While many modern TTRPGs attempt to tackle the topic of revolution and political upheaval, most fail to truly capture the atmosphere or immenseness of the event and the fallout that follows. While everyone dreams of having a big Les Misérables barricade moment, one wrong step leads to the game becoming a tonal disaster or feeling like a toothless Saturday morning cartoon. Thankfully, The Rock Limpet succeeds where others fail by looking at the topic from a unique (but historically resonant) angle.
The Rock Limpet is a tarot-based solo TTRPG that casts the player as the leader of a revolutionary movement. While you were able to overthrow the original government and lead the new government, you were quickly overthrown and exiled, meaning you are now living out your final years in a remote corner of the world far from the people you loved and fought for. Knowing that the record of history will likely distort the events that unfolded and realizing you have lots of free time, you sit down to pen a memoir telling your side of the story.
The Slow Collapse Of A Revolution
While the game’s mechanics are simple, The Rock Limpet features a few twists that give the experience a unique vibe. During the game’s first phase, the player draws cards from their tarot deck and checks the prompt table to discover what the next part of their memoir will discuss before writing about the topic in their journal.
When the player has pulled two cards from each suite, their character’s health degrades. The player must then make a decision. They can end the game here, but if they think the character has more to say, they can continue for five more cards. However, due to their characters’ failing health, they can only write a single sentence per card. Once these five cards have been drawn, the player has to make the decision again. But if they continue this time, all future card responses are limited to a single word as their character’s health grows steadily worse.
Unique Time-Passing Mechanics Historical Documents
The slowly reducing word count enhances the game’s atmosphere, blessing the game with a melancholy tone that captures the feeling of a dream slipping through your fingers, leaving you weighed down by regrets and “what-ifs.” It also helps the final journal resemble many famous historical diaries and memoirs, as these often slowly trail off and grow increasingly confused as the writer ages or becomes more heavily affected by their illness.
The game’s prompts fantastically play into and enhance this tone. They’re split into general categories covering your life, the world situation before the revolution, the revolution itself, the post-revolution government, and the events that led to your dispossession. The prompts within these categories are highly varied, covering everything from big, wide-reaching topics, like the philosophy of the revolution and the battles fought in its name, to more personal things, like the keepsakes you have on your desk and the memorable meals you had with those close to you.
A Revolution That Is Neither Clean Nor Neat
The best thing about these prompts is how they convey the inherent messiness of political upheaval and the immense difficulty of managing a country. While several prompts mention the successes of your movement, others ask the player to focus on the friends and allies that had to be sacrificed along the way, the lingering effects of the violence you saw, the assassination attempts your character narrowly avoids after rising to power, the resource shortages that follow the revolution, and the struggle to stick to your principles even when the future seems bleak.
This sets The Rock Limpet aside from other TTRPGs, as most treat political upheaval as a binary state. Bad guys rule until the good guys overthrow them. The good guys then transform the world into an everlasting utopia overnight, and anyone who previously sided with the old regime turns the other cheek and accepts the new leadership without a second thought. But the prompts in The Rock Limpet show how any major event, even one that’s for the best long-term, will have wide-reaching ripple effects.
Playing In The Past Tense Enhances Immersion
The designer’s decision to set the game after the player character has been overthrown and exiled further enhances this, as it encourages the player to think about the events’ grander context, from the seeds that laid the groundwork for the revolution to the unforeseen issues and pain that come in the days following it. This decision, mixed with the nuanced and often messy prompts, means that the gameplay experience is much deeper than it looks, forcing players to deeply immerse themselves in their character and look at the situation from many different angles.
The Rock Limpet is a terrific game that tackles a big topic in an easy-to-follow but thought-provoking way. Thanks to its well-thought-out structure and well-worded prompts, the game gently encourages players to think deeply about the subject matter and their opinions, putting themselves in the character’s shoes and asking what they would do in such a situation. Because of this, The Rock Limpet is a fantastic example of how TTRPGs can be used to discuss big topics like politics in an approachable but memorable way.
Jonathon Greenall is a freelance writer, TTRPG designer, and visual artist. They love creating and exploring the often overlooked corners of indie media, spotlighting things that dare to be different.