I cannot recall where/when I first heard of this - probably the kickstarter in 2024 - but when I spotted this in London (the mighty Orc's Nest or maybe The Arcanists Tavern?) I decided I had to go for it. I clawed the time to scuttle over there from the City on a long lunch and have a good rummage - this and Minions were two that particularly caught my eye. It felt like a good 'support your local games creators' opportunity so I did.
What you get is a card-based story telling game that all told reminded me of For The Queen with hints of Microscope, moderated by the card-draw. I slightly misunderstood what I was getting here in the 'what happens when the quest is over?' tagline - that made me think it was wholly focussed on the consequences side of things and not infact the telling the whole tale of the journey/quest.
Nicely laid out with clean, spare art. I ripped through reading this in a single-seating (admittedly on an airplane but still end-to-end in a go).
So what do you get in here?
8 pages covering 'how to operate the book'
22 pages on creating your story including genre and setting creation
20 pages on creating all the things in the setting - locations to threats and PCs
20 pages on running the scenes of the game including worked examples
14 pages of support material - references, character and story sheets and inspirational maps
Expanding on all that; what you have in here is the neat idea a campaign in retrospect. You start off with deciding genre and creating things to be encountered along the six-act journey. These can be locations, treasures and threats, and maybe you have some supporting characters that come with you.
There are lots of scene setting tables that you use to set up the locations and hazard, treasures and threats, NPC and atmosphere. These are great quick campaign generation tools and would be useful for lots of games or in a DM's toolkit in general. Each set of tables is split out by the different campaign flavours (grim, heroic, kids, horror) - though I imagine one could substitute in some other sparklist (such as from Worlds Without Number) to get sci-fi, western, etc.
To actually run the tale players get dealt a card per chapter plus three and then assign a card per chapter as they play. Each card suit dictates the tone of the players contribution which they start with "do you remember when..." and then tell a physically or emotionally enriching or disturbing/detrimental happening for that place. The overall tone for the chapter is determined by the majority suit played.
It is a more prescriptive, structured game to focus story-telling and shape the action into the set forms of the chapters. There is advice to chop out the second and fifth chapters for a short session, or loop through additional third-to-fifth chapters to extend the session.
What is in here is a cool potential game played within ~ 2-3 hour slot with a nice balance of rules & freeform to bridge out of classic TTRPGs and intro people to storygame type things. It follows a six act structure that could be customised or free form as well.
It could also be great for a shared backstory generator ~ session 0.5. Run a session of The Long Road Home and you've got a party with a true shared history to start a big campaign with.
You could also adapt it to be a post-finale tool for a standard campaign by doing a sweep up of campaign major events and running multiple "homecoming" scenes to see how things play out in the end.
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