Ludonarrative Dissidents

DIALECT: A Game About Language And How It Dies is a 2018 single-session RPG by Hakan Seyalioglu and Kathryn Hymes, published by Thorny Games. It’s a game about a small community, isolated from larger groups, that first creates its own verbal forms to describe its situation, and then must adapt or lose them as the community reacts to external threats. It is critically acclaimed and a winner of multiple awards.
Dialect at Thorny Games
Dialect at Wikipedia
Preview sample of the Dialect rulebook

Read the full show notes here.
⁠Discuss this episode on our Discord.

Our livestream discussion for August!
Watch the episode on Youtube
⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Discuss this episode on our Discord.

SWORDS OF THE SERPENTINE is a game of fantasy shenanigans in a labyrinthine sinking city populated by rogues, schemers, cultists, swashbucklers and your player characters, written by Kevin Kulp and Emily Dresner, and published by Pelgrane Press in 2022. It uses a variation of the Gumshoe system originally created by Robin D. Laws in 2007.
Swords of the Serpentine at Pelgrane Press
Swords of the Serpentine at DriveThruRPG
Full show notes are here
Discuss this episode on our Discord.

Our livestream discussion for June!
Watch the episode on Youtube
⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Discuss this episode on our Discord.

CHICAGO BY NIGHT is a 2018 city sourcebook for Vampire the Masquerade 5th edition, written by Matthew Dawkins and a host of others, and published by Renegade Game Studios, who have the rights to do all this stuff these days. The most recent iteration of a sourcebook that first appeared in 1991, this edition is by far the longest at 357 pages. It describes the vampire culture, clans, people, locations, backstory and subterfuges of the eponymous city. (‘Eponymous’, because I always have to check, means ‘lending its name to’ a thing, not ‘taking its name from’). We talked about the latest edition of Vampire the Masquerade earlier this season and concluded that it did what it needs to in a suitable style, if you like that sort of thing. How does that fit with huge chunks of crunchy campaign-world detail like this? Don’t click that dial!
Chicago by Night at DriveThruRPG (there’s more information here than at the publishers’ website)
Vampire the Masquerade 5th edition at DriveThruRPG
The original Chicago by Night from 1991 at DriveThruRPG
Chicago by Night second edition (1993) at DriveThruRPG

Read the full show notes here.
Discuss this episode on our Discord.