I first found out about this “spaghetti fantasy” setting for D&D a few years ago, the day after Gen Con, when I found a flyer for it in the hallway of the ICC, run over by one of the little carts they use to get around. It’s carefully pasted into my diary of the time.
( just so that we’re clear – that’s Italy flipped around, yes? )
I did talk to someone at Origins Game Fair last year who did his level best to sell me on buying All The Things for Brancalonia, and I think that’s where I heard it referred to as ‘Lowbrow Renaissance’ & where the specific non-lethal pub brawl rules came up.
So I was looking forward to this game, and I want to stress that despite what I’m about to describe, it was entertaining.
The game took place in the football stadium, out on the field, where we could get our nerd contamination all over the place.
The GM showed up a bit after us players (not late), and announced that he didn’t have printed characters, so we should use the pre generated ones from a website. Then gave the wrong domain name, so it took a while for everyone to find the file in question, but we eventually all did, zooming & panning around on our phones to read it.
There were some comments about ChatGPT & Grok which I didn’t quite catch, but which I was later told was said GM talking about understanding the rules of the game, or maybe coming up with a scenario. It was also later that one of the other players told us that they’d played a session of this game the previous day, where this GM & another guy had both turned up and said that they were running the game at the same table, and ‘our’ guy had simply said “OK” and left.
The game started with the setup for a pub brawl, when Other People heard Our Group get information on treasure to be recovered, and … That’s pretty much the rest of the session. It was entertaining & well characterized, so whatever our GM lacked in organisation or preparation, he did have a good line in making the thing fun.
We got out of the pub, and then out of the jail-wagon which had turned up. And then the Tornado Warning went off, and the “get away from the windows and get to an indoor space” announcements were made.
Following the Storm Shelter signs took us into a dead end corridor that ended in a roller door, which seemed like a flaw, but eventually someone from stadium staff came through and opened the door.
Nobody seemed to be panicking, which was good, though they also weren’t exactly filling the space properly, just clustering around the entrance, which seems less than useful if what I learned from the movie Twister can be believed. Me, I went for being as far back as possible, on the grounds that the end walls of the stadium are glass, and I’m not sure that an opening stadium roof is proof against tornados. Quite the opposite; I suspect it rapidly becomes flying metal debris.
I can report that a bunch of people in a concrete tunnel make enough noise that you can’t hear the announcements, but eventually the all clear was given, and we all wandered back to the field. All except the GM, who was nowhere to be seen.
The popular theory at the table is that he was phoning it in to get a free badge by running games, which is plausible, but he also forgot to collect event tickets, so … That’s gonna have consequences when it comes to claiming anything back.
Out in the rest of the convention, there was no tornado specific damage, but the winds did turn a bunch of shelters in the food truck area into metal pretzels, and short but heavy rain caused flooding; It came up out of the drains into some businesses, came out of the walls at one hotel, and out of the ceiling in the gaming hall of the convention centre.
So I can’t say that I know much more about Brancalonia than I did when I started. They’ve renamed a few classes, added a few races (one of the characters was a Marionette, though I only figured that out part way through), and put in a pretty fun fistfight mechanic that isn’t the standard “this could kill someone” D&D system. But I can’t tell you much else about the game.
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