Join us for a Try-It-Out of The Silt Verses RPG, a tabletop roleplaying game of folk horror and monstrous divinity, in which a group of indebted Custodians are sent into isolated territories to deal with stray gods and terrifying divine manifestations which threaten the nearby community. The Custodians investigate these entities and the manifestation of their powers, and will then seek methods to appease them, neutralize them, or otherwise engage the local community to find a solution. The Custodians gradually become aware of a looming conspiracy that overshadows their work, as a powerful organization seeks to take advantage of them to fulfill its secret agenda. The Custodians will ultimately decide how to confront this organization, all the while struggling with their complicated relationship to faith and the gods of their past whose power threatens to consume them.

The Silt Verses RPG is based on the horror/weird-fiction podcast of the same name. The entire podcast is wonderful and worth listening to, but in particular, episode 3 and episode 7 are excellent, stand-alone episodes that demonstrate both the world and the kinds of activities the Custodians might engage in. The game’s mechanics are based on Apocalypse World and Brindlewood Bay, but you don’t need to know anything about those two games before we play. The Silt Verses RPG is a deeply collaborative game, and players will often be asked for direct input into the fiction, even outside of the sphere of their own characters.

Aim

The aim of the characters in the story is to pursue investigations surrounding these stray gods and powers, and come to terms with their complicated past with a particular god, deciding if they will continue on that path and be further changed by the power that god provides. Our aim as players is the same, but also to learn more about these characters’ fraught pasts and uncertain futures, as well as to paint a vivid picture of our version of the Silt Verses setting, a responsibility we all share. The aims for today’s session are to create and introduce our characters, learn the basics of how the game works by playing it, and then have a debrief period at the end.

Tone

The tone of The Silt Verses RPG is dark, strange, and unsettling. It presents a world where monstrous horrors are viewed as miraculous and divine, and systemic cruelties as routinely accepted by society. It exaggerates difficult themes of our world by showing them as literal gods, and this can verge on the absurd—but this is not intended to become a parody. A little bit of levity or humor from time to time is ok, but we will always strive to return to that dark, gloomy landscape the characters exist in.

Subject Matter

Cosmic horror, graphic violence, ritual sacrifice, intense body horror, grotesque religious imagery, cults, religious trauma, harm to children and animals, family trauma, government corruption and oppression, police violence, war, and natural disasters are all things that may come up frequently in this game. We will use a number of safety tools to help manage these potentially difficult topics including: the X-card, Lines & Veils, and the Open Door Policy. Although many of these topics are part of what this game is designed to explore, we can choose to omit them during our game. No game is more important than its players. That said, it’s possible this isn’t a game you’d enjoy playing and that’s okay!