Reading TTRPG 53 - The Silt Verses
Other versions
The Silt Verses is a Carved from Brindlewood roleplaying game. I chose to describe it by comparing it to other games using that system, like Brindlewood Bay, Public Access or The Between.
Some of the basics of this range of TTRPGs are not described in this article. Feel free to look after those games.
At first, The Silt Verses is a podcast. Created by Jon Ware and Muna Hussen, this audio fiction has a first season of 15 episodes. It's a fantasy horror fiction, only available in english (for those coming here from another language).
Before reading the TTRPG, I didn't listen to the podcast. I only got some notions about its subject, through discussions on The Gauntlet discord, through memes often mentioning crabs. I knew the tone was a folk horror one. A genre in which I have few references, but that appeals to me.
So, The Gauntlet team worked on that game, the first licensed one for the publisher. The project was lead by Gabriel Robinson (Token, Candlelight, ...) with Jason Cordova. And used the home system Carved from Brindlewood.
The game got out about a year ago (november 2023), but I only recently got into it fully (I read some bits here and there). Let's talk about it.
The World
Let's talk about the World of the game before talking about the game itself. Without talking about the podcast. I only just started listening to it (after reading the game), and I want to talk about the world as it is presented in the game.
The game takes place on The Peninsula. An isolated, inward-looking nation, with one large city, Glottage, as its capital. But also many smaller towns and villages. Scattered across a desolate countryside. This is one of the aspects of folk horror. These isolated, inward-looking communities. In terms of the era, it's very similar to our own, perhaps a few years behind in some aspects. Hyper-communication via networks is absent (although there are glimpses of it).
And then there are the gods. Thousands of them. Authorized gods. Forbidden gods. Gods for every aspect of life. The Saint Electric, for example, is the one who makes electricity work. Some farming families have their own harvest god, travelers worship a god of the lost so they don't lose their way. But the point is, these gods exist and are tangible. Thousands of them. And the authorities are trying to control them, to avoid excesses.
And the gods are hungry. Always hungry. A God needs sacrifices to grant his miracles. It's where horror comes in. Angels are the creatures corrupted by the Gods, by their essence, who serve their needs. Usually starving. Saints are humans who have been touched and modified by the essence of a God.
And that's where we're going to play. Investigating, confronting, meeting gods and their vessels. Working for the government, to prevent excesses.
The Game
In The Silt Verses TTRPG, you play Custodians. Hired by a government-linked office, willingly or unwillingly, they are sent on missions to various parts of The Peninsula, to investigate and solve problems often related to gods.
The Custodians share one characteristic: they are all bound to a God, but their faith is wavering. We're talking about character sheets here: each one corresponds to a faith, and is referred to as a Faith Sheet, which is grafted onto a more classic, almost blank character sheet. The classic elements of a Carved from Brindlewood character are there:
- Lists to describe the character, including their style.
- A list of equipment to be assembled together, here called Personal Altar.
- Space to get some Conditions.
- Abilities, whose names and functions have been adapted to the context.
- Verses, corresponding to Crowns, Masks and other Keys.
- The Verse of History, a list similar to all of them, which explores the past of the characters.
- The Verse of Prophecy, distinct to each Faith, which explores that Faith.
- End-of-session questions to collect XP.
And then there are the Moves specific to each Faith. These take horror and strangeness to a whole new level. The Trawler Man, a God linked to the tides, gives the power to ingest things to make them disappear, like the tides that cover everything. Then, like the receding tide, to spit out the water and silt and draw something from it, a Clue, an Object. Follow the faith of The Saint Electric and become a living conduit for electricity. The devotees of The Pox Martyr, on the other hand, absorb the aches and wounds of their fellow citizens to relieve them, taking these afflictions upon themselves.
These Faith Sheets, the character classes, set the tone. Read them to discover the characters and the extent of their abilities, but also the questions they will have to face (via the Verses). Each Faith is unique, explores a wild concept and offers its own mechanics. In this respect, it's akin to The Between.
The Silt Verses offers a number of interesting new features compared with its predecessors, which fit in beautifully with its peculiar tone.
For example, no more Day or Night phases. But the structure of two distinct moves, one more dangerous than the other, remains. There's The Veiled Move, which corresponds to the usual Day move. Then there's the more dangerous Revelation Move, which kicks in as soon as a divine influence hovers over the scene. Every encounter with a God, Angel, Saint or even a simple Miracle will result in a "It's worse than that... ”.
The other big change is travel. Custodians will travel between their various missions, pausing one to take an interest in a new one (missions accumulate if you don't deal with them quickly). The group can split up. And each trip triggers the Journey Move, as well as a Journey Phase. A separate phase, during which the Custodians will discover the world: a diner, a billboard, a construction site and more. Several events are proposed, which will trigger a few scenes, and generally allow Custodians to rest (by removing their Conditions). And without travel, there's no real chance to rest. You'll have to navigate between communities. A very interesting game design, which mechanically and playfully pushes towards a particular style of story.
The Mysteries
The Silt Verses RPG comes with 8 Assignments. And a Conspiracy, which corresponds to the campaign framework as we know it from the other Carved from Brindlewood games.
The mysteries, in my view, are at the heart of the game's proposition and form the game's setting. It's the mysteries you select that bring your Peninsula to life. It's through mysteries that you immerse yourself in this world, discovering how it works, its specific features, its themes. And sometimes its history, too.
Each Mission explores a community and an incident surrounding one (or more) gods. There are investigations of undeclared gods or unauthorized use of divine essence (The Hungering Roots, The Dusk Mother, The Floating Market), containment of uncontrolled divine activity (The Bowered Companion, Young Joly Junk, The Sleepless Warden), a confrontation between two faiths to be resolved (The Skyward Sprawl) or a most dangerous infiltration (The Miraculous Clinic of the Bleeding Witness).
Two assignments stood out for me. In The Bowered Companion, the Custodians are sent to investigate a small town on the side of a trade route, where transport trucks have disappeared into the fog. A God of the Lost is said to be starving, having been neglected for years. Think The Mist. Getting lost in the woods. A town falling into disrepair. And a capitalist need to reopen these roads (they're partly sent by the transport company).
In The Sleepless Warden, the Custodians are sent to investigate a Battle Angel, an ancient war machine powered by divine essence, normally inert, but which has reactivated itself in the coastal village where it once sat. A village where fear of strangers reigns. War has taken its toll on the locals, even if it has never reached its borders. But the mood is one of suspicion and rejection of outsiders.
Strong themes. Contemporary. Harsh. Which made me want to dive in.
I had more trouble imagining how to play The Skyward Sprawl, an assignment where a (direct, lethal) confrontation takes place between two faiths, in a building that has almost itself become a divine carcass. Body-building-horror.
But this variety of Assignments means that you can really set the tone to your liking by choosing your Assignments, bearing in mind that additional scenarios exist, both official via the Patreon and Third-party.
And then there's the campaign. The Conspiracy. Which shows a group following the Custodians' operations with interest. They remain distant at first, but soon come into more direct conflict, leading to a very action-packed finale. Just from reading, I find the final mystery, which is more constructed than what we find in the previous games, a little more action than the rest of the game. But it's built with enough white space to fit in well with each campaign.
What's more, the game has been designed so that other Conspiracies can easily be grafted onto it, instead. Like The Between's Masterminds.
Conclusion
What a great discovery! The Gauntlet team shows that it's possible to present an original, highly original world without offering pages and pages of lore. It's truly impressive. The world reveals itself as it unfolds, via the Faith Sheets and the characters' powers and questions. Via the mysteries and themes they address. Via Journey Scenes and the snapshots they present.
This requires you to immerse yourself in the game to get a vision of the world, but it also makes it easy to make it your own, using only the elements that appeal to you. It's easy to set aside certain assignments that don't fit in with the story you want to tell.
System-wise, Carved from Brindlewood is robust and holds up perfectly. The mysteries are multiple, varied, with some offering particularly interesting mechanics.
This game is distinctive. In its world. In its proposition. In its approach. Not every table will have an appetite for its themes, and it's important to emphasize this: discuss the game in advance before jumping in. In my eyes, this is a great horror game, blending the intimate, through the faith of each character, with the creeping horror that lurks in forgotten corners. I'm discovering folk horror with it, and I'm discovering that I like it.