Revenants Return And Return Again

Beyond death there is a place of waiting, somewhere between the world of the living and the afterlife. This is Limbo and were it not for the fact that it is staffed by demons and ghouls, you would be hard-pressed to mistake it for anything other than a dentist’s waiting room, complete with beige walls and magazines and newspapers on the table. You are dead, but according to Greta, the administrative demon working your case file, not ready to pass on to wherever the soul goes to. You have a task to resolve. Perhaps you need to bring your own killer to justice, prevent an unexpected death, or complete some other unfinished business. Doing so will stop a Shattering Event that would otherwise trap you here permanently, and prevent you from passing on. Yet you only have limited time—four nights, each night awaking to find yourself back where you started—before that Shattering Event occurs and when you return you are still dead. Dead as the day your corpse was committed to the grave or left to rot undiscovered and missing. Thus, you must navigate the world of the living in the shadows as the undead, swathed in perfumes to hide the stench of decay and formaldehyde and wreathed in clothes to hide the signs. Worse, your memories have been disrupted and broken by your passing, and only by recovering what you cannot recall will come closer to preventing the Shattering Event. You are a Revenant and you have four nights in which to explore the last days of your life and stop the Shattering Event.

This is the set-up for The Revenant Society: The Endless Loop Beneath the City, a roleplaying game designed by Banana Chan and Sen-Foong Lim—best known for the highly regarded Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall from Wet Ink Games—and Julie Ahern. Published by Van Ryder Games, a company better known for its Final Girl and Hostage Negotiator board games, following a successful Kickstarter campaign, it is designed to be played by two to four players, plus a Fate Weaver (as the Game Master is known), aged fourteen and over. It is also a storytelling style game, using Powered by the Apocalypse, which can be played as a one-shot or as a mini-campaign of four, up to four-hour sessions. The core rulebook for The Revenant Society: The Endless Loop Beneath the City contains six scenarios that will play out in La Belle Époque Paris at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, or in Jazz Age New York, which play out in and around the Paris Métro and the New York Subway.

The Revenant Society: The Endless Loop Beneath the City Deluxe Box Set includes not just the core rulebook, but also a Fate Weaver Screen, maps of both Paris and New York, a Map of Intrigue for tying NPCs together, maps, a Loop Board, and six Playbook Boards. The Fate Weaver Screen lists the Fate Weaver’s Hard and Soft Moves, a Loop Event Generator, an NPC Generator, and a Location Generator. The maps of both Paris and New York are marked with their respective underground stations, whilst the Loop Board tracks the time clocks, events, and questions for the four Loops. It is double-sided, one side for a One-Shot, the other for a Mini-Campaign Loop. The six Playbooks are also double-sided and consist of ‘The Grizzled’, ‘The Compassionate’, ‘The Philosophical’, ‘The Diplomatic’, ‘The Hopeful’, and ‘The Glamourous’. Each of the Playbooks list the stats, Moves, and more, as well as having space for the player to fill out his Revenant’s background. Both the Playbooks and the Loop Board are write on/wipe off and The Revenant Society: The Endless Loop Beneath the City Deluxe Box Set comes with several pens suitable for that purpose. There are also miniatures for the Watchers, the supernatural creatures who will dog the efforts of the Revenants and a Team Miniature used to track the progress of the players and their Revenants across the four Loops. The thirty or so Memory cards, many of them period photographs, will be used by the players to prompt their Revenants’ memories.

A Revenant in The Revenant Society looks similar to other Playbooks in Powered by the Apocalypse roleplaying games. He has four Stats—Resolve, Nerve, Calm, and Vigour—ranging between -1 and +2, and a set of four Moves. For example, ‘The Grizzled’ has ‘Browbeat’ for coercing answers out of an NPC, ‘Supernatural Strength’ when using his extreme physical strength, ‘Body Part Substitution’ for replacing a part of his body with an item to reduce damage taken, and ‘Clumsy Brawler’ for fighting. ‘Body Part Substitution’ is the Undead Move for ‘The Grizzled’ and each Revenant has its own Undead Move. Beyond this, a Playbook has a lot of background details that the player fills in during preparation for play. The only mechanical choice that a player makes is to choose a beginning Move. The other choices he needs to make deal with his background and relationships with the other characters. All six of the Playbooks are built on archetypes and inspired by film and media. For example, ‘The Hopeful’ is either a factory worker, a hairdresser, or a telephone operator, and is inspired by the anti-nihilist and fool tropes, Waymond Wang from Everything, Everywhere, All At Once and Phil at the end of Groundhog Day.

The four Moves inherent to each Playbook are not the only Moves a Revenant has access to. Basic Moves include ‘Investigate’, ‘Blend In’, ‘Persuade’, ‘Struggle’, ‘Flee’, and ‘Dirt Nap’, and ‘Saving Grace’. ‘Dirt Nap’ is used when a Revenant wants to rest, whilst ‘Saving Grace’ is for helping another Revenant. There are also two Team Moves, ‘Burn This City’ and ‘Take Them Out’, which can only be performed when all of the Revenants are in the same location. They are drastic in nature, the first seeing the Revenants create a supernatural fire to disrupt the situation, the latter having the Revenants open a door to Limbo and push an NPC through and so kill them. The Fate Weaver has her own Moves, split between Hard Moves and Soft Moves. Both are designed to push the narrative along and might be to add a Watcher when a player rolls high on a Move, pass out a clue when a player is stumped, restart a Loop, and so on. Like the Revenants, Watchers have returned from Limbo, but they take pleasure in the Revenants’ failure. There can be up to four of these faceless creatures in play, their presence acting as a penalty on all dice rolls made by the Revenants and also highlighting the undead nature of the Revenants to the living.

Mechanically, The Revenant Society works like other Powered by the Apocalypse roleplaying games. A player chooses the Move he wants his Revenant to use, rolls two six-sided dice, and adds a Stat to the result. If a Revenant is at a location where he worked, he instead rolls three dice and chooses the highest results. On a result of six or less, the Revenant fails, and may take damage, but will gain a point of Experience; on a result of seven, eight, or nine, the action is a success and the player can choose one of the options listed for the Move; and on ten or more, the action is a higher success, and the player can select two options. However, a roll of ten or more also adds a Watcher to the Loop. Effectively, failure rewards a Revenant with a chance to learn, whereas a higher success grants greater benefits, but may attract the attention of the Watchers—some Moves include an option to not have a Watcher appear.

Set-up for The Revenant Society sees the Fate Weaver seed the Loops with Events and clues, some of which are Red Herrings, for the Revenants to discover. These can ones of a mystery that the Fate Weaver can create herself or one of the six included in The Revenant Society. Notably, these are seeded across only six locations across the Paris Métro or the New York Subway, the rest marked as under construction and inaccessible. This effectively focuses play, at least in a geographical sense. In Session Zero, the Fate Weaver introduces the game, sets expectations and responsibilities—both of which are neatly set out for Fate Weaver and players alike, sets the scene in Limbo, and then the players introduce their Revenants and fill out their Playbooks.

Play then begins with the Revenants awaking in the Subway or Métro. In the first Loop, the Revenants awake to find themselves in the dirt of a tunnel with a train bearing down on them, armed with only one Memory card. They will also have an Item card, representing an object that they will always wake up with at the start of a Loop. Their reaction, typically to use the ‘Flee’ Move, is designed to teach the roleplaying game’s mechanics. In subsequent Loops, the Revenants will awake in different locations around the underground. The Revenants will then proceed to explore the Location they are in, looking for Clues and responding to Loop Events and Fixed Events. Whenever they employ a Move—either Basic, Undead, or Team—they fill out a segment on the Clock for the Location. The number of segments on the Clock will vary according to the number of Revenants, but when the Clock is filled out, the Revenants move on to a new Location, a two-hour window of time, and a fresh Clock. This is done collectively. The Revenants cannot split up to go to different Locations, but they can split up to explore a Location. When they reach the end of a Loop, whether because time has run out or because a Revenant has taken too much damage, the Loop begins again. Although it starts in a different place under different circumstances, as the Revenants explore this Loop they encounter new Loop Events, but also Fixed Events that do not change from Loop to Loop. In effect, each Loop is a chance to reset the investigation and let the Revenants start again with the information they have found out so far and then go look for new clues. At the start of each Loop each Revenant will also have new Memory cards that will trigger further questions about who they are. As the Revenants explore Locations and look for Clues, the Fate Weaver will be keep track of both them and the connections between the various NPCs, one of whom will be the Culprit. The Map of Intrigue is used to record the connections where everyone can see and ultimately help the Revenants and their players identify the Culprit.

The investigation of a case should ideally culminate in the revelation as to who the Culprit is and the Revenants acting to stop him and so prevent the Shattering Event. Whatever happens, whether they stop either or not, the players have the opportunity to explain what happens to their Revenants. If they succeeded, are they are at peace and do they move on to the Afterlife? If they failed, what happens to them trapped endlessly in the Loop? There is even a possibility of setting up a sequel, so that the Revenants return to Limbo in readiness to go through another Loop, attempting to stop another Shattering Event.

For both players and the Fate Weaver, there is solid advice on safety—particularly at beginning and end of a session, content warnings—in general and for each scenario, and the tools necessary to play. The Revenant Society: The Endless Loop Beneath the City Deluxe Box Set includes an X-Card and an O-Card. The Fate Weaver there is background on both La Belle Époque Paris and Jazz Age New York, including both history and details of important locations in and around the Paris Métro and the New York Subway. There are notes on post-World War I Paris, but sadly not on pre-World War I New York. Over a third of The Revenant Society is dedicated to scenarios or cases, three per city, plus advice for the Fate Weaver on creating her own. They include the Revenants trying to find out how they died and how those deaths are related to a cult, to a fire, to an assassination, and so on. Each case clearly lists the objective for the Revenants, events at the start of each Loop, locations, the identity of the Culprit, the nature of the Shattering Event, and the various Clues and Events particular to that Loop. There is also a good guide for the Fate Weaver who wants to create her own cases, whilst the Appendix contains all of the roleplaying game’s printable content as well as the maps, Memory cards, and various Fate Weaver Moves for easy reference.

Physically, The Revenant Society is a lovely book, illustrated with period photographs and other images combined with an Arts Décoratifs—or Art Deco—style. All of the extras, including the dice—in The Revenant Society: The Endless Loop Beneath the City Deluxe Box Set adhere to this style and are lovely. If The Revenant Society is missing anything it is an index and that is a major omission. A lesser omission, but one that would have been helpful, would have been an example of play.

The Revenant Society: The Endless Loop Beneath the City is a collaborative storytelling game, one of horror and tragedy and contrasts. Contrasts between the Living and the undead nature of the Revenants, and between the joie de vivre swirling around the Revenants and the grim nature of their task, all hidden behind a gilded façade of its very lovely period feel. In prior years, a storytelling game like The Revenant Society might have been self-published as a smaller book, a la indie style, but in this larger format, The Revenant Society has room to breath and cast more light onto the darkness of the Loops that the Revenants find themselves trapped within and what they need to do to escape. The result is that The Revenant Society: The Endless Loop Beneath the City is a rich and grimly atmospheric, yet familiar roleplaying game, telling a type of story we have seen before, but where the players and their Revenants are telling it working together with the Fate Weaver.