I’m coming to this thread to fangirl it up because everyone is doing a fine job, but there’s not enough excited squeeing. ;P I love love LOVE this game. It has been my favorite one-shot tabletop game for years and has yet to be unseated despite some stiff competition. It’s just an absolute joy to see these relatively simple elements produce a consistently solid experience and meaningful story every time. That is good game design. I’m sure people have had bad games of it, but I’d say the least exciting run of it for me was still better than the average con game and was still really meaningful for some.

It…ahhh. It’s not one thing. It’s about how the structure does such a good job of moving the story through a changing time. How evocative some of the moments are. How nuance can be added to a seemingly set character or moment or how something unexpected can change everything. It’s that it brings to light this awful time in history and actually educates a little without drowning players in cold facts. And that it brings to light this little known group of seemingly religious weirdos and shows them in glorious variation. Selfless, vain, kind, hard, questioning, defiant, zealous, predatory, damned, not religious but allied, and so on. 

And the scenes. So good. One of the best things you can do is use your scenes to answer or explore the questions you’re supposed to be wondering about and only bring in story cards if you need a twist or something fresh. The scenes are often really well varied without much effort at all. They are often driven by characters who are reacting to loose confinement and a dark future, so those difficult conversations are had, love is explored, beliefs are questioned, secrets are revealed, and so on. Tender moments and some really brutal ones as well.

It has never felt like misery tourism to me because you’re not standing from afar going, “Wow how awful for those people, how deliciously sad.” You’re digging in and telling stories of individuals caught up in this shitty thing and seeing all of this beautiful and ugly humanity between the individuals. I find it does more to make you consider other points of view than most games. Like, I’ve seen Raimond played a bunch on times, and often he’s this standard hardass, proud patriarch. Not a Cathar, yet he protects them. When I had a chance to play him at Dreamation earlier this year, I thought about why someone like that would choose to burn. And I thought about the Catholic army bearing down, wanting their more convenient salvation in the blood of close-to-home heretics and spoils of war and how this guy built Montsegur with his own hands and he knows exactly what’s going on and fuck if they were going take his pride too. He ended up being the only main character of that run to chose to burn and it wasn’t for being a Cathar. That is the kind of nuance that exists in the true stories of our world but that don’t always show up in our history texts that declare the numbers and the winners.

It can’t make players play nuanced characters though. In all the runs I’ve seen, there are occasional plays on characters that make me roll my eyes a little because come on a zealot is still a complex person. An asshole doesn’t always have to be an asshole, etc. But even with weaker plays, we still get to see that character developed through different types of scenes and interactions and there are enough characters in play that less interesting ones fade back a little. And that’s another thing! There truly is a lot of variation. Some games tend to focus more heavily on the fighter dudes, some on the kids, some on the Perfects, some on the women, and some on the core family. And that changes a little every time based on what different players want to explore.

Some little tips ff you take a crack at it:
1. The Prologue is a bit of a cold start. And there’s a confusing name typo that’s a carry-over from the early version. (It asks if Bernard tastes the blood of revenge – it should read: Guillame.) It’s basically just a freely narrated action scene so we can get excited and see the particular moment that draws the notice and ire of the Catholic church.

2. The background sheets should really be read aloud early on if not before play begins. I don’t like throwing info at people, but it’s really hard to play a game about Cathars if you don’t know anything about what they believe until several scenes in.

3. Make sure Arsende’s player discusses who her rapist was with the player of the character she says did it (if it’s a PC). Because finding out that your character committed rape (even long ago) is not something everyone can deal with well.

4. Do not feel pressured to incorporate the stuff on the Story cards. They can offer an interesting twist or give you a cool idea, but if there’s drama and interest aplenty, just enjoy it. Some of the ideas on the Story cards seem badly disruptive, though it depends a lot on what’s going on in an individual game. In the last game we played, no Story cards got used, but one or two is pretty normal.

5. When time is more constrained, avoid incorporating Story cards unless they help resolve something. Play cards to interrupt the narrative only if it helps things come to a point or ends the scene (because they can be used to cut to an entirely new scene or to add more elements which is fine if you aren’t crunched for time). Have half of the players do their scenes in Act 3 and the other half in Act 4 so it’s not a full round each time.

Finally, you HAVE to come to Dreamation so Brand Robins and I can drag you into a private room with a couple of other souls and play the shit out of this.