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What players are saying:
Review of the game by Ben Ferber
Stillfleet is ideal as a game system, as a sci-fi setting, and as a political thriller.
As a game system, it allows everyone at the table to be extremely powerful and change the direction of a scene or a story at the drop of a hat—while still remaining OSR-style crunchy enough to satisfy your appetite if you like randomness and math contests as the bread and butter of a session's moment-to-moment. Its die-based stats also Just Work in a way that d20-style stats never quite have—they give you an instant understanding of both who you are and what you're up against. It's also a game where you begin already-powerful and as you level you become overwhelmingly powerful—but the enemies you make along the way may be godlike.
As a sci-fi setting Stillfleet is highly unique and almost overwhelmingly rich. It's a far-far-far future setting littered with dangerous ancient technology, which acts as a constant reminder of myriad failed civilizations who stood on the ground you're standing on now—and most of whom seem to have eaten themselves alive through various excessive-but-hilarious forms of hypercapitalism. It encourages you to play a weird character and lean into your own alien-ness—anyone from a nanite-drunk vampiric superhuman, to a whisper-quiet motile plant looking to exact revenge on loggers, to a charlatan sentient computer program conning their way to the next score. It has clever twists on classic aliens (the animalistic and terrifying Xenoglades, the shapeshifting subterfugous Solarians) and wild new ideas (the serial-killer-slash-performance-artist Void Elves, the hiveminded crab-fungus mega-scientist Mi-Go)—the world never lacks for threats, villains, and most importantly, foes who make you ponder whether YOU'RE actually the villain.
In that light, as a political thriller Stillfleet is a game that overtly encourages its players to wrestle with the morals of their job—is enacting economically violent cowboy diplomacy in service of a mega-future East India Company's profits and technological dominance really what you should be doing with your life? On the other hand, if you defect and use your considerable powers for a more altruistic cause, will it even have an effect or are you just throwing yourself to the dogs?
Ever since I first played it, Stillfleet has become my favorite game. Give it a try for yourself!