There is a narrative tension that lives at the center of most table top RPGs. It haunts us from the product lines that started at TSR in the 80s and continue to be churned out by its various successors. Some games have tried to fight against it, but few have succeeded.
The tension I speak of lies between player agency and setting agency.
You see it in the millions of words written about settings. It appears in the tightly tuned adventures that are designed to tell the author's story. You even see it in the rules, showing up in page after page of Game Master advice.
All of these things stand in opposition to player agency. They stifle it, and worse, the predominance of it creates difficult habits to break. The kind that drives people to apologize for not "creating a better story" at the table.
Hell, the very concept of a Game Master creates a power dynamic that makes those habits as difficult to break as smoking...
Annalise wasn't the first game I played that tried to break this mold. I am not even sure that was Nathan's intention when he wrote it. I do know that playing it for the first time was a revelation for me.
But I will come back to that...
Annalise is music at play. It is Wojciech Kilar's pounding, brooding opening theme of Bram Stoker's Dracula. It evokes the smell of sex and the coppery taste of terror.
The game is a collaborative story telling experience that unfolds like jazz. Everyone plays off of each other, building a narrative by pushing and pulling each other's ideas. Everything is up for grabs, but the rules keep you on the rails like a master percussionist.
It is Buddy Rich's Birdland.
The first time I played the game, I happened to play with Nathan and some talented players. It didn't take long to pick up the guide rails of the rules and we jammed. We hummed at the table, and I remember doing the equivalent of humming the tune of play on my way home.
Even so, I asked myself, was this game that good?
Like any group activity, the skill of the participants in the game plays a key role in its success. You go from good to great when there is skill and chemistry. I can say with confidence, after playing it a bunch of times, Annalise is that good.
It doesn't make up for unskilled players. No game can do that. What it does though is give you the gaming equivalent of Buddy Rich. The guidelines are clean and it resolves the tension I mentioned earlier in a way that has left a mark on me.
The vampire is the answer. Or rather, what it does to that tension I mentioned.
Annalise is a vampire game. But, it might be the only game in which the vampire has no agency. It was a genius move on Nathan's part to make it a prop rather than a character.
He flipped the table over.
It wasn't obvious until I started playing what this meant. In other games, the big bad has a ton of agency. Strahd is controlled by the GM with his own agenda. The Camarilla is a bunch of assholes with different agendas that are, again, all controlled by the GM.
Essentially, every big bad in the RPGs that dominate the cultural landscape has their own agency. The power dynamics baked into the rules, force play to center around them. They become the star of the story, with the players more often reacting to them rather than the other way around.
Nathan kills this by making the vampire a tool to be used by all the players at the table. The only agency it possesses is in reaction to the players and what they want to explore with their characters.
He made the vampire Beetlejuice. Important to the narrative, but a prop with limited screen time in the story of two ghosts, a sad girl, and her weird ass family.
Ever since playing this game, it has hammered home different habits for me. The games I have come to love embrace this power shift in the narrative. It has helped changed how I design games and explore fiction. I now look for those tension points and either embrace them openly or undermine them intentionally.
Honestly, I can't recommend the game enough.
I am excited to share that I have gotten copies of the latest volume of Testament. I have signed copies available at my store of all three volumes. They are also available to order at most book stores.
Testament - Segnom and Dhmelos
Broken into five parts, Segnom and Dhmelos continues the journey of mortals and immortals reshaping them with every step. Segnom explores what it costs you when you climb back up from defeat. Conversely, Dhmelos explores the price of power and what is required of leaders to be worthy of it.
Each page of Testament was block printed, hand painted, and handwritten. Those pages were then faithfully reproduced within.
