Alas Vegas

BAD BETS, BAD DEBTS AND BAD DEATHS

You wake in a shallow grave in the desert. It’s night. You have no memory of how you got here, or who you are, or the location of your clothes. A scar of neon in the shape of a city squats on the horizon. There are answers there. And trouble.

ALAS VEGAS is a dark journey through a bizarre and terrifying casino city where sinister forces war for control and lives are worth no more than a handful of gambling chips. Caught in a struggle between rival factions, the players must find allies, the truth, and a way to escape. Memories are recovered, secrets are revealed, old debts are settled, and nothing is what it seems.

Your character sheet starts as blank as your memories, but your character gains skills by having flashbacks to their earlier life, so as the game progesses their backstory does too - creating a twisted web of links between the characters as they piece their past together and work out what's happened to them.

The conflict mechanics are based on the casino game Blackjack played with Tarot cards, creating high-stakes narrative showdowns, and spinning elements of the game's story from the cards that come up in play. 

'Alas Vegas' lasts four sessions, structured like a high-budget HBO miniseries, leading to a revelatory final climax that's a fitting end of the campaign. It’s Franz Kafka’s Fear and Loathing. It’s The Hangover meets The Prisoner. It’s Ocean’s Eleven directed by David Lynch. It’s like nothing you’ve played before.

PLUS THREE EXTRA CAMPAIGNS

ALAS VEGAS runs on the Fugue game system, built to tell stories of characters with amnesia. It uses Tarot cards and rotating GMs to create unique, high-tension adventures, heavy on character and narrative. As well as 'Alas Vegas' itself, the book contains three extra complete Fugue campaigns:

• YET ALREADY, frantic time-travel to save a chaotic, collapsing universe, written by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan;
• WARLOCK KINGS, paladins returned to life as generals of a dark army, by Allen Varney and Johnstone Metzger;
• REMEMBERING COSMIC MAN, in which you play two characters: one of a gang of superheroes whose leader has just been found dead, and one of the police investigating the crime, by Laurent Devernay and Jerome Larre.

Plus all the Fugue mechanics, of course.

PLUS A HOST OF STARS

ALAS VEGAS also contains articles by some of the finest games writers of the last two decades:

• Kenneth Hite contributes a complete stand-alone story-game set in the blood-red heart of classic Vegas, 'Killing Bugsy Siegel';
• Robin D. Laws tells you how to use tarot cards to create game narratives on the fly in 'Tarot-Jumping Other Games';
• Mike Selinker adds a bizarre casino in which your characters can place bets on their own chances of success in the adventure; 
• Matt Forbeck details the ins and outs of running gambling games in RPGs ;
• Richard Dansky expands the Alas Vegas setting in 'Grifts, Scams and Making it';
• John Scott Tynes serves up cocktails in 'The Guide To Drinking Heavily In Vegas';
• Eye-popping interior art by World Fantasy Award-winner John Coulthart and Dennis Detwiller;
• John Kovalic contributes an exclusive in-game comic strip!
• And Sean Smith describes how to... but you have to let us keep a few secrets.

AND THERE'S MORE!

Every digital copy of ALAS VEGAS comes with a four-seat license, so you can legally give extra copies to your players. The Fugue mechanics have been released under a Creative Commons licence, so you can download them for free and remix them for your own projects, including ones you publish. Plus there are designer notes and more.

THE REVIEWS ARE IN!

"The ultimate one-shot roleplaying game" - Reviews from R'yleh

"Worth the wait" - Tabletop Gaming magazine

"Alas Vegas is a stunning self-contained game with a heck of a narrative punch" - Jason Mical

"Weird and cool and stylish and clever" - Mikko Rautalahti, writer of Alan Wake and Quantum Break

"Best indie RPG I've read since Mouse Guard, which has my vote for the best written RPG of this century. You should get it." - Mike Selinker, designer of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game and Betrayal at House on the Hill

"James Wallis is a god" - Sean Jaffe

About the Designer

James Wallis, ‘the godfather of indie game design’, is the Origins Award-winning designer behind Once Upon a Time, the Ennie-nominated Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and the 2017 reboot of Paranoia.