I’m going somewhere, and I want you to join me. I’m going to a place that always seems just past our reach. It’s a mixture of myth and hard, biting reality. This place, it smells like familiarity, and yet it beats the heart like first times do. It’s wedged between a mix tape, a throw-away comment and a shifter. It’s going to take a lot of open road to get to.
But open road’s all we’ve ever really got, anyways.
“So… Ribbon Drive. The most emotionally touching con gaming experience I’ve ever had.” Christian Griffen, author of Beast Hunters
In Ribbon Drive, we collectively create a story about a road trip. We do this in the comfort of a living room, over the course of 3-5 hours. We each create a character, one of the people going on this road trip. These characters are our individual jobs; each of us will roleplay one character’s decisions and actions. We’ll share the responsibility of narrating the obstacles and scenery that comes up all around us. Ribbon Drive creates stories about letting go on the open road, and we all work to both further and complicate this agenda during the game. It draws inspirations from road movies like Wristcutters, Everything Is Illuminated, y tu Mama Tambien, Little Miss Sunshine, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things and Thelma & Louise (and, to a lesser extent, Two Lane Blacktop, The Doom Generation and Wild At Heart). Our ultimate goal is to create a thought-provoking, meaningful experience. We let the music guide us. We let the road throw us curves. As our characters, we rethink our attachment to the future.
“Ribbon Drive inverts the tradition of a soundtrack for a story. Instead, it creates a storytrack for music. Effortless innovative, intensely captivating, and a little bit profound. It’s a brilliant game.”
Ben Lehman, author of Polaris and Bliss Stage
The game is hugely influenced by mix tapes that players bring to sessions of play. As such, Ribbon Drive is sold with a compilation CD featuring lots of cool artists and demonstrating the kind of themed mixes that the game works well with. It includes music from xox, Ghost Mice, Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, You Say Party! We Say Die!, The Butcher’s Bag, Tuck, June Madrona, Maria in the Shower, Van Gogh’s Severed Ear and Chris Clavin (formerly Captain Chaos; also a member of Ghost Mice). That’s a mix of local and non-local, many of which you haven’t heard before, all of which are really cool. The book itself is 30 pages, beautifully laid out in full colour by Kevin Allen Jr, and it’s packaged with the CD in a DVD-sized case.
“If you like music or driving, trees or memories, small towns or long silences, people’s faces, or summer roads that stretch on more endlessly and elegantly than language can give credit for — this is the game for you.” Daniel Wood
AP Reports: Death Of An Artist, Somewhere In Kansas… (pt. 1-4).
Reviews at: The Gamer Traveller (Daniel M. Perez), Claw/Claw/Peck (Bryant Durrell), Robin D. Laws – Gencon Day 3, mentioned on This Just In… From Gencon (podcast, episode: Sunday 11am), Yaruki Zero (podcast, episode #10).
[Cost + What You Want To Pay]
Ribbon Drive now costs what you think it should.
Here’s how this works: it costs me about $9 to ship the game anywhere in the world. And producing it costs me $8 per copy. So, the cost portion is $17.
Figure out how much you want to pay me on top of that. A buck? Five? Ten? Combine [cost + what you want to pay], and click the button below. Enter that amount, and the game is on its way!
Looking for Ribbon Drive in stores?
VANCOUVER:
Drexoll Games, McDonald & 4th
Drexoll Games, Port Coquitlam
Strategies Games, Main & 22nd
Craving For A Game, Central City Mall, Surrey
SEATTLE:
The Dreaming, on The Ave (that’s what the kids call it, right?)
Some time ago, I wanted to make a game about travel called Grand Tour. If this does as it is billed, I won’t have to write it, I may have just found you wrote it for me. I won’t be at Gen Con, but I will be getting this as soon as I can.
Prepare to be promoted on The Gamer Traveler as well. I’ll send links.
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Ordered!
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“I’m going somewhere, and I want you to join me. I’m going to a place that always seems just past our reach. It’s a mixture of myth and hard, biting reality. This place, it smells like familiarity, and yet it beats the heart like first times do. It’s wedged between a mix tape, a throw-away comment and a shifter. It’s going to take a lot of open road to get to.
But open road’s all we’ve ever really got, anyways.”
You are now imagining this paragraph read in the voice of Garth Marenghi.
I’d love to try this. If anyone will be at GTS next week with a copy they’d be willing to share or run, please email me at peter@gencon.com.
Hi,
As mentoined on The Playlist, I’ve hosted this at a couple of Cons in the UK now, it’s been a bit of a tough sell unfortunately (if the number of people who say to me ‘I’d have played that if’ actually just signed up and played it it wouldn’t be anywhere near as big a problem though
)
First game ran with 4 players, was an incredibly low key game and absolutely fantastic. We told the story of four old college friends, two guys, two girls, two high flyer corporate types, two blue collar treading water types, driving down from Canada to California. Some excellent scenes and a really interesting story. It was kicked off with the ‘Sweet Revenge’ mix that I’ve added to the playlist.
As I’ve seen in at least one other report we didn’t end up using any Detours at all but the story didn’t suffer from that.
The second game ran with 3 players and was a much more upbeat theme. We picked a theme titled ‘A World Insane’ to start (I’ll add that to The Playlist at some point) and had a story with three brothers from Ohio who had just rescued their sister from a Branch Davidian style cult in California and were looking to get back home to the farm. This had a lot more action narrated in to it and some edqier themes than the first game. It also generated a much steeper learning curve with some elements that I’d look out for in future games.
The game didn’t seem to work as well with 3 players versus 4, it felt like it upped the amount of work for each player with less time to kick back, watch the game and chip back in when needed. With 3 players we were all always involved in what was happening either as a PC or bringing in NPC’s and it felt a lot more hectic. Of course this could be nothing to do with 3 players and all to do with the other factors…
Without realising it we created a chase movie in the second game, which also forced the pace and focussed the story more than might have been helpful. So, that’s something that I will watch out for in future. It’s not necessarily the ‘wrong thing to do’ but it seemed to create a specific atmosphere and knowledge that it would do that would be useful.
The biggest mistake I think we made was to have the sister in the car as an NPC from the beginning. I talked to a friend about this and their instant response was ‘one of you should have been the sister’. And I think he was right. We’d played Kagematsu in the morning and all wanted to play guys this time round, but having the NPC there all along meant we either had to focus on her, or she became baggage we were just ignoring and neither felt right.
I’d be interested in other peoples views about having an NPC in the car as following this session my temptation would be to avoid it at all costs, or at least not if they are going to be there for more than a scene or two.
Having said all that, we still enjoyed the second game (I was the only player who played both) and agreed it ticked all the boxes for ‘a fun time’. Looking forward to running it again later in the year, although possibly not until November, depends whether I can see it working at any of the Cons I’m attending before then.
Very Cool, W00hoo. What’s your real name, btw?
Sounds like great games. Chase games are fun, but they’re definitely a lot different! In a chase game, it’s important to remember that the characters can escape the cops for a while, and have “down time” in some backwoods village, before the cops catch up again.
3 players can work great, but it is definitely more “involved” and potentially a lot more intimate.
My policy with NPCs is that it’s fine to bring them in, but someone better be playing them. Which means: if someone wasn’t dedicated to taking on the role of the “sister” for lots of play, she should have been written out early on.
Does that make sense?
Pretty much meshes with what we decided. Was talking to a friend straight after the game and his initial thought was ‘one of you should have played the sister’, which was spot on.
We went for a very loose approach of her being NPC’d by whoever wasn’t involved in the scene as much, rather than having a single player dedicated to her, but I think the biggest problem was that she was such a driver of problems for the trip that it was just easier to sideline her rather than bring her in which just made her existance a bit of a burden rather than a good point for the story. As we were pushing pretty strongly with the idea of ‘getting the family home’, it was one of the futures my guy was focussing on, then the idea of just dropping her to make the game easier didn’t really fly. If we’d focussed on the issues we generated for her then there wouldn’t have been a chance for other facets of the story to move anywhere. It was just too big a bit of plot I think.
We did have some side trips where the chase side of things didn’t feature at all, there was a nice set of scenes that were initiated with the sister potentially ODing on prescription sedatives (brought in largely as a way to sideline her but keep her in the car) where the brother I was playing addressed his other future, which was the possibility of having a fling with an old sweetheart seeing as he was so far away from his wife and kids on the farm. That played out really well with him finally deciding not to risk his marraige. While we were playing that out there was a second scene going on where the other two brothers buried some differences while getting drunk set in the classic bucolic setting of the tree with a tyre swing sat by a country pond. Although it also emphasised the fact that we didn’t really know what to do with the sister as her ‘medical emergency’ ended up being ‘all just fine’.
One other thought, don’t know if this has cropped up when you’ve been playing. We had a scene in Vegas, one of the brothers had taken a trait of ‘$10,000 in a holdall’ which he hadn’t decided the story of at the beginning. During play it was decided that he’d come across it in the cult buildings during the daring rescue of the sister. It appeared as the brothers had decided to just kick back having got off of a bus on the strip in Vegas. They’d agreed to go and hit the casino with the view of either making it big or losing the lot. One of the players then suggested that we resolve it using the next track on the CD, if it was an upbeat, positive track then the brothers had won big. If it was a downbeat, negative track then they’d lost the lot. The tension as the track changed was amazing with a real ‘YES’ feeling when the next one proved to be a cheerful one!
Oddly, it felt as if the 4 player game had a lot more time for personal development between the characters, while the 3 player game was much more about the scenes than the people inhabiting them, although that could have been more to do with the chase aspect than the number of players. It’ll be interesting to see how things develop the more I play the game.
Oh, it’s Mik by the way although I use w00hoo as a sign in name pretty much everywhere on the net I am…
We did have some side trips where the chase side of things didn’t feature at all, there was a nice set of scenes that were initiated with the sister potentially ODing on prescription sedatives (brought in largely as a way to sideline her but keep her in the car) where the brother I was playing addressed his other future, which was the possibility of having a fling with an old sweetheart seeing as he was so far away from his wife and kids on the farm. That played out really well with him finally deciding not to risk his marraige. While we were playing that out there was a second scene going on where the other two brothers buried some differences while getting drunk set in the classic bucolic setting of the tree with a tyre swing sat by a country pond. Although it also emphasised the fact that we didn’t really know what to do with the sister as her ‘medical emergency’ ended up being ‘all just fine’.
+1
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