Indie RPG fans familiar with Jack Harrison’s previous games will likely be surprised by the big twist in the latest project he has designed. His Zine Quest hit Bucket of Screws is a solo game about designing a spaceship in the spirit of beloved space rust buckets like Millennium Falcon from Star Wars or Serenity from Firefly. His other Kickstarter minigames, orbital and artifact, let the players design a space station environment or a magic item. But his latest project funded on Kickstarter on launch daychallenges players to create something much more elaborate and abstract: a conspiracy of intrigue and betrayal leading to a final act of cathartic vengeance.
harrison’s new game, the slow knife, was designed to guide two to four players through the process of building and telling a story in the style of Alexandre Dumas’ 1844 novel The Count of Monte Cristo. In the game’s words, a “promising young soul” has his life “ruined by a handful of greedy villains” and then returns to plot an inevitable revenge. Harrison tells Polygon that the impetus behind the game came from his love for Count of Monte Cristo‘s brand of slow-burning political intrigue and the difficulty of translating it into most mainstream RPGs.
“I’ve found that there are a lot of stories about violent action, both in the media and in role-playing games,” says Harrison. “You know where everyone is trying to take down the boss in one big action sequence. But there’s not a lot of social intrigue in role-playing, especially in games like D&D. They are not necessarily aligned that way. So I started thinking, ‘How can I tell this kind of long-term social revenge story?’”
The Slow Knife invites players to this type of intrigue, with each player answering the card prompts to create a villain who has damaged “The Knife”, the game’s protagonist. Then players flesh out the story of The Knife’s successful vendetta against them. The game is built around a deck of cards divided into four acts that structure the players’ treachery program – complete with a literal conspiracy board, tracing of connections and major events. Yes, you can make your own yarn board to connect the dots, although Harrison says his playtests also used washi tape or bulletin boards and pins.
“I love game artifacts in general,” says Harrison. Indie role-playing games that encourage players to create drawings, maps, or other physical elements to help with storytelling have become increasingly common in recent years, particularly with the emergence of solo journal games centered around these types of physical creations are built around. But with The Slow KnifeThe Strokeboard is also designed to help players keep a complex story in order, reminding them which storylines are still available to develop.
“In a simpler one John Wick In story you can keep the characters in your mind – you go from point A to point B, it’s easy,” says Harrison. “While it’s really helpful with a social storyline to see all the complex connections and who you’ve introduced throughout the game, you can try to close the loops and tie everything together.”
says Harrison The Slow Knife is specifically designed to help first-time roleplayers or group narrators navigate their way—or even help experienced gamers tell a specific story—by asking inviting questions and providing clear boundaries for story form. Like other GM-less prompt-based RPGs such as For the queen
“What I really like about prompt games is that they give you a skeleton for the action,” he says. “They tell you something true about your character or about the world, and then ask you to make that thing interesting, expand on it, and integrate it into the story yourself. You’re never asked to go all out, you’re just telling a little bit of history.”
But while the shape of the slow knife The story is predefined, it can take place in a variety of environments. The game guides players through creating their own environment, or they can try one of the three optional playsets that answer these questions ahead of time. One takes place in 19th century France. Another is a sci-fi tale of health-obsessed aristocrats aboard Arcadia Prime, a luxurious space station orbiting an environmentally devastated Earth. The third places the story in a high-fantasy court, “the prime dominion of the High Elf elite.”
In all cases, however, the story leads to the same place. In playtesting, Harrison says, he begins by laying out the final card of the game, revealing the prompts for The Knife’s Revenge and what the players’ villains do afterward. “Everyone knows where the story is going and where it’s headed,” he says. “It gives people the ability to steer the story in the direction of the knife’s revenge, while also giving them enough flexibility to tell the story they want their character to tell.”
Harrison says the finished game will include safety guidelines to make the villains “funny-nasty” and not evil, which could make people at the table uncomfortable. “It’s not exactly fun to play or watch evil,” he says. “But when people screw these real bastards, there’s really satisfaction in planning their demise and being responsible, with utter dramatic irony, for putting them in those situations where they’re going to brace themselves for ever-greater failure. and less satisfaction. There’s comedy in there that was really satisfying in testing watching these villains build up for the fall.”
And in The Slow Knife, this fall is – as the description says – inevitable. “I decided pretty early on that the idea of the villains winning was off the table,” says Harrison. “It just wasn’t a story I wanted to tell. I think it’s important to close that cycle and balance out all the bad things they did early in the story – even if that doesn’t always reflect what happens in reality. I can’t speak for everyone’s politics, but the idea of taking down a bunch of bad rich people has a lot of appeal to me in the world we live in. Even if it’s a bit of a fantasy!”
The Slow Knife is currently on Kickstarterwith a campaign ending March 21st.