Era of Silence is a game published by Shrike Tabletop. Game material and content is reproduced here for review purposes and is owned by Shrike Tabletop. Era of Silence benefited of investment through crowdsourcing. We have received a review copy for Era of SIlence.
1. Every Individual Component Is The Best
In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we do not find bad or good useful. So, the Split/Party framework assumes it is the best art, best layout, best writing, best design. This is an acknowledgement that nobody makes “bad” art on purpose; any given element is the best art that could have been produced at that point, restricted by its material conditions and constraints of time and effort. This is also because saying something is good/bad art is the most useless criticism that can be given. In practical term, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgement.
Ludo
Era of Silence is a game by people that love combat for people that love combat; it appeals to the "mainstream” assumptions about games, and while remaining very pop game (what some would call “trad”), it tries to cut down on the less interesting chaff of the game and focus in delivering the best of the experiences appealing to the pop audience.
Despite being easy to understand to people coming off trad/pop design, it avoids many of the assumptions that haunted that strain of design for the last fifty years and is not afraid to do things differently and experiment1. The game is impressive at various levels, if anything else, for its ambitions; considering the limited resources at hand, Era of Silence achieves a game that offers a game experience comparable to some of the biggest companies dominating the art form. A lot of their innovations are outright ingenious.
Ingenious is also the way it manages to circumvent the material limitations impose upon it; take a chance with Era of Silence even if you find some elements rough. You will become a fan and be looking forward to what the team can accomplish with more time and resources. If you are a fan of skirmish combat you know how beret the environment has been in artistic innovation; that alone is a strong argument to put your support behind teams such as these.
Brad
Era of Silence is an interesting text, from its description you think it would weigh itself down with a heavy color palette and dark aesthetic, mimicking games such as The Witcher, or Bloodborne, Instead, it goes for a bright almost pastel and a wide variety of character designs and appearances (including a fantastic in-universe ad.) I love this, it feels like Mad Max: Fury Road, and has a fun and playful tone throughout the text.
2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At
Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly breakdown, we have to meet the game at the level it is: not lament its choice of premise and wish it was something else, nor resent for not conforming with our politics, not letting “missed opportunities” stand in our way of applying the critical framework relentlessly. It also includes not working with the game as marketed or how it exists in our desires, but as it is.
Lucrécia
Era of Silence is a game about combat; one should expect combat when going about it. Again, it is a game about skirmish action at the fringes of society. If you are not expecting that, you will not enjoy yourself. It is also, as previously mentioned, very trad/pop.
It also is the prime (and first) example of its new game system, the Thorne System. The engine is a roll under system, with a lot of math behind it, so this is an assumption its pop audience may need to overcome.
Another divergence from its pop roots, is a more relaxed attitude towards GM authority. There is much more negotiation and formalized GM tools. More significant, the game is seen as a tool and art piece, that knows it is going to be changed and embraces it. Era of Silence’s modular design both invites and expects players to be co-designers of the tools used for the art-form.
Brad
Era of Silence is about fighting on the fringe and by god, it’s a game that is about what it says it's about2. If your friend says we are playing Era of Silence, expect combat to be a core pillar of that campaign.
The Thorne System is interesting, feeling tightly designed and player-facing, taking tools from the GM and distributing them. Era of Silence does make me excited to see some more Thorne games in the future.
3. Identify What The Game Says It Is About
Games are about things. Usually. Mostly. That is often the same thing they market themselves as. This often means to establish the relationship of the game with systems, mechanical frameworks, genre, etc. This is how games establish exceptions about the nature of play and creates a common space for creation.
Ludo
Era of Silence is a skirmish game set in a post-apocalyptic world where the world has moved on after the death of ancient empires and abandonment by the worlds. Players are people on the fringes of society, where they use their skills for violence to make their way in the world. There is a focus in cooperation during combat, and a pretty clever action economy that rewards squad tactics.
The game is set into the world of Vian, a “chemipunk” setting. Era of Silence defines chemipunk as an aesthetic of an alchemically-charged sci-fantasy with an anti-capitalist and anti-fascist ethos: all kind of cool toys, guns, cybernetics and even entire fabricated people can be found in Era of Silence.
We indeed, have a modular, skirmish action game here; this critic was initially supposed to be about Tidebreaker, a game that I waited for three years to deliver that. After its disappointment, Era of Silence came out of seemingly nowhere to deliver exactly what I hoped Tidebreaker would have been.
Brad
Era Of Silence is a -punk setting that is actually punk, it is about anti-fascist and anti-capitalistic efforts in a world that empires have left to rot. The players by their very nature are confined to the fringes, branded by churches to show that they have magical gifts, or simply heavily armed.
Vian is a setting that I could definitely see myself cracking into and having a blast with, and all the various gadgets and gizmos scream cool. Which is important because as mentioned above, the combat is compelling and dangerous and your players are gonna immediately want some cool tools for which to rip and tear.
The Thorne System is advertised as modular, which is one of my watchwords in gaming, something many systems claim to be. The Thorne System seems to deliver in this case though, a game system that has parts that can be removed and retooled and replaced and added to, which makes me eager to see the future.
4. Uncover What The Game Is REALLY About
What the game says it is about is not always what the game is about. This is where we look at all the weird interactions, examining the system that game creates, how the way mechanics interact with the text and art, how it exists on a given context, how well parts flow together or get in the way. This creates a much richer environment that the original design could ever imagine once a game hits the table.
Lucrécia
Era of Silence is about two things. One, is war machines. War machines are entities that defy the monopolies of violence associated with states3. After the colapse of Empires, nobody in Vian can claim to have a monopoly on military and right to kill; instead of using heroic adventurers at the frontier, they have to concede - and use - war machines like the player characters to expand their reach. Polymorphous and diffuse organizations, war machines are characterized by their capacity for metamorphosis. Their relation to space is mobile. They are able to reinvent itself and the world. Of course, such claim is not inherently anti-capitalism or anti-fascist: war machines built their own identity through violence and can do such things, but they are themselves a fluid: they are in negotiation with institutions and are shaped like their containers. Era of Silence is one of the few tabletop games — especially in the pop strain — that allows you to explore being a war machine, even they still have to interact with the corporations and emerging states. Still, those exhausted with the current use of -punk will be happy to know that Era of Silence allows you establish your own relationships with such structures and always engage with them on your terms4.
But more important, Era of Silence is a game about promises. Its modular systems promises a lot of ways to customize your character, with many subsystems allowing further expansion that you may design for or see future development. Its additional rules showcase the thought and care that has gone into the design. The game is a promise of all the things the Thorne System can do. The setting of Vian is about the promises about people created by gods or capital to serve specific purposes to find their own meaning in a world of their own. Finally, all the neat things Era of Silence has already accomplished in the original book is a promise of how great all the modular systems will look when expanded.
So, at one level, Era of Silence allows you play war-machines in roleplaying games; in another, it gives enough of a base for you to be convinced to take a chance with the Thorn System and really get frisky with it for years to come5.
Brad
Era of Silence is about the Fight, that is the obvious theme it wears on its sleeve, but it doesn’t just revel in violence, your players are desperate people trying to survive, and must transform into something powerful to do that. There are strong themes of transformation and survival, but also of a struggle against existential and very existent forces that the players run up against.
How much it succeeds is still in the air, and only time can tell the most interesting part: what they — and us — learn from this.
A shockingly rare thing in this field.
Despite that being a historical anomaly in which we happened to live in.
A bare minimum that is unfortunately rarely reached.
In the heavy FOMO, the-next-big-thing, awarding-the-previous-decade-and-the-next year release, stream of crowdfunding, quick to release and forget space of contemporary roleplaying artistic scene, every game that seems to be setting itself for the long haul is worth pointing out to.