This Tactical RPG Has A Cool Tabletop Game-Master Feature; Please Overlook Her Railroading Faux Pas
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Sunderfolk, a four-player co-op turn-based RPG, is looking like the next game to encourage folks to experience the joy of tabletop games. It sees players fight together through a story where every NPC and player choice is narrated by a game master, allowing a group of friends to party up for weekly game nights to play through a campaign together. Sunderfolk doesn’t offer the same level of narrative freedom as a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 (or playing an actual tabletop game with a real person as the game master); instead, it honors binary choices in a curated narrative. Even if that means Sunderfolk’s game master is technically always railroading the players (a major faux pas in the tabletop community), I still think this feature sounds incredibly cool, potentially doing enough to still emulate what it’s like to play in a story-driven tabletop campaign with your friends.
In Sunderfolk, each player can pick from six different classes: the spell-slinging Arcanist, support-focused Bard, frontline fighter Berserker, area-of-effect specialist Pyromancer, sharpshooter Ranger, and slippery Rogue. You play as the titular Sunderfolk, anthropomorphic animals who reside in the Sunderlands, which have come under attack by the corrupting influence of shadowstones. You can play Sunderfolk with everyone in person or virtually with some or all players in different locations. While the action happens on one TV or computer screen (meaning someone will have to stream the game if you’re playing virtually), each player interacts with their phone (sort of like a Jackbox Party game), allowing you to dictate what your character does next from anywhere.
Sunderfolk uses its own system, but it’s built on the backbone of existing tabletop games. “The game that had the biggest inspiration on us, gameplay-wise–I think even some of the audience has kind of seen it in the way that the game plays out–is Gloomhaven, which is a board game. Gloomhaven and Frosthaven are kind of our biggest inspirations,” game director Erin Marek told me.
