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Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine
by Keith [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 12/25/2023 05:15:10

I get the feeling there's a good idea hidden in this but it's such a jumble to read through. The background images and background colours make reading it very difficult. I imagine I'll struggle on but I was very dissapointed.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine
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Glitch: A Story of the Not
by Edith F. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 10/10/2023 00:24:41

I got on the Nobilis train during Nobilis 3e, and then found Chuubo's, and then the Kickstarter. I read mostly the prerelease version of this for a long time, not bothering to update because the full version wasn't that different. I read it over and over and over, never really able to put it down for good, no matter what. I didn't end up actually looking at the release version until I had to redownload the book for a new computer.

All of this to say, thank you for adding the little section on the Strategists in Appendix A. I needed it. -nim



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Glitch: A Story of the Not
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Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine (ePub Bundle)
by Davide Q. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 07/19/2023 08:56:49

Too complicated, got headhace by reading it, moltiplicità of formats not understood. More a divertissement than a game to be really played.



Rating:
[1 of 5 Stars!]
Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine (ePub Bundle)
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Glitch: A Story of the Not
by Timothy M. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 04/18/2023 23:59:55

If you've played any verison of Nobilis, Glitch is the game about playing from the other side. If you have not played any version of Nobilis, Glitch is a game about being caught up in a struggle between two rather terrible groups of entities over existance itself. It is also a game for people who really want to have an extended philosophy discussion along with their improv storytelling.

It's certainly a thing I like, but be aware that it's not really like most other RPGs when deciding whether or not it might be yours.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Glitch: A Story of the Not
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Fortitude: the Glass-Maker's Dragon
by Emily B. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 01/22/2023 19:29:38

I mean, it's just beautiful. Singularly the most impressive RPG campaign I've ever experienced. It seems vague and impenetrable at first, and then you start playing, and you let these quests guide you (and the whole way quests work is wonderful just fyi) and you have "oh!" moment after "oh!" moment. It just flows. A work of art, honestly. A work of art about silly anime teenagers, but there's nothing wrong with that.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Fortitude: the Glass-Maker's Dragon
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The Flood
by nightpool .. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 08/27/2022 23:36:16

This is a game about the relentless financialization of farmland in the face of global capital, which it simulates by forcing you to take your favorite poems and commit horrible, horrible crimes upon them. But the poems are not a metaphor: the concept of farming meaning from poetry is one that's interwoven with the very fabric of the game, with late-game techniques like Agribot Post-Ophism and Stacked Vertical Poetics that you can use to optimize your verses' annual yield (and therefore, the money you need to survive).

It's honestly a very bleak and depressing game, but one still filled with humor and whimsy, turned towards an ultimately tragic ending. It's funny, it's heartbreaking, it's a work of art, and I think it needs a Twitch speedrunning community. Just like in Minecraft, where players spend tens of thousands of hours generating new random worlds, playing the game hundreds of times per day in an effort to find some version of the universe that will let them finish the game slightly faster than the last person—so to might one expect to play hundreds of games of The Flood before getting a glimpse of that perfect, shining golden land: a happy ending.

Imagine how many poems you would need.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
The Flood
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Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine
by Courtney D. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 07/13/2022 17:09:56

This book is a frustrating, confusing mess. Through all the verbose flowery text and wistful "You can do this, if you'd like," I struggled to actually see the parts of the game that mattered. Look, it has great presentation with its art and design being great. But I had to read reviews from other sites in order to understand just what the hell this game even is.

There's no character sheet, the example characters are purely conceptual. There's definitely some sort of character structure, but hell if this book lays it out in a way to intuitively understand. There's example skills that get lost in the pages of backstory intwined with them. It depends heavily on inspiring you with What-Ifs and open ideas but the mechanics are small sections hidden between massive walls of text. I've seen and played some systems that encourage creative uses of a character's two-word traits and skills (eg Risus and Amazing Tales) that have explained themselves in a fraction of the text and page-span of this.

My first reading was following along until it eventually got swamped by all these different genres and neat little "you could do this!" prompts and colourful symbols. I tried to skim the book but the layout didn't make it clear what was worth noting and what wasn't and the space wasting images only served to make scrolling take longer. There's an overview of play, even giving you page numbers to things as it explains itself. But sometimes there was no succinct summary of what X was, meaning I had to do even more page hopping to decipher what X meant to this game. At this point I just get fed up every time I try to read it.

For something that is supposed to be easygoing, evocative and emotional, it can only draw out my irritation.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine
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Glitch: A Story of the Not
by Chris V. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 06/04/2022 20:20:22

This book was exactly the kind of thing I did not know I wanted. After how great the Deceivers book was, I fully expected that it would be near impossible to do Strategists well, but I was truly stunned by how great this book ended up being.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Glitch: A Story of the Not
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Glitch: A Story of the Not
by Gregor S. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 04/28/2021 09:54:45

I have read a lot of TTRPG books that touched me on a fundamental level, but none, not a one ever felt so resonant as this one. Glitch: A Story of the Not has already moved me all over the emotional spectrum from just reading the thing. There is a lot to read to here, it's a big book! But all of it is amazing. I generally go for smaller, simpler games. PBTA is my jam. I don't usually have the attention span to get through such a tome, but Glitch is simply so excellently written, so packed full of vivid details and compelling philosophy, that I made it through this one no problem. This right here is a gamechanger. The rules can be a little loose, but they are clear where they need to be and the rest is flexibility. There is an incredible amount of freedom here that is still bounded enough and in the right places by the rules to keep the game on track and focused. The elaborate examples of play really help understanding how this game is supposed to run and they were the most true.to-life examples I have ever read. The players in these examples make mistakes and forget things and leave tons of loose ends all over the place. They get the rules wrong. This is obviously pointed out by the book so you know what the "correct" ruling would have been, but the point here is to show that these things, too, are a part of playing Glitch.

I am rambling, I'm sorry. It is difficult for me to focus on any particular thing about Glitch because it is simply such a marvellous, special whole. This is one of those games that's worth buying even if you don#t think you'll ever get aorund to playing it, it's that good. But you should ABSOLUTELY play it, too. Because the play experience is absolute Gold. This game goes from knee-slappingly funny to absolutely disastrously (but beautifully) sad in no time flat and I love it so much.

So what is it even about. Here's my two cents. Glitch is about disability and coping. It is also about being a divine, epically powerful harbinger of destruction, called an Excrucian Strategist, albeit one who has given up on destruction is trying not to fall off the bandwagon. Each PC is a member of a self-help group for world-destroying monsters who don't want to destroy the world. And they are also so achingly human. This is a game in which the average character can easly do a bunch of really impressive, cinematic stuff and if they push themselves can be a wondrous storm of change and destruction, but may on any given day, not manage to shower or hydrate. The Strategists are comically tragic people, all dying all the time of an Infection that is unique to them and causes the world to break them. They have every reason to want to fight back. But it is also futile. And in the end, perhaps the best thing they can do is just try to make the best of their situation, whatever that may mean for them individually.

I don't think any TTRPG character I ever made has ever been so relatable to myself as this not-quite-a-person with the falling stars in their eyes that can turn themself into a Kaiju and go on a rampage, but also lives in utter chaos, because cleaning your room taxing in a way that miracles generally aren't helpful with.

That's the kind of game this is. And I don't think I will ever find one that I will love more than this.

On Nobilis: I played Nobilis before, another game by Jenna Moran and the game where the setting of Glitch originated. Ever since those days, I always wanted to play an Excrucian. With Glitch that's finally a real possibility. I did not expect to want to be a Strategist out of all of them, but Glitch recontextualises them in a way that has catapulted them to the top of my list of entities in Nobilis. If you've played Nobilis before, I should say, I haven't actually played a lot of it. I always read more of it than I played, because I found playing it very taxing. The possibility space was simply way too big at any given time. There were too many options! And in miraculous combat my brain would simply overheat trying to think of all the ways miraculously empowered enemies could counter my every move and ruin me. Glitch does not have this issue. Miraculous conflict in Glitch is remarkably freeing, dynamic and fun for the simple reason that tactics aren't really a thing there. You can certainly still win a fight simply by devising the perfect miracle if you're the kind of person who can do that. But you don't have to be that kind of person in this. In this, all you need to do to win, if you want to win, is to pay for it by overtaxing yourself with miracles and actions that are dramatic and difficult for your character. This approach works so incredibly well. And it fixes the main problem that has always held me back from fully enjoying Nobilis.

So if you bounced off Nobilis for being too obtuse, too free, too daunting: Give Glitch a shot. It has all the good stuff, but is so much easier to manage.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Glitch: A Story of the Not
by Jordan D. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 03/19/2021 10:48:38

I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to play or run Glitch- previous works in this line, like Nobilis and Chuubo's, stayed on my shelf for years before I ever got a chance to actually introduce my friends to them. But much like those works, you just need to read Glitch to recognize immediately that this is the kind of experience that you absolutely cannot get anywhere else. When the stars finally align and a game does come together, you're not going to forget it anytime soon.

Speaking of shelves, Glitch is a very attractive book and I recommend getting a print copy if you're the sort of person who enjoys having pretty books around. Even the digital editions are quite fun to read, helped in large part by the copious full-page illustrations of demigods dying of absolutely ridiculous things (personal favorite: Vilita Skaudus). As always, the author's microfiction and ability to spin tangents is a treat.

If you enjoy a little introspection about the nature of fiction and created worlds, I recommend picking up this book to read it. If you also like having a pretty book on your shelf, I think the printed book is worthwhile. If you're feeling a little burnt-out on traditional RPGs and would like to try something kinda crazy and different with your regular group, this is definitely an option you should consider.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Glitch: A Story of the Not
by John F. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 03/19/2021 01:23:00

[Excerpted from my personal blog]

I think most people, if asked to boil Jenna Moran's work down to a single word would describe it as "whimsical." There's a lot of that here. There's a character in this book who is "dying of trademark infringement" - fate conspires that her actions just happen to strongly resemble those of a "famous idol" with a similar name, and the universe punishes her for her unintentional plagiarism. There's another character whose title is "The Prince of the French Fry that Fell in the Corner." At one point he saves the universe (though the canonicity of this is dubious - it was in one of the always delightful microfictions that are a Jenna Moran signature). If you're coming to this for the whimsy, you're going to find it.

However, Glitch made me think, and I'm persuaded that a better word for Ms Moran's body of work is "intricate." The good kind of intricate, mostly. The kind of intricate that demonstrates craftsmanship and care, that you largely marvel at because of the elegance of its many interlocking parts. But also the kind of intricate where material you're reading on page 320 would have come in really handy for understanding concepts introduced on page 30. Also, sometimes, if it's late and you're a little zonked from the time change, you'll have no fucking clue what's going on.

As a follow-up to Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine it's fascinating. Chuubo's was a singular accomplishment that will likely never be repeated, but I think it's fair to say that the thing it accomplished was to expose the superstructure of rpgs as a storytelling medium and point the way towards designing new games that took its insights to heart. Glitch is exactly that sort of game. It owes a lot to Chuubo's, but it's not Chuubo's.

In many ways, it's a strictly superior game. When it directly inherits a concept, that concept is usually subtly improved. For example, "genre actions" have been replaced by "spotlighting." If you read closely, spotlights replicate a lot of what genre actions actually did, but they're presented as more abstract and more like a character power than a player obligation. You use a spotlight to make the GM or another player stop and elaborate on whatever they were just talking about. The specifics of what they're supposed to do with the spotlight are often similar (for example, Chubbo's epic fantasy genre had the "Decisive Action" where you're supposed to give a speech about what you're going to do, and then do it and Glitch allows you to "spotlight a test" and buy an automatic success if the character gives a speech about what they're about to do), but the difference in framing, and, heck, the new, more evocative name, make the concept a lot more attractive.

Similarly, there's a change to the quest system that is, quite frankly, inspired. Now, players take turns being the "focus" of a session. You can only advance your storyline quests while your character is the focus, but for the duration of the session, so can the other players. They can trigger your quest flavor options and earn one xp for you and one xp for themselves. The implications for player investment in each others' stories is staggering to contemplate. I am positively salivating for the next edition of Nobilis.

Which brings us to . . . not exactly the downside of Glitch, but let's call it a "caveat." Glitch is weird. Even for a Jenna Moran game it's weird. You may have noticed that I've not yet explained what Glitch is about. That's because what it's about is roughly 3-layers deep of Moran-verse self-referential. People think Glass Maker's Dragon is insular, but there's only one thing you need to know about Glass Maker's Dragon - and that's that we'd all gladly die to protect our Best Boi Leonardo de Montreal (or Seizhi Schwan or Jasper Irinka or, hell Chuubo himself - that is one damned charming campaign).

However, for Glitch I have to take several steps back. So, there's this game called Nobilis, and in that game you play people with the power of universal concepts. A character is something like "The Power of Fire" and you've got a broad ability to define what that means, getting as weird and as epic as you want. Set whole worlds on fire? Yes. Light a fire in someone's heart and convince them to pursue their dreams? Sure. Grant humanity the Promethean fire and boostrap it into a new age of technological plenty? If that's what "fire" means to you and the rest of the group doesn't rebel at you hijacking the setting, knock yourself out.

Now, the Nobilis have enemies. They're not just out there in the cosmos doing cool shit, there's a war going on. There's a faction called "The Excrucians." Their goal is to destroy the universe and their powers are beefy enough that they're uncowed by the frankly ludicrous strength of Creation's defenders.

With me so far? Good, because there are actually four types of Excrucians, and they all approach things a little differently. Deceivers have these infectious self-referential paradoxes that they use to corrupt the things of Creation. Mimics wield roughly the same powers as the beings that empowered the Nobilis, but in doing so they make a mockery of the laws of the universe. Warmains will just directly fuck your shit up. And then there's Strategists, with their signature power of The Worldbreaker's Hand, which can make things, even the abstract properties of ordinary objects, just not exist anymore, and because of this dread power they enter Creation doomed to die, usually pretty quickly, only to come back again and again in an endless cycle of resurrection.

Glitch is about the Strategists. But not the Excrucians. It's about the Strategists who decide to drop out of the war and live their doomed lives as best they can. They're still dying. They still share the Excrucian's fundamental conviction that Creation is a crime against the Void. But instead of attempting to slaughter the Powers that defend the universe, they solve mysteries.

That doesn't even begin to really describe the game. That's just what you need to know before you can say whether you're interested in what the massive expansion in canon will explain.

And honestly, you should be interested. It's very interesting. It's alternately funny and scary and thought-provoking, and Jenna's "wise, with a smirk" voice is used as artfully as it's ever been. But . . .

In Jenna Moran's own words, "You can think of Glitch as a kind of improv ethical philosophy and comedy jam session."

And that's . . . It's . . . Are you trying to sell the game or presage the exact parody your detractors are going to use to dismiss it as being made for absolute wankers?

There are several examples of play, and they're quite useful for understanding the game, but they are so arch and verbose that even I, no stranger to discursive quips and self-indulgent meandering, had to roll my eyes a couple of times. Even as I was being absolutely charmed by the wit, I was rolling my eyes.

Two out of the five attributes are called "Eide" and "Flore" and good luck guessing what they do (the other attributes are "Ability," "Lore," and "Wyrd," and they're not exactly straightforward, but at least they have existing fantasy provenance).

And look, I like this game. Quite a lot, actually. But if someone called it pretentious and impenetrable, I would not be able to deny the justice of those accusations. It's a niche within a niche and I'm actually kind of astonished that it exists at all.

But you shouldn't necessarily let the book's worst qualities scare you off. It will also take you to places that you've never dreamed of and show you things you'll see nowhere else. It's the double-shot espresso of fantasy. The things there are to love about the genre, Glitch has, more extreme and more specific than just about any alternative.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Glitch: A Story of the Not
by Zephaniah B. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 03/08/2021 22:40:37

i love this game very much

i could say more, but the other reviews say it better, so let me just say that: i love this game very much



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Fable of the Swan
by Vivian B. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 03/05/2021 11:36:45

So like...

This book is really, really good. It is liminal. It is divine. It's quite difficult to describe! There's a strong narrative voice attached to an equally strong narrator character. There's some heavy stuff going on, some very real adolescent girl struggles with sexually aggressive boys she feels she ought to be attracted to, with the sort of fuzzy I-don't-know-who-I-am-but-I-think-who-I-am-sucks identity crises teens so often go through.

It's also got a cold and iron god of Death, and giants, and magic and legends and a brass octopus with a dead lift of several tons.

Read the book!



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Fable of the Swan
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Glitch: A Story of the Not
by Tessa M. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 01/27/2021 18:41:45

This year I got to play a game of Glitch. This game will amaze you. It will bring you closer to strangers. It will improve your life, or at least your writing. This is only skirting shy of hyperbole from personal experience. This game creates bonds.

Underneath all the wonderful writing, the actual running engine is pretty simple, and even more intuitive to play than read. Everything comes back to Cost, which builds up as you take damage, attempt to file taxes, and use your sweet void-entity powers, and goes down when you take time to recover or earths in Wounds if you need a lot gone at once because you hit the cap, for instance. There are no dice; if you want something, all you need to do is be willing to pay for it.

Each of the powers is a narrative moment in it's own right, from characterisation flair to concept defence to capstone, and combined with the attentional direction of the Spotlight system this gives you and every other player a massive amount of control over the story you're collaboratively creating. Plot beats that are detrimental to the character are fun. Failing is fun. This is a game where being Worfed is fantastic, because it lets you show how serious the stakes are for the group's comeback, and hey, if you're not down for it, you can always convert the problem into that nebulous Cost. The game's Wound system encourages you to create fun problems for yourself; being a disappointment has mechanical advantage. All of this makes the moments when you choose to do something super cool (and you can do some balls to the wall amazing things even automatically) even better. You don't have to worry about permanently dying - even the Ending Book mostly exists so you can close out your character's story in a way that makes sense - so you can just run face first into things, it's great. Whenever I'd get stuck, I'd run up and down the power list and inspiration would leap out.

Everything hangs together, everything flows even with the eddies and messiness of actual play, it's just really fun. This will be folded in my heart as a treasured memory.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Glitch: A Story of the Not
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Glitch: A Story of the Not
by Jonathan C. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 12/29/2020 00:34:12

Last session, I killed my friend and maybe love interest, who is a clown. Next session, I expect to ride with a flaming spear of violence against a war criminal and nemesis, who is a badger. In between, I have been thinking long and hard about the nature of identity, and how the manifold ways we try to flee from the past, limping bloody and burned into a future that can promise us at best a tired, quiet survival. It's possible, if the prose daunts you, to skip right over it and play a perfectly sensible game about retired void-god detectives. I think that, even if you tried, and didn't read any of the microfictions and skimmed all the rest of the text, you would end up playing a powerfully compelling game. Glitch is a game of Strategists, each dying of a bespoke curse, but that's not why Rule 1 of the game brought me to tears. Glitch is a game that suits itself to philosophical monologues mixed with comic breaks from reality, but it's not about that. Glitch is a game about not dying.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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