#165: 5 Reasons Why Pasion de la Pasiones Is Real Good
#165: 5 Reasons Why Pasion de la Pasiones Is Real Good
I. Dear Reader,
I’ve been playing the wonderful telenovela game, Pasion de la Pasiones, recently. (I talked a little about one playbook, El Jefe, in an earlier issue - comparing it to Apocalypse World’s Hardholder.)
For those who aren’t familiar, it’s a Powered by the Apocalypse game, designed by Brandon Leon-Gambetta and published by Magpie Games. It’s a game where you play out the latest season of a long-running telenovela - one that’s romantic, melodramatic, maybe even, dare I say it, trashy? In my game, almost everyone has revealed that their parents aren’t their real parents. It’s that kind of game.
But even as it tells these stories that don’t take themselves too seriously, its design is sharp, slick, erm, straight fire? (Is that a thing? Do people still say “straight fire”? Sorry, English is my first language.)
Anyway, here’s 5 reasons why Pasion de la Pasiones is Real Good:
The design gets everyone on the same page fast. When I talked to Chris Chinn on the podcast, he complained that games still required stuff like his Same Page Tool, 15 years after it was invented. Well, this game doesn’t really need stuff like that. You look at your playbooks, you look at your moves, and everything is communicating a vibe.
Even if you haven’t seen a single Spanish telenovela, I think you’ll still pick this up easy. I haven’t seen a single Spanish telenovela but as a kid, I had one grandmother watching the American soap opera, The Bold and the Beautiful, while the other grandmother was watching Kahaani Ghar Ghar Kii which, if you don’t know it, is a classic of the India’s saas-bahu genre (meaning mother-in-law/daughter-in-law, and yes, it is exactly as bad as you think…)
Still do your safety tools though because the characters gets toxic faaaast. Best to make sure, it stays in everyone’s comfort zone, you know, toxic-fun rather than toxic-toxic.
Rolling with questions! This is probably Pasion’s most influential innovation. Okay, so in this game, you don’t have stats in the game. Instead, when you roll the dice, you add +1-3 depending on specific questions attached to your playbook and the move you’re making. For example: In the move, Accuse Someone of Lying, the questions are “Do you have an audience?” and “Do you have evidence?”. If you answer yes, you get a +1.
This is super interesting because it makes you pause out and flesh out the scene a little bit. Is someone watching you make this accusation? Who? How many?
It makes the fiction (fictional positioning, if you want to be technical) matter in a very simple way. If your character has evidence, they’re more likely to do this successfully. Neat!
It does all this super fast while giving you something more interesting to ask than, “What’s your Charisma modifier again?”
Let’s stick with the Accuse Someone of Lying move because it’s got a piece of design that embraces the game’s genre while harnessing TTRPGs’ specific strengths. So if you score a hit with the move, one of the options you can choose to happen is “You are right despite what the audience has already seen.”
Let me unpack that a little. When you accuse someone of lying, you can be correct even if it contradicts something we’ve previously played through. An example: Your character, Eladio, stole money out of the safe. Another character, Anjelica, saw it happen and tells the police. You can Accuse Her Of Lying and if you hit, you can declare that actually you didn’t steal money from the safe. So then what actually happened? Well, maybe someone dressed up like you to frame you, maybe it was your secret evil twin brother, maybe it was your own money in the safe so technically you weren’t stealing it, maybe-. Is this confusing? Yes. Is it extremely fun to do? YES.
This basically gives you a straightforward tool to bring in incredible (in the literal sense) twists and bombshell reveals.
At the same time, like Flashbacks with Blades in the Dark, it’s a way of skipping strictly linear storytelling. The narrative is in our hands as players and we can jump back and forth as we please. (This game also has a more straightforward flashback move so you don’t have to accuse people of lying if you want to just do a bombshell reveal.)
Every session starts with each character answering a prompt about something that happened in an earlier episode. It’s mimicing the “Last Time On” part of TV shows and the idea is that when you start playing, it’s Episode 70, not Episode 1. So there’s a bunch of stuff that’s happened that we haven’t pinned down yet. Every session, we learn some new thing from one of those previous episodes and if you want, it can be something that absolutely wrecks everyone’s plans. It keeps every episode chaotic and dramatic in a way that is almost impossible in other games.
Your characters don’t really die. It’s not that kind of story. But if you’re ever fictionally at a place where you should die, you can come back with a “distinctive, sexy scar” or an eyepatch or as “a twisted, evil version of yourself”. Come on!
The big reason to not play Pasion is if your table isn’t into romance. But even then, it’s a great system to understand from a design point of view. It’ll give you ideas aplenty.
Thanks for reading.
Yours yoursfully,
Thomas
II. Media of the Week
AA Voigt goes down a deep rabbithole talking about weirdness, body horror, and worldbuilding in this video essay about Heart, Annihilation and Friends at the Table’s Sangfielle season.
Please consider joining 50+ other patrons and support the newsletter on patreon to help keep me going.
If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.
III. Links of the Week
Plus One Exp launched a subscription-based RPG Zine Club which delivers new zines every month with options to choose from storygames, OSR adventures, or both.
There’s An RPG For That recommends games where you run a store and (the easier prompt, I imagine!) games inspired by gundam.
Another roundup of great RPG mechanics on the Age of Ravens blog. This time, Lowell covers characters defining the world, Moment of Truth from Masks, over the top powers and more.
Misc
The Tabletop Awards from Dicebreaker are open for submissions again.
IGDN’s Diversity Scholarship opens up today as well. It’s primarily a mentorship program with a monetary component, I believe, and you can apply here.
IV. Small Ads
All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.
Don’t Play This Game, a solo RPG of handcrafted horror. Inspired by found footage films and cursed messages. Sign up and try to survive the demo here.
Tiny Library: Modern Fantasy is a deck of 51 single-card RPG fragments from 51 different creators. That's a huge amount of diversity and pure creativity on the tabletop.
Vynestra: a 5e high fantasy world and city setting with 1,000 pages of lore inspired by ancient civilizations such as Rome. Live on Kickstarter now!
(Forgot to insert the link last week, so bolding it this week to be fair!)
Role to Cast is an award-winning Actual Play podcast, bringing you a variety of TTRPGs performed by professional actors, with original stories, and interviews with TTRPG designers. Subscribe now!
This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.
Scarred Lands 5e, a post-apocalyptic setting from Onyx Path
Bundle of 13 horror novels and short story anthologies with some great writers (Tim Powers, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Lauren Beukes, etc)
Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!