Let's be honest: I would never have read this game if it hadn't been part of a big bundle I bought on itch and if I hadn't noticed that its cover was designed by the wonderful momatoes. It's worth reading despite all that, even if it's a game propelled by the apocalypse that doesn't bring much to the already overflowing corpus: because it's a game where you play strangers in a big city, displaced people who arrived there by chance and have to make a place for themselves in a setting that doesn't really want them, young people who inherited the trauma of their parents and aren't sure of what to do with it. These are themes that are rarely tackled head on in role-playing and I'm not sure I'd want to deal with them in play, but it's good to be confronted with them from time to time...
In Home Again, designer Nell Raban has taken the Powered by the Apocalypse engine—a framework predominantly grounded in individual power and control—and re-centered the entire system to rest on a foundation of community. This design choice is reflected most overtly in the communal stat pools, but the values permeate the design of the entire game, in the favor pools between characters as well as the very nature of the stats themselves.
Though Home Again confronts the real violences inflicted upon the diaspora, this trauma is not at its core the point of the game; rather, the game acknowledges this trauma and asks its players, "how can we heal and move past these—together?"
A great game, and one that supports its core thesis every step of the way.
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Let's be honest: I would never have read this game if it hadn't been part of a big bundle I bought on itch and if I hadn't noticed that its cover was designed by the wonderful momatoes. It's worth reading despite all that, even if it's a game propelled by the apocalypse that doesn't bring much to the already overflowing corpus: because it's a game where you play strangers in a big city, displaced people who arrived there by chance and have to make a place for themselves in a setting that doesn't really want them, young people who inherited the trauma of their parents and aren't sure of what to do with it. These are themes that are rarely tackled head on in role-playing and I'm not sure I'd want to deal with them in play, but it's good to be confronted with them from time to time...
In Home Again, designer Nell Raban has taken the Powered by the Apocalypse engine—a framework predominantly grounded in individual power and control—and re-centered the entire system to rest on a foundation of community. This design choice is reflected most overtly in the communal stat pools, but the values permeate the design of the entire game, in the favor pools between characters as well as the very nature of the stats themselves.
Though Home Again confronts the real violences inflicted upon the diaspora, this trauma is not at its core the point of the game; rather, the game acknowledges this trauma and asks its players, "how can we heal and move past these—together?"
A great game, and one that supports its core thesis every step of the way.
caro, i'm crying! thank you for this thoughtful and touching comment. <3 ;_; <3