Post by jzhanson in Orbital comments

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Played this with a group of 5, including one who had almost never played RPGs before and one who had only played D&D before, and we had a fantastic time! The setup, reading the rules, and reading and filling in all the pillars on the Miro board took a bit longer than we expected (close to 2 hours), and we didn't use the pillars much in the end.

We played very cinematically, and our group of a half-man half-machine Wrench, a shapeshifter Shadow that turned out to be the reluctant villain, a deserter military AI Heart, a multi-legged multi-armed multi-tentacled orb-creature Monitor, and our shapeshifter Source dealt with a cyber-bomb planted by the Shadow that shut off the life support in our station. The military AI Heart turned evil and revealed themself to the Shadow, who then had to decide whether to complete his mission and kidnap the Heart, or sacrifice his mission to save the station, all while the Wrench and the Monitor fought to keep the station afloat.

It was really some of the best improv I had done in a long time — I really like the head fake of how the collaborative station building prompts define the station, but also build groupthink. :P

We were able to start Belonging-outside-Belonging lucid-dreaming after the second round, which was also really cool to experience.

The graphic design is super nifty and really captures the Belonging-outside-Belonging feeling of the station.

Highly recommend this system for a sleek, virtual-friendly (seriously, the Miro board and instructions is really helpful for online play) RPG that's beginner friendly and fairly rules-light! Very cool picklists for characters as well.

Jack Harrison3 years ago(+1)

Thanks so much for your lovely feedback 😊

humoreffect3 years ago(+1)

Very curious about what you said here, are you able to elaborate at all?

"We were able to start Belonging-outside-Belonging lucid-dreaming after the second round, which was also really cool to experience."

thanks for sharing!

jzhanson3 years ago(+3)

"Belonging-outside-Belonging lucid-dreaming" is me rephrasing/repurposing/bastardizing a line from Riley Rethal's excellent Galactic 2e. In her words:

"as you're brainstorming ideas and discussing the shape of your story, you're entering a mode of play called idle dreaming. this mode is all about curiosity: asking questions, following tangents, brainstorming together. talk about the setting you're building and the things that you find interesting, confusing, or important."

At the start of Orbital, when answering the setting questions and fleshing out the Aspects, we engaged in exactlywhat Riley Rethal describes.

However, during play after the second round, we were all collaboratively storytelling in what felt like a mix between "idle dreaming" as described above and long-form (U.S. American) improv, where we were implicitly passing focus and taking turns to define scenes and pick who would be in each scene. We trusted each other and the story we were building together - building the setting together built groupthink to the point that players were playing up/off motifs that other players were setting up and building themes in the narrative. It really did feel like good long-form improv crossed with being in a TV writer's room, since we were describing film camera shot compositions during our scenes and building the visual aspect and bringing up running color motifs and so on. That's why I described it a bit differently as "lucid" dreaming, because we basically didn't use the rules at all at that point. We were just naturally passing focus without turn order and asking questions like "I have a really good scene idea, do you trust me?" or "I think X should go next, I want to see how their character reacts to what just happened."

Appreciate the interest, hope this helps!

itch.io

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