After (Part 1)

Present Perfect Continuity

After is a game by Pat Roach and John Dewees, published by Cyclopean Publishing Company. We have received a review copy.

1. Every Individual Component Is The Best

In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we don’t 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 acknowledgment 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 terms, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgment.

Lhuzie

We asked for them, and you delivered more impossible art pieces. What a delight After is. A rules-light narrative game set in a world of domains where everything is possible, play as powerful entities dealing with a critical event — one that echoes their more innocent past and that will shape their fate and that of their domain.

The layout is clean and practical, the art direction exists and works arduously at conveying the range of possibility of domains and games of After besides the creatively-dead, IP-maximalist “multiverse” concept that dominates this imaginary. The illustrations are delightful and do a great job at setting the tone of the game.

A treasure among these kinds of game, that’s what I found in After.

Brad

We frequently say here, if your game can be shorter? Make it shorter. If your game can be tighter designed? Make it tighter. Coming in at a lean and mean eighty two pages, I don’t think you could make it tighter or slimmer.

The layout and art direction feels fantastic, never constraining but guiding to the wonderful possibilities of After.

2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At

Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly break it down, 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.

Lhuzie

After is one of those “rules-light”, with little mastering support that rely on familiarity with other TTRPGs and/or aptitude with a more improvisational game mastering. While this format of the game has been made popular by designfluencers influenced by artforms like improv and/or one-shot focused actual play, it is way more demanding from a table than the label of “light” may suggest to the unaware. Arbitration and design are expected on the fly, as well as more flexibility than “yes, and” and “not, but” through other players’ contribution. As such, After will be exactly the kind of game you love or one that you struggle with. Know one thing: it does not hide behind words like “fruitful voids” to explain why it did not bother design a playable game.

These kinds of games tend to be on the side of “designed to one-shot” in the TTRPG spectrum-treated-almost-as a binary of “designed for one-shot”/”expected to go on forever”; which is why it is surprising how strict in its structure After is. Each campaign of After has five sessions: two of these sessions have unique rules — a “Session Zero” where the structure of the campaign is established, a “Final Act” with unique rules that concludes the campaign and wraps up in a series of epilogues; the rest are “regular” sessions, following the “default” rules of the game.

For a game that expects an audience already familiar with roleplaying games, After keeps throwing curveballs to those that are too into roleplaying games. It knows what people will assume when confronted with concepts like experience or narrative currencies and plays that familiarity against you. It keeps one on their toes and paying attention to what After is trying to get them to do; After may startle those that “already know how these games go” and wanted something they could auto-pilot through with no speedbumps. This makes After a great experience for people that really like improv GMing and rules lite inventive practices but are looking for a game that would challenge them in novel mechanical and narrative ways.

As a game with a well-structured campaign framework for an experienced audience, Session Zeros in After are part of the play experience beyond what you usually discuss in a session zero. This requires you to frontload a lot of the GMing and conceptual work where one would “play to find out” in the majority of rules-light narrative games. By the end of Season Zero you must know why you are playing and what this campaign is about; come prepared for that.

After has a glossary, a feature essential for a game that plays so much with familiarity and expectations associated to colloquial concepts; it is also a feature rare in this artform and that I will always praise any TTRPG that includes one. You rarely need to check a glossary, but whenever you do, it is a life-saver.

Brad

In addition to everything Lhu says above, After is so clever that I am glad I read it, but for the love of god, read it from front to back. You are going to lock into truly a fascinating experience, but it does require that moment of buy in from you.

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 establish a common space for creation.

Lhuzie

After is a game of narrative time-travelling, where a story is told both in the present and in the past, interwoven with each other. It uses the perspective change of a more innocent, less powerful self and its contrast with a mighty present incarnation to layer rich, personal, complex storytelling with simple tools.

Brad

After is a game about innocence and power, where you are different in the present and occasionally get to show us how you were in the past.

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 in 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.

Lhuzie

After is a game about doomed choices and the weight of memory and consequences. The role of the past in the storytelling differs greatly from what you may assume from the previous point. It is not about starting in session zero “in media res”, every session a moving present following on the ongoing action from the past; as you play, you learn more of the ongoing present but also more of the events of the past that led to this present.

It is a game about future perfect played in present perfect.

During session zero, you establish the past in pretty definitive terms: how life was for your past self, what the situation is now and how that is different, and your personal conclusion. Before the game “starts,” you already know how you got there. And you’ve have already been marked: you then gain your first Focus.

The rest of the game is played in present perfect. The story is about the present, a present that is ever anchored in that Focus — in the consequences of your past, on the course already set for you. Memories of the past are a mechanical resource, no more narrative in two-temporal frameworks than using Stress in a FitD game is. Flashbacks throw you back to the past: you have to face a challenge in your more innocent, less-capable, yet unburdened by their destiny and archetype; the narrative, however, never marches ahead in the past. It remains in the present perfect, Focus of the past doing nothing to the past, consequences remaining away from what was; it is the present that suffers the consequences. Rather than discovering the past as its own foreign country, it entrenches how your present has to be.

To flashback to the past becomes freeing. It is when you can be a person. When you do not have to fear Experience or Focus. There are so many other stories you can tell, so many things you can be, so many different persons that you can yet be and become. But that is temporary; the past is gone, all that is left is an anchor of the present. It will pull you back; and each time you do, the more your path forward is set in stone.

During the Final Act, the future perfect explodes in a climactic conclusion. This is the path you’ve been upon, set before you “started” playing the game, reinforced every past act or present decision. Your destiny beckons, and you can embrace its power, accepting this is who you are — or resist, drawing on the freedom of the past memories. No matter what, then there is only the uncaring future, shaped by the Focused consequences of a present shaped by a past it could not change.

Not In Media Res, not TTRPG Rashomon, Not Playing to Find Out; narrative time travel like no other that is only possible in this artform.

Brad

There is a constant desire in narrative to frame who people are before they gain power in all fiction. You see it in TTRPGs from the classic E6 and Level 0 concepts of the dragon game to the all too common preludes of World of Darkness and the “you gain superpowers” sessions of a variety of the classic super RPGs.

After chooses to make the most interesting choice it could. By dividing your character mechanically into two separate beings, you are given the stunning and fantastic opportunity to show how power twists and changes you.

This is such a compelling idea that I’m genuinely mad I had never seen it implemented till then, and the game focuses itself on the idea of time advancing, with rules for what happens after the final session. This game isn’t just about the ending, it is one of the few games that is totally focused on actually bringing one about!

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