Archive Delving - Our Queen Crumbles

I'm back with another quick delve into the archive! More of a heroic jaunt, really. Today I'm reading through Our Queen Crumbles, by Jason Brown.

I reached for OQC today because I wanted to read something I knew I liked - that's right readers, this might be the very first thing I'm reviewing that I actually remember reading before! I do want to see if my opinion holds, but I'm fairly confident it will. The product itself is gorgeously illustrated, with a gorgeous cover illustration by Jessica Fong, interior illustrations by Al Lukeheart, and Sal V Cloak on layout. The whole thing weighs in at a lean 24 pages. My memory is that it seems like it owes some inspiration, both thematic and procedural, to recent classic For the Queen, which I've never played but have listened to a handful of games quite happily. We'll see if that's true, too.

The kickstarter page advertises the game as "weird fantasy," which I associate more with Troika(!) and, like, Ultraviolet Grasslands, so I'm curious to see if my reread reveals that I missed something here. The kickstarter also describes it as a place where "the dead whisper to those who listen and the fundamental forces of nature can be bent to your will" which... kind of just sounds like fantasy to me! There's also a detail that this game was a game chef finalist, and that the "hack", Golems of Claypit, written with Adam Vass, debuted at Big Bad Con 2019! That's another thing I totally missed. I don't think I ever read through the supplemental materials, so I'll check those out this time as well.

The last piece I want to hit before jumping into the actual text is this part of the pitch: "The conclusion is already in place: You have failed. The Queen is dead." This kind of specificity does really work on me. Plus I'm kind of a sucker for melancholy. Ok and the last line of the introductory paragraph is "Go on an epic fantasy road trip as you pursue the Queen’s killer to the Tree Under the Mountain, and use what time you have left to say farewell." I would like to do that! So I think this brings the list of things I'm looking for to three (or kind of two and a half); does this game help me run a melancholy road trip epic?; does this game hit some non-standard fantasy beats?; and does it live up to what I remember?

The text begins by running through the set-up and procedure, both of which are quick and simple. Amusingly, the very first direction is to read the story and "feel the crushing weight of your failure and accept the inevitable approach of death." That's a great rule! More rules should be like that. The rest of the set up just informs us that we should make some choices on the queen playbook, not make choices on the assassin playbook, and have players pick from the four main playbooks and make a choice or two. The procedure is not much more complicated - there will be eight turns, each at one of the locations outlined in the back of the zine. The locations have a question to answer, and players will play out a short scene as their characters, possibly making additional choices on their sheet, and hopefully learning more about the assassin. At the end, there's a conclusion - the characters confront the queen's killer, and then get a short epilogue (making another choice on their sheet).

As you can tell, most of this game lives on the character sheets! Before we get to them, just a short diversion to the story, which we're directed to read aloud. I'm struggling a little to settle on exactly what it is about the story that doesn't work for me. It's competently written, and seems like it would broadly be fun to read aloud. It clearly and cleanly establishes our cast of characters, who all seem cool. It might be that it sits strangely with how I imagine the rest of the text? The final words are about how the only thing left to the dying queen is revenge - that's pretty metal, but it doesn't quite fit the melancholy vibe I was imagining. It also describes how the assassin slipped through all these lines of defense - but wants to leave that character wide open, for us to learn about in play, so it comes off as just kind of empty. Did they just get extremely lucky? Are they a chosen hero (and are we on the "wrong side of history"?). Both of those seem really fun and cool, and I appreciate that the text gives us room to find that out! But maybe it's that the "mystery" of it all is not really what I was expecting either (in fact there's a little sidebar highlighting the mystery angle, though "mystery" does not appear on the itch or kickstarter page). Anyway, all that's just to say that this part sticks out to me as just slightly incongruous with the rest of the book.

The meat of the text is in the character playbooks, both in terms of sheer volume (10 out of 23 pages) and the exciting "game design" that's going on. Mechanically, the only thing happening here are "picklists". I'd love to delve into the design history of them - it seems to me like I first saw them get mainstreamed with Dream Askew/Dream Apart, and probably done most famously in Wanderhome, (and were a more background part of pbta games before that?). Anyway, the picklists here are all excellent, full of exciting and interesting little details that give me a lot of fun ideas for how I'd want to hack them or bounce off of them. 

Both the Queen and the Assassin playbooks are part of the load bearing structure of the game, and so I think it's important (and well done) that they have more options on their sheet than can be chosen. I mean, it also helps that all their options are great - the Queen has choices for what signs of decay appear over time, and the Assassin has a list of rumors. Both accomplish their goals of being exciting and fun to read, but also help point me to what a scene could be about. Fittingly, the Queen's "Conclusion" picklist has only a single choice - that she dies. It's obvious and not something that we really need put in text in this way, but I think it does some cool work by standing in contrast to the other characters, and even the Queen's other choices.

The four main character playbooks are all excellent too. One little trick doing a lot of work here is really just a little piece of layout work - everyone's "Traits" picklist starts with two choices already "picked" - one unique but character defining thing, and "you love the queen." It works well! I can easily imagine that this is the part of the game that people would get excited for - "Ooh, I have such an interesting idea for the Knight of Whispers! I want to play to find out what happens to them." In addition to a nice big list of traits to choose from, each character has a unique list of items (the Knight gets weapons - the Witch gets spells), and a list of things in their "satchel". I'd list some of the choices that made my eyes widen or made me smile or made me wonder what I would do with them, but there are just too many! So I'll just conclude this little piece by saying that they're all great, and I do of course have a favorite but I'm much less confident in that choice than I was before I opened the zine back up today.

The last part of the text is going over the locations. There are exactly eight, and you'll visit each of them over the course of the game, although the order is up to you. Procedurally, this is fine by me - but the text also comes with a map, which destroys the fiction of travelling to all eight! By the map, I would visit, like, three of these before getting to the conclusion. This is a slightly cursed problem - laying them out in a line would probably not fit nicely in a two-page spread of the zine's dimensions, but is the alternative of just not having a map really better? Unfortunately, the major competitor in this space is probably Fall of Magic, which really crushes the map-having angle, and this really makes me wish for something like that map - lots of blank spaces, and a couple of branching choices. I'd probably make my own, and just forget that I saw the map in here.

The writing for the locations is fun! We've been getting little sprinklings of what I think is supposed to be the "weird" fantasy - like, the witch is the "Gravity Witch", and has spells that can crush things with black holes; the historian has a book on "the Glasswise Beast" (which is a great name for a beast). We get a little bit more in the locations - a river that is mysteriously always hot, a desert with glass flowers, a crystal monolith, etc. They're all cool but none of them are very "weird" to me! I am by no means a genre expert, so I have no strong claim here about what is or isn't "weird fantasy." I'm only noting it because it does accord with my memory that OQC is cool but not pushing what I thought of as the genre boundaries.

And that's really it for the game! Nice and short. I'll save the full "final thoughts" for the end, but it's quite good, and I know I want to at least steal parts of it for a game if I can't ever find the time to bring it to the table. But with the text once again fresh in my mind, I wanted also to read through the "extras," which are new to me. 

Up first is the "Retainers" doc, which has additional character options. There's a powerful foreword which resonated with me - I don't often talk about the impact that my mother dying when I was young had on me, but it's often on my mind, or not far from it. Beyond that, I really appreciate these personal touches in writing. Writing games and about games for me is pretty personal - I don't have a lot of reach, for one thing, so everything I'm writing is for a kind of personal audience. But for another, I think that there is something indelible about a person that gets put into this kind of writing. But getting more into that starts dipping into the "manifesto" about what it is a game text is doing that my friends have told me not to write, so let's get back into reviewing.

There is an alternate Queen and an alternate Assassin, both of whom are just a little underwhelming. The Queen works a little better for me - her picklist of her deteriorations has some wholly new and some slightly altered options (along with some that are just the same), and the effect on the whole is enough to help me imagine a new Queen. The other lists, sobriquets, marks of royalty, etc, aren't pulling as much weight. For the Assassin, there's a bigger fictional shift - this playbook establishes an identity for the Assassin (a legendary pirate hero of a sort). I don't really care for it! The new rumors are all cool, and there are some fun new conclusions, but I'm not inspired by the idea of a pirate assassin. Ho hum.

The rest are entirely new characters, new companions rather than new interpretations of the core four. These are a little hit-or-miss for me. Some are great - the changeling child entry, for example, expands on a cool location in the text and has a whole bunch of inspiring and surprising choices in their lists to pick from. The ones that miss for me do so for a variety of reasons. Some have just a boring establishing fiction; some have uninspiring picklists; many are unobjectionable but just don't have the sharpness of vision of the original four. They feel like extra characters - people who aren't as connected to the main plot, but might be along for the ride. One thing that I noticed right away is that none of them have the trait "Loves the queen".

None of them except two out of the three made by Riley Rethal, which close out the document! I can't believe I forgot Riley was a part of this - I'm a huge fan of their games writing (although I haven't followed them into their fanfiction phase/s, I support their endeavors wholeheartedly). All three of these whip, but particularly the two that do say "Loves the queen." It's not just that line of text, of course, but that all of the playbook is aligned around this center - they're here on this journey because they couldn't not be. They're inextricable to this story (even if they didn't exist until the expansion). I did notice that some of their picklist choices are a little more subdued, or don't go as hard, or offer strong new pieces of the world to establish. I think the effect here is, instead of making me less excited about the character options, encouraging me to read between the lines - the trait "Makes a perfect cup of tea" isn't really that "cool" but picking it does add a new kind of depth to the character. Anyway, shout outs to Riley.

My feelings on the Retainers, on the whole, is that it's probably most useful to people who want to make their own edits to the base game, and get a feeling for what does or doesn't work for them. And it is fun to read through! With a few notable exceptions, though, I'm probably not bringing most of the text in here to the game.

Next up is Golems of Claypit! It's only two pages long, and it's made to be a little convention game - you play by going around a social space and asking passersby if they're playing, then having a brief conversation. It's cute! There's a little 1d6 table of locations, with suggested prompts, and at the end of each little scene you trade character sheets so the other person can write what trait of yours they noticed (or would like to introduce). The traits are written to be wide enough that you can choose what you want to do with them, if one's been imposed on you that you weren't thinking of. After five traits, you pick from three epilogues. That's it! I don't have too much of an opinion on it - I've never really been a convention person, but it seems like it could be fun for a little social gathering too.

That's Our Queen Crumbles! It's a great little zine, definitely a top contender for something I'd want to play as a little one shot, or steal some neat ideas from. I'm a little gratified to discover that my memory was largely correct. 

Ok!! Another entry for our records, and our archive gets a little more sorted. 5 for reading, 3 for rating, and 18 paragraphs for 98 points. Pretty good!! That brings us to a nice and even 360 points. I think I'll keep us there for now... Hopefully I don't regret it tomorrow when the romans arrive.