In March 2024 we revived the April 2019 Fiasco Classic Bundle featuring Fiasco, the original 2009 indie RPG of powerful ambition and poor impulse control. Make your own cinematic tales of small-time capers gone wrong – of disastrous situations founded on big dreams and flawed execution, right out of films like Raising Arizona, Fargo, and other Coen brothers movies, in about the same amount of time it’d take to watch one. During a game you engineer and play out stupid, disastrous situations, usually at the intersection of greed, fear, and lust. 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 who populate dozens of its playsets, the game enjoyed immediate, long-lasting success, and it made a star of creator Jason Morningstar.
Returning from April 2019 like a well-meaning convenience-store robber paroled from a Tempe prison, this bargain-priced Fiasco Classic revival once again presented both the original Fiasco and The Fiasco Companion, lots of playsets, and many of Jason’s live-action freeform games published by Bully Pulpit Games. Bully Pulpit presents new games like these every month through its Patreon campaign.
There were five titles in this revived offer’s Starter Collection (retail value $42) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the Fiasco Classic rulebook (2009), plus the card-based Civil War RPG Carolina Death Crawl; the live-action game Radioactive Bison; and the freeforms The Climb and Out of Dodge. And as a convenience for this offer’s customers, Fiasco designer Jason Morningstar curated Jason’s Favorite Fiascos, a collection of seven free playsets.
Those who paid more than the threshold (average) price also got this revival’s entire Bonus Collection with six more titles worth an additional $52, including The Fiasco Companion, the Fiasco playset collections Run, Fools, Run and American Disasters, and the freeform games Winterhorn and The Skeletons.
And for this revival we added Space Post, Jason’s game about delivering the mail across interstellar space. If you purchased this Fiasco offer during its original April 2019 run (as “Fiasco and More”), you also receive the newly added Space Post on your Wizard’s Cabinet download page and in your linked DriveThruRPG Library. When you buy a Bundle of Holding early, you never worry about missing a title added later – even much later.
Ten percent of each purchase (after gateway fees) of this Fiasco Classic revival went to the charity designated by Bully Pulpit Games, Mines Advisory Group. Mines Advisory Group (MAG) is an international organization that saves lives and builds futures through the destruction of landmines, unexploded ordnance, and other weapons remaining after conflicts. Since 1989, MAG has worked in over 35 countries.
(By the way, check the many free Fiasco playsets at FiascoPlaysets.com.)
