Assassin’s Creed tabletop RPG puts the video game’s most divisive feature at its center

polygon.com:

The time-hopping Assassin’s Creed franchise, first launched by Ubisoft in 2007, has been adapted into a tabletop role-playing game by CMON and is now up for pre-order. But rather than placing one of its many,many existing and extremely popularhistorical timelines at the center of the action, the publisher has made the bold choice to center the game’s primary narrative throughline in the modern day. That’s right: Assassin’s Creed Roleplaying Game will focus on the Animus machine, a MacGuffin-shaped piece of futuristic technology that lets regular people experience what it was like to do murders in the distant past. A 130-page “quickstart” Animus Training Program is now available to download for free.

For the uninitiated, Animus technology is a form of virtual reality that reads latent fragments of a subject’s ancestral DNA and uses that biological information to reconstruct events from the past in an immersive simulation. Narratively, anyone who has ever enjoyed an Assassin’s Creed video game has been inhabiting a character from our own, modern era who is themselves placed inside the Animus machine. Then their genetic information tells the story from there, a fact that the player is occasionally reminded of via cutscenes and short, playable sequences.

But while many fans — including some here at Polygon — find the Animus aspect of Assassin’s Creed games to be either extremely confusing, needlessly complex, or both, CMON’s emphasis of it appears to be why Ubisoft ultimately greenlit the TTRPG.

“I think that’s exactly what got us the job,” CMON’s head of tabletop role-play, Francisco Nepitello (The One Ring), told Polygon in a recent interview. “There were several projects that were pitched to Ubisoft for a role-play game,