In April 2019 we presented the Fiasco and More Bundle, featuring indie RPGs from Bully Pulpit Games. With Fiasco you make your own cinematic tales of small-time capers gone wrong, right out of films like Blood Simple, Fargo, Burn After Reading, and A Simple Plan. It’s like making your own Coen brothers movie, in about the same time it’d take to watch one. You engineer and play out stupid, disastrous situations, usually at the intersection of greed, fear, and lust. There will be big dreams and flawed execution. Things won’t go well, to put it mildly, and in the end everything will burn in a glorious bonfire of jealousy and recrimination.
Fiasco is a landmark of modern indie RPG design. With its relationship-centered character generation, shared narrative control, tightly scripted format, and no-prep two-hour playtime, Fiasco popularized the story-game approach sometimes characterized as “sad things on index cards.” Unlike the big-dreaming losers (more politely, “ordinary people with powerful ambition and poor impulse control”) who populate dozens of its playsets, the game enjoyed immediate, long-lasting success, and it made a star of designer Jason Morningstar. This bargain-priced Fiasco and More offer presented both Fiasco and The Fiasco Companion, lots of playsets, and many of Jason’s live-action freeform games.
There were six games in our Starter Collection (retail value $42) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete Fiasco rulebook (2009); the card-based Civil War RPG Carolina Death Crawl; the live-action game Radioactive Bison (which Jason wrote for patrons of the Bully Pulpit d.rip crowdfunding campaign); the freeforms The Climb and Out of Dodge (both previously in our May 2014 American Freeform offer); and the Dungeon World scenario When War Came to Colgur (another d.rip patron reward). Plus, Fiasco designer Jason Morningstar curated a collection of seven of his favorite free playsets.
Those who paid more than the threshold (average) price also got our entire Bonus Collection with five more titles worth an additional $44, including The Fiasco Companion, the Fiasco playset collections Run, Fools, Run and American Disasters (the latter previously in the November 2013 Indie Cornucopia), and the freeform games Winterhorn and The Skeletons.
Ten percent of each payment (after gateway fees) went to the charity designated by Fiasco designer Jason Morningstar, the Mines Advisory Group.
Hit the highway, dude — that duffel bag of marked currency in the Paradise Casino’s backstage dressing room isn’t going to steal itself!
Fiasco resources
- The Bully Pulpit Games Fiasco page has lots of linked reviews and Actual Play recordings
- FiascoPlaysets.com
- Gosh Darn Fiasco: A long-running podcast featuring Laser Malena-Webber (The Doubleclicks), Richard Malena-Webber (Atomic Game Theory), and their friends playing Fiasco
- Fiasco on Wil Wheaton’s TableTop: Set-Up — Part 1 (Season 1, Episode 8, July 2012) — Part 2 (Episode 9, July 2012)
- Bully Pulpit Games d.rip campaign — a Patreon-like crowdfunding campaign that funds little games, weird experiments, tabletop- and larp-focused stuff, and (so far) a couple of Fiasco playsets
- Jason Morningstar Game Generator (Abulafia)
