Rascal Catches The Last Train To Hell (via Bremen)

Thomas: For the inaugural Rascal game night of 2025, I brought Caro Asercion’s game of doomed musicians fleeing from their deal with the devil. Chase already wrote about the game before so I’m not going to feel obligated to explain the mechanics, but it’s quick (we played it in 2 hours) and messy and a big bucket of fun. Asercion serves up a punchy situation with punchier prose wrapped up in more “gaminess” than most RPGs could hope for. Which is fair—not all of them can have a classic folk game as the core mechanic. 

I played the Hound, the lead singer and lyricist, and alternated between that dog (stress on that and dog) and a sad puppy. I’ll let my colleagues fill in the rest of the details of the very special session we had but I will flag that it was a hell of an experience playing this as colleagues because running a journalism site is a bit like being in a band, just with less sex and drugs. As we told these stories of bandmates sniping at each other, we were wiping the sweat off our collective foreheads and going, “Phew! Glad we’re not like this in real life! Right? Right?”.