeksis Lords, protectors of Thra who were doomed to perish without seeing the world healed in full.

Time and again through the Age of Wonder, Champions rose, stood against the Lords, and fell. Each time, these Champions left behind some trace of hope that inspired others who came after them to resist the power of the Skeksis Lords.

Visions of Thra is a fantasy tabletop of hope and resistance in an unjust world for 3 to 5 gelfling Champions, using a custom triadic dice system designed for the world. This game contains themes of colonialism, genocide, warfare, discrimination, environmental destruction, murder and horror.

In 972BC, a crack hero band was sent to prison by Menelaus, King of Sparta, for a crime they didn't commit. They promptly escaped from a maximum security exile island to the Lacedaemon underground. Today, still wanted by the king, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... The Λ-Team.

Sing, O Muse, of an episode of a Homeric epic for 4-5 mythic Mycenaeans. Uses AGON.