[A little review]
Emissary is a delightful little game of collective storytelling\worldbuilding. It wears its inspiration by Ursula K. LeGuin very vibrantly across its pages, with quotes and structures drawn straight from her novels.
It is not a long game, but everything from its examples of play that lay bare the index card-driven gameplay to the image-backed quotes to the d100 table of nonsense words that fills all of page 20 is flavourful without any given page appearing overstuffed or “too full.” It gets the job done and informs you about what this experience provides at a glance.
Emissary is a game that is liable to give you out as much as your group is prepared (and interested) to put in. You will engage in tightly capped collective worldbuilding (with the entire origin planet of your story’s titular protagonist fitting onto one index card!) that informs the storybeats that lie ahead. You proceed into telling the story from multiple perspectives and without fixed “ownership” of characters, e.g., no one person plays the titular Emissary. Someone begins narrating them, but others can control them in future scenes.
The game has definite rules and decisive elements, but it can feel more akin to an aid to the conversation than an overriding presence: your group collectively decides the consequences and when they tick down. When either reaches three ticks, it’s over—that consequence is the note the story ends on.
There are a few times the game encourages the group to feel free to draw upon more expansive conversations they have, but there is a clear directive to not get too expansive in what we’re recording: remembering the conversations to forward the fiction is fine, but we call it at one index card per element of “here” (the world where the game takes places): environment, people, culture, technology, and politics. You’re free to go over, the example even shows a “politics continued” card, but that comes out to a grand total of three bullet points across both notecards still.
Meanwhile, there’s one card for “there,” the world our Emissary comes from; this makes a lot of sense if you know the Hainish Cycle (most famous entry, The Left Hand of Darkness, being one of my favourites): these stories tend to be strongly based on experiences had on a singular world, with the world of origin either being literally Earth or just distinct in a couple important ways we hear about but do not see directly. It’s more than enough to drive the contrast and doesn’t call for you to do repetitive work, but rather, complimentary conceptualization: “here” is our stage, and “there” is our Emissary’s origin and motivation driver.
I think this game is a great sit-down-and-run experience for people interested in collective worldbuilding and storytelling. It has more directed story aspects than most games with a collective worldbuilding aspect and no GM, but it does not constrain player creativity so much as pressurize it into forward momentum. The game suggests a long game might call for two rather than one sessions; in other words, it’s inherently built for one-shots. And in that context I think it lives and breathes quite well. While I don’t see many groups seeking continuous back-to-back games of Emissary, its capacity to tell stories and set stages is profound. If your group is interested in sci-fi settings you’ve all got a stake in, seriously consider using a lively round of Emissary as a jumping off point for your game.
One question hangs here: is this a game that people could enjoy without being familiar with the works of Ursula K. LeGuin?
The emotional core of this game is contact, conflict, and conclusions between two distinct worlds in a nebulous sci-fi setting—two distant places with very different realities coming into contact, via a single point of contact. I think a certain kind of sci-fi fan can see the immediate appeal of this scenario, and whether or not you’ve read a book or seen a show with a similar premise before, you see the many myriad permutations this setup can unfurl into. So long as you’re that kind of sci-fi fan, I think the answer’s a resounding yes—though I’m sure I mirror the author’s endorsement of reading some of her books yourself if you find these ideas intriguing!
A professional yet understated layout and strong economy of words to package all this up leaves Emissary an easy recommendation that justifies its price-point and then some in this reader’s opinion.