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What a weird, weird game this is.

Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth has been on my shelf since the 90s. This game is about creating an epic narrative experience. You can create and play characters in a fantasy world, yes, but you can also create the fantasy world using its detailed procedures, and the killer app, you can play nations in that world and through play create an entire interactive history. The promise of slipping up and down the scale of play from character to country was exciting, and these two dense tomes were filled with detail and precise rules…

…that were widely agreed to be impenetrable, and perhaps incomprehensible.

One day, I thought, one day I’d play it anyway and find out for myself.

Well in 2024 the opportunity arose. I was joined by three smart, brave, noble, and extremely foolish friends to puzzle out and play Aria. What a time we had!

The game is vexing, difficult, and incomplete, and its ambition definitely exceeds its abilities. Our game was the same. There were some splendid moments nonetheless!

Steve Hickey, the driving force of this playthrough, wrote it all up on RPG.net. You can read his detailed account of the whole story there.

My central contribution was ‘Pit Town’, a place so in thrall to its volcanic religion that it was destroying itself by throwing most of its productive effort into the pit as sacrifice. Did the fortunes of Pit Town manage to turn in the course of our game? Read Steve’s tale to find out!

(No, it all went very badly.)