When the Confluence team first approached me, they showed me what was in their beta and invited me to promote and hype the product if I so wanted to. Immediately seeing so many friends of mine from the TTRPG space (who I must say are all industry professionals) meant this was definitely going to be a banger of a product! What first caught my attention was the number of books included in it: 5 of them (of very different sizes of course). A first rapid overview of the rules left me a bit confused as well… What is this Confluence all about?
Confluence is a TTRPG like nothing you’ve experienced before: A genre-blending game of fantasy, sci-fi, and horror, built to tell character-driven stories through exploration of Atlases and artifacts touched by the people of the world
Upon getting a good read of the full books I can confidently say that Confluence truly is doing something I have never seen. In many ways it can feel similar to other games, having that sort of feel of a system that can be used for everything you can imagine like Cypher, Cortex, or Fate. The feel of every player acting partially as storytellers made me think of the Ironsworn series as well. The way the Focus, and Facets work has a PbtA feel, and the token mechanic kind of feels like the Belonging Outside Belonging framework. However, it is the Atlas that truly makes the game stand apart from all others I’ve played: an entire book that acts as your character options, your setting guide, and what will be fueling all players with ideas to see where the story goes. With it, you are able to truly give players the sandbox open-world feel that can usually feel so difficult to create in TTRPGs.
With all those comparisons I said you may think that maybe the game isn’t that great? Well, you would be entirely wrong! I found Confluence to take inspiration from many places, and having created an excellent product that allows you to change genres, settings and feel of a campaign from one moment to the next, and that is all thanks to the setting itself that is SO important for Confluence to work: Ajureah. Let me tell you a bit more about it…
The Setting
Ajurea has a particular thing… If you have played Heroes of the Storm (remember that videogame? No? Am I the only one?) Ajureah looks to be kind of a similar thing in its setting. The place is some sort of world made out of places, beings, and other weird phenomenons from other universes PULLED into this world, no matter the moment in time. Imagine when you were a little kid and you would grab all the toys you had and making them share a space together, no matter if they are weird aliens, cartooney talking animals, or a Buzz Lightyear (we will be coming back many times to this metaphor). Some know they have been ripped apart from their universe, some don’t and believe they have lived in Ajureah forever. The Pulling works in weird ways. But just like Pulling there is the PUSH, which will make things disappear from Ajureah randomly. Remember that storm filled with poisonous gases that was pulled from outer space into a pirate-filled sea twelve years back? It got pushed from one moment to the other! The Pulling and Pushing are incredible to have characters no matter the feel they might have face extremely weird odds.
What if kids students from a medieval magical school were to do a heist on a sci-fi base led by a vampire pirate?
The Mechanics
Without going very deep within the details of the mechanics, let me just say that this is not a rules-light game. I would not call it crunchy either though. The rules are extremely simple to grasp, and despite having several variations for some of the rules, the core of the game revolves mostly around the two kinds of rolls, the tokens, and a selection of things that all work quite similarly: focuses, areas, themes, player character facets. There are a few other things, but I found these to be the most important to get a grasp on how the game works. I won’t get into details in all of these but will offer a broad overview.
The Rolls
- Quick Roll: For when you a doing a quick action, or reacting to something. You roll 2d6s and choose one die result. On a 6, you succeed and narrate the result. 4-5 you succeed with a complication that the GM says. 1-3 the SL describes the outcome. However, double 6s is like a crit in which you get additional stuff. All in all, very similar to how PbtA games handle rolls.
- Scene Roll: This one I found weird at first until I understood why it is so special. These are the rolls you make when you have enough time to prepare or want to see how you would interact with your surroundings. The one making the action rolls, and every player who participates in the action being made can implement some of the other game mechanics to add 1d6 to the dice pool. The GM, however, rolls their own dice pool as well adding dice for anything that is making the roll more challenging. The player and the GM roll their dice pools and the players match the dice rolled with the ones from the GM.
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● A player had a green die representing an Attribute (rolled a 6) and a
blue die representing help from others (rolled a 2).
● The SL only rolled a red die for the Character Focus working against
them (rolled a 4).
● The player will likely choose the green die attributed to the Attribute to
match against the red die representing the Character Focus, the
players 6 then beats the 4. Now the player determines how that
Attribute helped them overcome the obstacle and the NPC in their way.
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I find this brilliant design, because of how the game works. All players partially act as GMs. The GM losing on one of the dice comparisons doesn’t mean that something bad happens to the GM all of the time, but something good could happen to the player characters. There is an example on this in which as a result of one of these rolls the players state that there is an exit for their characters that can help them get out of a bad situation.
These rolls are also used for combat. In these, you may use a Scene Roll making use of a “Closed Combat” facet for example to get additional bonuses when fighting in close quarters.
Tokens
Tokens act as your ace up your sleeve to get out of bad situations. You are constantly getting tokens along the game, mostly when you are using the rules of the game to make the story more fun for everyone. These are used to get bonuses, rerolls, establish truths about the world or location, and other actions that allow you to get out of a bad situation or help your character look cool.
Focuses, Areas, Themes, player character Facets
While very different in how they interact with the game, these all have things in common. They can all be found within the Atlas or can be made up to make the story more interesting. If talking to a shop owner they say something about a potion that can make you invisible using a flower from the “Upside Down Desert”, if players find that interesting, they can make “Potions” a focus because they want to see more of them in this campaign, or at least this session, the Upside Down Desert (or the shop itself) can be created as an area within one of the locations in the Atlas, or it can be an entirely new one that you add to the Atlas. Want to add a theme? There are many in the Atlas as well as possibilities, but “Exploration” works here… maybe even “Dungeoneering” if you want to give it more of an Indiana Jones feel to the adventure. Upon deciding on all that, you might define that your character actually is a “Botanist”, which may be added to your character as a facet. These things don’t have to come up all at once and there is a maximum of all these things you can have at once, so coming up with all these just from the shop is a bit of an extreme example.
Going back to the example of playing with toys and imagining a world, this all just feels like stating facts about your character toy and all your friends now must respect it. It has become a truth. This allows the GM to not need to prepare as much for the game, because the players themselves will be picking what they want to do when they find something interesting. That’s why you can have a sci-fi session about escaping prison, and the very next session can be a slice-of-life bar romcom episode in the Wild West.
One thing I must state, however, is that even if this all may feel very chaotic (and it kind of is), focuses, areas, themes, and facets all have their own things tied to them that make them much more complex than what I am saying. It feels very intuitive and gives the game a huge amount of customization and options, excellent for those who want to make power-builds as well as for those who would rather have a simpler game.
The Atlas
As I said, the Atlas is what the game truly revolves around, and what makes it stand out from all others I’ve seen. It feels like a personal journal, with plenty of paper clips and details you have gathered before going as a tourist to a new place. You can always count on it to tell you what you will find in your surroundings, and if you want to mark something new you discovered in this location you can write it down! In this game, by writing things into the Atlas, you make it cannon. Do you want something different? Maybe the setting pulled something new there that can make things more interesting! I’m already thinking on playing a separate campaign to the one I am running, and using the same Atlas with the added things from the other campaign!
By having the Atlas you give all players the possibility to determine what they want to focus the campaign on, by checking out all the cool stuff that there is to explore and do. They determine what the session or campaign is about, and the GM already will have most of the preparation done. It might mean that the GM sort of has to be quick on their feet at improvising, but if you are a bit experienced it should not be that hard. Whenever in doubt, just pull out a thing from the Atlas! On the GM’s side of things, you can find a plethora of story hooks, cool NPCs to import to the game and help run it. It truly feels ground breaking, as it allows for the players to have SO MUCH AGENCY. Plus looking at this incredibly colorful book and yelling “I WANT TO GO THERE!” seems really cool.
The art and layout of this Atlas (which is the only thing I’ve gotten the mostly finished version for this breakdown of the game) is outstanding. Just look a bit at the colors of these pictures! It truly shows you what the game is intended to feel like and gives you a sense of wonder like few other games I’ve seen. The art, at the same time, showcase very different lineages, which for a game in which you can play from a bus-sized individual, to a tiny-mouse-like being that can fit in a pocket is incredible because it fuels players’ minds on which kinds of characters they can play. I can assure there will be plenty of “That looks cool! I want to play that!”. The maps included in it also really gives the book a very tour guide feel, which is amazing! (don’t mind me fangirling while looking at this beautiful book)
The other content
Apart from the rulebook and the Atlas, the game includes three other books. These are the following:
- Calibration. In this book there lies a step by step guide on how to do an extremely successful and informative session 0. You will go through the usual safety tools, set expectations, and provide a quick summary of the rules for new players to immediately get them into the game. In addition to that, you will be choosing what you want the campaign to be about by going through the Atlas and choosing what you like. Lastly, it has an explanation on character creation, and how to link your characters with each other from the very start through relationships. Pretty cool to have it so streamlined.
- Sujatha’s Journal. A journal that details all the important details about the world you are playing in, in more of a glossary style. Teaches you about the world, the pulling and pushing, and which important characters and factions have been through the many eras. I see this being extremely valuable mostly for GMs and for those players who want to delve deeper into the lore.
- The Catalog of Lists. A collection of Lists from things that aren’t necessarily tied into the world enough to appear in the Atlas, but that give you plenty of options to choose for your character. Due to its huge variety of options, these are classified into colorful tags, making it much easier to understand what you are looking at at a simple glance. If you are all set into delving into horror, then you can use the tags that are linked to it, for example. This is clearly a book for players mostly, but I can see GMs using it for their NPCs.
Some last details I liked
I couldn’t add these things into any of the categories above, but I feel they are important enough to still mention, so here you have them:
- Thousands of choices, but forgiving. The game is full of SO MANY choices! That makes the game extremely modular to adapt to whatever all want to play. Be it for character options or what they want to do as players. The game itself also has mechanics to indicate that players should be able to test stuff and if they don’t like it they can change it, making exploration of the system that much better, and at the same time making it forgiving instead of having players stick to a choice until the very end. A great example of this is the Exploratory Facets mechanic, which allows the player to give their character a facet, giving them a few bonuses, but not all of the ones the facets gives, allowing them to change it for another one whenever they want.
- Pre-game and post-game as in-game mechanics. Some other games already do similar things, but I really like seeing them. Preparing the game to play, as in making sure everyone is happy with the campaign direction, choosing focuses, and areas, and recapping is all a mechanical step you have to take before beginning play. The same happens with the session end, where you must check if everyone is all right on an emotive session, look for what everyone liked or disliked, etc.
- The SL Principles. SL is the term used for GM in this game. The principles are like a list of things you should always go back to when in doubt to keep the game moving in the right direction. It points new GMs to what to do to take full advantage of the game mechanics. It’s always great seeing these helping guides!
- Wounds. Wounds are the mechanic the game has to show damage. The damage to the character can happen in a variety of ways, not only physical. Like in other games, it affects the character options you have chosen, meaning you might not be able to use some abilities while damaged. I particularly liked the Wounded Bargain, in which the GM can do a bargain with the player who rolled poorly to see if they would rather get a wound in exchange for a success, or similar things. Feels pretty much like doing a bargain with the devil, which I always like.
Quotes from their creators
“Confluence was built in a way that feels like a stroke of pure luck. A purely collaborative writer’s room, where artists shaped mechanics as much as designers.” – Alex Teplitz
“Each page of the Atlas has been lovingly touched by an artist and writer, imagining they are doing so from the perspective of a character in Confluence. This is a living, diegetic book. Conversations and arguments and discoveries happen in the pages as you read them.” – Alex Teplitz
“We want people to discover Ajurea with the joy and excitement of a child opening a Dragonology book for the first time.” – Alex Teplitz
Focus Card Database: “Players are encouraged to share the elements they built for their games with other groups. The places and characters of one world become the building blocks of another.” – Kandi J. Williams
“This is a genre-bending TTRPG- not just because of the variety of different settings and themes, but because of the magic of Confluxes. The thrill of ‘anything can happen’ is met with the encouragement of ‘you’ll decide together how the story unfolds’. – Kandi J. Williams
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