Quy Serra Serra is a single-session roleplaying game in which life goes on at the end of the world. Roleplay as characters trying to go about their business in a small town as the world falls to pieces around them. Sure, it’s a tragedy that the whole world is falling apart, the explosions, the unaccountable events, but who has time to think about all that? What will be, will be.
Facets
To start the game, players build their world by pulling from their experiences with small towns. The world in Quy Serra Serra is made up of facets, notecards or slips of paper with sentences and descriptions on them that represent the various things in the world that tether the characters to the world and allow them to pretend the world isn’t ending.
Characters
Each player will choose one of the characters to play as:
- The Hermit, living life on the fringes
- The Boss, leading a gang of ne’er-do-wells
- The Lord, returning to the town they grew up in
- The Wanderer, walking aimlessly around town
- The Private Dick, trying to uncover some conspiracy
- The Mayor, desperately clinging to imagined power
Situations
Characters come with six situation prompts to guide your roleplaying. During the main part of the game, you’ll be trying to unfold those situations through freeform roleplaying. Perhaps you’ll need to initiate a manhunt as the boss, find an ally in a near-death state as the hermit, or overplan a disastrous community spectacle as the mayor. Situation prompts are secret information, so you won’t know exactly what the other players are aiming for as the story progresses.
The Apocalypse
While unfolding situations, each player will also have a certain number of facets to destroy. The world is ending, after all, try as your characters might to ignore it. When you destroy a facet, it changes the world and the scene as restaurants get swept up in hurricanes, aliens take over city hall, eternal riots descend upon the town, or some other calamity occurs depending on the way your world is ending. Your characters can get destroyed as well. Pretending the world isn’t ending is no way to save yourself. Quy serra serra!
This game’s character playbooks take inspiration from László Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming and The Melancholy of Resistance, as well as Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.