Then there’s the basic moves, which are glorious in at least two ways. Examples are “are you taking control of this situation?” and “are you the centre of attention?”. Most fun of all is your character’s question as long as you can answer yes to it, you get +1 to all your rolls. More standard for PBTA are the moves and the relationships – though these are very good, and further reinforce the character type and the themes of the game. My character Ernesto was essentially built from those props: an eyepatch, a scarily large knife and a huge mansion. This simple decision makes it easy to see what the character is about. Each one has a set of props which you can choose from to help add flavour to your character. So how does Pasion do it? Start with the playbooks. In other words, think of a Western soap opera, then imagine that all concerns about suspension of disbelief and overacting have been not merely removed, but destroyed with a flamethrower, and you get some idea of what you’re in for.
The police descend on the (deceased) landowner’s mansion at the reading of her will, to try and wipe out Ernesto’s drug empire, forcing Ernestino and Marcela to smash through window to a waiting limousine, while Ernesto and Maria shoot their way to Ernesto’s helicopter. In a single scene, Maria reveals that she has been posing as a nun to sooth the pain of a wealthy landowner (and inveigle herself into the landowner’s inheritance), and then agrees to run off with Ernesto, ripping off her habit to reveal a slinky dress underneath. Ernestino, Ernesto’s twin brother who everyone thought was dead, makes love to Marcela (who is under the impression she is making love to Ernesto) against a marble statue of aphrodite. Ernesto, the eyepatch-wearing drugs kingpin, fed his lover Maria’s sister to a pair of jaguars for refusing to do his bidding. You cannot really go wrong simply noticing the things that will give you a mechanical benefit and doing them – and if you do, you’ll naturally get both a fun experience and an on-genre experience.īefore I talk any more about how it does this, let’s just look at some things that happened in our game to give you an idea what I’m talking about: The core mechanics and the playbooks point you in the right direction, probably more effectively than any other game I’ve seen. Pasion is brilliantly designed to reinforce the themes of a telenovela even for a complete novice to the genre. Now you might be thinking “why would I play a game about that when I know nothing about telenovelas”, and that is what I thought too. If you haven’t come across telenovelas, my totally uninformed layperson’s summary is: overwrought, over-the-top Latin American soap operas. :strip_icc()/pic5878145.jpg "leverage roleplaying game too many chiefs")
Pasion is a (currently ashcan-only) PBTA game based on telenovelas. I was recently lucky enough to get to play Pasion de las Pasiones by Brandon Leon-Gambetta.
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