During our first meetup in Warsaw I got a printed copy of the ‘Forgotten Gods’ (thanks again, Ike!). It is a role-playing, urban game by Nausika allowing players to become ancient gods and decide human fate.
The name of the game
The main goal of this game is to discover the city of your choice whilst socialising with your co-players and most importantly – to have fun! As the game creators mention in the game manual, Forgotten Gods is a mixture of genres – role-playing, city-game, touristic, educational and lastly – philosophical. The main game mode, which is basically a pervasive game, lasts around 3 – 6 hours.
How do you play Forgotten Gods
In order to play, every player ‘incarnates’ as various ancient gods from different mythologies. Authors give players an option to delve into a selection of mythologies: Norse, Celtic, Slavic, Greek, Egyptian and Sumerian and gods of war, love, wisdom, nature and death. Staggering 30 combinations in total. To immerse players with their characters, Nausika provided character sheets with background for every god. We learn his or hers speciality, character, symbol, way a given god was praised and interesting stories/facts from their lives. We even get a small drawing – Great touch! 🙂
Although the player’s character is a god, they look and behave like mortals, carefully observing the world around them because of an experiment they started 1000 years ago…
Forgotten Gods Oath
Our gods’ experiment is called The Oath. Gods decided to withdraw from participating in mortals’ lives and see if they’re capable of surviving on their own for one thousand years. The millennium is coming to an end in a few hours and you need to choose between extending the trial and ending it.
To help you decide, you have to walk around the city and participate in various quests. Currently, there are 8 quests in total, including 6 group quests and two individual ones. Players have to look for specific items, symbols and evidence to complete challenges.
It’s worth mentioning that if the group doesn’t like any of the proposed challenges, skipping them doesn’t harm the game itself – unless you decide not to participate in everything 😉.
Preparing for the game
To help participants prepare and build the hype, Nausika designed workshops. They are voluntary, however I personally really like this idea. Each workshop comes with an instruction on how to carry it out and an expected duration so you know exactly what you are getting into. An explanatory paragraph describes what aspect of the game will be impacted after incorporating the specific workshop (touristic, role-playing, philosophical experiences or even safety).
There’s an optional festival mode too! If you are organising any sort of a conference or convention you can easily leverage Forgotten Gods to increase your engagement and let your guests have even more fun! To make playing this game on your event more popular, a post on social media might be required to take the prize home.
Our ideas
You might’ve noticed that we really like this game. Our team is spread across Europe, so opportunities to play it in person are highly limited. We discussed it and we plan to redo this game to play it online.
Our idea is specifically tied to the Memage Quest. The point of this challenge is to seek symbols, names, art, etc. that resembles your god of choice. Nothing stands in the way of incorporating more types of tasks but we like this one the most.
To make it more challenging, you can set the time limit i.e.1 week during which all players try to gain as much ‘evidence’ as they can. Dedicated communication channel might make counting points easier and prevent cluttering your main chat😃.
It might be a good way to tighten the bond between you and your group of friends, it can also make you engage with each other more. What do you think?
Summary
Forgotten Gods by Nausika is a great city game. Beyond the original concept it is flexible enough to allow players to choose which elements they like and add new ones if they have an idea. There are even multiple ways to play it. I really like the fact that this game is… almost modular. This flexibility and a few pantheons to choose from enables many playthroughs without getting tired. I’m looking forward to play it in the near future because even without doing any workshops suggested by Nausika I’m already hyped up.
If you would like to play Forgotten Gods it is freely available on Nausika’s official website in English and Polish languages for free. I can’t recommend it enough: nausika.eu/forgottengods/.