In my opinion, The Far Roofs is the best intro to Jenna Moran's work there is. Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine is a groundbreaking work and huge inspiration in terms of what a TTRPG system can even do, but it's also a massive intimidating tome even before you add on the extra campaign and setting books. Far Roofs does the work of a core book, setting book, and campaign book all within under 300 pages, even with full-spread artwork in there. That's absurdly efficient. I cannot praise this game enough. it uses dice, cards, scrabble tiles, and it all comes together in an extraordinarily ambitious little package. @candiedreptile drew lots of cute rats for it and also Hoop Snake

the 1.0 is available on Backerkit and i am cashing in my "dude just trust me" social capital for tabletop stuff here

https://the-far-roofs.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

Let's go on a journey together

hi i'm going insane, thanks for coming along. i have equipped myself with a questionable understanding of Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, the Book of Golden Hours material from Jenna Moran's Patreon, and bits and pieces from other jennagames to try and fit this all together.

Let's see what we can pull together here...

(the post in question)

okay so this is a set of recurring character themes ("Arcs") in the tabletop role-playing games of Jenna Moran, including Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, Glitch, and The Far Roofs. In these games, you decide a storyline for your character to follow, and these determine both specific plot beats that can occur to them, and specific powers that your character gain as a reward/expression of their growth.

Some of these are easier to explain than others. a Role arc is about fulfilling a specified role, a Training arc is about pushing yourself to your limits, but I'm a little shakier on Mystic and Storyteller, which have more idiosyncratic definitions like "this is a story about living in the shadow of a god." i will defer to my oomfs on those. But when the Otherwordly Arc is about receiving strange visions and being transformed by your experiences in another world, yeah that's Hitomi from Escaflowne

My personal recommendation for trying to understand uhhhhh all that stuff is The Far Roofs, which has a draft currently available through BackerKit, but this site is also a very cool and good resource to show links between certain expressions of those Arcs and the powers associated with them