Posted in: Games, Tabletop | Tagged: Lysa Penrose, Mundane Magic, rpg, Tabletop

We Tried Out A New Indie Tabletop RPG Called Mundane Magic

A short time ago we had an awesome chance to try out a new tabletop RPG with its creator as we dove into Mundane Magic. This new game was created by game designer Lysa Penrose, who has written for publishers like Wizards of the Coast, Kobold Press, and Jetpack7. Penrose snagged myself and a couple of other games journalists to sit down and play the game over Zoom to test it out and see how it functions. The game is a simple three-page RPG with basic mechanics for building a character and telling a story. The premise is that three players will take on the role of crones who have lived for many, many, many years, charged with the task of protecting the mortals of this plane. They do so by going back through time and fixing changes that have occurred to get everything back to normal, but only they can tell what's been changed and what needs to be fixed. If you don't repair it, the fabric of time and reality could be lost forever.

This game is pretty fantastic as it only requires three people and a GM, only a single D6 for dice, a pencil and paper for you to make a character sheet (or copy one from the PDF), and your imagination. The GM will take you through a scenario, either one of the suggested ones in the book or one they can create on their own for the adventure, which lasts about 2-4 hours depending on how you choose to play. The adventure we went on came from the book as we had to go back to 1800's London in a world that is run by dinosaurs with intelligent brains. We had to get a specific couple to fall in love at a gathering while also preventing a political uprising at the same party.

The three of us made our Mundane Magic characters in advance with specific traits that we roleplayed. However, there are certain guidelines in the book we needed to follow. We all had to pick a Focus (Minutia, Muscle, and Moxie) which would determine how our specific gifts would be treated as Crones and help define our character's abilities moving forward. Minutia helps guide knowledge that could help with complex plans, Muscle would use physicality to your advantage, and Moxie relies more on charm. We were given six Gift points to use in spells to help us out along the way. One of us used a spell to help train a dinosaur how to act like a perfect gentleman, while another one of us used it to make everything weightless and cause objects and people to float in a room. Without spoiling the story for everyone, we managed to get the timeline back in order the way it should be, but then came back to find things were altered in a different way.

This game is absolutely fun and it makes single adventures with the same set of characters possible without long cliffhangers. Basically, you can have an adventure in one sitting, come back, find everything is changed, call it a night, and come back the next time you want to do a game with that premise and a new adventure to fix that timeline. It's a brilliant way to play that can create chapter after chapter of adventures with the same three players and never get dull. If you're interested in trying Mundane Magic, you can get it at Drive Thru RPG for $5.

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