Scope used to be a big deal in TTRPGs. The Generic Universal Roleplay system (GURPS) proudly boasts “with GURPS, you can be anything you want,” and there’s still plenty of energy for 5e-based products trying to ride high on mastery of a known system. But I’m much more interested these days in the opposite. Games where the scope is so tight that the game provides a clear consistent experience. Games where everyone is likely to play the same kind of character, and do the same sort of thing.

Even D&D has gone this way – big hardback campaigns like Curse of Strahd and Rime of the Frostmaiden provide cultural reference points among groups – how did you defeat Strahd? What did you do in Bryn Shander? Did you help the gnome mind flayers in their spelljamming vessel? (Possible spoilers there, I guess). And smaller, indie games have also tended to be successful when they’ve limited their scope to one approach, and hew closely to it.

Rosewood Abbey, from Kalum from the Rolistes podcast, is very tight in scope, and very good. You can’t be anything you want. You can be a friar, at a specific abbey, at the foot of the Alps between the 12th and 13th centuries. You can explore the abbey, you can go into the village nearby – you won’t be going any further. You’ll investigate mysteries that, despite their potential for supernatural origins – and other NPCs being sure that they are – have mundane solutions.

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