hi!!!! do you know of any poetry based/centric ttrpgs? solo or for more players!
Hello friend, so I’m going to drop a few games that help you write poetry or use poetry creation tools, but I also recommend checking out lyric games! Lyric games are written such that reading them alone is a form of play. This means that reading these games is often an experience in itself, meant to evoke emotion in a similar way to the experience of reading poetry. It’s a movement within the ttrpg sphere that I’ve only heard of, but the conversations I’ve been witness to concerning lyric games is very intriguing.
Now, on to the recommendations.
No One Dies Alone in Revolution, by Robin Rudd.
No One Dies Alone In Revolution is a single-player poetry-writing ttrpg in which you play as an empyromancer, interpreting flame and smoke to identify each new revolutionary soldier's patron saint, all past martyrs of the cause, and composing the prayers they will call out in battle.
This game uses a deck of cards, a dice, and an associated oracle to tell the story of the saints who died, and the prayers you will write in their honour. This is a creative game deeply steeped in ritual, and I think it makes the poetry-creation process feel quite natural. The lines of the prayers have rules depending on the cards you draw and the dice you roll, determining metrical feet, details that must be included, and the emotions the prayer is meant to evoke. If you want a game whose emotions bleed out onto the page, you want to try this game.
Gentleman Bandit, by allison arth.
They call you the Gentleman Bandit, because no one knows your name. They call you a monster, a villain, a dealer of death.
But they don’t know you.
Not your Heart, your Poet’s Heart filled with rage or filth or the expansiveness of True Love; not your Grieving Heart loosed over a chasm, making a sound like the sorrow of wolves as it plummets toward wet river stones, cracked bones left to bleach.
In this writing-focused RPG, you personify the eponymous Gentleman Bandit to write a 13-line poem you'll leave for the dead — and the ones who discover them. Card draws guide the content of each line; optional dice rolls add poetic devices to further shape the experience and ratchet the difficulty.
Using a deck of cards, you consult an oracle to determine the theme and topic of each line of your poem. There are optional requirements you can include in your poetry creation, such as writing in meter, applying a rhyme scheme, using double meanings, or using words from a diction list. Your final poem will also help you determine your next poem, as you can compare your hand to different poker hands.
This game also has a multiplayer option, if you are playing with multiple people, and two successors: Moonblind and The Swallowtail. There's also the Gentleman Pirate supplement, for fans of Our Flag Means Death.
Reverie Cycle, by Caro Acersion.
Reverie Cycle is about a group of isolated individuals, each shunning their own troubles and trials. They record their waking thoughts in their journals, reflecting on the world around them. But at night, their dreams — poetic, sensory, abstract — blur and blend with each other, creating a shifting, liminal state of overlapping worlds. The poetry of these dreams cascades and reappears, and eventually tumbles into their waking world as well…
Reverie Cycle is a play-by-poem roleplaying game — it uses poetry as a form of play, and play as a form of poetry. You don't need to consider yourself a poet to play, but by the end of the game, you will be.
This is a game about dreamers, asking for help in overcoming obstacles they are afraid to acknowledge when they are awake. It’s also an online game, with instructions for setting up the game over a private chatroom, such as Discord. The game also comes with safety emojis that you can use as you play, allowing you to react using a shorthand that signals to the players that something about the current play needs to be changed without breaking the through line of messages. Character creation involves answering a number of playbooks for your character, and assigning their unique touchstones that show up in their dreams. If you want a collaborative poetry experience, I recommend Reverie Cycle.
Care for Hecuba, by Hy Libre!
These games are born from caring about helpless tragic characters. Hecuba, Medea, Semele, Medusa-- these are monstrous, vulnerable women whose function in the story is to gravitate toward an inevitable death. By playing these games you are caring for them, because Euripides and his contemporaries are dead and somebody needs to.
These games borrow tools and expectations from poetry, but they're all "playable". You might interact with them by just reading, or by asking a friend to play them with you, or changing them to be "playable" in a way you like, or by saying "Hmm!" and moving on.
These games have the rules written as poetry, and their modes of play may occasionally also bleed into your daily life - eripedes’ favourite game tells you to ‘clean your fucking room’, for example. This is possibly also an example of a lyric game, because it feels like you are playing it as you read it. The games feel very intimate, so if you want an intensely personal experience, consider Care for Hecuba.
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