Explore a weird, interconnected world bigger than humans in ASSEMBLAGE

Scryptid Games’ newest offering, Assemblage, rises from the primordial stew and plops onto Backerkit on Thursday, March 13.

In Assemblage, you’ll play as an entire species—a really strange one—with a unique set of relationships to the other species around you. Are you a symbiotic slime mold clinging to the underside of sentient gemstones? Or are you a phantom octopus, drifting serenely through the aether and siphoning the lifeforce out of anything unlucky enough to encounter your ghostly appendages?

Inspired by world-building games like Microscope and the posthuman musings of Brave Sparrow, Assemblage will have you exploring these complex ecological relationships in a weird, wild world built collaboratively as part of the fun. Players start by creating a habitat, a setting that could be a terrestrial planet, the belly of a titan, a veil between worlds—you name it. But then the game flips the usual script by having you create relationships between the world’s inhabitants while you flesh out the details of the different species. Only by exploring what you are to each other can you fully understand your strange self.

Assemblage will come as a small, boxed TTRPG, and uses prompt cards to guide players through several “seasons,” bringing change to the world and causing the various character species to adapt in their own ways.

It also presents players with a rare opportunity: players do more than make their world—they also break it. In the final phase of the game, an epic ecological disaster created by the players wreaks ultimate havoc. They are posed with a timeless question: when the world is shattered, how will they survive?

Publisher Scryptid Games is the indie press that broke through in 2023, winning multiple awards for Brigitte Winter’s innovative Psychic Trash Detectives. Scryptid’s tagline is “We make story games for cryptids,” and Nat Mesnard’s Assemblage perfectly aligns with this aesthetic.

Their newest game is the brainchild of Nat Mesnard (they/them), the NYC-based designer exploring the confluence of queerness and nerd life, and whose path is littered with titles published by both Scryptid Games and 9th Level Games. The art for the game comes from Jill Colbert, aka Manfish, Inc., whose inclusion of fantastical monsters in many of her darkly elegant-and sometimes-whimsical pieces is fitting for a game published by and for cryptids. 

Assemblage is launching March 13 as part of Pocketopia—a celebration of portable, easy-to-learn tabletop games on Backerkit. Pocketopia, as part of that larger campaign, is asking game designers to pair up, collaborate, and offer some cool “Cross-Collab Freebies.”

For Pocketopia, Scryptid Games is collaborating with Stop, Drop and Roll Games, pairing Assemblage with Why We Fight, a solarpunk game about fighting fascism after the apocalypse. Why We Fight features slick character- and crew-building mechanics and a strategic combat backbone. 

Backers who pledge both projects will also receive Collective Action, a game duet that splices how to use Assemblage to create settings for other TTRPGs with the expansive crew-as-character possibilities and exciting scenarios from Why We Fight. You could use Assemblage to create a weird ecology and then use Why We Fight to create a team of scientists investigating that weird ecology, tying the two in a strange existential tango.

So, well, there it is: two solarpunk, eco-fantasy TTRPGs that explore catastrophe, survival, the promise of a brighter, greener future, and the chance to punch Nazis and explore weirdness as you go. You can find out more about both projects on their respective Backerkit pages. Perhaps life will indeed find a way…