GM: Sharang Biswas
Players: Sophie Lagacè, Sean Nittner, and Tom Lommel
System: Bloomfall
Sharang and Yeonsoo Julian Kim are working on a game commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences to increase players awareness of plant life around them!
Bloomfall is a game set in the progressive era of the United States centered around the Prometheus Academy, a boarding school on Heartwood Island, which also happens to be littered with portals to Elsewhere, a verdant land of alien and fey creatures. You play students who have found a way to Elsewhere and make forays into it when problems arise (as they often do).
Here’s the game’s pitch:
Bloomfall is set during the Progressive Era at Promethean Academy, a prestigious boarding school that sits on the border of a mysterious and verdant realm called the Elsewhere. The academy is located on Heartwood Island, a barrier island off the coast of the Mid Atlantic. While the rest of the United States deals with the repercussions of rapid industrialization, Promethean Academy remains tucked away in the heart of the natural world.
The Elsewhere is a source of both beauty and danger. Magical creatures, plants, and phenomena overflow from the Elsewhere into Heartwood Island, often wreaking havoc on the academy. As the player characters venture deeper into this strange world, they encounter the Rooted, ancient beings intrinsically tied to the Elsewhere and its magic. The Rooted are as variable as nature itself, abiding by their own laws and sowing wonder, destruction, life, and chaos in equal measure.
This is a game about exploration and building a relationship with the world around you. Heartwood Island is filled with forests, beaches, coves, and marshes to explore, while the academy is home to secret rooms, passageways, towers, and labyrinthine gardens. The Elsewhere itself is made up of impossibly sublime landscapes populated by creatures and plants that seem to defy logic. No matter how many layers you peel back, there are always more secrets to uncover.
Solo Excursions
Before we met to play, we all picked characters (I chose Neeraj, the kid who likes to draw tattoos of insects on his arms and sometimes accidentally speaks in rhymes) and were set to do some solo work before the game. There were three excursions to complete:
- Picking a plant and picking some visible parts (like the root, leaf, branch, etc). The for each pat, write down some obvious details. Pick to of the parts to observe more closely and write more details about those. Recording one detail we liked from each part. I have a rosemary bush outside my office that I love walking past (I like the smell and the bees that zoom around it, oblivious to me). It’s often covered in cobwebs for reason I’m not sure of. I looked at the root structure and decided to pick the details “Tangled” and “Cobwebs”.
- “Upon Reflection” is an exercise where we get in the heads of of characters and ask what our experience in the Elsewhere is like. We took the two details from the first excursion and imagined a fantastical creature inspired by them. Knowing Neeraj really likes bugs, I thought of a kind of stick bug that can interlock with each other to form shapes that look eerily like things we recognize.
- “Compendium Entry” was the final excursion assigned. We wrote up a kind of bestiary entry for our creatures. Mine was a called Lighting Links, they appear a a horde of interlocking stick bugs that are brown, tan, yellow and green (all the colors of my rosemary bush) and take many forms.
Gameplay
Once we got together we introduced our characters and did some world building. We created story seeds (motifs we would draw on during the game), detailed our three foes (one of which would become our nemesis at the end of the series) and did a bit of build up for our adventure.
Sharang noted that everyone was unusually sleepy and we had a few scenes showing all our characters (as well as the rest of the faculty and students) dozing off at inopportune times, which finally led us to realize the problem was supernatural in nature and that we’d have to go into the Elsewhere to address it.
There we met Autumn’s Vice who helped us identify the source of the problem, but only after we paid a terrible cost (each character has a personal story seed and we had the option to share it with Autumn’s Vice but it would be come a darker version of itself).
Armed with a stone that allowed us to see the invisible plants causing us all to slumber, we returned to the Prometheus Academy and removed them… all while invisible to each other (a side effect of the magic).
What Rocked
- Sharang is a such a moody and evocative GM. He did a wonderful job of describing the majestic landscapes as well as the terrifying or awful villains.
- The game does a good job of making you think about plants with it feeling like an “edu” game. I know that’s a major goal and it was done well!
- I loved a lot of the setting elements, both those built into the setting, and those we created. The fact that were are more to “unlock” got me excited play more!
- The game plays in 2-3 hours with very little prep, making it great for a con slot! Yay.
- The story beats were cleanly divided so we were sure to get through the adventure on time and get to play the whole thing (rather than having to cram everything at the end).
What could be improved
- Despite some clear efforts to distinguish it, I think the game still falls into the gravity well of Harry Potter. I think Prometheus Academy needs something more than having portals to Elsewhere to make in an iconic location that stands on it’s own.
- The game play is very structured (answer questions here, narrate your actions here, roleplay here) which I think is probably good for new players but felt restrictive to me. I was happy to go along for the ride, but realized afterwards that we didn’t so much control the outcomes as we did describe the details of them and how they affected and changed us.
- I really wanted to see the result of our solo excursions in play. That’s a lot for a GM to manage (I remember running Fate and tryin to keep track of everyone’s aspects) so I think the game needs a proper “bestiary” to hold all the contributions from the players so that even if they don’t show up immediately, the are part of the world and can be added to the game later on.
- There were a few terms in the game that didn’t connect with me. I think some revisions there will help bring the otherwise evocative language home.
- The core mechanic (roll 1d4 and spend a currency to raise the result until you get what you want) felt a bit anticlimactic. Since a d4 has such a small range, it really came down to banking the currency so you had enough to spend to get the outcomes you wanted. Each role had a custom set of outcomes (with results going to 8+ meaning you would have to spend currency to get them) that took a while for Sharang to read through all the varying outcomes and then for us as players to decide what how many points we wanted to spend to achieve them.
- Currently the in game currency is also the advancement system, which I think cause players to be risk-averse and hoard currency rather than spend it in game.
I’m really excite to see Yeonsoo and Sharang continue to develop Bloomfall. I think they are doing something very cool!
