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Together, become a weird ecology. When the world shatters, how will we survive?
Assemblage is a science-inspired eco-fantasy TTRPG by Nat Mesnard in which 2-6 players use prompt cards and a guidebook to collaboratively build the story of an interdependent ecosystem on the verge of environmental disaster.
In Assemblage, you play not as a single character, but as an entire species. As each player imagines their own unique and fantastic creatures—deep sea leviathans, magical bacteria, insect cryptids, psychic cats, sentient moss—you will craft the story of an ecological assemblage: a group of species tossed together in a strange habitat, finding interdependent ways to survive.
Following along with the guidebook, and taking inspiration from your deck of prompt cards, you’ll come to understand the history, shifting present, and possible futures of your assemblage.
Then it will be time to encounter an epic environmental disaster—and discover how your assemblage responds.
“[W]e are not used to reading stories without human heroes…We forget that collaborative survival requires cross-species coordinations. To enlarge what is possible we need other kinds of stories.”
— Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
Card-based gameplay
This is a card-based, GM-less story game that can be played in as little as 1.5 hours — with flexibility to tell a longer story if you choose. The game will come in a handy ~5"x8" portable box that contains:
- Guidebook containing rules of play, safety tools, and help with facilitating a GM-less game for the first time
- Setting cards to inspire fantastical habitats
- Ecological relationship cards to establish species interdependence and conflict
- Event cards to inspire scenes and roleplay, and let you tell the story of your assemblage over time
- Cataclysm cards to outline the depth and extent of the crisis your assemblage will face
- Keystone species and Extinct species role cards that define player species who shape the story in special ways
