One of the fun parts of mythology is watching it change over the years. From stories of King Arthur that add in later knightly legends like Sir Lancelot to modern day characters like Superman learning to fly for his radio show, these stories endure because of their flexibility and authors making fresh takes with new perspectives. Broken Tales, from designer Alberto Tronchi, offers players a chance to rewrite their favorite fairy tales and fables in a way that turns bad guys good, good guys bad and a few powerful legends into uneasy allies that could go either way. I received a review copy of the game at Gen Con. Does the game end happily ever after? Let’s play to find out.
The setting takes place in 18th-century Europe where a wish has broken the world. Someone tapped into the power of stories and brought them into our world–except the process changed them. The myths and legends were all broken and have reformed in unusual ways. On a basic level, that means characters like Little Red Riding Hood and The Big Bad Wolf have changed teams with Red running around as a werewolf like creature and the Wolf hunting other legends like himself that have gone bad. There are also those characters who are somewhere in the middle, such as a Merlin who is more concerned with figuring out how magic works now that he’s real. The setup gives players a chance to dial in how clear cut they want the heroes and villains of their story to be.
Broken Tales uses a light system of d6 dice pools to resolve rolls. These rolls are broken down into two broad categories based on fictional positioning and avoiding danger. There are three levels of difficulty in the game with three successes, five successes and seven successes. If a character has a descriptor that fits the task at hand, they automatically start out with three successes. If they need help, they can either spend Soma points to buy more successes or they can choose to make a roll. Instead of looking for successes, the player chooses how many dice they want to roll hoping to avoid any of them turning up a 1. If that happens, the action is a failure. If they hit the target, they got a mixed success, with one success above being a clean success and two above a success with benefits. You can only get the later two results by picking up more dice than you need or overspending your resources. This system gives an interesting risk versus reward choice that turns one of the weaknesses of dice pool systems where the more dice you roll the more likely you are to roll a 1 into the central focus of the roll. There’s something novel and fun about picking up the dice and hoping for “No whammies” instead of looking for successes.
The setting itself is fairly light with most of it coming out in the write ups of various twisted legendary characters. It’s a mixture of ones most people would expect, like The Pied Piper and Krampus to ones that bend the timeline a little like Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. The level of detail feels similar to the gorgeously grim art from Daniel Comerci. It’s dark and full of broad strokes allowing for interpretation by the viewer. There are several write ups of villainous legends in the core book plus more heroes in the expansion books that make it likely players won’t have to go far to choose a character based on a legend they like. If the legend seen in the books doesn’t fit your group’s vision there are a few ways to change that. The first is making their redemption part of a quest. While players could throw down with The Three Little Pigs recast as a gang of sledgehammer wielding window smashing thugs they can also bring those characters over to doing good by reawakening the kernel of good that’s inside them. Just as those characters still have a small reminder of their previous character, the pliers also have a touch of darkness as well that they can let out if they are desperate. The child witch Baba Yaga (which, I’m sorry, I’m calling Baby Yaga and you can’t stop me) can tap into the massive powers of her elderly form if she needs to, though using these dark gifts cause the characters to take wounds and run the risk of disappearing if they take too much punishment.
The second method for customizing a legend is using the rules to build your own. There’s a lot of support for game masters in the book including several characters and adventures. But I really enjoyed the advice on how to use the system to run their game. Besides having powers that can be used to build legends there’s extensive advice on how to adjust and retheme abilities to fit a particular legend. I suspect fans of Oz could do their own take on a story like Wicked without too much fuss. While the legends included are fairly Eurocentric, there are a few that step beyond that category and the tools presented give tables a solid foundation on how to build their own.
Bottom Line: Broken Tales gives gaming groups the power to remix classic tales into fresh adventures that can seem familiar right up until the lights turn out.
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