Buy the Welcome to Night Vale role-playing game for the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home
Welcome To Night Vale, regarded by our sister site Vulture as “the foundational institution of the fiction-podcast genre,” is getting its first official adaptation as a tabletop role-playing game. Currently in production by Renegade Game Studios (publishers of Vampire: The Masquerade, Alice is Missing, and the Transformers Roleplaying Game, among others), the BackerKit campaign to fund the Welcome To Night Vale Roleplaying Game kicks off Oct. 1. Polygon recently sat down with several game developers to learn more.
The Welcome to Night Vale podcast began in 2012 as an experimental storytelling project cast in the shape of a public access radio broadcast. The fictional host, Cecil Palmer, narrates most episodes from his studio inside the mysterious desert town known as Night Vale. Over the last 12 years, the otherwise peaceful enclave has been the subject of hauntings, disappearances, mysterious happenings, and several major events in the ongoing Blood Space War — all while the Sheriff’s Secret Police look on from their headquarters inside the local sporting goods store. Recurring characters include the Faceless Old Woman who secretly lives in your home, a five-headed dragon named Hiram McDaniels, and John Peters, who is a farmer.
Night Vale is — and I mean this in the very best way possible — a lot to take in, and so the team at Renegade is going slowly with this first TTRPG offering by leaning heavily into the gazetteer format. A standard pledge made during the campaign will score fans a copy of the Welcome to Night Vale Roleplaying Game, which includes four small in-fiction books. The Visitor’s Guide will provide background information on Night Vale and its people, while the Citizen’s Guide will assist in character creation. Meanwhile, eager game masters will find everything they need to run a session or a campaign inside the Host Guide. But the real action comes with the introductory adventure, titled The Skeleton Gorge Incident.
“Cecil at Night Vale Community Radio will be asking for your help,” said developer Carlos Cabrera, “because someone is hijacking the radio signal, and of course we can’t have that. So as either interns [new to the station], or just [local] people offering their help, you get to follow that mystery to see where that leads — and hit some of the famous locations of Night Vale along the way.”
Of course, given the… let’s call it ephemeral nature of Night Vale’s geography, the boxed set doesn’t come with a map.
“Similar to how the radio show presents everything […] from a sort of theater of the mind mindset,” said associate producer Ben Heisler, “we similarly lean into that. Because people who’ve listened before have seen these places before in their brain, and they kind of know where they are and can share that, along with the GM, as you experience the places in the game.”
The final product will be based on Renegade’s own proprietary Essence20 system — the same system that underpins its other popular TTRPGs. But it also includes features and attributes that are completely new to Essence20. One of those is called “weird,” and it was the creation of TTRPG writer Shay Snow (Pathfinder, Coyote & Crow).
“What the weird skill does is allow you to mechanically interact with all of the strangers around you,” said Cabrera. “Whether that’s from without or within gives you special benefits on dealing with just how weird of a place Night Vale can be. As the quote goes, you are finally ‘weird at last,’ and it also is a requirement for getting some of the other stranger benefits like different appendages, or moving tattoos, or whether you have a third eye and what that can bring to your character’s abilities.”
The game includes several classes, called roles in the Essence20 system. One will be a combat-focused class called the soldier, which will have the option of being a veteran of the ongoing Blood Space War with limited control over localized gravity fields. Another role will be politician, an especially useful skillset given the exotic nature of the community’s electoral process. But not even the role of a farmer is completely safe, considering they have close ties to the trade in illegal contraband that the nefarious StrexCorp seems so preternaturally interested in.
Obviously, a Night Vale-themed TTRPG could easily appeal to fans of the podcast, but developers have so far been thrilled to see people wholly unfamiliar with the program also hop on board in the early playtesting.
“One of the fun things that I’ve already been seeing on the Renegade Discord myself is that we have people entering the Night Vale chat who have never played an RPG before but are super big fans of Night Vale,” said Cabrera. “We’ve also had people who don’t know anything about Night Vale but are already fans of RPGs or the other Essence20 games that they have. They want to check out Night Vale for the new things that they could bring to the system, because it is Essence20 and you could cross those streams if you want [and have the] Decepticons show up […] for a crazy night of mayhem.”
The starting adventure will feature nine challenging threats to deal with, so maybe inviting some giant robots along for the ride isn’t a terrible idea. If you’ve ever wanted to see Megatron go up against one of Night Vale’s librarians, then the Welcome to Night Vale Roleplaying Game should have everything you need to get started.
Just be mindful not to enter, or even acknowledge the existence of, the dog park. All hail.
