New TTRPG ‘Our Brilliant Ruin’ Promises ‘Downtown Abbey’ & Existential Horror
A new tabletop roleplaying game from a newly formed studio promises to be Downton Abbey meets Game of Thrones in existential horror.
It’s more like the announcement of an announcement. Studio Hermitage, a “newly formed transmedia company”—and let’s take a minute here to appreciate 2013 for letting us borrow its favorite buzzword here—announced a Kickstarter campaign coming February 27th, kicking off crowdfunding for a tabletop RPG with an ambitious scope.
Downton Abbey meets Game of Thrones is a bold pitch, to be sure. But it’s what Our Brilliant Ruin, the new RPG in question, hopes to deliver. According to a press release, the company wants players to navigate the “sociological and political landscape of an Edwardian world on the brink of demise.”
What does that mean? Well, let’s take a look.
Our Brilliant Ruin – Coming February 27th
The Ruin befouls everything in its path, ravaging culture and geography alike and leaving its living victims contorted into horrific creatures. In its wake, Dramark society moves toward an irreversible demise, buoyed on a tide of excess and intrigue.
Our Brilliant Ruin uses an original system of dice pools driven by a character’s emotions and motivations. Combine personality traits and skills to accomplish goals by rolling pools of d6s to determine success, failure, or catastrophe. Inspired by similar dice pool-based systems, these original mechanics for Our Brilliant Ruin provide numerous ways to determine player characters’ fates.
An attack motivated by jealousy could be Obsession + Fight, or discovering your best friend is hiding a dangerous secret might be Benevolence + Intuit. Players can leverage their Portfolios to gain advantages in social situations and call upon their Passions to gain an edge on a roll… at a risk.
So right away, we can see the dice pool based system that underpins everything. You come up with a number of traits, figure out which ones best apply to the thing you’re trying to do, and try your best to make sure that the ones with the highest numbers line up to the roll you’re about to make.
It’s not a bad premise, but it’ll be interesting to see how and why the emotions relate to the promise of a “doomed world.” It’s one thing to give in to your passions in an Edwardian setting full of monsters and manners, but another entirely if your emotions are only ever used to figure out how many dice you roll.
Will they be levers for enemies to embroil you in intrigues with? Will they be arrows in your quiver against the eldritch and unknown?
All we can say for certain is that Studio Hermitage has more than just the RPG they’re developing in mind. As a transmedia company, they promise to be “working on original Intellectual Property for production across a number of formats, including video games and print.”
So the world itself has a big role to play in Our Brilliant Ruin.
Look for it on Kickstarter, February 27th!
