#pigsmoke

By Chris Longhurst

Step into the shoes of the faculty of Pigsmoke School of Sorcery, America's finest learning institution for the magically gifted. Teach classes, publish research, and try to navigate the cutthroat world of academia when the demons are real, the auditors are constructs of pure order, and imposter syndrome might just mean you're a doppelganger.

Students exist to make your life difficult. Your department head is an arch-conservative taskmaster who leans on you to make their department look good. The Dean's Office wants to ensure you're following all of their ridiculous rules. The bursar won't give you any money, your peers want their names ahead of yours on your latest paper, and your personal life is a garbage fire. Chase tenure, avoid burnout, and try to resist the urge to go adventuring: like all get-rich-quick schemes, it'll probably just end with a humiliating death.

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:

“The signs! The Movement of the stars! It’s all coming together!”

I drew @professorlizzard‘s Pigsmoke character, Prof. Jhey Dhed. He’s a Workhorse professor from the Department of Foresight.

(Pigsmoke is an rpg about being in the faculty of a magical university, and all the little squabbles that come with that.)

By Chris Longhurst

Step into the shoes of the faculty of Pigsmoke School of Sorcery, America's finest learning institution for the magically gifted. Teach classes, publish research, and try to navigate the cutthroat world of academia when the demons are real, the auditors are constructs of pure order, and imposter syndrome might just mean you're a doppelganger.

Students exist to make your life difficult. Your department head is an arch-conservative taskmaster who leans on you to make their department look good. The Dean's Office wants to ensure you're following all of their ridiculous rules. The bursar won't give you any money, your peers want their names ahead of yours on your latest paper, and your personal life is a garbage fire. Chase tenure, avoid burnout, and try to resist the urge to go adventuring: like all get-rich-quick schemes, it'll probably just end with a humiliating death.