MEGALOS (Part 1)

MEGALOS is a game by Matty. Game material and content is reproduced here for review purposes and is owned by matara makes games. MEGALOS was the beneficiary of a crowdfunding campaign.

Ludo

It will be immediately apparent is that MEGALOS had an absurdly tiny budget. It can barely cover the print and distribution run of a zine. And yet, you get a 350 pages rulebook, for a crunchy game, with a fitting layout and art, with some art-direction, with zero feature-bloat, a game-gamey and you did not have to wait five years for it. In every single aspect, outperforming every single indie and “indie” darling crowdfunded project out there in what you get for your generosity and trust.

Despite the layout being busy sometimes, it is clean enough that finding particular information is not so as difficult as most books in this artform. The art direction is, as I mentioned, better than the average project1, but can still be inconsistent at places. But alas, these are things more materially supported projects struggle with, so doing so well in these aspects is already an outstanding feat.

Where it does not give an inch is in the effort poured into game design. The design of the game is meticulous. You can feel how carefully weighted and considered every option has been laid out; you can see what you could be, but it is also done with no cutoff points where you can see the missing pieces — what is, is a whole. Every single page contributes to establish a powerful framework and system that makes MEGALOS be.

It is a steal.

Brad

MEGALOS is a fantastic example of doing what you can when you can. The layout is not perfect, but you can see the love and work poured into making the whole games layout the best layout it can be. The same can and should be said for art direction, which is good enough but never great.

The game is 350 pages jam-packed with mechanics and playability, and the pages do their maximum to make that information both absorbable and referable which is a worthwhile effort to say the least, and was in my experience, perfect workable.

Lucrécia

This is a fantasy game that draws on familiar expectations of the adventurer genre, but trying to avoid the assumptions of this artform about adventurers and adventuring.

The game assumes accepting the conventions of crystalpunk/aetherological fantasy. That is, magic that is not magic, science that is not science; what is for ease called magic has rules and principles, well-studied and predictable phenomena, that behave like the positivist principles of Enlightenment-born science for us2. So fantasy where the fantasy is a world build of different rules, with different outcomes, but still creating a social knowledge that is just like the one we recognize — the same as the hegemonic culture imposed on us. Everything — we are told, — has an explanation, an order3.

MEGALOS is about stories centered about those exploited and suffering for the maintenance of the status quo4; that, of course, brings a lot of things that need to be carefully unpacked for safety and comfort. More important, it flips the meaning of adventurer outside of more ubiquitous in the art-form adventurer-conquistador: adventurers in MEGALOS are a dispossessed underclass, that magictech society requires their exploitation and the untasteful jobs they do to function. As essential as the aether that powers their magical machines.

Finally, MEGALOS uses combat as sentences through which it communicates its artistic ideas; this is a game for those interested in combat. You need to be willing to embrace it to get the best of this book.

Brad

MEGALOS is about the crystalpunk game that your first jrpg inspired in your head, a game about magic being science and looking rad with fantastic crystals. There are clear rules for these crystals, as simple and examinable as basic scientific principles. This world has a clear order of adventurers, who are heroes chosen to undertake massive risks for reasons known only to them and their communities.

Ludo

MEGALOS is a crystalpunk tabletop roleplaying game of aetherological fantasy. It centers its fantasy in tactical combat, intrigue, and adventure. As mentioned before, it has the punk stage and center. Questing is a form of mutual aid between the people that have lived for a millennium among the fallout of a magical catastrophe. While under the constant threat of an imperialist power, recent developments have allowed them to visit, explore and settle parts of their world and past that had been denied to them for countless generations. It is a dangerous endeavor, and what adventurers must do, for all sorts of reasons — learn about your ancestors, stop a danger to your community, secure essential resources, etc.

Meanwhile, the imperial power is being aggressive in its colonization and conquest, ready to exploit dangerous energies and ready to use this opportunity to exploit all peoples of the region. Everything you do in MEGALOS is a wrench in their plots.

Brad

MEGALOS is a game about living the punk in crystalpunk, using your power to explore things forbidden to you, and using your might to both continue exploring and to strike at oppressors.

Lucrécia

MEGALOS is about telling science-fantasy punk stories through a synthesis of TTRPGs and MMOs.

Considering how much modern TTRPGs try to draw back from the art-form of video games you would think MMOs would be a prime wheel for drawing from: they are, after all, different art-forms that allow cooperative collaborative storytelling that is enhanced by the limits of a ruleset. But no, that is far from the case. MMOs and TTRPGs only connect in either IP licensing tokens, aesthetic mimicry, or indirectly through non cooperative cooperative intermediaries of isekai/LitRPG genres.

I always felt like there was something missing, some opportunity loss by not looking into how either media does the cooperative cooperative part5. MEGALOS proves my suspicious rights. This game inhabits the space of MMOs, but in many ways that are not immediate. In the social knowledge, in the socialization, in how it handles adventurers and quests, in how it approaches combat, etc. Not aesthetic dress-up, not route emulation; the syncretism of a deep love for both MMOs and RPGs, looking at how one can feed into the other.

And mostly, how MMOs have been killed. Like the source of the worst things afflicting the world of MEGALOS, MMOs have been made worse to live in and outright destroyed by capitalism. Conventional Wisdom (TM) of entertainment executives considers MMOs as a genre past its irrelevancy. It is a type of game I always loved; there was something about the social aspect in combination with a game that was much healthier to my disabilities and neurodivergences than, say, social media. In a funny way, despite the pivoting to life-services collectatons open world sandbox games as the “New MMO” — and definitely damaging to the diversity of the genre, — the internet becoming four websites and everything having to be integrated back into social media, probably did more to kill the unique features of the social aspects of cooperative collaborative storytelling of MMOs in favor of other aspects.

The MMOs that still linger do so for different reasons. Activision-Blizzard-Microsoft keeps up two versions of World of Warcraft as a subscription-nostalgia Funko Pop life-service-like corpse-puppet of the old khan of khans. Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online, endure by successfully doing their own thing, not pursuing the cooperative collaborative storytelling and social structures of MMOs of yore; they are action RPGs, more akin to something like Warframe. Of the big dogs, Final Fantasy XIV is the one happily shrugging along, an anachronism somehow playing chicken murderdodgeball with the perfidious incompetent executive board of Square Enix6. It may be to no surprise how much of the enduring chocobo-that-could made into MEGALOS' examination of the unique way MMOs tell stories — and how they fail at it — and bring it to TTRPGs, enriching our art-form.

Capitalism is an evil that cannot stop leaking into MMOs, either from the meta aspects of the game industry that have essentially killed MMOs as a genre, or in the long-standing storylines woven inside a game. But all too often they don’t even realize they are telling stories about capitalism. MEGALOS, is aware of this inability to perceive what is so close to them, and makes it central to its world conflict.

This coalescence is further enhanced by leaning on its robust combat system.

Storytelling in MEGALOS is done mostly through combat, and for that, you need a pleasant combat system. It has a fantastic one, built around three classes, that you can customize to different roles — reminiscent of the classic defense, damage and support triangle. The action-initiative system offers interesting decisions while making elite enemies always feel a cut above the rest of the opposition and avoids any trap options. Even in combat it performs a flawless synthesis with the way both artforms do things.

Brad

MEGALOS is a game whose theme really is “Magitech as Tech”. This might sound reductionist, but it rules and isn’t.

In almost every other piece of media involving Magitech, you will see the same tropes, huge wonderful airships, cool magic mechas, and cities full of tech compared to rural communities that look positively cottage-core.

Isn’t that weird? That you could have airships and mechs and yet Farmer Bob is still tilling the fields with a giant horsebird? The fact that you see most people having to walk everywhere and yet there are magick-mobiles in the big city that you can use as a taxi?

Some media answer these questions incidentally, but usually, they are ignored in favor of the rule of cool, or simply that the writer hasn’t considered it. Megalos centers its adventuring in a world where much like ours, there are no tools that will guarantee liberation, and instead simply tools that will create new and horrible situations and its so fascinating to finally have a game to facilitate asking that question.