Literally came out about over a year late from promised release. But besides that, this is an underwhelming splatbook for a bad game in its own right. And certainly not worth the wait.

Decent ideas, but crippled by a lack of examination and follow-through on the tremendous potential of scifi tropes it attempts to interact with. Certain important or highly interesting plot points are either underdeveloped or simply not interacted with, and the setting comes off as a confused muddle. Also uses the awful ""Kardashev scale"" which is a practically meaningless level of measure of development.

This is a polished gem of a game that is so simple to run that I think anyone could have fun with it. It relies heavily on procedures which are outlined well in the main book, and the central premise of following gentry sword masters and their beloveds over a single social season keeps the pacing tight and fun!

The variety of randomly rolled beloveds and possible scenes ensures a strong amount of replay value even if the same group comes back to run several one-shots.

The humor and writing are also suburb and had several of my player joyously reciting favorite lines that they encountered over the session.

I backed this game on Kickstarter, as it's a genre I really like (but rarely play), yet was clearly being approached very much tongue in cheek. And I love it.

I've seen it described as “Bridgerton, only extremely violent” but I found it a bit more nuanced than that. There’s a great deal of Three Musketers and Romeo & Juliet, with the romance and sword play and divided loyalties, but there's a touch of Baron Maunchausen, with the silliness of the setting, and the bravado of characters bragging. A touch of cowardly Flashman perhaps. A pinch of Blackadder. Maybe even some Hamilton, if you want to sing along with your duels to the death. And it's actually been reminding me of some reality TV shows, with a cast of entitled posh folk constantly falling into and out of relationships, and having arguments with each other. All set in the fictional olde city of Vindamere (“a jewel of vice upon a harlot’s powdered throat,” “the shiniest blemish on the nation’s face” and “a sty of unrepentant civic vice and bottomless financial corruption”) set in an undisclosed country, but possibly as accurate as any city depicted by Shakespeare.

It looks the perfect game for a 'messy' one-shot of comedy and faux-tragedy.

Each player controls their main character, the tutor of a fencing school, who is hard to kill and remove from the game (though it's not impossible), and the various 'Beloved' characters that orbit them, students, friends, even family, who are much easier to have killed off and die dramatically. The Beloved characters can be stolen by other players once they become more devoted to their duelling fop, at which point they move over to your school. There are only four stats to keep on top of (or, technically, two sliding scales, with Foppish poised against Serious, and Duelling poised against Aristocratic, that you'll want to ensure don't max out in any direction - the main way your main character can be removed from the game), plus keeping note of all the minor characters who are connected to your school.

It's GM-less, so the game has a vague script you follow, and then choices that are a little like the decisions in solo gamebooks (or the choices you get in computer games for branching narratives), except that once the player has rolled to determine whether they succeeded or failed they should narrate exactly how events unfold, elaborating on the details given by the script (so rather like Moves in PbtA games). There are a few scenes that must occur in the narrative, such as the opening ball, where your main character falls in love with another tutor's Beloved, and the climactic final act where duellists compete to win a fencing contest, but then a whole bunch of optional scenes that can be dropped in: secret meetings, rowdy pub brawls, murder mysteries, people running away to get married, duels to the death to demand satisfaction, revolutions, even a Faustian pact or two. I especially like how the results of certain actions allow you to add an additional amusing title to your name, or on rare occasions force you to adopt an alternative identity altogether and switch your whole name to some specific silly name, after commiting a terrible crime and re-entering society with a fake moustache, adopting a ridiculous accent for the rest of the game.

I've got it to the table just once, and we had a blast, though there were a few points where the rules weren't exactly clear (as if it hadn't been thoroughly playtested). However, it's easy enough to house rule, and this is a game that immediately struck me as fun to hack so that the same idea of charming but competing protagonists with a random grab bag of followers or allies can be applied to various genres: pirates, cultists, international spies, etc.

Well worth checking out, though the price might feel a little on the high side.

TL;DR - My RP group took a break from our main campaign to give this a whirl, and a week later, we're still talking about how much fun we had. Can't recommend it enough.

The Long Version:

My RP group only has one night a week together, and even then, we've got about three hours max before one of us falls asleep (working dads, check). We had a week recently where one of our players was unavailable, so it presented a great opportunity to try something new. Enter Dueling Fops of Vindamere.

We got through a full game in just about two hours, which was perfect. It probably helped that a few of us got together for a half-game dry run the night before, but this was done more out of necessity for our group since our "play" time is limited, and we wanted to maximize our fun on game night instead of figuring it out. Whether you do a dry run or not, most groups should really be feelin' the groove by their second game of Fops. It was on the second / full game that we really started leaning into our characters and taking extreme offense to petty stuff. Made things a lot of fun.

We had a good time with three people, but once we added a fourth, it seemed to be the tipping point for things getting bonkers (in the best way). Part of that is probably more confidence / familiarity on our second playthrough too. There were one or two scenes where we weren't quite clear on what to do, but Fops includes "Ye Rule of Democratic Liberty" which means a consensus by the group allows play to proceed as the group wants. This makes it easy for players to contort the story events around any whoopsies. For the final scene, it also helped us make our bracket decisions based on what would be most thematically appropriate / funniest / off the rails. So this feedback isn't really "some things weren't clear" so much as it is "this game was super flexible and remained lots of fun even when we were a little confused because too much beer."

Setup and PC creation is as easy as rolling dice, though you can complicate things by making up your own names for stuff if you want. You have your own character, but our group really got attached to our Beloveds, who are randomly assigned, and come with names like "Alluring Enamorata", "Bitter Daughter" and "Goofy-Faced Failson," making them immediately endearing. They can, and often do, steal the show, but that's all for the best as it effectively gives you a few characters to play with in each scene (unless one of the scoundrels you're playing with lures a Beloved away from you). It's not a lot to juggle, as most scenes only offer a single action per character, which helps keep gameplay moving. For a new game, you can ditch your previous characters or bring them along (assuming they survived, of course).

For what it's worth, this was also relatively straightforward for me (an inexperienced GM) to set up on my own in Roll20 after some basic guidance (and committing some time to uploading documents, but this is Roll20's issue, not Fops'). I was able to share out the scenes with players as they came up, and put together a stats cheat sheet in Excel to share over Zoom so everyone could see everyone else's stats / beloved status. Again, the Excel sheet was more out of necessity for my group to keep track of everything as not everyone has access to a printer or a PDF program in which they can edit values on the fly. You likely will not need one if your players have access to Adobe or a printer (Fops comes with a nifty character sheet for your rakehell).

Can't recommend this enough for a group looking for something completely different to fill a couple of sessions with your usual gang, or as a one-off palette cleanser for an ongoing campaign. It's not too bawdy, but much like Cards Against Humanity, you're going to get the most laughs with the people you know best, so YMMV if you're trying this with a new group. Once you're familiar with the gameplay, you could probably get two or three full games in, depending how long your group has to play.

As I said at the top - we're still talking about our Fops' exploits even after resuming our main campaign, so I'm sure we'll be revisiting Vindamere for more laughs soon.

This game knows what it wants to do and does it very well. It's tightly focused with quite a bit of inherent pvp so it's not going to be easily adaptable to other campaigns.

Your only stats are two paired values: foppish/serious and duelling/aristrocrat. The sum of each pair always equals 10. For example, if your duelling goes up, your serious goes down. If any socre hits zero, you've left the foppish duelling scene.

The game progresses through a series of scenes where players try to stay alive, steal followers from each other, and weather the harsh world of the idle rich. The structure gives it a feel between an rpg and a boardgame and the whole campaing should play out in 1-2 sessions.

I love the humor throughout this book! The book at once mocks the Fop way of life, while also helping to encourage the players to do so as well, by leaning into the Foppishness as much as possible.

I love, too, the structure of the game, and its effectively episodic nature.