Electra before the throne

Electra before the throne is a three player, three character shortform freeform game that wraps Greek classical mythology over the throne room confrontation scene in Return of the Jedi.

Electra face Hades, the King of the Dead, who has raised her father Agamemnon from the dead to serve him. Each character has a goal for the scene, an understanding of the situation (which may be wrong) and a kind of tic-tac-toe of abilities regarding the other characters.

Around them the city of Argos is under attack by the dead, the three protagonists must find a resolution to their conflict in 20 minutes of gameplay, after which Argos will be destroyed and its people slain.

This game is entirely a riff on the confrontation between Luke, Darth Vader and the Emperor in Return of the Jedi, re-imagined through classical literature. The blend of high and lowbrow culture makes it seem immediately comprehensible.

The requirements of the game: short play, exactly three players; means this has been kicking around in my possession while waiting for the right circumstances but I'm curious to see how this nano game works in practice.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A New Era

 While I've had a lot of success using Blogger I've decided to move away from integrating everything on Google products. In the era of GPlus everything worked together nicely but now there's always a feeling that you're one product manager away from everything being cancelled while at the same time your content is being ingested and reprocessed to create new things like generative AI that you never really were asked about. I've decided to start writing on a new blog that is part of the Fediverse and which I think has a nicer interface for writing and reading. The first post there is a writeup of the storygame Scene Thieves which is about a travelling troupe of actors who bring drama and do crime.
Read more

Valiant Girls & NanoWorld

You wait for one A7 game and then you get deluged by them. Following on from Vast and Starlit are Meg Baker's Valiant Girls and Marshall Miller's Nanoworld . Valiant Girls has the players taking on the role of Ethopian girls and the perils they overcome. As a game that is pro-people and anti-game nerd the setting feels more intimidating to play for me than the typical genre games since making stuff up about Ethopian girls feels a lot harder and more culturally loaded than pretending to be an orc or a robot. NanoWorld, by comparison, is safer ground with the players taken on the roles of clones who are just about to have their dystopian world shaken by unusual events. It is an Apocalypse World hack and is unusual in that each player's character is identical and when one player discovers a limitation or ability to the clone line all the characters gain the same trait.
Read more

Ruma: Dawn of Empire

Ruma is a Powered by the Apocalypse game about a Roman Empire that is facing off against supernatural threats summoned by it barbarian neighbours. Players take the role of characters who are confronting those threats. The rules introduce Latin-flavoured playbooks that reflect various roles in historical Roman society and within the Legions. Irritatingly Ruma introduces some alternative names and spellings for the various countries and peoples of its world. It tries to put some fictional distance from history but not in a way that adds to the historical roots. While flawed as a narrative campaign Hunters of Alexandria did a better job of blending the historic and supernatural fantasy of its world. Apocalypse World, as a ruleset, seems appropriate to the environment, the Empire is powerful but besieged by threats that seek to overthrow it. Characters will win big eventually but the costs will be high. Ruma's fundamental problem for me is that I'm not sure why this isn
Read more