At the Monarch's Gate
A downloadable game
You and your companions have traveled across long distances and faced many trials to come to this point, in the hope that you will be heard by the one person who can grant you what you need. Now you stand at the gate to the Monarch’s throne room, seeking entrance and an audience.
All that stands in your way is the Gate Guard, who extends their hand and demands that you leave your weapons at the door.
At the Monarch’s Gate is single-session, GM-lite storytelling game for 2-6 players (3-5 recommended) that can be played in the space of two to three hours.
You will tell the histories of the weapons you carry as you surrender them, one by one, before entering the presence of a powerful ruler. Use a combination of dice and Tarot cards to build your reputation while revealing your true intentions—or keeping them hidden until the moment is right.
Created for the 2019 Tropes Jam, At the Monarch's Gate was inspired by the Extended Disarming trope.
Note: the printable version is sized to be printed using the booklet settings on your printer.
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Development log
- AtMG v1.1.1 ChangesNov 12, 2019
Comments
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I ran this with a complete newbie to roleplaying this past Sunday and it worked excellently. The tarot cards did what they're good at, which is telling a cohesive symbolic narrative over time. and the structure of the game makes the narrative fleshed out and concrete, giving a strong framing for the story. There's a good balance of roleplaying directly and narrating actions, which made it easier for the newb to get into.
We were a bit pressed for time so didn't spend too much on the disarming/bluffing, but it was still a really delightful game with a really cool ending for us!
I like that the rules emphasize to use the imagery on the cards to guide your stories. A lot of tarot games make the fact that it's *tarot* with pictures and symbolism sort of an afterthought to the ranks, suits, or latent meanings with the pictures as an afterthought. But this game instructs to use the imagery directly. It helps that I was using a very lush deck (The Chromatic Fates tarot).
A fun game of storytelling with hidden motives, framed by the trope of "pulling out a pile of weapons when disarming".
This is a full game spun from the cloth of a very specific tropey moment in RPGs, and it's great.
It's also surprisingly complex.
You use tarot cards, two types of dice, a bunch of random tables, interpretation, and people chiming in to add details as everyone in the group gives up their weapons to the gate guard.
Even so, it starts out comedic, and then escalates in tone until it's something fairly tense by the end, and has the potential to get quite explosive.
If you like indie storytelling games and want to try out something highly-specific, definitely give this a shot.
Alternately, this would work as a great flash-forward at the start of another adventure game's campaign, and is worth picking up for that reason as well.