Congrats to Zorana on winning the Fiasco contest! We hope you enjoy all your Fiasco goodies and the hours of enjoyment to soon follow! Please, everyone feel free to keep commenting and discussing the game in the comments below!
Let Me Tell You A Story
During our last day at Gencon, Micah and myself were pulled into a game of Fiasco by Danny Rupp of Critical-Hits (aka @Bartoneus the Architect DM) along with about a dozen other folks, we wound up with 4 full tables of games going on. While neither Micah or I were honestly too keen on the idea of playing at first, I’m fairly certain the experience was some of the most fun we had during the whole convention and I’m very glad we played.
Let me tell you a little bit about Fiasco, our play experience, and how you can earn a chance to win a copy of this masterpiece!
(Skip down to the “Your Session!” header if all you already know all about Fiasco and want details on how get in the running for an exclusive Fiasco prize package from Bully Pulpit Games!)
The Pitch
Fiasco is a game that is highly narrative and just random enough to keep things interesting. By ‘highly’ narrative I mean around 95% of it requires making stuff up on the spot. It’s not a game where you roll dice every turn or even a game where you level up or attempt to acquire any sort of treasure. Hell, you’re lucky if your character is even alive by the time the whole thing is over. All you need to play is four 6-sided dice per person (2 white/ 2 black), some note cards or scratch paper & pens/pencils and the rule book.
The goal in Fiasco is to set out and sort of create a your own film collaboratively between you and your friends. It doesn’t require a DM and only takes about 2 hours to play. The game was created around the feel of basically enacting your own Cohen brothers movie, but with all of the additional (and mostly free) playsets, you can act out just about anything your heart desires from space epics to slasher flicks and war movies – the list goes on and on. The game fits best with movies where things turn into…well…a fiasco. I wouldn’t try recreating any romantic comedies or broadway musicals with it, but just about anything where stuff can go horribly wrong will fit the bill.
Playsets
Playsets frame up the setting and theme of your session. The core book comes with four to start you out; Main Street (Cohen film), Boomtown (western), Suburbia (think Desperate House Wives) and The Ice (Fargo, The Thing). There are a lot more available through their website, most via downloadable free PDF’s.
Setup
Setting up a game of Fiasco is dead simple, each player has 4 6-sided dice, two are white, two are black (color matters not so much as long as you can designate a color for ‘good’ and one for ‘bad’) you take all those dice and roll them all at once. Sorting out all of your 1′s 2′s etc from that initial role is where you build your ties to the other players, this is where the note cards/scratch paper comes in. You place a note card between yourself and every other person at the table, then you go around as each person picks things from a list of Relationships, Needs, Locations & Objects.
From these lists you build your connections to the other players, they can range from totally wacky to pretty status-quo movie tropes – either way it all plays out in an insanely fun manner. When it is your turn you can either decide to set up a scene by narrating to the other players what your character is doing or you may choose to resolve where the other players set up a scene for your character and you decide the outcome. Setting up a scene gives you near limitless boundaries including flash forwards and flashbacks.
Gameplay
Turn by turn and scene by scene when the final decisions come regarding what happens to a character, a single die is awarded to that player – black for something bad happening and white for something good. Sometimes it is the players choice whether something good or bad happens to their character (when resolving) and other times it is the rest of the players who decide the fate of your character (when you set up a scene).
Towards the middle of the game an event called “The Tilt” is introduced which basically serves as a giant plot twist or catastrophic event, it is basically the climax of the film that allows/governs all things from that point on to spiral from. A small intermission from the game is taken at this point and afterward you resume play to finalize your story.
At the end of the game you roll all of the dice you have acquired through the session with black and white cancelling one another out to determine your final score.
Example: you had 3 white dice and 4 black dice, you roll all of them simultaneously and add the totals up of each color. Your black total is 6 and your white total 5, this leaves you with a result of “Black 1″ and a table in the book is consulted to help you narrate your characters ending scenes.
So it is a strategy to attempt to try to acquire mostly dice of one color if you wish for your character to have some sort of prosperous (even if malevolent) ending to your story. This makes for great situations and stories as everyone goes around the table placing a single die in the center of the table declaring “This is my character doing…” as they narrate the results of their final results.
Our Session
For our session we decided to go with Logan Bonner’s “The Dragon Slayers” playset due to Micah and I’s inexperience with games like this we figured a bit of familiarity would ease the narrative wheels in our brains.
To make a long story short, our game consisted of shapeshifters posing as mindflayers who brainwashed an entire town through eating ‘mind control corn’, an old man haplessley getting his head smashed like one of Ghallager’s watermelons, demons destroying the entire city and one of our characters dying and becoming a sentient warhammer of demon smiting. All in the course of 2 hours we told one of the most fun, crazy stories I’d heard in a long time.
Your Session!
Now it’s your turn. In the comments below ask us a question about the game, tell us a story about a time you played the game or a great memory you have with Fiasco or suggest a movie or movie theme you’d like to see turned into a playset for the game. Doing that will put you in the running for winning a Fiasco Prize Pack from Bully Pulpit Games consisting of whichever of the 2 books you choose (either Fiasco or the Fiasco Companion), the PDF and some exclusive extras!
Feel free to comment multiple times however it is only one entry per person. Winner will be determined at random at midnight August 30th. Good luck!
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Sounds like fun. Wondering what the min and max number of players would be?
It is for 3-5 players. I’m sure you could accommodate for more than that if need be.
At Gen Con, I played a game of Fiasco at Games on Demand. It was the “Jersey Side” playset, in which I ended up playing the part of Marianne Fitzhume, cancer patient and wife to John. John was carrying on a dual life in which he was married to another woman and was the rabbi at a local synagogue. Add into all of this a cancer doctor dealing black market organs, the doctor’s fence and a CPA who ran his office out of stall #3 at a local nightclub (we called what he did ‘toilet-commuting’). There were faked life-insurance documents, fist-fights at the cancer-support meeting in the community center, sex, lies and snacking on charcoal. It was the most bizarre, hilarious caper story I’ve ever had the joy to be involved in.
I’m currently working on a space-opera-themed playset that involves planet-destroying super weapons, smart-alek robots, space monks with ancient weapons and mysterious powers, aliens, scoundrels, bounty hunters and pirates.
I trained a chatbot on the text from Timecube (a Theory of Everything website written by a high-functioning schizophrenic), and let the chatbot itself run a game for me at a convention. It went so well that the players said I should write a Fiasco! playset based on it. I’m currently brainstorming.
I’ve heard a lot of good things about Fiasco; I find the idea of using cinematic storytelling techniques in RPGs absolutely fascinating.
I played it at Gen Con as well, and it was arguably the most fun I had at the con (which means something, as the whole 4 days were phenomenal!). We played Boom Town. Our game was ultimately a tragedy, with the villain being the only player whose character both survived and had a good life after the events of the game. We had romance, crime, and a few sprinkles of old west racism, all dangerous topics for a group of 4 white male nerds, but we pulled it off. One of my friends played Suki, my mail order bride from Japan and martial arts master. The other played “her” very close friend from Japan, who moved to America with her, and secretly harbors feelings for her as well as seeking her respect for his own martial arts skills that she taught him. Someone else who we didn’t know played a former criminal turned preacher, and my character was his former crime associate, Quick-Draw Pete, who he resents for letting some of his friends die, but he keeps this resentment a secret. The events of the game certainly were a fiasco, and obviously too much to put here, but it involved the death of our child and Suki, attempted rape, my character spending the rest of his life as a drunk, Suki’s friend having to feel guilty for the rest of his life because of his attempts to gain her respect causing her death, and the raping murdering preacher walking off scott free.
The game is certainly full of possibilities, and works best if you keep in mind you’re not supposed to be a good person, all the characters are essentially tragic and their best intentions and plans often go awry. I wanted to play it the rest of Gen Con, but I couldn’t find the time, so I would love to get a copy to play with my friends back home!
For my question/contest entry:
How easily does the game lend itself to creating your own ‘Playsets’?
Very easily, check the downloads section of their website for all the user-generated playsets. Other people have theirs hosted on blogs, etc. as well. Personally I’ve only played the game once and I think creating your own playset would be a breeze.
Not only that, but the Fiasco Companion even has a chapter in it dedicated to building your own play sets.
My question: Is combat handled the same way as normal interactions? IE Setting Up a Scene, or Resolving it?
Secondly, I think a Vietnam module a la Full Metal Jacket or perhaps a Lovecraftian version of Apocalypse Now would be awesome.
Yes, combat is explained narratively as is the whole rest of the game. Its a very large cooperative story telling game, every aspect of it
Also I believe there already is a Cthulu playset that Dave Chalker created called Alma Monster
I love the idea of Fiasco as an RPG system. To be honest, I didn’t ever think that this sort of concept was really in dire need of a system surrounding it, but now that I’ve taken a look I can definitely see the niche requirement.
Now, please tell me – what was the turning point that made you want to create this lovely system?
Plants vs Zombies – Should be capable of creating fun short scenes.
Love the concept of the game and the actual plays always sound like a hoot.
Like Jeremy Wong, not sure if this is something I could run. Understanding that there isn’t really a centralized GM. Have to think on this one, as I am a huge fan of Indie Games.
Setting – Rookie You: Players are all police academy grads on a crime scene. They know each other from the academy and some players shouldn’t have graduated, but used other finese to make the “grade”. While others are great police officers who are overlooked and hold grudges. They’ve all been called into a domestic dispute where “blank” from their collective past has been murdered or is the murderer. What do they/you do?
I haven’t roleplayed in years, but were I to dive back in, it would be through FIASCO. I’ve been watching BREAKING BAD for the first time, and when they complete the series and release it all on DVD, a copy of FIASCO ought to accompany each boxed set. They go together like meth and mayhem.
Were I to draw up a FIASCO scenario, I’d base it in Las Vegas somehow. There’s so much to draw from, both comic and serious: FEAR AND LOATHING, SMOKIN’ ACES, CASINO, OCEAN’S ELEVEN, even THE HANGOVER. The Mob, casino moguls, crooked cops and Feds, IRS agents closing in, holes in the desert, small-time crooks tangling with big-time sports gamblers or card-counting cheat crews . . . hell, sounds like a great way to kill a 5-hour flight to Sin City.
I’ve tried to put together an anime/manga inspired playset. I haven’t gotten to test it yet and I’d welcome any comments:
http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/not-a-hope-in-harem
When I read the Fiasco Companion, I was struck by the into detailing the basic rules of improv, as I’ve seen this more and more in narrative games–how following some improv tenets can help improve your overall gaming experience. Having talked more about this with fellow gamers and improvers, we’ve decided to put together a small workshop at our local gaming store taught by a talented improv instructor who will lead the group in some simple games that practice “Yes, and,” illustrate the dangers of blocking and the benefits of making your partner look good, accepting “bad” outcomes, and tips on establishing scenes. And in the second half we’re going to tie it all together by playing some Fiasco!
Sounds great. Where is this happening?
Fiasco is an awesome game. I’m bringing my giant Fiasco Kit to PAX next week and hope to entice random people into some great sessions.
Great (Terrible!) Fiasco Memories:
– By the end of our session using the Touring Rock Band playset, my fat roadie character and the tough-as-nails band manager character were driving the tour bus as fast as possible from the revenge-driven redneck-carnies in their pickup truck while the drugged-out spacy lead singer character tried to hold on to the top of the bus with the stagehand she was ‘spending time with.’ It ended horribly for everyone…except the lead singer, who survived, entered rehab, and sold her story to make an award-winning documentary. Go figure.
– The Manna Hotel scenario involved 5 players, in 2 teams of 2 (a fly-by-night lawyer and his prostitute-turned-adult-film-star companion, a severely white-trash middle-aged husband and wife), both vying for my character, aka “Trust Fund Bubba”. Multiple betrayals, a shotgun-fueled convenience-store robbery, bank fraud, and the re-re-re-theft of a valuable antique coin ensued.
– The Alaskan Fishing Town playset. A drug deal gone wrong. At the end, the kindly old man says, “Did I ever tell you about my wife Jessica?” and a chill ran through us all. The most subtle and greatest (IMO) session I’ve played in. Hint: Jessica drowned. With help.
I’ve noticed on your site the ‘play set of the month’. Is there any plan to assemble these into an anthology/calendar for print? What is the criteria/process for getting recognized a PSotM?
–
TAZ
We do have plans in the works to compile the Playsets of the Month into a print format, but we haven’t solidified that yet.
We don’t have published submission guidelines for the Playsets of the Month. I can say that we’re pretty picky about what we publish, and our monthly schedule is pretty well booked. That said, we’re happy to look at your work and let you know if it would fit. Keep in mind, there’s no compensation for the free playsets that we publish, aside from the glory!
Thanks,
Steve Segedy
Bully Pulpit Games
This is one of the two games I wanted to play at GenCon that I didn’t get to (the other being DARPG). Great description of how the game plays by the way…I’d been wondering. I’d love to see an Alien type playset, though I suspect one already exists. It’s just so obvious. A NASCAR based one would probably be really funny too. Nothing like a little Ricky Bobby Fiasco to create a good time. I say this, and yet I hate NASCAR, lol.
If I had known at the beginning of the game that my gym teacher was a post-op transsexual that was the father to the high school’s star lacrosse player, I would have named her “Jesse”.
My first game of Fiasco was epic. We chose the Leviathan playlet and fully embraced the implications of a Titanic-clone steaming across the sea. Several of our regular D&D players had cancelled, so we played a pick up game of Fiasco instead. Our GM’s wife joined us, even though she had never played an RPG before in her life.
Our characters were: A nun (played by the GM’s wife), her alcoholic brother the first mate (played by the GM), a young British heiress in love with him, and two WWI German soldiers on their way to the new world to make a new life.
Through the course of the play, it was revealed that the two Germans were actually on the ship with a bomb to sink it. The nun had been a nurse in WWI and patched one of them (me, actually) up while the heiress had a romance with the other. Many romantic shenanigans happened but it all came to head, one German was killed but managed to set the bomb off (in a flashback after his death, no less!), the boat sank and the first mate was murdered. The nun came out of it relatively well (“smelling like a rose, all things considered”) while her brother the first mate had a terrible roll and he wound up taking the blame for EVERYTHING and went down in the history books as a major villain. The heiress was ruined and spent the rest of her life trying to prove that the first mate was innocent. My character, the German soldier who orchestrated the bomb plot and coerced his cohort into actually placing it, wound up in prison as an accomplice.
All in all, it was a rousing success!
I was thinking sam spade-style detective story or scifi detective (ala 13th floor or Blade Runner) would be great.
How about Bad Santa, Zach and Miri Make a Porno, Pineapple Express, Day the Earth Stood Still (B&W), Dawn of the Dead (Zombies!!!), ohh and 12 Angry Men (Henry Fonda FTW!!).
Can’t wait to play. I’m reading the Fiasco book now.
Is there an “Army of Darkness” style playset?
I have to say I love the concept – It’d go well for just about any genre. Things like “The Dirty Dozen”, where everything seems to be going so very well until just one person mucks it up for everyone.
This game sounds awsome. What I would like to do with it is a WWIi military Op. Game. A bunch of men going into a battle with very diffrent ideas regarding what they need to do and very diffrent moral standards. One could be the sadistic seargent, one could play a pascifist , one could be a captured enemy solider or a local tow girl being on the wrong place at the wrong time etc
I couldn’t be happier that you guys enjoyed it so much, and I am REALLY glad I’m the kind of person that tries to talk others into gaming (especially at GenCon). I myself sat out of quite a few games because of other plans (I was mocked for it several times), but I am really glad you guys decided to join that game and I hadn’t played Dragon Slayers yet so I was happy to finally try it out (having Logan at the table while using his playset helped immensely also).
I’d love to win the Fiasco Companion, so I’ll tell you about the first game of Fiasco I played only a few months ago: We used the Objective Zebra playset – Dave and our friend Jon were former rival sub captains now on the same submarine, I was Jon’s 2nd in command, and our friend Scott was stuck in the middle. All of us chose GI Joe character names/ripoffs. Within the first 5 scenes my character ended up beaten, paralyzed from the legs down, and giving awesome motivational speeches from his hospital bed. Dave’s character was attempting to perform some dark ritual back on “the island”, where Jon and I had found the Shroud of Turin (yea, you read that correctly) and hidden it on the submarine. The game ended with Jon revealed as a nazi spy trying to steal the Shroud and dead on the beach, Scott’s character was “rescued” from the island only to discover it was a nazi ship, Dave ended up shot in the back by me as he completed his ritual only to be sucked into the earth by an eldritch monster, and I believe my character survived somehow and led the other sub survivors to rescue (on the other side of the island from the nazi ships).
This sounds like a very intriguing little ruleset.
Tell you what, here’s a nifty idea for a playset: a comedy of manners, much in the same vein as PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves & Wooster books. Lots of running away from meddling aunts, awkward doctor’s appointments, bumbling attempts at romance, clever butlers, trips to the country, gentlemen’s clubs, hair-brained schemes, petty crime, falling in lakes and some positively spiffing dinner parties that are just asking to go haywire in a storm of family bickering and maybe just a little bit of thrown food.
Great themes would be a space setting (a la Galaxy Quest) or any terrible sports team building movie, like Whoopi Goldberg’s Eddie (although that one have to really highlight the specificities of it or risk end up playing a little too close to Touring Rock Band)
Hmm, I’m not sure if there is one already or not, but I suspect that an Animal House themed playset would be awfully entertaining.
Wow. I’ve never heard of Fiasco before, but I wish I had! That sounds *awesome*! I can just imagine the endless scenario concepts for a game like that. Even if I don’t win the spiffy drawing, you can be sure that I will put Fiasco on my list of games to acquire.
My setting suggestion? Swashbuckling, ala The Three Musketeers or Zorro!
This sounds interesting and I know a couple of my D&D buddies would probably LOVE it. Sounds like something perfect to have on hand if everyone can’t make it to a session… It would help avoid what we’ve got going on right now: a handful of one-shot adventures that have become pickup games for when one person can’t make it. “Oh, so-n-so isn’t coming, okay pull out your characters for that one adventure, you know, with just you and him, but not the other guy.” Sounds like we could just combine all the characters from those various adventures in one big Fiasco… actually, that could be interesting, haha.
Count me in for a chance to pick this up!
This sounds like a ton of fun – I’d definitely like to give it a try.
Playset ideas: Maltese Falcon. Glengarry Glen Ross. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
I’m surprised that you didn’t play the GenGom playset while at GenCon, or is that too meta?
I was thinking that all the different genres had been covered, but I don’t remember finding a superhero playset. The movie Mystery Men would be a good example for that kind of a playset.
This sounds like it plays the way I always wanted Toon to run. With that in mind, I think a lot of fun could be had in a Mid 20th Century American Cartoon style environment. Perhaps, a la Warner Bros./ Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
I’d love to see a playset of this game created around the films of Terry Gilliam. Twelve Monkeys, Time Bandits, OR Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas would all make very different, very intriguing sessions.
Sounds awesome. if I dont win the contest, I will probably end up buying it anyway. I would love to see a Pulp Fiction style game go down.
The first Fiasco game I played in involved a small Southern town, a corrupt sheriff, his necophiliac son-in-law undertaker, a wayward drug dealer, a blackmailing mortuary employee and a casket full of narcotics and sex toys. It was AWESOME. Half the cast died in terrible ways and the other half walked away in variously demented ways. We had a ball and just kept staring at each other the whole time saying, ‘We should write this down. It would make a GREAT movie!’ Go Fiasco!
Perhaps I am old school but every time I see an Alice in Wonderland or Wizard of Oz interpretation of something I am always interested. I guess I want to wake up in another land just once.
Hmm, I wonder how well Fiasco would deal with car races (The Fast & The Furious) or something like the Thin Man, where everyone is at the table being potentially accused by Nick Charles.
All these stories about Fiasco make it sound great, but to be honest I still have no idea how you would actually run a game of it. Does there need to be a “facilitator” who may not fit the GM role but has other responsibilities?
No, the ruleset acts as a facilitator. There is no need for any central authority.
This is mostly true, though we’ve found that every “gmless” game benefits from someone who can help guide things along. This is generally whoever owns the book and has read the rules. With an experienced group, however, everyone tends to take on those responsibilities.
It’s also generally true that playing the game once is sufficient to facilitating the game the next time. The rules are pretty easy to pick up.
Suggest a setting, you say… Well, without looking to see what already exists (both on the publishers’ site and in the other no-doubt brilliant suggestions of the people who’ve posted before me), I’m thinking modern occult or urban fantasy. Or, for something completely different, how about medical drama?
This game does sound fantastic. Are there any other games you’d compare it to? (Sort of, “fans of X game will love Fiasco”.)
Does it play well with teenagers?
Fiasco works great with teens. MJ Harnish has played a lot with his after-school gaming club and had a great experience with it. We also include a set of “softer” Tilt and Aftermath tables in the Fiasco Companion that help create a lighter tone for those who want more of a “John Hughes” story.
This sounds like a great game. I can not wait to introduce it to my game table.
I played for the first time about a month ago. My corrupt lawyer lost the forged will (or was it the real one?) during a blacked-out three day drug binge. He ended up disbarred, jailed, and then working as a waiter in his ex-partner’s country club. Very cool game!
How about a Hong Kong Action Theater playset? Like the John Woo Chinese gangster films. Amazing gunplay and fearless heroes.
This sounds like a great way to spend an evening when I forget…*ahem* don’t feel like playing D&D. Some playsets I’d like to see are buddy cop and film noir style fiascos.
Our first game of Fiasco started a little slow.
An hour later, I was drunk-driving a stolen car with a bomb under it, tossing a gun around the cabin between a bunch of people I hate, and mistakenly rushing back toward the bridge where the cops were showing up to stop a murder that hadn’t happened yet.
I’m not entirely sure where the transition point was.
Wow this sounds like a marvellous game- if I don’t win this competition, where can I buy it? =D
Anyhow, it also reminds me of a game I’ve played called ‘Once Upon A Time’ do you think Fiasco’s better than that one?
You can buy the game from Indie Press Revolution or your friendly local game store!
I haven’t played Fiasco yet but I hope to try the game soon with a new play gang because I love it.
My suggerences for playsets are:
- A Jane Austen’s playset, (something like Pride and Prejudice and Fiasco)
- High School Playset, something like Glee but with more drama
Definitely, we need an Smoking Aces themed playset
I remember playing this at Pop Culture Paradise the other year (before any additional playsets were out). It was a fun game set in a small Southern USA town. I was a teen working at the local Quik Stop where an antique Civil War gun was prominently displayed over the registers by the owner. Each player wanted to steal the gun for their own reasons including my supervisor/girl friend, her mother, and the man on the run from a shotgun wedding in a neighboring town. The two guys got hosed big time, and the two ladies (also played by guys) made off with the gun and lived happily ever after. I remember this game fondly and have wanted to play it again ever since, so winning a copy would definitely help with that!
I’ve been racking my brains with my gaming group to find a solution for player absence
Sometimes you get to a point in your campaign where you don’t want to forge ahead without someone present and running their character as an NPC really isn’t an option. This might be the answer for those days when you have people who want to get together and game but you don’t want to press on and exclude anyone from an ongoing game. We have one campaign that has a built-in plot device to try and work around this common problem, but Fiasco sounds like a good way to satisfy our gaming cravings without feeling like we’re leaving anyone out. We’ll have to give it a try. I used to run a backup game where everyone played average people running up against zombies, chainsaw-wielding maniacs, etc. and if your character bought the farm you had to play the next available NPC, whether it was the mailman or the little old lady from down the block. This is the closest thing I’ve seen to that type of game in a long time
I’d like to try a pulpy, noirish sort of setting, with one or more inept detectives, like Rigby Reardon from Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid or Sam Diamond from Murder by Death. Stir in some despicable Nazi villains, femme fatales, a globetrotting archaeologist, a mad scientist and the MacGuffin Device, occult artifact, or hidden wealth everyone is searching for. I’d also like to do a sci-fi one where everyone is (space)shipwrecked, lost, or trapped together on a small space colony. Think Lost in Space, Red Dwarf, Space 1999 and maybe Farout Space Nuts if you remember that. Throw in an unsolved murder and you could have a sci-fi version of Clue (the movie).
Here’s another sci-fi / murder mystery playset idea: (Almost) everyone wakes up from a cryogenic sleep aboard a starship, but the side effect is temporary amnesia. One of the sleepers was murdered. Everyone’s identification has been removed, and the computer records and systems in place to help restore the memories have been sabotaged. To complicate matters, the ship is way off course, and it’s current trajectory has it headed toward a sun. Without a pilot or navigator who remembers what to do, everyone is doomed. People start to get memory back in small pieces, but that’s when they start getting murdered. The killer could be anyone. Even you! LoL
This indeed sounds like a fun break from D&D, I will definitely have to run it by some of my players and see if I can get it started.
Saw FIASCO at last year’s Origins, and was hooked. I’d love to create a Gothic Horror style playset with the classics from old movies: wolfman, Frankenstein’s monster, etc. OR being a big MST3K fan, something like Journey to the Center of the Earth.
This game looks really fun to play! Sounds like it would be great for recreating Guy Ritchie movies too.
I jumped into a Games On Demand session of Dragon Slayers Saturday afternoon. Mad props to Nora for sticking it out to facilitate five (or maybe more) Fiasco sessions in a row. We ended up with the tale of a wannabe druid who was born to be king of the necromancers, his vindictive enthusiastic necromancer fiancée, a blood-drinking golem, & two identical men who don’t know which is the alchemical simulacrum & which is the original.
It was a disaster for everyone but the golem. Timmy the would-be druid fulfilled his hated destiny to rule from a throne of skulls, his now ex-fiancée was driven to personal & professional ruin, the real man joined the fiancée’s legion of zombies, & the simulacrum was driven away by enforcers come to collect on his debts. The golem meanwhile was turned into a real woman & went on to fame & fortune as an adventurer.
I have to admit I was leery of the whole idea of a fantasy playset to begin with. I was worried that either the fantasy or the Cohen-esque elements would feel like a cumbersome bolt-on, but the whole comical catastrophe felt very natural.
a Noir-type scenario would have me drooling in my lap. Not the corny new funny noir, but old-school, horribly-gone wrong scenarios. Stuff like lady vanishes, maltese falcon, double indemnity, vertigo, blade runner, M, third man, etc. There’s always some back stabbing, something missing, someone isn’t who they seem to be, etc.
Thanks for making an awesome game =)
I also got to play Fiasco for the first time at GenCon. It was a really good time and ended poorly for most of us (as expected).
Our characters consisted of a Jewish woman who was trying to keep a promise to here grandmother to help a cancer patient. She was married to her Rabbi husband who was married to a Catholic Cancer Patient in need of an organ transplant. Who wanted to sleep with her doctor, that was helping an organ thief, who hooked up one time in the mens bathroom with the Jewish accountant who was best friends with the Rabbi’s wife.
We ran a bit short on time but by the end the Rabbi was in the process of divorcing both wives, the Jewish women had tricked him into signing an organ donation form, the doctor was backstabbing her organ thief co-conspirator and to save the cancer patient.
Looking forward to playing again.
Have you ever played Fiasco with a future or sci-fi setting? I’m curious if it would work.
It works great with science fiction. There’s a hard SF playset called “Mission to Mercury” in the Fiasco Companion and a bunch of others, from cyberpunk to Buck Rogers, are floating around on the Internet. Anywhere you can combine powerful ambition with poor impulse control, you can have a Fiasco.
I have not yet gotten to play Fiasco, but have heard wonderful things about it on the Critical hits blog, these comments, and the RPG Twitter community.
I think that The Movie idea/theme of “Collateral” (I believe starring Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise) could make a interesting playset, although it would probably only be able to accommodate a low number of players.
I accidentally came across this page yesterday morning and had no interest in this contest. Then, later that day, I played Fiasco at PAX, and when I got back from the show floor, this page was the first thing I looked for.
We played a game set in a small southern town, and from our relationships we established that I was an AA sponsor, a mortician, and a conman. The person I was sponsoring was a hairdresser (who moonlighted as a mortician on the weekends) whose business was being destroyed by a new hairdresser in town. His one customer, Edgar, was a simple man who was roped into the hairdresser’s plans. And his mother-in-law was a Southern belle who was trying to get rid of her deadbeat son-in-law and recently made an investment in my mink farm, which was one mink in a small pen, digitally doctored to appear as hundreds of minks, frolicking.
This is where things started to get more ridiculous.
When we were coming up with southern-sounding names for our characters, someone threw out the name “Sanders,” which we decided was the southern belle’s last name. The natural progression from that is that she was heir to the Colonel Sanders fortune. As the game went on, we added more and more to her fortune, including a vast collection of poisonous snakes, (possibly) a branch of the FBI, and almost everything in town – including, eventually, the rival hairdresser. Not to mention that many of her relatives “mysteriously” died in very similar inexplicable ways.
Act One was going very well for my character. He had gotten hit by a bus (owned, of course, by Sanders Bus Services) so he was in the hospital when the son-in-law and the hairdresser spread snake poison on every surface of the Sanders Hair Parlor and burned it down. The belle offered a reward for anyone who could identify the two men on tape – and I was planning on telling her for the massive reward.
Then came the tilt, and everything went downhill for me.
We decided that someone was going to self-destruct, and the most obvious candidate for that was my character. He even told the hairdresser at the beginning that running multiple cons was too difficult for him, so when his plan became an elaborate three-layer con it was essentially doomed to fail. When everyone converged on my hospital bed, the truth came out for nearly everything, and we all wound up in serious trouble.
Unfortunately our game was cut a little short because someone else needed a table, but we managed to get through half of Act Two and the Aftermath. In the end, the hairdresser, after getting out of prison, opened up his own chain of hair salons and ran people out of business; the son-in-law ended up reforming his ways while in prison; Mrs. Sanders’ poor investment choices came to light and she lost much of her fortune; and after several attempts to con my way out of prison, I ended up in solitary confinement, where I had no one else to con.
PAX is only one day through, but I think I can safely say that that game was the highlight of my convention. It was so much fun to add more and more ridiculous and hilarious elements to our world, and the collaborative nature of the game made it that much easier to make a one-off joke into a core element of the story. We barely stopped laughing as we played through the game, and I can’t wait to try another playset with another group of people and see how it all comes together.
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Fiasco is one of those games that have made it on my list of games I’ve got to play, but never had the chance. I also think that it would help bring in my non-gaming fiancee and friends!
Fiasco is awesome. We played Boomtown and had a great evening of gaming! It was great improv and everyone got involved!
I read through the Fiasco book. Seems brilliant. Still trying to figure out a way to pitch the game to my regular party. Any ideas on how to make devoted D& D players try this brilliant game?
A scenario involving lowly computer programmers discovering how much power they actually wield in a corporate jungle (inspired by Office Space) would be fun.
I ended up playing my first game of Fiasco this past Sunday. With a bit of confusion, we were up and running rather quickly. We worked to ratchet up the tension rather quickly. I was a Sheriff bilking his pool boy for comics, paying with laundered money. As the story unfolded, the Sheriff was in fact married to the true brains of the operation. In one scene, one of the characters was left to burn and die in the basement. The following scene, it was revealed that a burnt body was found in the basement. And the third scene revealed that the character left to burn and die had made it out alive. So now we had an extra body!
We had a very enjoyable time, and are all looking forward to playing it again in the future.
We played our first game of Fiasco this weekend. And we had a blast. In one of the scenes, we left Daniel, one of the characters, to burn and die in the basement. In the following scene, it was revealed at trial that a charred body was found in the basement. And the next scene, it was revealed that Daniel was alive. So now we had another body, and slowly the once benign looking wife of the corrupt sheriff became more diabolical.
I’d like to see an Ealing playset, based around films such as Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, A Fish Called Wanda
I’d love to see a Fiasco play set based on the Misfits BBC TV series!
Sounds intriguing. Do they have a “SciFi Original” option for movies?
Somehow I think they might actually use this method for them…
I’m dying to give Fiasco a go – the rules look a blast. Playset suggestions based on a couple of neat TV shows:
* Being Human (BBC version) – A house full of postmodern supernaturals who want to be normal. Tilts around a supernatural dragging them into trouble or a human finding it too much…
* Re:Genesis – Biopunk dystopias, insane conspiracies and screwed-up relationships.
Tilts around a scientific discovery going wrong or discovery that this is a conspiracy.
I’ve never heard of this game before, but I know a good game design when I see it. I think a zombie version of the Main Street and Suburbia plateaus would be amazing, as well as some tie-in pieces. No game about movies is complete without references to the single largest horror sub-genre there is.
A post-apocalyptic set would be nice too (think Mad Max)…yeah…
Durn iPhone autocorrect. Plateau was supposed to be playset lol…
I want to see something with The Mummy. Campy fun all around.
One of my favorite RPG sessions ever was with Fiasco. There was an adult bookstore, a YouTube video of a cat sitting on a man’s face, and MURDER. It ended with a million dollars. One great part of the game was playing multiple characters – both our own PCs and the whole cast of NPCs surrounding them. Hilarious and never boring.
I heard about Fiasco on all the podcasts I listen to and one thing I heard was it sometimes ends up getting naughty…what is the best way to try to avoid that if you want to?
The easiest way to avoid that sort of content in your game is to talk to the other players up front and establish what sort of story you’re interested in. This is valuable in general for setting the tone- dramatic, serious, light-hearted, completely gonzo, etc.
looking forward to trying it hardcore. Even when I don’t win I’ll probably buy it.
Can the game be played for more then single session play? are their any campaign rules, advancement rules etc?
The game is designed for a single session of play and there are no campaign or character advancement rules built in. However, we do talk a bit in the Fiasco Companion about how to chain multiple sessions together using thematically-related playsets and consistent characters.
In any case, while Fiasco isn’t intended for long-term play with a single story, it definitely holds up to repeated play, even using the same playset.
I think this would be fun with a Hong Kong action movie sort of setting… what do you think?