Something is Wrong with the Chickens

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Something is Wrong with the Chickens is a single page TTRPG in the vein of Honey Heist. Very few rules, just a handful of dice, and a madcap premise. Our session was run by the author, Elliot Davis.

In this game you play a randomly-selected chicken (or turkey, or duck) that has acquired a randomly-selected Eldritch Trait. Tentacles, spikes, that sort of thing. If you want to know how this came about you're asking too many questions. Suspension of disbelief is mandatory. The party barrels through a randomly-selected scenario as they try to get revenge on Bryson Foods for their crimes against chickenkind.

Chickens has a single, simple dice mechanic that handles all skill checks as well as the push and pull between your chicken nature and your eldritch nature. There are three outcomes: A success (yay!), a chicken failure, and an eldritch failure. If you roll an eldritch failure you gain a (randomly-selected) eldritch trait. If you roll a chicken failure, you lose one instead. Gain too many traits and you transcend this world, removing your character from the game. Losing all your traits makes you too delicious and you are immediately taken away to be turned into nuggets. This also removes your character from the game.

I liked this system a lot. It feels silly to talk about 'depth' in a game featuring eldritch chickens but there are legitimately times where you're hoping for one kind of failure or another to keep your traits balanced out. Narrating failures based on the trait lost or gained was also a tonne of fun.

Chickens was great, and I would 100% play it again. One thing I think would be worth doing is expanding the list of traits that your chicken can acquire, as after a few rounds of losing and gaining them there was a fair amount of duplication between players. Rather than d6, a d66 or even a d100 table of traits would make for a richer and more surprising game, but then you'd need a second page for it so maybe that breaks the rules. Perhaps you could ask the players to come up with some at the beginning of the game?

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Sock Puppets

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Sock Puppets stands out amongst the games I played at Breakout. It has no character sheets, no stats or skills, and you don't roll any dice. The game is basically one long improv scene acting out an episode of a dysfunctional children's TV show, and I had a great time playing it.

Our session was run by the creator of Sock Puppets, Kurt. He took us through the game's few rules, and regaled us with stories from its development while we made our puppets. The first half hour of the session was spent cutting and sticking brightly coloured paper, foam, and googly eyes to a brown paper bag that we then wore on our hands for the rest of the session. Here's my creation, Pip.

Each player had a couple of prompts to seed the game with, which include relationships such as one player being another's step-parent and agendas like slipping in 'subtle' product placement messages. I had to try and shoehorn in references to Luxembourg while trying to one-up everything another player did. Then Kurt said “Go!”, started a timer, and the rest of the game was us improvising an episode of children's television in real time.

This was as chaotic as it sounds, and definitely not for everyone. Without the common structures of most TTRPGs, and no GM to help distribute focus (Kurt made a puppet and played a character along with the rest of us), each player needs the discipline and awareness to share the spotlight without prompting. There's also the classic “Yes, and” rule of improv which I think would be worth calling out at the beginning if you run this game yourself. Our table did a good job with these things about 80% of the time, I reckon? Pretty good for a group of strangers at a con.

Sock Puppets was a unique experience for me, and I am glad that I got to play it with the creator. It's definitely not a game I'd recommend playing remotely over a video call though, you'd lose 90% of the fun that way. If you've got a local group and some craft supplies handy though, I'd say go for it.

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The Wildsea

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I travelled to Breakout with my good friend Carson, who runs SSTO Press. On the drive back he told me about playing the LotR RPG The One Ring. A particular point he raised was that he quickly felt at home because the game was set in a world with such well-known lore. Lord of the Rings is the lore in many cases. It is the most familiar fantasy format and tropes found there make their ways into almost all fantasy media.

The Wildsea is the opposite of that. Every aspect of the setting is novel. The world is a sea of trees that the players traverse on ships that are also giant chainsaws, cutting their way across the canopy. There are humans, but they're joined by cacti, funguses, moths, and sentient colonies of spiders(!) as playable character types.

One downside of this is that there is a fair bit of terminology to learn up front. Ektus, Char, Tallshank, The Thrash. It was a little overwhelming looking at my pre-generated character sheet. Standard RPG terms are also thrown out for the most part. You don't have attributes, you have Edges. Injuries become Mires. Rather than an inventory you have Salvage, Specimens, Whispers, and Charts. I still don't understand all of those.

Our Firefly (that's what Wildsea calls the GM) was fantastic. She had all the information we needed about our characters and the world at hand and did a wonderful job of introducing us to the game. Ektus? Cactus person. Char? A ship's cook. I learned afterwards that she writes games too, so check out Mint-Rabbit over on Itch.

Once over the initial terminology hurdle, the novel setting of The Wildsea means that there's a lot of space for the players to add their own details. Being a narrative-focussed game we spent a lot of time asking and answering questions about the situations we found ourselves in. We made many decisions about the world that would already have been answered had we been in a well-known setting. What we built over the three hour session was ours, and I enjoyed that a lot.

My Wildsea session was definitely a high point of the convention. If the opportunity to play again comes up I'll definitely take it.

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Brindewood Bay

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In Brindlewood Bay you play a team of little old ladies who solve murders in the titular coastal village. It's got all your daytime TV and literary mystery tropes, with each player choosing a “Maven Move” named after an iconic fictional detective. I chose Ms Marple, which meant that I could breeze my way into any location regardless of whether I was supposed to be there or not.

The game revolves around collecting clues, which are vague enough that they don't narrow down the list of suspects too quickly. In fact, the key thing is that there isn't a pre-written solution to the mystery. It is the player's job to concoct a narrative based on the clues they find. The more clues they incorporate, the greater the bonus they can add when they make a “Theorize” move to try and solve the case.

Building this narrative was satisfying, and the scenes where we gathered clues were a good mix of investigation, interrogation, and intrigue. Things escalated quickly and the pace felt well-suited to a game based on hour-long TV episodes.

The one thing that I didn't grasp especially well was when or how we were should transition from gathering clues to solving the mystery. Given that we'd stand a better chance of succeeding in our Theorize roll with more clues, we wanted to gather as many as possible. We had over a dozen when we reached the end of our session, which allowed us to solve with ease. If we hadn't had the constraints of the convention schedule I felt that we'd have continued picking up clues until we simply couldn't fail. In theory there was a narrative time pressure too, but that didn't really come into play.

Essentially, it never felt like it made sense to Theorize while the option of searching for clues was present. Maybe that's not a choice that the players are expected to be considering. Without a 'real' solution to be uncovered there's no “ah ha!” moment where things fall into place. That's a big part of the material this game draws from, and I felt its absence.

I really enjoyed my session playing Brindlewood Bay. If someone in my home group picked it up I'd be very happy to play some more. There's a whole overarching mystery that I haven't even touched on here which you'd uncover as you play through the course of a campaign.

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