The Slow Knife lets you craft a conspiracy of betrayal, and the revenge that follows

polygon.com:

Indie RPG fans familiar with Jack Harrison’s previous games are likely to be surprised by the big twist in the latest project he’s designed. His Zine Quest hit Bucket of Bolts is a solo game about designing a spaceship in the spirit of beloved space-going rustbuckets like Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon or Firefly’s Serenity. His other Kickstarter mini-games, Orbital and Artefact, have players designing a space-station setting and a magical item, respectively. But his newest project, funded on Kickstarter the day it launched, asks players to craft something much more elaborate and abstract: a conspiracy of intrigue and betrayal, leading to a final act of cathartic revenge.

Harrison’s new game, The Slow Knife, is designed to walk two to four players through the process of setting up and telling a story in the vein of Alexandre Dumas’ 1844 novel The Count of Monte Cristo. In the words of the game, a “promising young soul” has their life “ruined by a handful of grasping scoundrels,” then returns to plot an inevitable vengeance. Harrison tells Polygon that the impetus behind the game came from his love for Count of Monte Cristo’s brand of slow-burn political intrigue, and from the difficulty of enacting it in most mainstream RPGs.

“I’ve found that you get a lot of stories of brutal action, both in media and in role-playing games,” Harrison says. “You know, where everybody tries to take down the boss in a big action sequence. But there’s not a lot of social intrigue in role-playing, especially in games like D&D. They aren’t necessarily geared that way. So I started out thinking, ‘How can I tell that kind of long-term social-revenge story?’”

The Slow Knife invites gamers into that kind of intrigue, with each player answering card