Fiasco Read online

  The world is full of complainers.

  And the fact is, nothing comes with a guarantee. Now I don’t care if you’re the Pope of Rome, President of the United States or Man of the Year; something can all go wrong.

  Now go on ahead, you know, complain, tell your problems to your neighbor, ask for help and watch him fly. Now, in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else − that’s the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas, and down here you’re on your own.

  Visser, Blood Simple

  Fiasco

  By Jason Morningstar

  Edited by Steve Segedy

  Layout by Patrick Murphy and Jason Morningstar

  Additional layout and eBook by Giulia Barbano

  Color art and Cover by John Harper, www.onesevendesign.com

  Additional art by Jason Morningstar

  Boilerplate

  This document uses the Hitchcock typeface. Fiasco die font by the Madirishman.

  Fiasco is copyright 2009 by Jason Morningstar. Color plates are copyright 2009 by John Harper. All rights are reserved.

  If you’d like to create Fiasco-related content, we’d like to help. Write us at [email protected].

  ISBN number 978-1-934859-39-1

  Dedication

  To Autumn Winters, who loves a good fiasco.

  Thanks

  ...to Jarrod Acquistapace, Ariele Agostini, Kevin Allen Jr, Giulia Barbano, Rob Bohl, Jason D. Corley, Adam Dray, Lara Ermacora, Damian Fraustro, Nathan Herrold, Will Hindmarch, William Huggins, Sage LaTorra, Flavio Mortarino, Renato Ramonda, Kira Scott, Jonathan Walton, Kamil Wegrzynowicz and my friends at story-games.com and elsewhere for insightful comments and enthusiasm.

  Big thanks to Seth Ben-Ezra, Chris Bennett, Colin Creitz, Robert Earley-Clark, Lara Ermacora, Alessandro Fontana, Zach Greenvoss, Tom Gurganus, John Harper, Jeff Hosmer, Ralph Mazza, Robert Poppe, Graham Walmsley and Chris Yates for taking the time to help me make this game good as hell.

  Heartfelt thanks to all of you, and to every playtester, too − and sorry about the mess out back under the tarp. Best not to look, OK? I’ve got it all under control.

  Playtesters

  Team Bull City: Mark Causey, Joel Coldren, Jonathan Davis, Matthew Gandy, Mike Graves, Nathan Herrold, Andy Kitkowski, Scott Morningstar, Clinton R. Nixon, Ian Oakes, Robert Poppe, Eric Provost, Lisa Provost, Dan “Buttercup” Puckett, Steve Segedy, Joe “Uncle Timothy” Stanton and Remi Treuer.

  Team Do Not Use Our Real Names: Tomg, Spuds, Darth and Heli.

  Team EndGame: Chris “That’s my leopard” Bennett, Robert Earley-Clark, Chris Peterson, and Karen Twelves.

  Team London: Steve Dempsey, Wai Kien, Simon Rogers, Graham Walmsley and Graham’s friend Dave.

  Team High Point: Chad Bowser, James “Connie” Jeffers, Andi “Chicken Hut” Newton, Chris Norwood, and Clarence Simpson.

  Team Milan: Claudio Agosti, Silvia Bindelli, Claudio Criscione, Damiano Desco, and Flavio Mortarino.

  Team Los Angeles: Eric J. Boyd, Josh Roby, Ryan Macklin and William Huggins.

  Team Morristown: Lowell Carson, Eric Tage Larsen, Ryan Macklin and Michael “Preacher McKean” O’Sullivan.

  Team Peoria: Crystal Ben-Ezra, Gabrielle Ben-Ezra, Seth Ben-Ezra, Ralph Mazza and Keith Sears.

  Team Portland: Evan E. Dumas, Zach Greenvoss, Joe Jaquette, and Brian K. Smith.

  Team Seattle: James Brown, Chris Bennett, Michael Decuir, Ryan Forsythe, Matthew “Tire King” Gagan, Will Huggins, Matthew Klein, Ching-Ping Lin, Ralph Mazza, Lesley McKeever, Lukas Myhan, Paul Riddle and Mike “Lucille” Sugarbaker.

  Team Shot the Sheriff: Colin Creitz, John Daniels, Chris Deibler, Sarah “Heidi Jo” Thomas.

  Team SuperNoVa: Jeff Hosmer, Auntie M, Joe Iglesias, Sean Leventhal, and Mel White.

  Table of Contents

  Front Matter

  Table of Contents

  Elevator Pitch

  Getting to the Good Stuff

  Overview

  Glossary

  The Setup

  Scenes

  Act One

  The Tilt

  Act Two

  The Aftermath

  Optional Craziness

  Tables

  Tilt Table

  Aftermath Table

  Playsets

  Main Street

  Boomtown

  Suburbia

  The Ice

  Replay

  Designer’s Notes

  Filmography

  Cheat Sheet

  Resources

  The Elevator Pitch

  Here are just a few of the key ingredients: Dynamite, pole vaulting, laughing gas, choppers − can you see how incredible this is going to be? Hang gliding, come on!

  Dignan, Bottle Rocket

  Fiasco is inspired by cinematic tales of small-time capers gone disastrously wrong – particularly films like Blood Simple, Fargo, The Way of the Gun, Burn After Reading, and A Simple Plan. You’ll play ordinary people with powerful ambition and poor impulse control. There will be big dreams and flawed execution. It won’t go well for them, to put it mildly, and in the end it will probably collapse into a glorious heap of jealousy, murder, and recrimination. Lives and reputations will be lost, painful wisdom will be gained, and if you are really lucky, your guy just might end up back where he started.

  You’ll Need

  Three, four, or five people, including yourself. There is no Game Master.

  Four six-sided dice per player, two each of black and white. You really just need two different colors you can use to denote success and failure − I’ll use black and white for clarity.

  Several dozen index cards or sticky notes and some pencils.

  About two and a half hours, varying with experience, play style and the size of your group.

  Getting to the Good Stuff

  There’s a fly in the ointment, shit’s hittin’ the fan, the lion will speak!

  Saul, Pineapple Express

  Just Browsing

  If you are browsing and want to get a feel for the game’s flavor, read the Elevator Pitch, the Overview, and maybe the Glossary. Then check out the Playsets and the replay – an extended example of play.

  New to Weird Games

  If this sort of game is new to you, I’d encourage you to read the whole thing and pay particular attention to the examples cross-referenced in the replay. It isn’t rocket science, and I hope it’s pretty clear how it works, but it might be a little weird on first reading. The examples should help!

  Story Gaming Goober

  If you are comfortable with collaborative, narrative-heavy games (Fiasco is similar in a lot of ways to Prime Time Adventures or Montsegur 1244, for example), you can get away with ignoring the Replay and the “Things to Look For” sections of the rules. It does behave a little differently than what you are used to, though, so don’t make any assumptions. I try to spell out exactly what to do and when to do it.

  Fiasco Regular

  Here are the links to the cheat sheet, the Tilt table, the Aftermath table and the Playsets. Go crazy.

  Overview

  Before we go any further, all right, we have to swear to God, Allah, that nobody knows about this but us, all right? No family members, no girlfriends, nobody.

  Peter Gibbons, Office Space

  Fiasco is a highly collaborative game in which every player should always be engaged – either actively playing a character or throwing out suggestions, brainstorming scene ideas, and listening for ways to make each scene hit harder than the last. Because the pace is so frantic, every choice you make has to matter a lot.

  A game of Fiasco begins with The Setup – a group activity where you and your friends create a potent and unstable set of circumstances. You choose a Playset, which f
ixes the game in a particular time and place – a contemporary southern town, maybe, or the old west. Using a pile of dice, you create an interconnected circle of Relationships and Details pulled from the Playset. Once you’ve created a situation poised on the brink of juicy disaster, you define characters based on your choices.

  Once the Setup is done, you play out scenes, which focus on various characters in rotation. When it is your turn, you get to choose whether you want to Establish the scene (setting the nature of the scene, any obvious conflict, the location, and the characters on hand) or Resolve it (leaving the initial set-up to your friends, but deciding on whether the outcome is positive or negative for your guy). You can’t do both!

  Play is divided into two acts. As a rule of thumb, each act ought to take about an hour. At the end of Act One is the Tilt, where some interesting and crazy things show up to disrupt the story. At the end of Act Two is the Aftermath, where you learn the ultimate fate of all your characters. Usually the Setup takes fifteen minutes, and the Tilt and Aftermath take another fifteen minutes total. Your playing time will vary a bit.

  You’ll have a bunch of dice (four per player), and these are used throughout the game in different ways. The dice aid in The Setup, help determine scene outcomes, and pace the game – when half of them have been used, Act One ends, The Tilt is determined, and Act Two begins. When all of the dice have been used, Act Two is over and it’s time for the Aftermath.

  In Act One you meet your characters, learn what they are after, and take some first steps toward getting them what they want. When the first act ends (after half the dice have been used), you add The Tilt that further destabilizes the situation. Then Act Two begins.

  In Act Two, you drive toward clear goals for your characters – maybe quiet success, maybe theatrical revenge, or maybe just a warm place to sleep. After the last die has been used, you learn your respective characters’ fates and begin the Aftermath.

  The Aftermath is played as a montage, and once again the dice offer you a chance to reveal your character’s fate in a colorful, fast-paced and sometimes surprising conclusion.

  One Last Fucking Thing

  I tried to write these rules in a conversational style that suits the subject matter and the films it references. You can expect some foul language and salacious depictions of reprehensible behavior, which will likely be par for the course in play as well. If that sort of thing bothers you, this is probably not a game you will enjoy.

  Glossary

  Look. Personally I don’t give a shit. I know Marty’s a hard-on but you gotta do something. I don’t know; give the money back, say you’re sorry, or get the fuck out of here, or something ... it’s very humiliating, preaching about this shit ... I’m not laughing at this, Ray Bob, so you know it’s no fucking joke.

  Meurice, Blood Simple

  Act: A unit of play consisting of half the game. Act One is preceded by the Setup and followed by the Tilt. Act Two is preceded by the Tilt and followed by the Aftermath.

  Aftermath: The Aftermath occurs after Act Two. Played out in montage, the Aftermath gives everyone a chance to share their character’s glorious future. Outcomes are determined by rolling the dice you’ve accumulated throughout the game, totaling each color, and subtracting the lower total from the higher. Resulting big numbers are good (black seven, for example), while trending toward zero is very bad.

  Category: On each Playset table there are six general Categories. For example, on the object table there might be a Weapon Category. Each Category, in turn, has six specific Elements. These are chosen during Setup.

  Detail: A Detail can be an Object, a Need, or a Location. It is always attached to a Relationship. You define them during the Setup by general Category and specific Element (like “Object: Weapon: Klingon Sword”, for example), and the game revolves around them. Things injected at the Tilt are also a special sort of Detail.

  Dice: Fiasco uses six-sided dice in a couple of different ways. They are a pacing mechanism, and an initial stockpile of four per player will gradually be reduced by half (ending Act One and triggering the Tilt) and then to zero (ending Act Two and triggering the Aftermath). In individual scenes, players will either choose or receive a single die whose color signals positive or negative outcome. During the Tilt and Aftermath, each color is added together and the smaller total is subtracted from the higher. Having a high number in either white or black is desirable, and in fact might save your poor guy’s life in the Aftermath. A matched set of black and white dice is the kiss of death, or at least the kiss of powerful hurt.

  Element: On each Playset table there are six general Categories, and within each Category are six specific Elements. Within the Weapon Category on the Object list, for example, there might be “a K-frame revolver”. These are chosen during Setup.

  Establish: One of the two ways you can approach your guy’s scene – by framing it up, deciding who is involved, what it is about and where it is going down. If you choose to Establish, your friends get to Resolve.

  Playset: The heart of a good fiasco – a combination of setting, situation, sub-genre, and kick in the pants. A Playset consists of four lists – Relationships, Needs, Objects, and Locations. The last three are collectively known as Details, and they are attached to particular Relationships.

  Relationship: The game’s core – the reason two characters are connected. Your character will have different Relationships with the characters played by your friends on your right and left at the table.

  Resolve: One of the two ways you can approach your guy’s scene – by allowing your friends to Establish, you can enjoy being surprised by how they frame the scene. In exchange for giving up that control, you get to decide whether the outcome is positive or negative for your guy – to Resolve the scene.

  Setup: The prep stage for a Fiasco session, in which you choose a Playset, establish Relationships, attach Details to them, create characters, and figure out exactly what is going on.

  Tilt: The Tilt occurs when half the game’s dice have been allocated, which means when half the scenes have been played, immediately after Act One. In a four player game, the Tilt happens after eight scenes. It’s when you learn what will happen to destabilize an already chaotic situation. Something might catch on fire, or someone might be arrested, or something really unfortunate might be accidentally left in a bus terminal to be found by the FBI. Tilt Elements can come into play at any time during Act Two – usually right away!

  The Setup

  The Basics

  Choose a Playset.

  Roll a bunch of dice into a central pile.

  Develop a web of Relationships and Details.

  Create characters attached to those Relationships and Details.

  Put all the dice back into a central pile.

  How It Works

  I’ve been to prison once; I’ve been married − twice. I was once drafted by Lyndon Johnson and had to live in shit-ass Mexico for two and a half years for no reason. I’ve had my eye socket punched in, a kidney taken out and I got a bone-chip in my ankle that’s never gonna heal. I’ve seen some pretty shitty situations in my life, but nothing has ever sucked more ass than this.

  Willie, Bad Santa

  Choose a Playset.

  The Playset is Fiasco’s core – from it you’ll draw situation, characters, and inspiration. Think of Playsets like trouble construction kits – you’ve got big lists of cool stuff, and each will have a flavor unique to its time and place.

  Playsets are divided into four lists. The lists reflect the things that will be central to your game – the stock elements. Relationships will be first and foremost, and they’ll be spiced up by Details that color and intensify Relationships. A Detail is always attached to a Relationship, and can be an Object, a Need, or a Location.

  The Playset lists, in turn, are broken down into six general Categories and six specific Elements within each Category. For example, in the Nice Southern Town Playset, general Category three of Locations is “Out by
the Interstate”, and within that list, number four is “The Quik-Pik gas station and convenience store”.

  Choose a Playset everyone is excited about, or make your own (there are four awesome ready-to-play Playsets in this book, and there’s advice on making your own, too).

  Roll a bunch of dice into a central pile.

  Once you’ve chosen a Playset, roll some dice in the middle of the table – four per player, two black and two white. Thus, you’ll be rolling 12, 16, or 20 dice, for three, four or five players, and they will be evenly split between black and white. It doesn’t matter who rolls – just make sure you start the Setup with a nice random assortment of numbers.

  Develop a web of Relationships and Details.

  You’ve now chosen a Playset stuffed with interesting things, and have a pile of randomly-rolled dice. The next step is to combine the two.

  Your particular game is going to have a bunch of specific bits associated with it, like “Location: The Suds and Duds Laundromat on Commerce Street” or “Relationship: Friends with benefits”. Together these will form the bones of your game. The guy you make will have a pair of Relationships with other people in the community, played by your friends to your right and left, and a Detail – a Need, Object, or Location − to help fill out his particular background.

  Start with the player who grew up in the smallest town and then take turns, building the web of information in rotation. You do this by looking over the Playset lists and grabbing a die from the central pile with a number that matches an Element you are interested in. If it’s for a general Category (Like “Location: Out by the Interstate”), write it on a new index card. If it is filling in a specific Element for a general Category already on the table (like “Location: Out by the Interstate: The Quik-Pik”), add that to the card to finish it. Leave a die you allocate on top of its card, just to keep everything organized. Since there will be one Relationship between each pair of players, you can simplify The Setup by starting with two index cards per player, and writing “Relationship” at the top of one of them).