Hello, Austin. How is the process to go around to search and find new games for Friends at the Table? Specially in the case of Sangfielle that it was a completely new setting and type of tone for FatT
So I'm deep in the weeds of this process right now as we try to figure out the game for next season.
Broadly, I follow a bunch of people online (via social networks like this one) who are great at promoting not only their own work but also games that excite them. I also visit sites like Dicebreaker and the excellent Indie Game Reading Club, and I regularly check the new releases on storefronts like itch.io's Physical Games page and Drive Thru RPG. I'm also part of a few discord servers where I see other people make suggestions, talk about games they're playing, etc. Also: I ask people for recommendations!
This is my general strategy for Knowing What's Out There. (Which, by the way, is actually kind of torturous, because it means I know about a bunch of games that probably aren't a great fit for FatT, and therefore games I won't actually get a chance to play any time soon!) But this is only a sort of pre-cursor step of "picking a game for the next FatT season."
Generally--with the exception of Sangfielle--we have picked the game for the season before we have clear worldbuilding done. So, for instance, COUNTER/Weight was always going to be a mech season about "divines" and "rigors," but it's intense cyberpunk character comes from choosing TechNoir/MechNoir. Likewise, a ton of the flavor and vibe of Twilight Mirage comes from the playbooks in The Veil, and you can literally hear and read me going through Beam Saber's faction creation steps in the old Drawing Maps Patreon bonuses.
The game we choose determines a ton about not only the way sessions will play, but tonally and thematically what we're exploring. The example I give a lot lately is a key difference between Beam Saber and Armour Astir: In Beam Saber, when PCs receive consequences while in their mechs, they can spend the "quirks" of their mechs to resist those consequences. As such, the mechs are like walking shields for them, protecting them from Stress and Harm, and thus allowing them to impact the world and history in ways most individuals can't. But in Armour Astir, Risks and Perils that apply to your mech count against the pilot, too. The mech is not a shield you hide behind, it is you, mechanically speaking.
To be clear: Neither of these is "better," they're just two different ways to tackle the mech genre, and when I sit down to prep for a season, I'm thinking about things like this as much as I'm thinking of our Big Idea statements (like "We could've built them to look like anything..."). Which also means that when I'm looking for a game, I'm looking for something that speaks to me in this way, something that has this sort of strong tonal, narrative, or thematic core which I am confident we can play on.
Normally, we have a game picked out for the next season something like 3-6 months before we start recording the series. There's lots of time to read the book, to sit with playbook options, to collaborate on Vibe in a way that's grounded by the limits and shapes of what the game can do--and even if the rest of the cast hasn't fully absorbed the book yet, normally I have, so I can help direct things into certain directions—"Ooh! That's a cool drawing, you should check out playbook X," for example..
But Sangfielle was different, and it's part of why figuring out Sangfielle 2 has been so hard. Not only were we very close to the end of PZN before we had Heart picked out, but we also had spent a long time brainstorming big setting vibes. We knew the genre we wanted to be in, we knew our touchstones, we knew some big things like that we wanted Haunted Trains to be a part of the setting, some folks even had broad character concepts decided. All before we'd picked a game or done world building proper.
Then we happened to pick a game where the worldbuilding was deeply knit into the rules and especially the classes, more than even The Veil, which was probably the last game we'd played with such an overt setting. We did our best to inject totally new elements to the world or to make those elements of the world ours, but you know: Shape Knights aren't too dissimilar from Heart's Vermissians, Duvall wasn't entirely bee focused (but he is fundamentally connected to bugs forever more), and Cleavers didn't even get a name change, we just gave them some distinct ideology.
I'm not saying we didn't do a TON of our own world building here, we did! There's a lot of I love about Sangfielle. But it is an incredibly weird outlier in that half of it always felt out-of-sync with Heart because it was written before we knew what game we were playing, and the other half feels so indebted to Heart's own excellent setting that it's hard to move forward with a game that doesn't have rules for, for instance, some version of Debt Priests or Bug-Made Men.
At the end of Sangfielle, I had this big existential crisis about trying to figure out what Sangfielle 2 was so that I could shape the finale accordingly. I read something like 16 different games in search of the right thing, gave that list to everyone else to read, we cut it down to like 5 different possibilities, we settled on a couple of possible directions... and then we actually played out the finales, and none of it seemed right.
In the time since then, I've read another 4 or 5 games in search of the right one, re-read some of the previous ones, chatted a ton with the crew about what they want in a Sangfielle follow up (including whether they want to play their old characters again, something that is never guaranteed!), and am back on the hunt for something that fits.
This was a really long answer that isn't super helpful, but hopefully is insightful into some of the current process. Irony of ironies, I already know games for the next Divine season and for Bluff City S3. Sangfielle is just a super hard nut to crack!
