It has been some time since you’ve left home, but now it’s finally time to return. To what, though?
The home you held in your mind, and the home you will encounter will not be the same. You are not the same.
You can’t step into the same river twice. You can’t go home again.
This is a GM-less roleplaying game meant for 2 to 4 players and a single session of about 3-4 hours. It is inspired in parts by Downfall, by Caroline Hobbs and Microscope, by Ben Robbins. Cover and interior art is by Venessa Tang. You will need pencils and paper and maybe a deck of cards to pick randomly from lists.
It is about a Town, the people who have left it and returned, and the people who stayed behind.
It is about returning home and grappling with what has and hasn't changed.
At the start of the game, you will collaboratively build a Town out of several elements. You will draw two maps for the Town: one for the Town Then, and one for the Town Now.
You then create your characters and choose whether they left the Town and returned, or stayed throughout the period. You also highlight certain questions you want to explore through your characters and relationships. You will track this through a relationship map which you draw between the Towns.
Then you introduce and explore different aspects of the Town and play through different scenes to flesh out the Town and the characters, seeking to answer the different questions you have.
You can look to Town card prompts to add different aspects of the town, then highlight how the Town has changed by picking an aspect and showing its form in both the Town maps. Based on what you know of the Town and its history, you can pick questions to form the basis of scenes between various characters to explore the Town in more detail.
Once you've answered a few questions, you'll move to end the game, even if you have questions left unanswered, as time passes on for the inhabitants of the Town.
