Issue #009: Riding the Branches

How a new TTRPG offers teenagers tricks for social learning

Author

Christopher Hutton
June 20, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

TTRPG as therapy? Say it ain’t so! A look at a new game on Kickstarter that helps teach social skills!

Riding the Branches

First a bit of personal self-promotion. I wrote a preview of the BRANCH RIDERS TTRPG for The Fandomentals, a game on Kickstarter that “Teaches Teens Valuable Life Lessons With Realm-Hopping Adventure.” CHECK IT OUT!

The multiverse is a premise that’s oversaturated in film and television, it’s still a promising prospect for telling meaningful and interesting stories. That’s why one group has decided to create a new TTRPG setting that offers simple rules but also provides meaningful opportunities to engage with social and personal issues through gameplay.

Branch Riders is a new narrative-driven TTRPG on Kickstarter published in partnership with Onyx Path Publishing. The book is penned by the Bodhana Group, a nonprofit organization based out of Pennsylvania that “advocates the use of tabletop gaming as a directed therapeutic and clinical practice that can benefit personal growth as well as enhance social and educational services to individuals and families.” The game launched on June 11 and is available for backing now, with a campaign running through July 11.

The game’s really interesting, and I urge you to give the piece some of your time. But it touches on something that’s absolutely fascinating, namely the use of TTRPGs. “Bodhana believes and teaches that RPGs are best when used as a delivery system for traditional therapeutic modalities,” The author, Jack Birkenstock Jr, told me. “It is the vehicle, not the destination."

Birkenstock’s methodology isn’t new, as there’s a lot of literature on this notion in psychological journals. But building a whole game around it is such an interesting premise, and I am eager to learn more about it and perhaps even try it in time.

Game Deals

  1. Free League, the publisher of Alien: The RPG, The Lord of the Rings RPG and the Blade Runner RPG has a sale going on til July 1! Up to 50% on most of their games.

  2. Dungeonmaster’s Guild has several discounts on books from the Eberron setting. This is a more steampunk world with a lot of different magics and things.

  3. Humble Bundle has the Maps Extravaganza bundle, which offers over a dozen tools for making city, town and dungeon maps. they’re not really top-down from a design standpoint, but still pretty useful for world-building.

THIS WEEK IN TTRPGS:

  • Wizards of the Coast is unveiling a lot of details about the 2024 Player’s Handbook, from new classes to new weapon tags to details about the Fighter. The company also released early details to a number of creators on Youtube, so there’s fragments if you wanna take the time to dig through it all. It’s still very controlled amounts of content, which makes judging it difficult.

  • Roll20 also unveiled new 5.5e character sheets in alpha. I use this system for my players in my Friday game, and never been a big fan of the character generator there. Eager to play with this new one.

  • Evil Genius Games, a publisher known for creating 5e variants that include modern settings. The company’s CEO was caught speaking at a panel about his plans to “[bring] together all sides of the cryptocurrency, blockchain, and Web3 community.” This includes NFTs and the like. To be blunt, it’s not a good look for them.

  • Legends of Avantris, a quickly growing Actual-Play channel that’s taken over my TikTok feed with clips of Chuckles the Space Clown, hit 1 million subscribers on Wednesday, a notable milestone that many TTRPG APs struggle to reach. Congratulations to them!

  • A preview of Pathfinder’s new Player Core 2 and Champion Class is also up at EN World.

  • The Creator Recognition in TTRPG Awards (or CRIT for short), released their finalists. If you’re a big fan of those in Actual-Play or Indie TTRPG space, give them some love.

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