Meguey & Vincent's PbtA Eye-Openers (PBtA)
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PbtA¸ "Powered by the Apocalypse¸" is a genre of tabletop roleplaying games. It was launched by our game Apocalypse World ¸ and it continues to grow.
Like a literary or musical genre¸ PbtA has a mainstream¸ a cutting edge¸ a number of fringes¸ conservative games and expansive ones¸ and even a subgenre or three.
This suite of games is about exploring the fringes of the genre¸ about taking the expansive view of what PbtA can mean. It departs from the expected formula of playbooks¸ stats¸ and moves¸ and guides you into some of the new places that "play to find out" and "roleplaying is a conversation" can go.
It includes 6 small games:
- Murderous Ghosts¸ a shared-character party game that shows how you can use moves to get players to buy into horror.
- The Sundered Land¸ which shows how tight the relationship between a game's setup - "I'm a doomed pilgrim on a dangerous road¸" or "we're telling our stories around the night watchfire" - and its moves can be.
- Mobile Frame Zero: Firbrands¸ which expands the idea of moves upward and makes each move into a tiny-but-complete game of its own.
- Midsummer Wood¸ which highlights the fruitful role that judgment calls can play in "play to find out" games.
- The True & Preposterous Journey of Half-a-Fool¸ which builds on The Sundered Land to upend the usual model of the GM as the one who poses questions and situations and the players as the ones who answer them.
- And Spin the Beetle¸ which takes just one move and blows it up into a wrong and hilarious icebreaker game about bugs - and incidentally¸ considered alongside Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands¸ offers a powerful observation about player consent.