• 22 Jan, 2026 *

You stand in front of what I can only describe as an art nouveau nightmare, forced into the approximate shape of a door. Whatever spaces were left for glass have been filled with thick obsidian and whatever metal holds it together has tarnished to where it’s nearly the same dark color. The paper poking from its edge is lavender this time, with a dried flower pressed within. It starts:

I really like Realis. I’ve been running and/or playing it for about a year now so I feel pretty confident in saying it’s one of my favorite games of all time — and its not even fully released yet.

If you’re unfamiliar, Realis is a game created by Austin Walker and published by Possible Worlds Games. Austin is also the GM for Friends at the Table, which is the actual play podcast that introduced me to indie TTRPGs. So I was pretty predisposed to like this game from the start.

The main mechanics are simple. Characters have sentences, each with a level of "Reality" (+x). They start broad: "I always kill my foe" (+0) and become narrower "I always kill my foe mercifully" (+1) and stronger as they level up.

Sentences are thrown against each other in contests, with the higher level of reality winning and ties going to the defender.

It’s so simple. And yet! I find myself entirely enamored with it.

From a player perspective, there’s enough to chew on to make the mechanics engaging. Trying to twist and bend language around to keep your sentences as broad as possible while still getting stronger, guessing the Reality of a sentence you’re going up against, arguing with the GM about the wording of, well, pretty much everything.

(Sidenote that I’m a freak who looooves arguing about semantics in a nice-ies way.)

It’s even better for the GM, in my opinion. You get to create little puzzles out of language for your players to solve! Riddles, if you will. What’s strongest when you can’t see it?

A shadow, of course!

It says in the Realis ashcan that you can expect PCs to win most conflicts, which I’ve found to be true! Therefore the challenge comes in positioning. Who can get the upper hand so they’re actually able to use their sentence? How do you get the noble off their land so they can’t use theirs? Will the PCs ever remember to take a lantern with them?

At its best, Realis creates a self-perpetuating engine of storytelling and inspiration. It’s a game that works best with a true "play to find out what happens" mindset — I’ve created a tense situation with no idea how everything’s going to play out and stuck a bunch of PCs in there to see what they’ll do. Players attempt to follow their goals and end up creating more trouble for themselves along the way (and Realis makes it very easy for players to get themselves into trouble). Most of my prep was done towards the start, building out faction and important NPC sentences, and now I just sit back and watch as it all goes.

At its worse, well. Realis is difficult to start up. I liken it to pancakes: the first one you make is always going to be a bit burnt. The ashcan offers no help on this front either, one of the few holes that becomes more obvious the more you play (though hopefully these will be filled in the full game). You’re going to need a strong hook at the very beginning that’s able to open up into more of a sandbox later on, giving the players momentum while you all figure out how the game works.

You also need a group that’s comfortable with arguing semantics and putting more importance on the fiction than on the mechanics. The main antagonist of my campaign isn’t that much stronger, mechanically speaking, than the PCs. They’re at the point where they could beat her in any one contest. So they have to be willing to step back when I remind them that she has the belief and protection of an entire kingdom at her back, and that the in fiction consequences of such an action would be disastrous.

(Or not! It’s more about what sort of fiction we want to tell. Ultimately we’ve decided we don’t want one where the main antagonist is beat in act 1 and now its a war between neighboring kingdoms instead — maybe you’d choose differently. Still, I think Realis works best with groups who can talk frankly about what they want to see in their story and work towards that collaboratively rather than trust that the mechanics will make that happen.)

That all being said, I think the engine of Realis works, and that it works well. Aaron Voigt nailed it when he mentioned that Realis comes from the same lineage as Belonging Outside Belonging Games, a singular line in a hour-and-a-half long video that blasted my brain right open. It is the moves from a BoB game that your character can always do, but done in a way where they evolve naturally alongside your character while still giving you a lot of control over when your character fails.

Which is, ultimately, what I love about Realis. It takes the way I approach playing a character in any game and mechanizes it. Taking a character from an archetype, a playbook, a class, and following along as they become a singular person, unique to the way you play them. It also supports the way I prefer to GM, which is heavily player-driven with a lot of collaborative world building. It all just makes sense to me on a fundamental level.

Plus the setting of Realis simply fucks. Far reaching dramatic science fantasy — it’s so good and perfect for a system that is as broad as this one is. Anything is possible in Realis, as long as you make it Real. You can have your Arthurian knights and clockwork robots and skyscrapers all next to each other, occupying different moons or crashing together through some strange accident of fate. This is where the inspiration part comes in too, there’s just enough hints of setting and lore in the book that it sends my mind into a thousand different moons places.

My current campaign is focused on two isolated moons, a purposeful narrowing of scope while my players and I figured out the system, and yet there’s currently seven moons fleshed out in the server, partially from PC backstories, partially because three of my players want to run (or are running) side games in the same Realis. It is simply so easy and fun to create sentences for people and places.

To the point where my friends make sentences just to get my ass while we’re playing.

I haven’t even gotten into the framing of the game book as the translation of something that was written in-universe, leading the reader to start examining (and distrusting!) language and the use of it in the same way that you will when you’re playing the game, meaning that you basically start playing it as you’re reading the rules —

The Twin Moons themselves

It’s just really, really good. The system of Realis is one of the most elegant ways I’ve seen the structure of how we tell stories be mechanized, set in a world that I want to explore every crevice of. I cannot wait for the full game to be released (55 CHARACTER CLASSES?? OVER 150 NPC CLASSES???? WILD. LET ME IN.) so I can explore more of what Austin & co have created and add to and change and destroy it with my friends.

• N.A.

p.s. hi hello thanks for reading my first Real Post on the blog! real quick i do want to shout out some coool stuff ive seen recently.

i linked to this earlier but if you haven’t watched Aaron’s video The Golden Age of Indie RPGs: 2010-2025 go do that!! its really good and well researched and fun to watch. also watch all his other stuff.

noted creators of cool games over at Graftbound put out a post about How to Deliver your Game Copy to a Layout Designer which i think is also really cool and important info

lastly my good friend Sylvan Lawrence (who’s playing a Xenagogue in my campaign :3) has also started a blog this year! you should go read it its pretty good <3

(oh and if you missed it you can presave Realis on kickstarter here)

alrighty thanks again for reading and if you have questions/comments/concerns about this article feel free to hit me up on tumblr or bluesky about them. see you next time!