When my crowdfunding copies of Stillfleet (2022), Qadida and The Rain Thieves arrived while I was at PAX Unplugged 2024, I immediately set about ignoring them in favor of practically everything else and then some. This was mistake.
Stillfleet is fucking weird. Something about that weirdness made it difficult for me to crack it open — perhaps the fact that it takes place 100 million years in the future. Something about that feels so remote and hard to handle (I have a similar issue with the gigantic time jumps in the Dune novels), especially in comparison to something so legible as, say, Triangle Agency. Which is kind of ironic, considering how much the two games have in common — they’re both fucking weird, they both have players working for a powerful corporation, they both feature conspiracy and redacted text and horrible cosmic entities while maintaining a sense of humor. For whatever reason, Stillfleet clicks better for me.
I think part of it is the touchstones. I don’t think anyone has really pulled of a Control-style story in a way that has knocked my socks off, including Control. Here, though, are bits and pieces drawn from Dune, Warhammer 40k, Le Guin’s Hainish stories, Douglas Adams, Octavia Butler and others and I genuinely enjoy those touchstones more, I think. The visual aesthetics of the game (primarily by Ethan Gould, but supplemented by a number of others) are more challenging as well; at first glance, I didn’t want to do the work, but now I am glad I did.
Anyway, the Grit system is pretty straightforward (the SRD is one page!). Five attributes (Combat, Move, Will, Reason, Charm), each gets a dedicated die assigned to them, which is rolled to check all associated tasks. Success is beating a target difficulty, 6 being the baseline. Fighting pits the Combat attribute against the Move attribute (only two of the base classes focus on violence, which is nice). Grit is a meta currency that can be spent to adjust rolls up on a one-to-one basis, but it is also used to activate class-based powers. Rolling dice doesn’t have great odds in aggregate, so the game is always pushing players to spend Grit. It feels tense without going overboard into straight-up horror a la Mothership.
The point of the game is to explore derelict space ships and exoplanets from which contact has been lost for millennia in order to get stuff. It’s a bit D&D in this regard, except your expeditions are funded by a far future version of the Dutch East India Company. What you do in the field can serve your interests, or theirs, but rarely both. And you need to be careful because fuck the moon, all of space is haunted.
Which, like I said a couple times already, the world of Stillfleet is weird. Six basic classes are normal enough, but the “freaky four” are “self-taught snakeheads and Archive-created tremulants […] the nanite-addicted blooders and the criminal jackals/mice.” No, I’m not explaining that further, nor will I tell you about Hell Sciences. I have to spend the rest of our time on Reasoning Things, the many types of differently evolved humans and alien species you can play. For instance: the Pepper Elf, which I think evokes a certain set of ideas that are completely at odds with its paranthetical description: “dark crystal automaton.” On the facing page is the Cactoid, which is probably exactly what the name conjured up in your mind. Oh, and there is a higher reality called the Escheresque which allows…Jesus, I’m at 600 words. That’s what happens when I try to review a 350-page RPG book with fairly small print. Go buy it, you’ll like it.
