‘Confluence: The Living Archive’ is an RPG About Building a World Within Worlds
Confluence: The Living Archive is a worldbuilding RPG that throws characters, genres, even worlds into a blender and lets you mash puree.
Confluence: the Living Archive is an indie worldbuilding RPG crowdfunding right now on backerkit. If you’re wondering what is a worldbuilding RPG? It’s an RPG that lets you tell the story of a place as much as you tell the story of the characters you’re playing. It’s an RPG that gives you control over the setting and how it shifts and grows over time.
But it’s a very broad category. Worldbuilding RPGs can include anything from The Quiet Year by Avery Alder, to i’m sorry did you say street magic by Caro Asercion. And it feels like each time a game ends up in this category, it pushes the bounds and expectations of what goes in it. Confluence seems poised to do that too, once its crowdfunding campaign finishes.
Confluence: The Living Archive – A World of Worlds Waiting for You
This is an RPG of collaborative storytelling. Which in this case means there’s a lot of ebb and flow of who takes the narrative reins. You play as a motley crew of characters in a region known as the Motley Coast. And motley is correct in every sense of the word. The Motley Coast is a place where supernatural phenomena called Confluxes pull people, places, and things from across time and many different worlds to a central place. Here’s where the genre-bending comes in.
Because the Motley Coast is a world full of all sorts of things. You might play a crew of pirates in the pirate city of Delrun, or a gang of time-thieves. You could build your own business, play small town politices, dive underwater to explore the depths of the kaleidoscopic seas that come together here – the list goes on. It’s a surprisingly broad list that you and your friends pick from as you build your game with a Group Sheet.
As you might imagine from something promising so much variety and expansiveness in terms of characters and story types, it’s a very abstracted system. At its core, you assemble a pool of d6s based on things in your favor, which can include abilities, allies, things you’ve done in the game to earn a bonus—and the GM (called here the Story Leader—which feels a little like what a youth pastor might say after spinning a chair backwards to sit on it cool-style before talking to you all about someone who puts the G in RPG) rolls against you, again building a pool from all the unfavorable circumstances, like your enemies, wounds, and so on. Whoever wins takes the reins of the story.
Of course there’s a lot more complexity that fills in around the edges. Players have custom abilities called facets which add to the game. And these can be built in play, so every game will be different. Then on top of all that, the game comes with a sort of mod toolkit, a short zine called So You Want To Build It that’s dedicated to customizing your own rules for Confluence.
It’s the kind of RPG that takes big swings and big risks in the space. But that’s what it takes to challenge expectations and conventions. So if you’re looking for something to scratch that collaborative storytelling itch, and want a whole world full of worlds, check out Confluence: the Living Archive.
Confluence crowdfunds through November 16th, so don’t miss it!
