Description
Emissary is a love letter to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle. Many of these stories—including The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Telling—follow a shared structure, beginning with a lone traveler who visits a culture profoundly different from their own. This visit becomes a catalyst—a lit match thrown into a whole world of tinder. At the end, the visitor understands something new: about the world, themselves, or both. And the world too may be changed by the encounter.
Players collaboratively imagine the worlds of Here and There, and then take turns guiding the actions of the Emissary as they encounter a new world.
Emissary is a GM-less game about a stranger venturing into a strange new world, a world separated by space and time from their own yet still not entirely alien. Players will collaboratively create two world: Here, and There, and an Emissary who travels from There to Here on a mission. This Emissary and their mission will inevitably have consequences for Here. Players separately create inhabitants of Here, with their own desires and connections to the world they inhabit, and then take turns playing scenes as the Emissary and various other characters, illuminating the central conflict of the Emissary’s arrival. Players collectively decide on a binary final consequence (will X happen or Y happen) and as the Emissary’s visit progressives, the scales tip in one direction or another until locking into a final conclusion.
Emissary is a thoughtful and focused storytelling game designed to be played either as a one-shot or over a handful of sessions. Although the introspective and egalitarian of Le Guin’s work inspire the core of the game, it requires no prior experience with the author’s work, and can be played using any genre of speculative fiction without issue. The rules focus all world-building details directly into the characters that inhabit it, setting the stage for a fraught conflict where tough choices lie ahead. A great game for players looking for more interpersonal intrigue and social conflict in their games, or for groups with multiple world-builders among them.
- 22-page, digest sized stable-bound zine. Color cover with B&W interior
