Flabbergasted is a game by Fleur Sciortino and Chelsea Sciortino. Game material and content is reproduced here for review purposes and is owned by The Wanderer's Tome. Flabbergasted has benefited from a crowdfunding campaign.
1. Every Individual Component Is The Best
Ludo
Gorgeous book, amazing art, clean layout. Everything on point, on purpose, evokes the theme and I never had trouble finding something. It accomplishes every goal it set upon itself and is a quite pleasant read.
Brad
It really is a gorgeous piece of tabletop medium, evocative without being busy and accomplishing every single goal it sets out to.
2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At
Lucrécia
The game is quite approachable, with little assumptions required. You are comedic protagonists in a Roaring 20s comedy show. Done! Mechanics are easy to remember and internalize, and surprisingly cognitive light.
Making a comedic TTPRG is difficult1, with most of them telling the jokes at you or being a list of prompts. Flabbergasted knows its challenge, knows its assignment, and offers techniques and design choices that facilitate the creation of a culture of play conductive to this .However, you need to buy in if this is going to work2 — it is the premise after all.
It is however, a saccharide version of the 20s, where the aristocracy have to lower themselves more into contact with other people… because new job opportunities decreased the wage gap and created a more equitable society. Yes, that’s definitely the 20s3.
Even This does not come up as an out of touch design choice like it did in our The Troubleshooters critic. No, this is not believing that the 20s at that, it comes with the game requiring it to be seen as that by the characters — and to the players when inhabiting them. This is not a hyperreal theme park of the 20s — this is the energy of a goofy, optimistic comedy that could have been done in the Roaring 20s, just like someone would make one about our 20s and just like most of our media ignores the nightmares coming in around 2029s, this ignores the crashing down of the lies of the period. Does not come up as an omission, but as a careful decision which becomes an assumption to make the game work.
Brad
This game is a light-hearted look at the madness of the narrowing working classes with the rich in a 1920’s that never was. This is a game that is designed to facilitate an easy laugh and a quick wit at the table. The game seems to have a good working knowledge of its identity, pointing out how it specifically invokes and evokes aspects of its inspiration in the text.
I am woefully unfamiliar with this matter, but that's never stopped me before.
3. Identify What The Game Says It Is About
Ludo
Flabbergasted is about hijinks and comedic nonsense amongst the high society of the Roaring 20s. Play one of of four class archetypes4. You are part of a Social Club around your shared special interests, and you keep trying to uphold your standing in society. There are no Secret Societies.
Brad
Flabbergasted is about goofs and gaffes, primarily those formed by the unique inter-mingling of stratified classes of people.
4. Uncover What The Game Is REALLY About
Lucrécia
TTRPGs are not theatre.
Because of certain adjacent media and art to TTRPGs, and being openly embraced by some new games, including some darlings, no, you are not there performing little plays for each other or doing improv. Such things may happen as part of the social collaboration project, but that is an adjacent art, not the art itself.
What when it is a TTRPGs about one of those adjacent arts? Not something that is wearing the trappings of theatre with scripted plays and dramatis personae, is a one thousand words NASA trash pile glued together as a bit-slash-performance-piece where the rules are “yes and” and assume everyone playing is interested in doing improv instead, or emulation as trying to do in one art what another does or has a theme related to another art, like a Powered by the Apocalypse game about Shakespearean thespians putting up a play.
What when a game is art, our artform which we critic, the art of TTRPGs, the art of collaborative storytelling, uses another artform to tell something about all artforms involved, and more?
Those are pretty rare. Final Bid does it amazingly, with collaborative storytelling and cinema5. Flabbergasted stands out too, another example that breaks through the clusters of mimicry, emulation, thematic aesthetics or just plain embarrassed to artistically present themselves as TTRPGs.
Flabbergasted plays with theatre in the way it is made, the way it plays, the way it flows. It is messier and not as brash in presenting itself as so — its themes aim, as mentioned before, televised comedic period pieces6. So, it is a game using a talk between collaborative storytelling and dramaturgy to talk about cinema and television. What is there not to love about this experiment? You’re pretty much guaranteed to get something out of it.
Okay, but how does it works? Well, Social Clubs and Secret Societies are how this conversation gets going on, game session to game session, without getting on each other toes or coming off as domineering. The Social Club to which the players belong to creates a natural “stage”, where they perform — where their character performs, socially, their interests and who they are. This creates different natural scenes, sets on the stage and so on, that are both fabricated by the collaborative storytelling done by players and the social acting and performances by their characters. On this you drop your characters, playing perfectly fit, versatile archetypes; through important Scene Cues, dialectics happen between game mechanics, collaborative narrative and thespian indulgency — it keeps putting you in a situation, pushing your social standing and immediately putting you in further situations as scenes change. The game system does what it does, and when allowed to do it, it is one hell of a rush.
Brad
Alright readers, it’s time to ask a question, have you ever been part of a secret voting bloc? Not in the various threats to democracy sense, but in the simpler “My ttrpg group is voting to determine what game we should play next and if its Dragon Game 3.5 again I’ll set myself on fire, so I’ll talk to the other players about this.”
This is a long way of saying that Flabbergasted a game about a group of people from different groups with different ideas and abilities is really a game about the TTRPGs and the groups that form around them. There will be society and then secret society and the funny parts of “Me and Kayla went out drinking last week, but the topic kept circling around to ______7 “ and this is where the game truly starts to work as a comedy.
You know these situations, not identically but the hilarious parts of cultural bearings and working their way through it. Flabbergasted isn’t about TTRPGs in a big dramatic oh so deep way, its about how funny it is to organize a group of people around a weird hobby, and that rules.