#71: Italy? 🇮🇹

Dec 19, 2021

I. Dear Reader,

After Finland, Australia and France, we’re hopping over to Italy. This list comes via my friend at RPG Internationale, a Youtube channel that does actual plays, reviews and interviews with indie RPG folks from around the world.

Five Italian Games That Mattered To An Italian Immigrant And You Probably Should Try

Art is politics. Games are Art. I don’t know shit about Art. I don’t know shit about politics either but I got beaten and teargassed in my home country by people who were real fucking sure that 14-year-old me was a socialist for protesting my school’s broken windows and lack of heating in winter.

I say this because it explains two facts I need to account for when making this list.

First, I am not a designer, I’m a semi-professional GM and YouTube reviewer. I have no experience in theory of game design - beyond the broad strokes, I don’t get the art of it.

Second, I do get the politics of it, the impulse of it. Sharing a world, system or story, can be beautifully political. Not in a “start a revolution” way, but more a “let’s share our realities” way.

As an immigrant I have come closer to getting Canadian culture by GMing Canadians than by following government classes. Understood antiracism more from playing a game run by a Black man than from reading Franz Fanon (though theory helps). And sure as hell shared more about myself and my culture by infusing it in my games than I ever did in conversation. So here it is:

(I chose only titles translated to english, except in the honourable mentions, for ease of access.)

1. L’ultima Torcia - The Last Torch

An OSR romp through a deeply Italian take on “red box” D&D. The d10-centric system is immediate, simple and immersive. Mechanics are fairly crunchy, with weapon degradation and inventory management galore. This game work best with hexcrawls or other journey narratives with dashes of dungeon crawling. Plenty of stories to tell from relaxed burglary sim to serious critiques/satire of dungeon crawling as a genre all the way to horror stories of desperate survival. The game is steeped in Italian pessimism and frames you as the “least bad bad guy” yet always utterly fucked. Good as “Baby’s first OSR”.

2. The Year

An interesting hybridization between lyric games and shared meditation, this is Giacomo Vicenzi’s most emotionally mature product. Designed as a four-player-four-session experience, The Year is emotion-heavy and gameplay-light and sees each player take control of a day in the life of the same protagonist. The vibes of the game owes a lot to the cultural history and trauma of South to North internal Italian immigration. While the epistolary set-up is cumbersome and relies on your local postal service not being shit (a bold decision for an Italian), The Year is still one of the best introductions to lyric games.

3. Historia

Scared to fully abandon 5E but want something spicier? Like satire, magical realism and dark fantasy? Do you deeply desire a Renaissance Faire/ Furry Convention hybrid? Well look no further! This game is a magnificent adaptation of 5E in a low(er) fantasy setting by Mirko Failoni (Art and Concept) & Michele Paroli (Game Design) that is simultaneously weird, dark and hilarious. The players take on the role of anthropomorphic animals (similar to those in the comic book BlackSad) and fight in a Game of Thrones meets Berserk inspired world with elegant and refined tools such as zweihanders and blunderbusses.

4. Trapped

The best interactive horror experience on itch.io by Giovanni Micolucci and one of the best pieces of “activist design” I’ve ever seen. Equally RPG, creepy pasta, meditation on medical trauma, and example of Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, this game will mess you up. As such, I heavily suggest you try this only with someone you trust and approach the fanzine in the right headspace. Trapped is a storytelling game for two players, played in the dark, using only a flashlight and music. One player is trapped, seeking a way out, even in death. The other is an angel, promising salvation but hiding sinister motives.

(Before the last one, a few honourable mentions, these are good games without an English book.

Sine Requie: A warhammer-fallout hybrid brave enough to be actually satirical, edgy and antifascist. Bleak as hell horror alt history set in the 50s with a system based on a poker (players) and tarots (GM). Egypt, Italy, and Soviet settings are great. The US and Japan are meh.
C’era Una Volta: First work of Francesco Lutario, probably Italy’s leading gamification and game design professor. A storytelling game for parents and their kids centering Italian tradition and the tales of Italo Calvino. I never liked RPGs as pedagogy but this might be the exception.
Dura Landa: EcoPunk RPG about the economics, logistics and violence of state building. About the people and places of the Mediterranean in a future of post capitalism and decolonization. Half Fist of the North Star, half Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, all amazing.)

5. Brancalonia

This is kind of cheating as it was a kickstarter megahit, but I can’t stress enough how good it is! Brancalonia is a D&D 5E setting book but does much more than just expand the world created by Wizards of the Coast. Mechanically, the game introduces a full rework of classes, new background, weapons, and items as well as a custom system for social “combat” and large scale brawling, centered around the comedy elements of Bud Spencer & Terrence Hill movies and Italian comedy and satire from the 70s to today. (Check out movies like “For Love and Gold” or “Amici Miei” to get what I’m talking about). Basically almost all the boring or problematic parts of 5E are dropped, along with any pretense of epic fantasy, in favour of satire, carnie bullshit and a world of tavern brawls, scams, star crossed lovers and political intrigue straight out of the Commedia Dell’Arte. Players are small-time crooks fighting their way out of poverty between revolting peasants and even more revolting nobles. It’s truly deranged and violently Italian - vibes of what a friend of mine described as “trash bag leftism” (with every implication you can imagine from those words) in a game world where the government told Jesus to take the wheel and he is driving straight off a cliff, the law makes no sense and everyone you meet is up to some fuckery.

II. Listen of the Week

Cannibal Halfling Radio did an excellent episode getting into the various flavours and meanings of indie with lots of helpful comparisons to trad games. This is something I’m going back to whenever this conversation happens I feel!
On the Hacked in the Dark podcast, an interview with Karl, the designer of Mountainhome. It’s a FitD game of dwarves building a community for themselves inspired by Dwarven Fortress. Looks like a lot of fun!

III. Links of the Week

News

After Kickstarter recently announced a pivot to blockchain dripping with buzzwords, the indie RPG scene has been wrestling with what to do.
- Gamefound, another crowdfunding site, took a jab at KS, announcing a series of actually helpful new features like handling your sales taxes.
- At the same, people are trying to organize an alternative to Zinequest in February so designer’s crowdfunding plans aren’t completely disrupted if they don’t want to use Kickstarter.
It’s been a big few months for corporations in roleplaying games.
- Demiplane announced D&D Beyond-style apps for Pathfinder, World of Darkness and Free League’s games.
- Fandom announced a process for people who want to make games on Cortex Prime. After some backlash, they clarified their intention.

Articles

Amabel Holland of the boardgame publisher, Hollandspiele, writes about themes and mechanics: “There's a Henry James quote I'm fond of. What is character but the determination of incident? And what is incident but the illumination of character? "Incident" here is a fancy word for plot, and so what he's saying is that plot should come out of characterization, and that characterization should be revealed as a result of the plot. They're not separate things, but the same thing, hopelessly intertwined, impossible to separate or to consider in isolation.”
On the Gauntlet blog, Lowell Francis talks about the 33 different games he played in 2021. Lots of great recommendations for the storygamer!
A comparison of the comic darkness of Mork Borg and Human Occupied Landfill.
A review of The Between, a game of Victorian monsterhunters

IV. Small Ads

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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. I’m half-man, half-beast, half-journalist, half-game designer.

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