The paranormal plays a huge role in our culture. From ghost tales around campfires, to literary expressions, and numerous stories on the big screen. As TV evolved it became defined by shows featuring the paranorma. Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Twin Peaks, and The X-Files cast a long shadow over the modern TV landscape. It is no surprise that those shows are important touchstones for Asher’s Ridge. This is a game that emulates the ‘small town, weird events’ genre that these shows had at their core.
Asher’s Ridge comes from publisher Montford Tales and is designed, and illustrated, by Rori Montford. The game recently finished crowdfunding on Kickstarter. The quickstart is already available on itch.io but I am looking at the text and art complete pdf that recently went out to backers. It’s a GMless game that sees players putting together a pilot of a paranormal TV show, with the potential for a campaign of episodes.
Skim Read articles, previously called First read, represent me going through the book in question for the first time. It is my initial impressions of the mechanisms, themes, and setting presented within its pages. I have not played the game at the time of writing.
I backed Asher’s Ridge during the Kickstarter campaign with my own money.
The paranormal is core to the game and it is great to see Rori address what that means upfront.
‘The game uses the word paranormal to encompass the supernatural as well as the unexplained and extraterrestrial’.
If you are going to set your game around a potentially loaded term, it is a good idea to define exactly what you mean by it in the context of the play the game wants to create. The book continues this trend by setting out many of the terms it will use to describe the different parts of the story you are going to create. A throughline of TV and film terms permeates the text, telling you that this is the way it wants you to think about story, character, and structure.
On top of this clear declaration of terminology, on pages 12 and 13 it lays out exactly which bits of the book you need at what moment. I praised this in my recent Blades 68 skim and I believe it is a great idea for all books that are beyond a short zine in length. It not only helps readers find sections of the book, it allows you, the designer, to highlight what is important and when.
Most TV series have some form of pilot, and Asher’s Ridge is no different. It gives you a setup to use as a one-shot or as a launch for a continuing series. This pilot part of the book also eases you into the mechanisms which use an unusual combination of component: a deck of playing cards, and scrabble tiles.
The core of the mechanical experience revolves around the scrabble tiles. You’ll form a word from a pool of tiles, and then narrate scenes based around that word. Over the course of the game you will link words together, providing both a physical connection on the table, and a thematic connection in the narrative.
The cards represent the locations those scenes will happen in and you’ll have only a few of them active at any one time. As the game goes on some of these locations will become escalated, effectively putting them in contention for potential revisit later on as the episode comes to its conclusion.
Although this sounds quite loose and prompt heavy, the text quickly nails down a specific structure to each episode and scene, which feels like it will help scaffold the play nicely. This points towards a traditional 3 act structure, but also guides how each of those acts will play out scene-to-scene.
Our characters for this drama are not defined by stats but more of a bio of who they are in relation to the town, and the other characters. An Occupation gives you an idea of their skillset, and a Catalyst is the core of the character and gives them reason to be in this episode. Each character has connections to both player characters and the wider cast of the show, and a wardrobe helping them to stand out for the audience. Finally we have an attitude that is at once exactly what it says on the tin and also a mechanism that allows manipulation of cards and tiles once per session.
Not content with the masterstroke of getting you to play through a pilot first, Rori also provides the characters you need to get going in that pilot. I have said this before, but it bears repeating: all RPGs for which it would be appropriate should have a scenario and and some pre-generated characters to play in it. I don’t want the book to only tell me how to play the game, I need you to show me.
The scenario in this case has 3 different possible ‘Loglines’ a word I had not come across before. It’s a short description of the episode like you might see on a streaming service, and gives us some of the key locations that will feature in the episode. Interestingly although it adds these locations to the deck of possible choices you are not beholden to have scenes in particular places to get the game to work.
I’ve already covered the rough gist of how this game plays, but let us head a bit deeper into the woods. This game is going to ask a lot from you as players. The ‘Cold Open’ at the start of the episode asks for 1-5 short scenes to set things up. These are meant to be really short ‘two or three sentences long” but at this point you don’t have much to go on. The introductory scenes that bring our protagonists into the story are similarly lacking in scaffold. That said there are a bunch of prompt tables at the back of the book that can help you, but I would have liked a wee reminder that they are there as it has been a few pages since the excellent guide at the start.
That said I think the core structure that Rori outlines is really good.
Each act you’ll get five locations from a deck of pre-selected ones. You’ll play out scenes until only two of the locations remain, wrap the act and move on to the next one. All the scenes are couched in the paranormal, grounding the story in the core of weird that is going to pass through the episode.
I do have an issue with the examples of play. They are written out like scripts. While this is quite charming and feels in keeping with the game, it doesn’t seem like how folk would talk around the table. It’s an idealised version, like you might see edited after the fact. There is no discussion, no exchange of ideas, no back and forth. If you give examples of play I want it to feel like play. Check out the examples in Mythic Bastionland for a best-in-class example of what I want. That said, the examples of play do at least show off the rules clearly.
We’ve looked at the structure and how we get through an episode, but what happens when the characters do something where we don’t necessarily know the outcome. The beating heart of RPGs is how it resolves those moments where we aren’t sure of the result of an action, and here Asher’s Ridge does a clever piece of manipulation.
The risk deck is all the court cards and the two jokers from your standard playing card deck. ‘Whenever a character does something inherently risky’ you draw a card from the deck. You compare its suit to that of the location card the scene is taking place in. A little table of comparisons shows you if the situation comes out Perfectly, hits a Snag, suffers a Setback, or is a complete disaster. Jokers don’t have suits, so if you draw them you pull another card and have to make whatever happens be a large and impactful event that resonates across the episode and perhaps the series as a whole.
This is straightforward enough but then something interesting happens in between acts. The locations that you’ve used get shuffled back into the decks and one of them gets put in the risk deck. This changes the probability of the risk deck, making certain future locations safer or riskier depending on the choices. There feels like there is a potentially interesting piece of metagaming to be done there (why we shouldn’t be afraid of metagaming in RPGs is a discussion for another time).
Commission the Series
All the information in the Pilot section of the book gives you a great foundation to absorb the rest of the ideas. The next section deals with running a series of Asher’s Ridge and builds on the fundamentals already established. It starts off with giving you more options for the way you run the game. Although the pilot is fully GMless there are ideas here on how to run in a more traditional model or even a rotating GM.
As you might expect there is a whole section on creating new characters to fit into your story, and also on how those characters can change over the course of a series. Although there is no experience system as such, characters grow by inviting Risk. As they do so they add letters to the pool, increasing our options for scenes, and eventually hit a point where their Catalyst and Attitude can change. The latter can basically be upgraded or changed completely. I really like systems that tie character development to the ‘fun stuff’ in an RPG. I want an RPG to encourage the actions that will cause problems or get the characters into trouble. Although the character development here is a slow burn, it feels right for the game.
The rest of this section is about ways to adapt the Risk deck over the course of a series, developing Asher’s Ridge to be your version of the place. There is then a huge section on all the different locations in the deck, and some prompts on how they might be used in a scene and over the course of an episode. These descriptions are really good with enough specificity to give a sense of place but not so much that you can’t put your own stamp on the place. This ‘tourist guide’ rounds out with a cast of characters you might want to include.
To round out the book we have some options for solo-play, scene inspiration guides that I mentioned earlier, and alternative ways to make the deck and tiles work if you don’t have access to everything you need.
Cliffhanger
Asher’s Ridge is my first contact with Rori Montford and I have to say I am really impressed. The book is really well put together with art that evokes the weird, liminal potential of the setting. The game has lots of support for the sort of play Rori wants to create. I feel like the nature of emergent words from the scrabble tiles will push players towards introducing unexpected elements into the narrative. Whether that gives the sort of weird story I love in X-Files and Twin Peaks, I don’t really know. However, I am keen to find out.
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