Welcome!

You bravely decided to write your first very own playset, and I have incredible new, this is one of the easiest thing you'll ever design, so let's talk about that.

What is a Fiasco Playset?

Fiasco itself is a collaborative storytelling game in which you begin play by building characters with shared history, and then you play out a series of scenes (four per person generally) telling the kind of story you might see in the length of a movie. Playsets are the narrative portion of the game that reskin the rules to play games that resemble movies, video games, books, tv shows, podcasts, and more of any genre. Some of the most popular playsets emulate action movies, slasher horror, heist movies, and sci-fi. 

A playset is, generally,  a document with 4 lists of 36 items each, these lists pertain to relationship types, needs, objects, and locations. That means by the time you finish, your full playset will usually have 144 items to help players build up their shared histories. If you would like to check out a massive collection of playsets, they can be found here. I absolutely recommend that if you join the game jam that you submit your playset to that website to help share it with others.

 Occasionally, playsets will include extra rules like James Gabrielsen's Camp Death which has an endgame rule to determine which character is the killer or my own playset Cold Moon Sabbath which has a beginning of game roll which helps determine what kind of witches' celebration you will be having. Another way that designers will make their playset more unique is to create an alternate "Tilt Table" or "Aftermath Table" (the originals can be found on page 56 and 58, repsectively, of the Fiasco core rule book. These additions are not uncommon, but also not necessary, consider if your genre would benefit from something extra, I personally always like when someone throws in a little something extra that makes their playset unique.

In my next post, "Who? What? When? Where? and How?", I will give some tips about how to actually begin to write your own playset.

Finally, please make sure that anything you submit to this game jam is in accordance with Bully Pulpit Games' custom playset license, which can be found here.