Feb. 26: Welcome to Hotel "Rouge"

A Hotel to Remember

Independent TTRPGs are a topic I am slowly growing to appreciate and learn more about. Whether it is a game about Lasers and Feelings, or an book where players invade Paris as vampires in order to kill Hitler, there’s so many fascinating game concepts that will likely only get played by a minority of players. But those games absolutely deserve love for the creativity behind them. That’s where I stand when it comes to the Red Lion Hotel, a TTRPG that will be released on Backerkit in March and tells the story of a hotel and all of the dramas within. It’s such a unique product, and I got to speak with its French creator, Côme Martin about its origin and design.

The Red Lion Hotel is a game for 2-6 players, where you draw cards that describe the interior of a grand hotel during the 19th/20th century and the characters within. Each card contains a location or person. The card also presents a narrative challenge of striving to start every sentence with all sorts of narrative challenges, whether playing as lost objects or improvising scientific lectures. It’s a unique experiment that provides a unique opportunity to test different parts of a person’s brain and to see what they can come up with when prompted.

Red Lion Hotel will be available for backing on March 13.
1. What's the origin of this game? What inspired you to create it?

Comte: As is often the case with ideas, it is a coalescence of different things. I got the idea of creating a game with no real Player Characters following a discussion with my friend Milouch, who went a step further and created a game with no (human) characters at all last year with The Black Wren. I initially wanted to talk only about the hotel's room, but I caved in, thinking I shouldn't make my game even more niche than it already was!

The other starting point is Meguey & Vincent Baker's Firebrands, which aims to tell a story through a series of thematic minigames. I liked the concept, but I felt the rhythm of a session was somewhat hampered by having to stop and read long rules occasionally, so I wanted to see if I could put my own spin on it.

Also, I really like liminal places, which is why I already wrote a game about a mall, and another about the subway. I consider The Red Lion Hotel the last third of a trilogy of sorts.

2. Why tell the story of a hotel and its residents over a focus on the residents individually?

It stems partly from the game design challenge I mentioned above but also from the fact that I wanted this game to tell many small stories simultaneously rather than one big, unified melodrama. I also relented a bit on that front by introducing "Theme" cards that allow for a common thread going through a given session, but the goal was always to finish a session with flashes of bigger stories you haven't seen from start to finish.

Following that impulse, it seemed logical to focus on the hotel's rooms and services themselves since they are, after all, often the reason why people would choose it (especially in the case of a grand hotel; if you only need a place to crash in for the night, you'd go to a cheaper place). Playtests have shown that making a given character pop up in the boiler room or the hotel's restaurant can greatly influence their description and actions, because you need a retrospective reason for them to be there—that's half the fun of the game!

3. What sort of inspirations did you draw on to create this game, whether it be other games or media that tell stories of hotels?

Apart from The Black Wren and Firebrands, I was heavily influenced by Georges Perec's Life, A User's Manual, one of my favorite novels, which presents a parisian building and the people living there by going from room to room and thoroughly describing every little thing they feature. Perec was also part of the OuLiPo, a writing group that believed narrative challenges were a driving creative force, a belief I strongly agree with and which I tried to convert into roleplaying terms in my own game.

As for hotels, I think my biggest anti-inspiration was Stephen King's The Shining, which is the go-to reference of many people when thinking about grand hotels. Not that it's a bad novel, far from it (and Kubrick's adaptation is also pretty good) but I felt like I couldn't do any better in that particular vibe, which is why I specify in the rules that there's no supernatural elements in The Red Lion Hotel. It's been done, and done well, no need for me to try and outdo that.

From an aesthetic point of view, the most direct reference is probably Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel; I like that the film shows the side of the staff instead of the clients and features over-the-top characters, which you could imagine in a TTRPG. Amor Towles' A Gentleman in Moscow also shows that to a degree, especially in its TV adaptation.

4. How do you view the game's replayability?

When I initially conceived the game, it was meant for campaigns, each session building on what was created in the previous ones, adding more and more rooms, more and more characters as you went along. You can certainly play it like that still, but I wanted the base experience to be short and fun, so you could then try another of the 1000 indie games you bought but never played (I'm not judging you, that's me I'm describing here!). However, simple maths has proven me that The Red Lion Hotel has a high replayability factor: there are a hundred cards in the game, each requiring about 15 minutes to set a scene with, so unless you're planning on a 25-hour session, there's little chance you'll see everything the game has to offer in just one go. In fact, when I demo the game in conventions, players are often left hungry for more, feeling they've only scratched the game's surface, which is always a good sign!

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