I Read Games reviews are me reading games when I have nothing better to do, like read a module or write or play a game. I don’t seriously believe that I can judge a game without playing it, usually a lot, so I don’t take these very seriously. But I can talk about its choices and whether or not it gets me excited about bringing it to the table.

I was going to go keep working on The Tragedy of Grimsby-Almaz today, but it’s too hot in the study to focus on creating beautiful things, so instead I read the Silt Verses. I honestly, after the complex and compelling disappointments that were Trophy Gold and Brindlewood Bay, had said to myself I wouldn’t read any more Gauntlet Publishing games. I was seeing a lot of praise for Silt Verses, though — it got an extended segment in the Dice Exploder End of Year Bonanza, for example — and I love folk horror, so I decided to give it a read.

The Silt Verses is a brief 86 pages, and calls itself both Powered by the Apocalypse and Carved from Brindlewood, leading me to anticipate mystery solving being a key part of the gameplay. Unbeknownst to me, the Silt Verses is a licensed product, adapted from a horror podcast by the same name. In it, the player characters are agents of a shadowy organisation who are sent to deal with dangerous divine manifestations. I find that description quite compelling, as it feels at least on initial impressions to imply a very catholic world where said angels and divine beings are not compatible with human life. The initial world building and pitch has me leaning in, that’s for sure.

The actual setting guide, however, which opens the book, doesn’t quite fulfil the promise. It, I think, implies a rural British setting before the turn of the millennium, an X-files crossed with Stranger Things with gods and saints instead of aliens and interdimensional monsters. But it also implies that all faiths supply these deities, making the word choice of saint and angel a little strange. I can see the reasoning behind that choice — limiting a game to just Catholic iconography might set you short on ideas— but it muddles things somewhat. The Custodians, this shadowy agency, become a kind of modern day version of the Night’s Watch from Game of Thrones — mainly criminals who are drafted into a dangerous and unforgiving job to pay off their debts to society. I came out of this quite disappointed; it is specific in parts that I didn’t need specificity in, but not specific enough to support me in playing them, for example, saying that there is a complicated web of conspiracy, but not telling me how to support that, or repeating the drama of the Custodians twice in a few pages. Hopefully this is an overview, and will be revisited later, but being 20% of the way into the book, I’d rather have something concrete to work with at this stage.

The Silt Verses assumes and abbreviates a lot of what it draws from Apocalypse World, which for me as someone familiar with that text and its descendants, is a virtue. Die rolls and stats are simple, although it uses the messy Advantage and Disadvantage system from Brindlewood Bay which I’ll take a stand against. It introduces a key mechanic here, which feels a bit messy in practice, called Writing a Verse. Basically, a player can always change the course of history and describe the outcome in response to whatever the Keeper just narrated as the new reality, increasing the level of success by an additional tier. There are no conditions on this. Initially this felt like a misguided rule; but then I realised that what it really does is place us in a dreamlike reality, where the Keeper is encouraged to always describe the worst possible outcome, and the players are always encouraged to counter it with a better outcome, as they flick between dimensions or realities. This is actually kind of cool, although I’d have to see it in play to really grasp whether it feels as cool as it seems (it might end up being annoying and clunky). But yeesh wouldn’t this mechanic fit better if reality-warping and dimension-hopping was actually built into the world?

The moves themselves are…functional, I guess? They’re weirdly named (the “Take a Risk” moves are called Veiled or Revelation depending on the source of the risk); they borrow “Answer A Question” from Brindlewood Bay, but it sits strangely here as it doesn’t feel like the goal of play as it does there, but rather ancillary. It’s clumsier too; you add the clues and subtrack a Complexity score which is associated with…perhaps there will be more on Complexity later in the book. It does say (I shudder in dread at the thought) “The Keeper chapters contain a more in-depth treatment of the moves”. [Nova from the future, reporting back: They do not spend more time on Complexity later in the book.]

This game is full of tiny missteps like that one, that point to a lack of or ill-considered editing. You choose your Custodian’s Style but they don’t have to be dressed in a manner that matches their style…what? Why choose that word, then? There’s redundancy, like the repetition of the abilities across different areas, that seem like they were overlooked rather than intentionally included. The first sign that there may be a limit to “Writing a verse” lies in the “Anatomy of a Character Sheet” section, which doesn’t contain a copy of the character sheet (but it refers to the “Writing a Verse” section that is to come, rather than the “Writing a Verse” section I’ve already read). It turns out that you can only “Write a Verse” a number of times, and each time you are to narrate an important flashback, and once you’ve ticked off all seven flashbacks, you retire your character. This makes the “Writing a Verse” group of rules seem like, to be honest, nonsense. It would look like this: The Keeper narrates the outcome to a scene; a Custodian says “No! I Write a Verse”, and narrates the alternate, slightly more successful outcome to the scene. And then, they narrate another scene, this one a flashback to one of seven choices. And then, if it’s their seventh flashback, they also have to narrate or decide why suddenly they have to retire immediately in that scene. \In none of the groups I’ve played with, would the entire table enjoy any player interrupting a climactic action with not one, not two, but three monologues. Disappointingly, none of these extra rules feel like they bring much to the table.

The Silt Verses “aims to tell a cinematic story” and to that end it uses a phased play structure that’s initially reminiscent of Blades in the Dark. We have an Investigation Phase and a Journey Phase, but…is there a third phase, for the showdown? Or is that part of the Investigation phase? This is another, I think, example of poorly named designed; the Journey phase appears to be an excuse to spend time chilling out with your Custodians and getting to know them, where the Investigation phase is where all the cinematic action happens. But that’s not clear, and like…these don’t feel like phases, just things that happen, and couching them in the phase terminology makes it feel like your session looks like Investigate, Journey, End Session.

That is the end of the first section, and I feel like it should cover most of the rules, as we enter the Keeper section now, but honestly I’m dumbfounded and don’t understand the phases of play, or what a session will look or feel like. You’d think with half a dozen Powered by the Apocalypse games under their belt, Gauntlet Publishing would have ironed out the kinks that had already been ironed out a decade and a half ago by the Bakers, but it seems not. I venture into the Keeper: Basics section tentatively. Here we have most of the information that really should have been included earlier: A list of steps for running investigations, for example. What an assignment consists. This is stuff that really should have occurred earlier, because read the “Custodian” section and I have no clue what’s going on. It feels like they know it too, because it comes before the traditional “Keeper principles” and “Keeper reactions” (rather than moves) sections, which are, to be entirely honest, pretty disappointingly generic. Although, I have to say, the “Keeper reactions” are far meaner than the usual, which plays into my suspicions about how the “Write a Verse” move is supposed to fuel play. Conditions follow this, the first time they’ve been expanded upon despite being repeatedly referred to, in the advanced section no loss. Then, we have a more in-depth treatment of moves. I was dreading this: It’s is an inclination that dates all the way back to Apocalypse World, but in Apocalypse World it served a purpose, because then nobody knew what a move was. Now, we get it, and here, as with most Apocalypse World descended games, keep the habit of elucidating their moves. It feels to me like a cover for bad design: A long, rambling chapter labelled “Advanced” but containing information that should have been in a better designed move, doesn’t make a game more playable. All in all the Keeper section is a mess of things that should be considered for all players and things that explain at length how to work around the flawed design in the section for all players. What a mess.

The next two sections, on the other hand, are absolute fire. There’s effectively a starter kit, showing you and talking you through how to run your first one-shot, how to keep track and run the conspiracy (this is the first time it’s mentioned, it’s not mentioned anywhere in the actual rules). It’s pretty cool, although I do wonder if in practice it might be a little too structured for actual play due to the freewheeling nature of the Write a Verse move. Then, there’s a session one procedure, which walks you through everything. This should have been the core of the entire book, what the actual hell is going on here? Who wrote this? Why is this at the end of the book and not the core structure of the book? This is yet another book from Gauntlet Publishing in dire need of developmental editing. It feels like they received feedback in playtesting and rather than redevelop what they’d already written, they simply these two sections to the end to address the concerns that “I have no idea what’s going on on how to play the game”. And that’s it. That’s the end of the book. At least it wasn’t 166 pages long.

I should mention safety, because this is a horror game. There’s a decent content warning midway through the first chapter; there’s a section on safety tools as part of the step-by-step running your first session section. It sets the tone for good communication, I have to say, but it doesn’t really speak to the specifics of handling the themes of religious horror, which to me could be quite sensitive to a significant part of the population. I’m not entirely convinced that more safety tools than this are strictly the job of the game designer (nobody involved in this, that I’m aware of, is a therapist and even if they were should they be issuing advice in a game?), but what’s here sets an expectation for clear communication that’s positive in my opinion, if a little cursory. The tools here are precisely the tools I’ve heard Jason Cordova speak about utilising on his podcast, Fear of a Black Dragon, so they’re probably well tested, at least, even if they’re not specific.

Layout is a bit of a mess, in my opinion. Columns often flick from a 50 / 50% split to a 40 / 60 % split in a single spread, which doesn’t feel intentional (although it may be, if the column texts aren’t similar in length, but it’s a clumsy solution). Fonts initially appear to change with section — the player section in serif, the keeper section sans — but certain highlighted sections are monotyped as well, and sometimes coloured and monotyped. And then the final section is at first all monotyped, but then switches almost completely to italic serif again. Because of these rapidly changing choices, locating anything in this short book is difficult to be honest. The art is mostly quite good and fits the mood and theme, although colour choices aren’t immediately apparently meaningful either. At first I thought the spot colour in the illustrations were section-related, but that doesn’t appear to be the case, and not all illustrations are spot-coloured, and some are fully coloured. This book feels like it was put together on Microsoft Word by a middle aged man in the 90’s who wanted to show off their new inkjet printer. It certainly doesn’t make the contents easier to process or understand; for me, it makes it harder, which is honestly a feat given how confused the text makes me.

Well, colour me disappointed. I was hoping for a compelling and well-designed horror game, but instead I got a mess with a single compelling mechanic. It’s a pattern, I’ll claim, after similar criticisms of Trophy and Brindlewood Bay as well. There are glimmers of hope in the Silt Verses that are not at all fulfilled by its text. A version of this book exists somewhere out there in the ether, which is rearranged in a manner that’s actually conducive to play, which contains some more concrete world building and some suggestions for gods based on the audio drama, that concretizes the setting in a manner that makes it playable or perhaps even intriguing to build a world around. The Silt Verses is not that book.

Sadly, I can’t say there are a hundred roleplaying games that try to do exactly what the Silt Verses does, but you can get a compelling, psychologically complex horror out of Apocalypse Keys or Grand Guignol or Sleepaway and honestly you’re better off hacking those with some heavy-handed religious themes and a coating of Men in Black than trying to piece this together into something that works for yourself. I won’t be trying to bring this to the table, unlike Trophy Gold which I’ve played a lot of, and unlike Brindlewood Bay which remained compelling enough to try.

Idle Cartulary