Let’s start the week with something jaw dropping: this is Silent Titans (2019), by Patrick Stuart, illustrated by Dirk Detweiler Leichty. It uses a light version of Chris McDowall’s Into the Odd rules (so light they fit on a bookmark). It is weird.

You have fallen through time, lost your memory and are exploring the Wir-Heal, a place where time and space have been poisoned by the dreams of those sleeping Titans. Animals in the Wir-Heal wear strange masks and talk. If humans stay too long, they turn into green haired, grass eating beasts. It may not be obvious at a glance, but there is a central mystery to solve. To deal with all of this means dealing with the Titans – you need to pull out their ego machines so they fall more fully asleep and stop making reality vomit all over itself.

For an RPG that  you might think is “gonzo,” Silent Titans does a good job of holding your hand through it all. Yes, the maps are strange (all the images in this post are dungeon maps, by the way – let that sink in) and the art is bonkers, but the text is grounded, full of excellent GMing advice and presented largely in bulleted lists, which makes it easy to parse (sort of – Stuart does like flowery language, even in bullets). The experience of Silent Titans is bizarre, but the execution is playable.

The art speaks for itself. It is rare in RPGs to have art so beautiful be so integral to understanding the world of the game. They could have presented Silent Titans in a more traditional way, just like you can choose to run it using your preferred OSR system instead of Into the Odd, but then it wouldn’t be Silent Titans anymore. This was designed to be a particular experience. That is rare and wonderful.

With 45 or so years of RPG history under our belts, we tend to think more about what RPGs are and less about what they could be. Silent Titans is 100 pages of Could Be – gorgeous, boundary pushing potential, waiting to blow your mind.