The indie RPG The Slow Knife tells a story of betrayal and revenge

Indie RPG fans familiar with Jack Harrison’s previous games are likely to be surprised by the big twist in the latest project he’s designed. Zine Quest is his first hit A Bucket Full of Bolts is a solo game about designing a spaceship in the spirit of beloved space-going rustbuckets like Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon or Firefly’s Serenity. Other Kickstarter games he has created include Oral ArtefactThe game allows players to design an item and space station. His latest project was funded via Kickstarter on the same day that it launched. It asks for players to create something more complex and abstract. A conspiracy of intrigue, betrayal and a final act in cathartic revenge.

Harrison’s new game, The Slow Knife is designed to walk two to four players through the process of setting up and telling a story in the vein of Alexandre Dumas’ 1844 novel The Count of Monte Cristo. In the words of the game, a “promising young soul” has their life “ruined by a handful of grasping scoundrels,” then returns to plot an inevitable vengeance. Polygon is told by Harrison that Harrison was inspired to create the game because of his passion for women. Monte Cristo Count’s brand of slow-burn political intrigue, and from the difficulty of enacting it in most mainstream RPGs.

“I’ve found that you get a lot of stories of brutal action, both in media and in role-playing games,” Harrison says. “You know, where everybody tries to take down the boss in a big action sequence. But there’s not a lot of social intrigue in role-playing, especially in games like D&D. They aren’t necessarily geared that way. So I started out thinking, ‘How can I tell that kind of long-term social-revenge story?’”

Slow Knife invites gamers into that kind of intrigue, with each player answering card prompts to craft a villain who harmed “The Knife,” the game’s protagonist. Then the players flesh out the story of The Knife’s successful revenge campaign against them. The game is built around a deck of cards split into four acts, which structure the players’ scheme of betrayal — complete with a literal conspiracy board, tracking connections and important events. Although you have the option to make your own yarn boards, Harrison states that his playtests used corkboards, pins, and washi tape.

Image: Mousehole Press

“I love artifacts of play, generally,” Harrison says. Indie RPGs encourage players create maps and drawings to aid storytelling. These types of games have been more prevalent in recent years due to the popularity of solo journaling game that focus on these physical creations. However, there are other things. Slow KnifeA string board can also be used to aid players in navigating a complex storyline and to remind them which plot lines are still open for development.

“In a more straightforward John Wick story, you can keep the characters in your head — you go from point A to point B, it’s quite straightforward,” Harrison. “Whereas with a social plot, it really does help to see all the complex connections and who you’ve introduced over the course of the game, which lets you try to close the loops and tie it all together.”

Harrison says Slow Knife is expressly designed to help first-time role-players or group storytellers find their footing — or by the same token, to help experienced players tell a specific story — because it asks inviting questions and creates clear boundaries for the shape of the story. As with other prompt-based RPGs that are GM-less, like For QueenOder Carolina Death Crawl, Slow Knife Guides players along a particular plotline and asks them to define it.

“The thing I really like about prompt games is that they give you a skeleton for the action,” he says. “They tell you something true about your character, or about the world, then ask you to make that thing interesting, to expand on it and integrate it into the story yourself. You’re not ever being asked to come up with something from whole cloth, you’re always telling just a little bit of story.”

However, the form of the Slow KnifeStory is already predefined and can be set in many settings. You can either create your own settings or use one of three playsets which will answer the questions for you. This one sets the story within 19th century France. One is the sci-fi tale of health-obsessed, high-ranking aristocrats aboard Arcadia Prime. This luxury space station orbiting an environment destroyed Earth has a crew of sci-fi characters. The third places the story in a high-fantasy court, “the premier dominion of the high elf elite.”

The story always leads to the same destination in all instances. In playtesting, Harrison says, he sets out the game’s final card at the beginning, revealing the prompts for The Knife’s revenge, and what the players’ villains do afterward. “Everybody knows where the story is leading, and what they’re aiming toward,” he says. “That empowers people to steer the story toward The Knife’s revenge, while giving them enough flexibility to tell the story they want to tell with their character.”

Image: Mousehole Press

Harrison says the completed game will have safety guidelines for making the villains “fun-bad” rather than evil in a way that might make people uncomfortable at the table. “Evil isn’t necessarily fun to play, or fun to witness,” he says. “But when people set up these real bastards, it’s really satisfying to plot their downfall, and to be responsible, with complete dramatic irony, for walking them into these situations where they’re going to be setting themselves up for bigger and bigger failures, and less satisfaction. There’s a comedy in there that has been really satisfying in playtesting, watching these villains build themselves up for the fall.”

In Slow Knife, that fall is — as the description says — inevitable. “I decided fairly early on that I wanted the idea of the villains winning to be off the table,” Harrison says. “It just wasn’t a story I was interested in telling. I think it’s it’s important to close that loop, and to pay off all the evil things they did early on in the story — even if that doesn’t always reflect what happens in reality. I can’t speak for everyone’s politics, but the idea of taking down a load of evil rich people has a lot of appeal to me in the world we live in. Even if it is a bit of a fantasy!”

Slow KnifeThis product is currently available via Kickstarter. A campaign closes on March 21.