The Welcome to Night Vale Roleplaying Game is now crowdfunding

Mysterious lights in the night sky, dark hooded figures with unknowable powers, announcements from the Sheriff’s secret police, and local news and weather — are these the things you’re looking for in your tabletop RPG? If so, you might be pretty excited to learn that the Welcome to Night Vale Roleplaying Game is crowdfunding on Backerkit now!

Welcome to Night Vale hardly needs introduction; launched in 2012, it’s a fiction podcast taking the form of a community radio broadcast from the little desert town of Night Vale, a town where every conspiracy is true. All of them. All at once. Welcome to Night Vale is by turns introspective, thoughtful, and extremely spooky, and it remains a treat to listen to even 12 years later. (If you’ve never heard it, the beginning is a fine place to start, but I’d also suggest “A Story About You.”) The tabletop game promises to help you bring the same kind of stories you can expect from the podcast to your table, and is brought to you by Renegade Game Studios, who have a fairly broad history of porting popular franchises to tabletop RPGs, such as Power Rangers, G.I. Joe, Transformers, and My Little Pony.

I will say that as much as I love the source material, my enthusiasm for this game is somewhat tempered. Sometimes the leap from podcasts that tend to focus on 1-2 protagonists to a tabletop game that necessarily expects a party of players can be a little clunky — this was the case with the Old Gods of Appalachia Roleplaying Game, which is another tabletop game based on a spooky fiction podcast you should be listening to but which illustrates the stark divide between what makes good fiction and what makes good games. Sometimes you can read an entire RPG book and not come away with the answer of “what does a party of characters in this game actually do?” because the setting was built for specific things that aren’t that; this was the case with Old Gods, and I feel like Night Vale could easily go the same way.

Renegade’s involvement also worries me in this case; their other RPGs use what they call their Essence20 system, which is derived from familiar 20-sided-die based systems like D&D and the Cypher System games (which is what Old Gods of Appalachia used). Essence20 puts a lot of emphasis on combat, which makes a lot of sense for franchises like Transformers and G.I. Joe, but Welcome to Night Vale has a lot of its roots in cosmic horror (think Call of Cthulhu), where fighting is both a last resort and a doomed idea. It doesn’t seem like a great fit for the license! Essence20 games also frequently feel extremely “samey” and bland, because Renegade doesn’t necessarily do much to skin its generic system for the game in question, often leaving in things from D&D that make little sense — why does the Power Rangers game have a daily travel pace chart and mechanics for getting tetanus? Why can my Transformer be proficient in Animal Handling?

Still, I hope I’m wrong. I’d love to be wrong. I’d love to have a game that brings Welcome to Night Vale to the table and helps introduce players to this funny, fascinating, spooky world it’s built. I’m not sure this is it, but if you think it might be, then you can back it on Backerkit now.