I recently spent a hilarious evening playing Butter Princess: A Game of Indulgent Doom, a comedy/horror/thriller one-shot tabletop roleplaying game published in July 2022. It’s a great break from your regular campaign or convention experience. Or maybe, like me and my friends, you just love indies so much you want to rotate through them all. Butter Princess is based on Trophy rules, which are included in the book. All you need besides the adorable guidebook, festooned with amazing 1960s style clip art, are a few dice of two different colors, paper, and pencils. The book includes a simple character sheet; we just used index cards. My gamemaster has a physical copy of the book, which is available as PDF from Drive-Thru RPG.
The World of Butter Princess
Most of us know the state fair environment, either from personal experience or films and television shows. All the fried foods, carnival rides and games, prize-winning farm animals, and washed-up musical acts. And crowds. So many people. And what is delicious, deep-fried scent? A little eldritch horror in the air?
As a cooperative storytelling game, the players create characters, people attending the state fair. Each has a high-stake interest in the glory of the fair—sculpted butter representations (each weighing 90 pounds [41 kg]) of the twelve Butter Princess contestants.
Characters will push their luck and their fortunes will decline through failed skill checks or feats of hubris but are always successful if they tell a great story. Players go into the gaming knowing they are likely to fail. Miserably. So, ramp it up! Evel Knievel it right over the top.
Content Warning: Gastronomical overindulgence, food horror.
Butter Princess
Butter Princess Characters
Players created characters based on typical fairgoer archetypes, such as Livestock Virtuoso and Tchotchke Buff. Appropriate skills are listed in the playbook.
Players also choose Feats of Hubris, an extra (maybe supernatural) ability, such as Gullet (consume with an inhuman capacity) and Service Animal (use your companion to disregard a rule).
Each character also has a drive; all are related to the butter princess sculptures. Examples are Steal (the carved butter icon) and Summon (the Spirit of Butter to this earthly plane).
Beyond that, players are free to name their character and create a backstory as fancy or plain as they wish.
Game Play
The game master conducts the players through five acts (called Rings) as they progress through the fairgrounds and the story. The players’ drives and their schemes to fulfill them inform the plot, but the game includes suggestions for small events (Moments), threats (Terrors), and enticements (Temptations) for added spice or structure, as needed.
Die rolls represent the outcome of risky endeavors. Failure would be interesting. Players roll one light-colored die if they have a relevant skill or occupation. They can also get a die for taking a Devil’s Bargain—a complication that will happen regardless of the roll’s outcome. If the risk is to the character’s mind or body, especial if a Feat of Hubris is invoked, the player adds a dark die to the roll. The dark die can affect the character’s Ruin score.
The characters are on a six-point track to ruin. At level 6, their character is lost, consumed by the Spirit of the Fair, hauled off by security, or other terrible fates. The lost character’s player, however, can continue in the storytelling and even offer Devil’s Bargains to the other players.
An Audience with the Butter Princess
My group had a lot of laughs with Butter Princess. We tend to lighter side, silly stories of heists and hijinks in games like this. Fiasco was mentioned several times.
A Minnesota environment felt just right, with a Fargo vibe. Some of our characters turned out to be disagreeable, ruthless people, but as far as moving along conflict, that worked well. We agreed we wouldn’t want to play these characters week-to-week, but for a one-shot they were fun. The game was easy to learn, the rules intuitive, and we completed our story in about 2 to 2.5 hours. Perfect for a weeknight dinner party game.
If you enjoyed reading about this collaborative storytelling game, you might like this review of Fiasco. Do you like storytelling games? Share a comment on this blog. (Click the blog title and scroll down to see the comment box.)
The Big Cinch from Montag Press, is an award-winning supernatural noir adventure by Kathy L. Brown. Sean Joye, a fae-touched young veteran of 1922’s Irish Civil War, aims to atone for his assassin past and make a clean, new life in America. Until he asks the wrong questions…
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