Plucky new tabletop roleplaying games hit crowdfunding sites all the time, competing for the attentions of RPG fans who’ve had enough of Dungeons and Dragons and want to experiment with something spicier. Among that madding crowd, Our Brilliant Ruin‘s luxurious art and dreamlike, Great Gatsby-plus-magical-apocalypse vibes do stand out. But, after speaking to the team behind it, it’s clear to me this isn’t a normal kickstarter TTRPG at all – there’s more going on.
The game’s weird, class-punk setting – billed as “upstairs-downstairs personal and sociological drama meets existential horror” is pretty bizarre to begin with, and its intriguing rules-light design deserves attention. But first I want to explore another remarkable thing about the game which piques my curiosity: the fact it’s entirely free.
Publisher Studio Hermitage raised just under $50,000 on Kickstarter in March 2024 – but that wasn’t to make the game; it was specifically to manufacture a physical edition of the rulebook. You can get the PDF version of Our Brilliant Ruin – just shy of 300 pages long – for precisely zero dollars on DriveThruRPG, right now. Which is great – but also odd.
Why’s it free, when PDF rulebooks for the best tabletop roleplaying games routinely sell for upwards of $20? Seemingly because of the other strange, interesting thing about Our Brilliant Ruin: it’s fundamentally a ‘transmedia’ project, with the TTRPG only the first of several products set in the Dramark, its faux-Edwardian horror setting. We get the first hit for free, so to speak.
Studio Hermitage has already released a 10-episode audio drama titled Clawmoor Heights – also free of charge – starring Game of Thrones’ Indira Varma and the Flanaverse’s Kate Siegel. Next up is Horror at Crane Mansion, a series of comics from Dark Horse, scheduled for 2025. After that – you guessed it – there’s already a videogame in development.
The videogame is still “further down the road”, studio co-founder and chief creative officer Justin Achilli tells Wargamer, with no hint of what type of game it is, let alone a release date. But the other co-founder, CEO Paxton Galvanek, proudly notes that their almost 20-strong team includes folks from a variety of big game studios, including Infinity Ward, 2K, and Paradox Interactive. “The sheer amount of talented people we’ve been able to attract from the videogame development industry is staggering,” he says.
They’re clearly excited, even if they can’t tell me anything real about it yet. But the question persists: how does this make money? In what we’re all aware is an ever toughening games market, how do you produce a lush, 298-page RPG book and a relatively star-studded radio series, and then give them both away for nothing? The answer, it seems, is a serious investor bet on Our Brilliant Ruin’s various media taking off.
Studio Hermitage is funded by (and part of) Amplifier Game Invest, a venture capital firm within vast Swedish conglomerate Embracer Group. That’s the same Embracer Group that bought Asmodee, the world’s biggest board game publisher, in 2022.
So the whole show is apparently backed by some of the industry’s deepest pockets, which explains a lot. But it’s still remarkable to see a tabletop game as the initial core, or hook, of a project like this at all, let alone as a free game meant to sell you on its lore. For tabletop evangelists like me, it’s exciting to see – but there’s surely risk involved.
However that business model plays out, though, the world of the Dramark, and the TTRPG itself, are appealing. And the Studio Hermitage team’s passion for their game and setting are positively… infectious.
Wuthering frights
Our Brilliant Ruin is a narrative-heavy, rules-light roleplaying game where the word ‘class’ doesn’t refer to your skillset, as with DnD classes, so much as which social faction you belong to.
“It’s a world that has an Edwardian aesthetic and social customs,” Achilli tells us, “so if you’re into upstairs-downstairs social drama, there’s a hook, with aristocratic families; guilds of non-aristocrats known as Truefolk; and societal outsiders or rebels known as Unbonded, at odds with the prevailing societal order, or who even want to tear it down”.
But wait, it gets weirder. This pastiche of late 19th and early 20th century culture and societal tensions takes place in a world littered with ancient, inactive mega-robots called ‘syllokinetics’. And all of it is being ravaged by the Ruin – a “destructive force of nature that eats away at the edges of the world, spoils natural resources, and turns people into monsters, forming an existential threat to humankind”. As a Warhammer 40k fan, I can’t help but detect a whiff of Chaos on the air.
The result seems to be an RPG where you can be wooing a gorgeous wealthy heiress at a party one minute, and the next minute fighting for your life against a tentacle monster, armed with a hastily weaponized canapé tray. The metaphor for the inherent fragility of civilized society might not be as subtle as Austen or Brontë, but it is very funny.
Cultural influences include Bridgerton and Downton Abbey for “emotional drama”, Achilli explains – but there are higher-brow literary inspirations too.
“While building the world, I was also reading Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre,” adds senior writer Rachel J. Wilkinson. “Gothic Romanticism was a natural fit for the storylines and landscapes of Our Brilliant Ruin — foggy moors, isolated estates, and haunted forests.”
“Gothic fiction plays a significant part,” agrees art director Andy Foltz – “particularly the decay amid ostentation and ‘what has come before’.”
It doesn’t take long to grasp that Our Brilliant Ruin is a game made by art history nerds, that was always going to place a premium on its aesthetics. In fact, the sheer volume of artistic inspirations cited is another thing that sets the project apart from the crowd.
“Artistically, we are influenced greatly by maximalism, Art Deco, and Art Nouveau movements,” says Foltz, adding: “Individual factions have other influences as well, such as the brutalism that sneaks into some of the Bellephine family’s architecture, baroque and rococo for the Galdeparks, and Regency and Georgian affectations of the Valgreaves.”
Class conflict is never far away, either. “The Fin de Siècle and Belle Époque periods were a transitional, liminal space in history, full of revolution, upheaval and innovation. It often resonates, especially with the age old message, ‘eat the rich’.” Now you’re talking. But this is a game, after all – so how does it play?
Play within the hour
The Hermits are all keen to emphasise how rules-light and streamlined Our Brilliant Ruin is at the table. Combat is present, and important – how else are you going to battle Ruin-twisted humans or beasts from the beyond? But intrigue, secrecy, and political machinations are just as prominent, and fluff trumps crunch.
“Game mechanics are simple and put a lot of narrative control in players’ hands,” says Achilli. “The systems are streamlined (the gamemaster never rolls dice, for example), reward success and failure, and let players push their luck to steer things in their favor,” he adds.
Unlike DnD stats, your in-game attributes focus on personality and motivations more than strict measurements of abilities, aiming to weave a bit of storytelling into every action. Every time you use a skill like ‘Fight’ or ‘Intuit’, you’ll link it to a personality trait like ‘Audacity’ or ‘Obsession’ – and you’ll get more dice to roll, the better you tie your action into your chosen characteristic.
Game masters have less work to do, too. NPCs and enemies don’t even have stat blocks – they just have a “rating that determines most of the facets of their (minimal) statistics”, says senior marketing manager Danny Ryba.
And above all, Our Brilliant Ruin wants it to be really easy to start playing. “Our character creation mechanics allow players to flesh out their character in about 15 minutes,” claims Rachel Wilkinson; “Let’s see DnD top that!”
“The reason we wanted character creation to be so fast was so
anyone could flip through the book and play the game within the hour,” she explains – “and that includes the gamemaster developing their story as well… we wanted Our Brilliant Ruin to be the kind of game you could grab for a quick pick-up session.”
In my book, that’s an attractive pitch. I love rules-light TTRPGs with quirky alt-history worlds; my gaming group has spent the last two years playing John Harper’s low gothic fantasy crime simulator Blades in the Dark, and it rocks. For my sins, I didn’t hate watching Bridgerton with my wife, either. Combine the two, with a hefty dash of creeping eldritch horror on top, and I can see myself having a (masquerade) ball in the Dramark.
I’m not quite sold on the idea of ‘transmedia’ being baked into a tabletop RPG from day one – not everything needs to be a multimedia universe. But I am enchanted by Our Brilliant Ruin’s peculiar combo of artsy, period drama sociology and fantastical entropic doom – so it’s going on my ‘to play’ list. Just as soon as I can find a stylish, affordable flapper wig.
For more TTRPG goodness, check out Mollie Russell’s recent interview with the cast of DnD actual play Natural Six, or her chaotic experience playing life-sized Dungeons and Dragons. Or, for the latest upcoming stuff from Wizards of the Coast, head to our complete DnD release schedule.
Source: Wargamer
