The Newest Flesh

The Fall of Home is a bit of an odd storygame, odd because it has a really specific scenario that is probably metaphorical but which I find hard to follow. It is about a group of people who have left a location they once called home and are now that it has fallen into ruin they are returning to pick over the pieces of the past. The media inspiration for the game includes “Night in the Woods” and “Bastion” which are good in terms of setting an atmosphere but don't clarify the reasons for how this specific scenario might occur. Perhaps it is drawn from American rust belt towns or Detroit's abandoned suburbs.

In some ways Fall of Home is like a lot of lyric or storygames with the players almost free narrating on their character's feelings about the concept of what a home is and what it means to irretrievably lose it. However it does have a three act structure, structured character archetypes, a turn-taking structure and an endgame condition that drives the character's emotional situation at the end of the game. It therefore has quite a few mechanics that are worth reviewing as this is not the same as a prompt or playbook driven game.

It does have archetypes or stripped down playbooks though, each player chooses a “Walk” for their character which encapsulates a certain relationship with that community. Each archetype has a special ability to affect the narrative and a goal that if achieved during a scene allows the gathering of Fragments, which normally require the expenditure from a limited pool of Remnants to acquire.

Fragments are memories and keepsakes of home, if you have enough at the endgame then your character has resolved their relationship with the place they once called home in a healthy way that allows them to move on. Failing to do this means you need to incorporate specific themes into your final narration.

I initially found the Remnants to Fragments economy quite strange and it still feels that primarily it is there to ensure appropriate turn taking while not being as strict a turn-taking mechanic. It is probably too mechanical for storygame fans and not interesting enough for game players.

The playbook moves are also quite varied, quite a few seem quite good allowing you to declare a fact or expose a hidden aspect of an existing scene but a lot of them feel like they are intruding on the free narration part of the Scene that occurs in Act 2. For example one move allows the archetype to introduce a newcomer to a scene but reading the description of playing the Scene it seems that this is something that anyone can do at any time and therefore quite underwhelming as a thing that is meant to differentiate your character.

The whole game feels like a freeform storygame that has lost confidence in guiding principles for the freeform and therefore ends up unnecessarily drafting elements from Belonging Outside Belonging.

I'm not sure I feel this is a strong enough concept or system to ever want to bring to the table myself but I'd be happy to give it a go if someone else was offering to facilitate.