There But For The Geese Of God

PHYSICAL BACKERS UPDATE: I've sent off the files for this last batch of games to Maz, who's handling the printing. Hopefully you'll be receiving your copies in a couple of weeks.

I went to Poland recently!

More accurately - I went to Poznan to attend Pyrkon, which was lovely, and I'd go back in a shot. This is probably because being invited anywhere as a capital-G Guest is a novel and thrilling experience for me, but also because Pyrkon is a non-profit convention which gives it a very different vibe from, say, UKGE or GenCon or even Dragonmeet.

It reminded me a lot of the old Nine Worlds con in London - a bunch of young weirdos, at least half of 'em queer, hanging out and shouting about their interests at one another. Unfortunately Nine Worlds was too expensive to make sense but apparently Pyrkon is doing just fine.

ANYWAY. They put on a historic tour of Poznan for the guests, so I - and several world-renowned fantasy authors, and the guy who designed Frostgrave, and some actors who I believe were zombies in the Walking Dead, and two people from Babylon 5 who didn't seem to give a single shit about anything that was going on - walked around and soaked up the many myths and legends of Poznan.

It was lovely! One of them involved the King of the Ravens. Another involved St Martin, who as far as I'm aware never visited Poznan, but that doesn't stop them venerating him so hard they make a special croissant about it once a year.

I reproduce the story we were told at the top of this month's game, but in short: Martin of Tours was a holy man but didn't want to be a Bishop. The church sent agents after him to swear him in, so he hid in a shed, but there were geese in the shed and they drew the attention of the church by honking.

After hearing this, world-renowned fantasy author Adrian Tchaikovsky said "Hey, that'd make a good one-page game, wouldn't it?" And, you know, yes. (Thank you Adrian.) My initial idea was to make a game where you play a recalcitrant Martin of Tours desperately trying to evade the attentions of magical geese, but there's not enough there to bring a group to the table. (Funnier, though, I think?)

There But For the Geese Of God is a an adaptation of a) GOAT CRASHERS, a stone-cold classic, and an ancient game called RELENTLESS which Chris and I made up accidentally whilst trying to make D&D stat generation even slightly interesting. I feel as though I've graduated from animal crime games, the genre that would define my work for the best part of a decade - now I'm on to animal saviour games. Animal... charity games. What's the opposite of crime?

Regardless. You play a goose with an archangel crammed into its big round goose body and you gotta make this feckless vagabond look like a saint. If you want to read some of the best descriptions of a goose ever written, for inspiration, please refer to Daniel Lavery's superlative essay on Untitled Goose Game:

My body works. My body is the softest triangle with a hose attached, strong and useful and all the way sweetheart. You need everything but I have it. I put my honk in a jar so there is more honk! I honk at you, I honk directly up to God, and I will never leave!

Oh! And Hollows is nearly done crowdfunding. So if you've not pre-ordered a copy, get your fuckin act together and come throw some money at us about it.

Love and honks,

• Grant