THEME: Botanical Adventures
This week’s games are all plant or plant-themed. Whether Ferns, Flowers, or Fungi, if you have a green thumb you might enjoy these games!
Plant Girl Game, by Dominique Dickey.
Your mother’s garden is crowded with succulents and sometimes—when the timing is just right, when your whole family is ready—one of those succulents emerges from the garden as a human child. This is how you came to be: you climbed out of the soil, between the ages of ten and thirteen, and found your family ready to love you.
Plant Girl Game is a cozy tabletop roleplaying game about a family of plant children working together to prevent an ecological disaster. You don’t have to be a girl, but you do have to be a plant. Your character’s gender is not essential to the game. In fact, the real plant girl is your mom—the kind-hearted witch who grows children in her garden.
Plant Girl Game puts a lot of focus on building a world that is fun and engaging to play in. It emphasizes the usefulness of safety tools, and provides a list of questions to custom-create your very own Plant mom, as well as the place you’re growing up in. The ashcan play-kit comes with three genera, although there are nine total to choose from in the full version. Characters have 3 stats, which they will add to a d6 when they roll to determine how they succeed or fail. Success can come with complications or advantages, so you have a lot of room for layered storytelling!
Mossy Mechanics, by Sinta Posadas / Diwata ng Manila
You've seen the power of the Succulent Sorcerers, you've experienced how a Petal Paladin enacts their order, and you have been beholden to the strength of the Bonsai Brawlers - now, be enchanted by the prowess of the Mossy Mechanics!
This is actually a series of recommendations, rather than one. The Planted RPG series contains four iterations with a simple premise: you are small plants on a grand quest. In Succulent Sorcerers, you use your magic to defend Mother Succulent. In Petal Paladins, you are defenders of the plants that cannot defend themselves. In Bonsai Brawlers, you are miniature trees who have dedicated themselves to a special fighting style in order to protect what you love. Finally, in Mossy Mechanics, awakened by the “Other Mother” and faced with a decision: will you support her plan for world domination, or will you work against her?
The basic mechanics are the same for each game. There are two stats: Resist, and Raw Magic. Characters contain three hit points, and two points of Rot. In order to push yourself to do better, you can spent a point of Rot to automatically succeed. If you fill up your Rot, take one damage and add a dot to either Resist or Raw Magic. Each game also comes with character options as well as game flavour in the form of character classes, dark secrets, roll-tables for scenarios, and premise to get the game going!
Orchidelirium, by aethercorp Games.
Take on the mantle of a grizzled and hardy orchid hunter in 1865, traversing the depths of unchartered territories in search of rare, elusive, and above all, expensive orchids for your shady employer, J. Carmichael & Associates.
For the Games Master, Orchidelirium provides a simple ruleset, an adventure, and improvisation tools to help build an adventure of discovery at the table.
Orchidelerium is mostly an adventure game with orchids added in to give a unique flavour to the genre. However, playing cards add a unique mechanic that enable setting and adversary generation in such a way that both the GM and the players have a bit of an oracle to help guide their way. The book comes with a lovely centrefold useful for keeping track of the obstacles the group will run up against along the way, as well as a reference page to enable quick look-up of prompts. All in all, a lovely book!
Little Garden, by Five Points Games.
Little Garden is a game about decline, corruption and perhaps even a little hope at the end of it all.
Play as Nomes, helpful garden Spirits, trying to maintain their bucolic home after the absence of the Garden's creator. Fight back dangerous beasts, vagrants from the encroaching wilds, and tend to the animals and other denizens that make their home with you. At least, for as long as you can, that is. The Wilds will not slow their encroachment, decline is inevitable.
This game is sorted into three rounds: Discovery, Deliberation, and Resolution. In the Discovery Round, the GM will introduce problems that the players will have to confront, using options from a series of GM moves to create obstacles. In Deliberation, players will use a pool of 8 d6s to take turns using moves from the Player options in order to confront the obstacles. At the end of the Deliberation round, the GM will resolve any un-resolved actions in a Resolution round before starting another turn with a fresh Discover Round. This will continue until one of three conditions are met, in which the game ends. If you like structured gameplay with an easy-to-read list and a theme of slow decline, you might want to check out this game!
Mushrooms & Magic, by FeatherBoy.
Years after a mysterious series of magical Churnings, kingdoms of Mushrooms awoke in a world left behind by the Ancients, surrounded by strange beasts and remnants of ancient technology from when "humans" walked the soils. In the years following, Mushroomkind fought and explored, discovered and innovated. But Mushrooms are small, and the world is large; much remains to be learned, and countless adventures are still to be had. Will you answer the call?
Mushrooms & Magic runs using a modified Powered by the Apocalypse / Monster of the Week-like system, with new mechanics for tool crafting, abilities, and several magic types. The game only requires one die - a d20 - and makes use of just four basic stats. While not necessarily rules-light, plenty of room is left within the game's structure for players to modify core abilities and attributes (and add their own!) as wanted within campaigns, and GM's are encouraged to have fun with the setting above all else.
Unlike the stats we’re used to seeing in PbtA games, Mushrooms & Magic uses a stat wheel, along with optional intermediary stats to cover actions that don’t seem to fit one solid option. Similar to many tabletop rigs, your character choice will influence options available to you - characters will pick both a Role and a Clade that embodies their character. A Role is similar to character class - it tells us something about what your character has to contribute. Clades indicate your character’s mushroom type, and give you a starting health and some innate talents - similar to Race in Dungeons & Dragons. If you’re looking for some good fungal fun, I recommend Mushrooms & Magic!
The Wildsea, by Felix Isaacs and Ray Chou.
Some three hundred years ago the empires of the world were toppled by a wave of fast-growing greenery, a tide of rampant growth spilling from the West. This event, the Verdancy, gave rise to the world you’ll explore as you play - a titanic expanse of rustling waves and sturdy boughs known as the Wildsea.
Your character is a wildsailor, part of a crew cutting their way across the island-studded wilderness of the treetop sea on a vessel of your very own. You’ll clash with survivor cultures and wild beasts, scavenge and salvage for wreckage and trade-goods, chase rumours, and uncover secrets. The focus of this game is on exploration, progress, and change - you’ll define the world of the Wildsea as you sail it.
If you like giant forests, leviathan squirrels, and the rambunctious energy of a motley crew crawling its way through a tangle of branch and bramble, this is the game for you. The Wild Words system, birthed in this game, relies heavily on player contributions and small seeds called Whispers to generate new locations, obstacles, and treasure for your crew of wildsailors to explore, befriend, tame, and slay. The setting alone is worth the investment in this game.
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