Glitch: A Story of the Not

Glitch is the first modern installment in a long-running series of games (starting with the RPG "Nobilis") for people who like recreational philosophy and metaphysics and thinking about how their fundamental experience of the world works. These are games built, from the ground up, to take thought experiments and goofy arguments and self-expression on the core of one's meaning and identity and blend them in seamlessly with the banter, conflict, exploration, and (in this case) mystery solving that you'll find in a tabletop RPG.

Sound interesting?

So, this particular game is a game about living in a broken world. It's a game about hope and struggle.

It's a game about people who've found mistakes in the way the world's put together; seen that the world itself is wrong; and, therefore, of course, developed eldritch powers, gotten inducted into a mystical society, acquired a passel of enemies, frenemies, and dubious allies, and picked up a tragic backstory.

Glitch uses a simple but heavily nuanced diceless system.

Players control two "spotlights" per "chapter" of the game, allowing them to direct the group's attention; they earn experience points through the use of those spotlights and through the specific activities tied to their "quests."

Characters have five traits rated from 0-7, associated with a total of ninety individually versatile abilities: each is bound to a particular trait and given a difficulty from 0-12. To use one of these abilities, the character must accumulate [difficulty-Trait rating] points of a "Cost;" these Costs may or may not have immediate meaning in play but regardless accumulate to become wounds, suffering, and, eventually, a final ending. Players are not generally expected to have all of the abilities memorized; rather, in addition to the richness of possibility in the individual abilities, there's always more to discover that your character can potentially do.