I played this game at Tapestries 2025, run by the author himself! I had a tremendous time. I enjoyed creating a concierge and a bellhop and characterizing their relationship, and I enjoyed how the tone of the game progresses naturally from lighthearted to serious and even grim, towards the end of the game. The way the challenges (prompts) are worded - that they are challenges that are happening at your hotel - really helps make them feel personal and real.
Characters can spend "favors" to help other charactesr resolve their challenges. At the beginning of the game, there are enough favors to go around and help everyone resolve their challenges. That helps players get comfortable role playing as their characters and helps players figure out the nature of their favors. But later on in the game, the challenges require more favors to resolve, and the characters are forced to choose which challenges to resolve successfully and which to fail.
The "favor economy" felt very well balanced and in line with the intention of the game, where "one good turn begets another" at the beginning of the game, which becomes less true as the game goes on. Also, the way the "suboptimal" outcomes are worded on the challenges all feel very heroic, so even if your character may not be passing with flying colors, it still feels like they tried their best and weren't shortchanged by GM fiat. It truly feels like your character is making a heroic sacrifice, especially if you play with open information and read the consequences of each choice before making your decision.
Thanks Aaron for being such a great facilitator! Bell and Key was the highlight of Tapestries 2025 for me. I've donated $15 to Trans Continental Pipeline in lieu of payment. <3
Played this last night with friends - awesome game! Amazing visual style and writing. I loved how the prompts for relationships instantly established very messy relationships between characters and good starting points for fleshing out deeper conflicts. I played the Hound, a whirlwind disaster of a girl who wore her heart on her sleeve and was sleeping with everyone else in the band. We also had Mule, a tall dark big man who didn't say much but did what needed doing, Cat, an aging rocker control freak lady who wanted to recapture her youth, and Cockerel, a bone fide asshole.
Great game! It ended right when it felt right with a few poetic turns aided by the dice and was neither too long nor too short. Make your memories count - you might or might not appear in other people's memories, but you're only guaranteed your own.
Wow! I've had my eye on this prize for a couple months and finally decided to buy it and I read it all in one sitting! A lovely lovely storygame with gorgeous layout and design and art and amazing writing! A treat and pleasure to read, and I look forward to playing this with my partner + marshaling another couple to play it with!
The Xenosexuality Conference was a lot of fun! The writing is comfy and fun in a way that reminds me of Becky Chambers Wayfarers, but much steamier! I really enjoy the descriptions of all the different alien types and the great worldbuilding that makes me feel like there's a whole universe outside of this fic. Great illustrations too! I would love to read more of Brilliant's adventures. :)
"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!
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.
