Disclaimer: I am real life friends with the designer, Matthew Ayers. I stayed in his house for Dragon Con and it was truly legendary.

That said, this is one of the games I have played the most this year. I got the pleasure of GMing it at Dragon Con, and it is one of only three games I have played a full campaign as a player. It is also not the first time I have discussed it on this blog. I played a much earlier version of the game and wrote about the playtest experience here.

I say all that to say this: I do not have time to waste, and if I did not love this game, I would not have played it as much as I have.

1. What is it about?

This is a game about unlikely heroes, cursed with a blight that gives them supernatural abilities and heals them from mortal wounds, but slowly robs them of their humanity, turning them into unrecognizable horrors as they tap into the corruption that powers them. A slick, powerful collaborative worldbuilding system makes every game of Blightfall different, but protecting the community is always the central theme.

The GM takes on the role of the Blight, a sentient force that seeks to infect, then dominate, everything it touches. The Blight is necessarily adversarial to the characters, and every step they take to thwart the Blight’s machinations drags them closer and closer to losing themselves to its corruption.

2. What is it like as a player?

2.1 Classes

You play as one of six archetypes representing key village locations: The Cathedral, the Harbor, the Mausoleum, etc. On first read, pieces of these classes may look familiar, but each with a unique twist. The Bonfire casts fire magic (hell yeah), but also is the master of gas-lighting. All abilities come with a narrative effect and a combat effect. The bonfire can shoot fireballs but also make everyone agree with you for 10 minutes (but will know you influenced them afterward).

Despite its gloomy exterior, and each player’s doomed fate, you are given godlike powers, many of which are so strong that they will tear down the walls of the gms best laid plans and drag them kicking and screaming into a story that is necessarily driven by the players. At the climax of our campaign, our Belltower used the following on the so-called BBEG just before the final fight:
Send a non-party member back in time for up to a single day.

It was an “Oh shit” moment for everyone, I cackled with laughter as we took a break so the GM could figure out what to do next. It felt like those unbelievable natural 20 moments in actual play, except here is the trick: There was no dice roll. This is just something the Belltower can do. Every class has these insane, story changing abilities, and for the most part, they just work.

Well, they “just” work. All abilities come at a cost of gaining corruption. “Cost” is maybe the wrong word here. You (the player) want to gain corruption. The more you have, the more gnarly abilities you unlock and the more nasty manifestations of your disease present themselves. Functionally it is your XP, and the game is designed around you hoovering up as much of it as you can until things go horribly wrong and you burn out in a sudden flash of monstrous energy.

In other words, the stronger you are, the closer you are to permanent death. Awesome.

2.2 Rest

Maybe the most beautiful mechanic in the game lies in its rest mechanic. In between major encounters, you can choose to rest in one of three ways:

• Restore Humanity
• Find Hope
• Embrace Darkness

Each of these have a mechanical benefit, this is how you restore HP and increase HP maximum, or how you master your skills and abilities, reducing their blight cost or boosting their damage. Cool.

The genius is that each rest must be accompanied with a rest scene. There is no fast forwarding through long rests just to get the benefit. You have to show how your character is changing and interacting with the community through these rest scenes. This is an opportunity to show serious character change. Over our six sessions I watched a teen farm girl decide that the best way to benefit the world was to amass as much power as possible regardless of the cost, and the oldest man in the village descend into a coldblooded, merciless killer.

I can count on two fingers how many times I have cried during an rpg session, but finding hope in two unlikely friends’ silent shared flask before they marched to their death had tears welling up.

3. What if I want to GM?

It’s a very smooth system as long as you can accept the plot shattering abilities the players have. You cannot approach this game with a story in mind. Planning is great, but you must be prepared to abandon the those plans at any point in favor of honoring your players choices.

3.1 World building

The first step is world creation which is largely offloaded onto players. They each have a set of questions on their character sheet that informs the world, and it creates unique imaginative settings in just an hour or two.

I have played on a snowpiercer inspired train where the engine was only sustained on fine art, a crystalline mountain surrounded by mist and massive floating sea creatures, and a pre-US-depression era frontier town shunted into a timeless multiverse by a mystical dust bowl.

Every time I have watched the worldbuilding unfold, I have been amazed at how much creative energy we can cram into a world in such a short time. It is so slick that you can run it at the beginning of a 3-4 hour oneshot with plenty of time for the adventure itself.

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Alrighty, there will be some spoilers from here on out, so be warned.

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3.2 Combat

Combat is really slick. It can quickly get complicated for players. They can buff each other, and each time they hit 0 hp, they flare back to life with lower max hp, but dealing twice as much damage for the rest of the combat. I once had players with their calculators out, dealing hundreds of damage in one shot. That is great for players! It makes them feel cool.

But GMs don’t have time for math like that. Because the players max health decreases as they get stronger, your attacks don’t have to scale like theirs. Creating creatures on the fly is a breeze. There is a simple formula for HP based on player rank, and the rest is largely just doing what feels right. Single attacks use d20’s for damage rolls, multi attacks use d10’s, etc., and you can forgo damage to inflict statuses like removing a player’s ability to use certain abilities. Making monsters on the fly just needs a good imagination.

Every time your players acquire corruption, not only are they getting stronger, but they are giving you ammunition to fire back at them. You can spend corruption to break the rules of the game: take an additional turn immediately, increase damage to the max roll, and even turn their friends and family into blighted minions.

I love this. Your players are guaranteed to gobble up that tasty corruption, and give you shiny new toys to hurt them with in the process. It is devious.

3.3 Death

The last important thing is permanent death. You may have noticed above that hitting 0 HP doesn’t actually kill a PC, it just reduces their max HP based on their level. The higher level they are, the faster they lose max HP, and the lower the max HP, the more often they hit 0 HP. It is a campaign scale death spiral. In our last session, I hit 0 HP five or six times in a single combat, and felt that death spiral in a very visceral way.

It ended with my character going supernova then entering blight death once my max HP hit 0. Not only is this permanent PC death, but the PC gains temporary health equal to their total corruption, and becomes a threat to the village. More than likely, this will end in a superpowered fight between your fully infected PC and your former party members. The climax to our campaign was me doing my best to kill my friends. Very very cool.

4. What else?

This game is still technically in progress, and the rules may change before the official release, but I think they will largely stay in the form I enjoyed in the later sessions. That said, I think there is one major pitfall with this game: Framing.

Everyone needs to be on board that this is a game about supernaturally powerful characters. I think the bleak, doomed atmosphere leads some to believe this is going to be a hyper deadly, ruthless OSR style game, but in practice it runs more like super hero comics if they were written by Cormac McCarthy. A disconnect here will cause friction in the gameplay.

Similarly, corruption rides a fine line between blessing and curse to players. Players may feel like they are getting away with something by taking on a bunch of blight and ranking up without feeling any immediate repercussions, but I think that is intentional. The game wants you to take on blight, then it slowly turns the heat on, boiling you alive before you have even noticed you’re in hot water.

So, in a word (or 1500), you should play Blightfall. If I ever had to run a game with absolutely no prep, this is the game I would pull out. It removes so much pressure off the GM and gives it to the players. You make the world together, the conflicts together, even the quiet moments together. You make the story together.

Isn’t that the whole point of RPGs?

-Brett

5. Acknowledgements

Blightfall is not officially out yet. You can follow it here for the official release.

A huge thanks to Matt for designing this game. Not only did he design a fantastic game, but he is doing all the layout and interior art himself.¹ I am inspired by all the work it has taken for him to get to this point, and constantly shocked by how much of game design is doing things completely unrelated to making a cool game.

Thanks to all the testers I have had the pleasure to play with. I had an amazing table at Dragon Con, I played a lovely one-shot with Liz, Gemelli, and Raggadorr, then a tear-jerking campaign with Liz (the teen turned effective altruist), johnofwants (the unlikely friend), and strat (the callous old man).

As always, a special thanks to kraftpaperhat for all of the Secret Sunday Sampler branding.

As a reminder, I play all of the games that I review on this blog.

P.S. I am really bummed today about The Reach of The Roach God. As far as I can tell, it is no longer even available second hand for egregious collector prices. It’s a shame, I have heard it and Thousand Thousand Islands were truly fantastic.

P.P.S. I wrote this entire blog post while listening to the KPop Demon Hunters sound track, because that is what Matt would have wanted.

1. I believe a majority of the art is photobashing public domain art, though still no small feat. ↩︎