As the popularity of tabletop RPGs explodes, indie publishers are pushing the boundaries of the industry both behind the scenes and in game design, including the type of material that’s being adapted – like Monty Python’s corpus of popular pregame material by Ren Faire.
Publisher Exalted Funeral and developer Crowbar Creative have announced a new tabletop role-playing game called Monty Python’s Cocurricular Mediaeval Reenactment Program, a tome that cheekily calls itself “not a role-playing game, but a very rigorous study, intended only for serious students of English history. It is by no means a complete and comprehensive guide to playing imaginative, highly unpredictable, medieval-themed RPGs based on the entire comedic edition of Monty Python with his friends.”
Which of course it really is. This dry British joke will get you every time!
Per sublime funeral, the reenactment program will include:
A land registry with an original Rules Lite gaming system; Guide to Designing Adventures; Character Creation, Bestiary, Entourage, and NPC Sections; Tables for generating all sorts of things; and ready-to-go adventures. There’s also a crazy backgammon-based minigame called Fetchez la Vache, which involves dice catapults and farm animals.
The publisher also notes that while the game is set in medieval England, it draws from the entire Monty Python catalogue flying circus staging shows. And for those worried that this will make their Monty Python loving friends the same more unstoppable quote devils, say designers Brian Saliba and Craig Schaffer the people of Dicebreaker that they were interested in making the game much more.
“What we were adamant [about] It can’t just be a recreation of scenes from movies and TV shows,” Saliba said in the Dicebreaker interview. “It’s more about providing a toolbox of things that people can use to create stories that feel a lot like Monty Python without recreating scenes.”
Hopefully the end product will be more of an RPG adventure that happens to be funny, as opposed to a set set in a world that Monty Python fans think is funny. After all, no one is counting on the Spanish Inquisition.
Monty Python’s Cocurricular Mediaeval Reenactment Program will be available on Kickstarter on Oct 22