These Are Things

continuing on yesterday's theme of 'games that make you re-engage with books in new ways' today's game for bundletober, the cool series everyone si doing where i talk about . a ttrpg, that i got in a bundle, is the books were wrong by chivu.

the first time i tried to paste this image into my post there were like four lines of space before it i couldn't delete. web site. anyways this is a very short game. one-page, in fact, and none of that duplicitous and scurrilous 'one spread but you call it one page' bull shit. no this is the real deal, one a4 page with barely any formatting to speak of. and it's brilliant.

like the rpgs in lit rpg set, the books were wrong needs a book to play with. unlike those rpgs, it can't be any (or nearly any) book -- instead, it has to be a wiki page for the lore of a fantasy series. which is already a fascinating constraint. i think it could also easily be played with any splatbook or sourcebook for a fantasy rpg -- and would only require minor tweaks for a non-fantasy setting.

they require you to do the exact thing i criticize fantasy and ttrpg lore for not doing all the time, and realize that this lore has a perspective. the books were wrong specifically casts you as an anticolonialist scholar, reading through anthropolohical accounts of peoples and cultures and disputing the colonialist and othering narratives woven into them.

it does this by giving you a selection of prompts to answer while going over different parts of the text you're playing with. the sort of questions that increasingly have been asked in anthropological and historical scholarship over the last century as decolonial perspectives have made their voices heard.

it's a real triumph--taking lazy worldbuilding that often (as i've talked about on this silly little blog) employs the vernacular and format of colonial scholarship and actually engaging with that--not just critiquing it, which is easy to do, but engaging with it and asking you play with it and treat it as malleable. one game like this is worth a million 'um you can just ignore the parts of the lore yo udon't like if you're the DM' disclaimers, in my opinion. it's deliberate, clever, and invites you to do something really cool.

A list of disappointing dogs, bothersome birds, and other awful animal companions.

A crow who steals shiny things for you. Usually, it takes your own things, puts them somewhere else for a while, and eventually (maybe) brings them back.

A fox with extreme balance issues; it has to be carried everywhere, and cannot hunt.

A nearsighted hawk.

A carnivorous deer with bloodlust that tries to take a bite out of anything that moves.

A scarred, intimidating-looking dire wolf that is easily scared off by a smaller dog, a squirrel, a cat, or pretty much anything else.

An owl that you’re pretty sure can talk, but that only says “who” in a human voice.

An invisible dog. It barks at all hours and will only stop if you scratch it behind its ears (wherever those are).

A cat. Just a regular, asshole cat.

A parrot that swears like a sailor and curses like a witch; whenever it speaks you either have to have a counterspell ready or simply apologize to whoever it’s offended.

A clinically depressed horse.

Human:

Elf:

Dwarf:

Halfling:

Half Orc:

Half-Elf:

Tiefling:

Gnome:

Dragonborn: