Welcome to Nachtvaleconsidered by our sister site Vulture to be “the foundational institution of the fiction podcast genre”, gets its first official adaptation as a tabletop role-playing game. Currently in production by Renegade Game Studios (publishers of Vampire: The Masquerade, Alice is missingand the Transformers role-playing gameamong others), the BackerKit campaign to promote the Welcome to the Night Vale role-playing game starts on October 1. Polygon recently spoke to several game developers to learn more.
The Welcome to Nachtvale podcast started in 2012 as an experimental storytelling project in the form of a public radio broadcast. The fictional host, Cecil Palmer, narrates most episodes from his studio in the mysterious desert town known as Night Vale. Over the past twelve years, the otherwise peaceful enclave has been the subject of chases, disappearances, mysterious occurrences, and several major events in the ongoing Blood Space War – all while the sheriff’s secret police watched from their headquarters in the local sporting goods store. . Recurring characters include the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your house, a five-headed dragon named Hiram McDaniels, and John Peters, a farmer.
Night Fall is – and I mean this in the best way possible – a lot to take in, and so the team at Renegade is going slow with this first TTRPG offering by leaning heavily on the gazetteer format. A standard promise made during the campaign will get fans a copy of the Welcome to the Night Vale role-playing gamewhich contains four small in-fiction books. The Visitor guide will provide background on Night Vale and its people, while the Citizen guide will help in character creation. Meanwhile, avid gamemasters will find everything they need to run a session or campaign in the Host guide. But the real action comes with the introductory adventure, titled The Skeleton Gorge Incident.
“Cecil from Night Vale Community Radio will ask for your help,” said developer Carlos Cabrera, “because someone is hijacking the radio signal, and of course we can’t have that. So as an intern (new to the station), or just (local) people offering their help, you get to follow that mystery to see where it leads – and encounter some of Night Vale’s famous locations along the way.”
Of course, given the… let’s call it ephemeral nature of Night Vale’s geography, the box set doesn’t come with a map.
“Just as the radio show presents everything (…) from a kind of theater of the mind,” says associate producer Ben Heisler, “we lean into that in the same way. Because people who have listened before have seen these places in their minds before, and they know roughly where they are and can share that, along with the GM, as you experience the places in the game.
The final product will be based on Renegade’s proprietary Essence20 system – the same system that underpins its other popular TTRPGs. But it also includes functions and features that are completely new to Essence20. One of them is called ‘weird’, and it was the TTRPG writer’s creation Shay Snow (Scout, Coyote & Crow).
“What the stranger skill does is allow you to communicate mechanically with all the strangers around you,” says Cabrera. “Whether that comes from outside or inside gives you special advantages in dealing with how strange a place Night Vale can be. As the quote goes, you are finally ‘strange finally‘, and it’s also a requirement to get some of the other strange perks, like different appendages or moving tattoos, or that you have a third eye and what that can add to your character’s abilities.
The game features several classes, which are called roles in the Essence20 system. One will be a combat-oriented class called the Soldier, who will have the option of being a veteran of the ongoing Blood Space War with limited control over local gravity fields. Another role will be that of politician, an especially useful skill set given the exotic nature of the community electoral process. But even the role of a farmer isn’t entirely safe, considering they have close ties to the illegal contraband trade that the nefarious StrexCorp seems so preternaturally interested in.
Obviously a Night Vale-themed TTRPG could easily appeal to fans of the podcast, but developers are so far happy to see people completely unfamiliar with the program jumping on board during early playtests.
“One of the cool things I’ve seen on the Renegade Discord is that people come into the Night Vale chat who have never played an RPG before, but are super big fans of Night Vale,” Cabrera said. “We’ve also had people who don’t know anything about Night Vale, but are already fans of RPGs or the other Essence20 games they have. They want to look at Night Vale for the new things they can add to the system, because it’s Essence20 and you can cross those streams if you want (and make the) Decepticons appear (…) for a crazy evening of bend. “
The starting adventure will feature nine challenging threats to deal with, so it might not be a bad idea to bring some giant robots along for the ride. If you’ve ever wanted to see Megatron battle one of the librarians of Night Vale, the Welcome to the Night Vale role-playing game should have everything you need to get started.
Please note that you are not entering the dog park or even acknowledging its existence. All hail.