I picked up Good Society as part of Storybrewer's recent Kickstarter. While the pdfs were delivered earlier in the year, I waited until I had the physical books in my hand before reading them. So these are my first impressions; I’ve not played it yet.
Good Society is a Jane Austen roleplaying game. It has a modern-day approach focussed on telling Jane Austen-like stories. While it can be hacked (and there’s a volume of variations, Expanded Acquaintance, which I’ve yet to read), if you’re using Good Society to run an investigative horror game, you are doing it wrong. (And that’s not something I like to say.)
As I’m a fan of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and (to a lesser extent) Emma, Good Society was pushing on an open door.
Physically
Physically, Good Society is a 6x9 hardback with pleasing layout and art. There’s lots of white space, giving the text plenty of room to breathe. The writing is engaging and easy to read—at first glance the game looks fiddly, but everything is explained clearly and I feel like I’m in safe hands.
I found the font a little small and I need good light to read it by—particularly the green flavour text where the contrast is reduced. (As I get older, this is a more common complaint and one of the benefits of pdfs.) It’s a shame the font couldn’t have been a touch larger—the margins are wide, and I’m sure a larger font could have been accommodated without additional pages.
Good Society also comes with a deck of cards (desires, relationships and minor characters) plus pdfs for character roles (kind of like playbooks), family background, connections and public information.
Characters
Characters are created as a group. Each player controls a major character with a:
- Desire—what they want (to marry, to get revenge, to deal with a scandal)
- Relationship—to other characters (siblings, secret betrothals, rivals)
- Role sheet—who they are (heir, socialite, dowager)
- Family—how they were brought up (old money, new money, foreign)
Good Society is set up so that the characters’ differing desires create conflict and drama. Desires and relationships are provided as cards, and Good Society collects them into playsets to suit different styles of game.
A Jane Austen character needs more than just major characters—it also has a cast of minor characters. Therefore, each player also creates two minor characters. Minor characters are played by the facilitator (if there is one) or by other players.
One thing missing from character generation is any sense of numbers. Thankfully there are no skills or attributes—there aren’t even any dice. Which brings me to system.
System
Good Society is one of these new-fangled games without dice, attributes, or skills. Characters can do whatever they like, given they are characters in a Jane Austen novel. There are no scenarios or adventures—instead, the players create conflict (and the story) by advancing their characters’ desires.
Mechanically, Good Society uses two types of tokens: resolve tokens and monologue tokens.
Resolve tokens shape the story in significant ways—they feel a bit like Fate tokens (for compels or using them to state a fact—not for adding +2 or re-rolling the dice). Although as I said, I have yet to play Good Society and they may feel different in play.
Monologue tokens are played on other players to force them to reveal their character’s inner thoughts in a monologue. (Not so you can use that knowledge, but simply because it suits the genre.) I’m looking forward to trying monologue tokens.
The strangest element of Good Society’s system is the phases of play. Good Society takes place over 3-8 cycles of play (decide how many cycles to play before you start). A cycle includes:
- Novel chapter: actual roleplaying, typically based around an event or a visitation.
- Reputation: assess characters’ reputation and assign tags.
- Rumour and scandal: Creating and spreading rumours.
- Epistolatory: Writing a letter. (You don’t actually write a letter, just describe who you are writing to and what the letter contains. I guess you could write a letter if you wanted to.)
- Novel chapter: Another bit of roleplaying.
- Reputation: assess characters’ reputation again.
- Rumour and scandal: More rumours.
- Epistolatory: Another letter.
- Upkeep: Refreshing tokens, and so on.
Each cycle should take 2-3.5 hours of play, so about a session’s worth. From an old-school roleplaying perspective, these cycles of play look very strange. But the bulk of time appears to be spent in the novel chapters, which is roleplaying as we know it.
Five things I like
In no particular order:
- Good Society is well-written and presented. Although I’ve not played it yet, everything is explained clearly and I don’t think I will struggle with it.
- I like the monologue tokens—I’ve played in a Shakespearean larp that had done something similar, but I’ve not used it in a tabletop game.
- I like stories driven by the characters’ desires. (That’s very like Lady Blackbird and freeform larps.)
- Characters are created collaboratively as a group. As a result, character creation looks like it will be fun.
- Good Society can be played without a facilitator, which I am looking forward to trying (once I’ve got a few GM-ed games under my belt). I want to play too!
And one thing I don’t
One jarring note in Good Society occurs exactly three times (four if you count the index): the game is set in the fictional town of Habershire. Which would be fine, except that a name ending in -shire is an English county, not a town. It seems an odd mistake for a team that clearly love Jane Austen.
Overall
Good Society is full of intriguing ingredients (cycles of play, resolve and monologue tokens, desires, major and minor characters, cards, playsheets). It’s hard to judge what play will be like (possibly harder than most RPGs), but I suspect it makes for a satisfying game. I hope to find out sometime in 2022.
Further viewing
While on the subject of Jane Austen (not something I normally talk about on this blog), may I also recommend Bridgerton and Belgravia, which are Austen-adjacent and cover many of the same themes. I’ve only seen the TV shows, but there are novels for each.
Then there is the wonderful Lost in Austen, my favourite time-travel story in which our modern-day heroine swaps places with Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth and the story is never the same again.
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