Fall of magic

Fall of Magic is a structured freeform game based around a beautiful cloth scroll that is printed with a game map.

The central conceit of the game is that magic is failing and the players take the roles of characters who accompany the Magus on a journey to attempt to renew magic.

Character generation

Creating a character is simple, you pick a name and archetype and a location and there you go. This means it is another cold open storygame where there is zero-hand holding to establish the world, the nature of your character and the relationships between your characters and the other players.

This means that right from the outset there is a bunch of assumed knowledge of how to get the best out of the game. It feels like a game for experienced story gamers and really takes no prisoners.

The structure of the game

The map describes the journey from Ravenshall to the Glow where the characters will all be changed and the fate of magic will be decided.

Each location in the journey has a picture on the map and several scene suggestions. Each player takes a turn to place their token on a scene suggestion based around the theme of the location and then put together a scene using the ideas from the prompts in the suggestion.

The nature of this scene is entirely elastic, it might be a traditional ensemble scene, a narrated moment, a soliloquy, a conversation between two characters overheard by a third. It’s entirely down to the player who has played the token.

The feel of the game

In the games I played so far the general feel of the game has been tragic or melancholic. The loss of magic being a metaphor for the end of life and general destruction of the world.

The scenes are quite individual and as a result the narrative tends to feel quite fractured and dream-like, leaping from character to character and shifting in time and focus.

How the games turned out

In the first game magic was renewed with the Magus being reincarnated within the Glow.

In the second magic was renewed but the fate of the Magus was ambiguous.

In the third magic was yet again renewed but the giant killed the Magus after the rebirth of magic which heralded the end of the world as the Magus had created the cycles of magic and essentially imprisoned everyone within it.

In most of the games travel was via Mistwood, only a conscious decision to foreshadow interesting things in the mountains moved the last game in a different direction.

In the first two games the Magus was something of a cipher but in the last game they were a more manifest character interacting with the player characters and inflicting their will upon the world as the burned through the last traces of their power.

I found it interesting that every group having got to the destination have essentially decided the magic should be saved despite different interpretations of the Magus. I suspect there is something about the sunk cost of having played the game for so long and then just confirming the thesis the premise of the initial scenes.

Few characters gained descriptors in our games so the change at the end of the game has generally consisted of erasure, which works but has a slightly weird effect of the characters being less than they started rather than changed by the journey. Far more satisfying is to change the character to try and reflect the change the journey has made on them. I often feel the characters I have played have been rediscovering things about themselves or reclaiming their past.

No hugs, no epilogues

Just as Fall of Magic has no real world-building, initial scene setting or introductory scene structure it also has no epilogue or story conclusion structure. Having described your final scene at the Glow there is no conclusion as to whether magic has fallen. The fate of the Magus tends to be highly ambiguous (unless someone has definitively killed them off). There is no concluding scene to reflect on where your character might go next. The conclusion is sudden and often jarring.

It is here that Fall of Magic is actually I kind of anti-storygame. It deliberately creates the kind of suspended narrative that is guaranteed to be structurally and emotionally unsatisfying.