Lovecraft Country! Four StorySets 📚 for Tableau: Collaborative Cinematic Storytelling

TL;DR: A Study in Madness is paused. My new game, The Launch, is out: an ashcan alpha at “Pay What You Want” with $5 suggested. It is also available this weekend as part of RPG Trader's GM-less Games Bundle, 106 games from 106 creators, “Pay What You Want” starting at $20, closing Monday 20 July at 6pm Pacific. More games coming.

You followed Lovecraft Country: A Study in Madness on BackerKit, and I wanted to share with you where it actually stands. Here it is, along with the thing that came out of the delay.

Dark Expeditions is out and has been for a while. A Study in Madness, the follow-up, is paused.

The reason is worth telling, because it is the honest one. In demos and beta play, the game works when the designer is at the table. That last part is the problem. Both of the Tableau games have turned out harder to learn than I hoped they would be, especially for people new to GM-less story games. A game that needs me in the room to land is not finished.

So I started building much smaller games to find out why. That is where Auspice comes from. It began as an experiment to puzzle out one question: how do you make a GM-less story game that teaches itself to people who have never played one? Small games, prompt cards, one evening at a table. Each one tests an answer.

Two of the upcoming Auspice games are in the Lovecraft family. Not set in Lovecraft Country, but sharing the same blood.

Auspice: The Bequest - A story game of a family and the thing it hands down, one generation to the next, and what it asks of the one who carries it.

Auspice: The Long Watch - A story game of the long vigil at a threshold, the watch that keeps it, and the night it finally stirs.

Lovecraft Country: A Study in Madness is not abandoned. I have done a great deal of work on it as a Tableau game, and that work is feeding the Auspice games directly. I am still puzzling out how to make it land for players who have never done this kind of game before. When I have that answer, it comes back.

One thing is happening right now, if you want it. My first Auspice game, The Launch, is available now on RPG Trader at “Pay What You Want” (suggested $5). The Launch is for three to five storytellers, one evening, no GM, crewing a ship away from a home that can no longer hold them. It is not a Lovecraft game. It is where the teaching problem is being worked out in the open. If you want the thinking behind it, I wrote a design diary entry about it.

Most of what I write about design ends up in my design notes or on Bluesky. This weekend that's meant threads about games in the bundle: a circus game that welds a real ending onto For the Queen's skeleton, and an Odyssey story game where you play blackjack against Fate and mostly lose. Next weekend I'll be at Go Play NW in Seattle with copies of The Launch and the other upcoming Auspice games, running them for strangers and posting what I learn when it doesn't go the way I expected. If that sounds like your kind of thing, follow me.

“The best stories are the ones we tell together.”

-- Christopher Allen

Dyvers Hands Productions