Pack up camp and let’s hit the road, today we’re setting off on a journey of magic and self-discovery in Ross Cowman’s Fall of Magic! We talk about the physical and emotional beauty of this evocative game, and explore how it tackles the travelogue genre. We discuss the journey as the goal, some stories that have done this well, and why exactly it has such a solid place in our hearts. Come join us as we make our trek to the land where magic was born!
The Farrier's Bellows - Fall of Magic
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Great to see this podcast tackling such a variety of classic and new indie/story games. I really enjoy the difference in perspectives from Zack and Diana. Keep it up!
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Not a game I’d considered playing, but having listened to your enthusiasm …
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I really like the idea of using this as a character generation process for another game. Like Traveller, where character creation is its own mini-game.
I played a day-long session of Fall of Magic where we did the whole map. We’d agreed to a bittersweet, Ghibli-esque tone for the playthrough and largely stuck to it, though things got a touch more gonzo OSR as we went. @JimLikesGames provided the scroll and facilitated the game, and he recorded an episode of his podcast about it here: https://anchor.fm/justplayed/episodes/2019-05-27-Fall-of-Magic-Home-Game-e460dv
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I run a monthly game for teens at a library. We’re reaching a conclusion to our Epyllion campaign and some of the kids are itching to try something more serious.
Would Fall of Magic be appropriate for young teens? Would it handle 8 players?
Also, this post seems to be missing the “Farrier’s Bellows” tag so it took me an extra step to find.
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You would need to run two tables to accommodate 8 players.
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Darn. There need to be more story games that can accommodate large groups.
Having two groups play story games concurrently and then debrief is really fun.
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True. But in this particular group I’m the only one with any desire to facilitate the game and I can’t manage two separate games simultaneously.
But maybe Fall of Magic runs itself? To draw comparisons to two other prompt-based story games, I could probably get my kids playing 2 separate games of For the Queen but not The Quiet Year. For the Queen is so simple, just draw a card and answer the question. Quiet Year is still pretty darn simple but has just enough procedure to the turns that the kids would need someone to guide them through it. The kids like story but prefer me to handle all the mechanics.
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I’d say Fall of Magic is probably only slightly more intensive than For the Queen–I think most teens would probably be able to run it with minimal assistance. High school age definitely, middle school it might be a little more iffy.
For what it’s worth, we did once play Fall of Magic with seven players by having some players “double up” and share scenes/characters–I played a Golem and Diana played the magpie that was on my shoulder, and we collaboratively chose locations and scenes for our “character.” In the end I think having young players share scenes and characters that way would probably be more demanding than just running two separate games, but we’ve done large groups of Fall of Magic with some moderate success.
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I enjoy a lot your podcast but I would like to make a suggestion.
Would it be possible to have a subsection with games that come from the game you are reviewing. In the Fall of Magic, there are 2 games that were published in Codex and this could have been a great opportunity to promote the Gauntlet work.
Definitely looking forward to the next episodes.
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It may fall outside the intended scope of Farrier’s Bellows but I’m always interested in the evolutionary tree of games. A brief topic about games that inspired the title game and games that were inspired by it would be pretty cool. I think a lot of it might end up being conjecture, since designers don’t always call out their inspiration, but sometimes the genealogy is pretty obvious.
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Thank you for your review of FoM.
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Finally got to play at PAX Unplugged yesterday. What a beautiful game! I mean that both physically and in terms of gameplay. I was out of spending money by the time I played, or I would have picked up a copy.
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