The land is sick.
It has been sick for a long, long time, and it is not getting any better.
Like any infection, there is a source. The City. It sits perched on the coast like a canker, the flow of greed and rapaciousness unceasingly polluting the world it inhabits. Its residents plunder and despoil, poisoning the land, dredging the ocean, hunting its children to the point of extinction to fill their coffers with dead metals.
A world can only suffer for so long before there is a reckoning. And tonight, with you as its voice, it just might get one.
Welcome to the world of Siren’s Oath: Tides Turning, which bills itself as a “revenge-driven, eco-fantasy, mermaid coven” tabletop role-playing game by Twisted Spire. Siren’s Oath kicked off its crowdfunding campaign this week, and I was provided with an advance digital copy of the game for review.
Players will take on the roles of members of a coven of mermaid-witches, who are meeting to decide the ultimate fate of the City above. Will they trigger the final Rite to scour the City from the landscape, fall into discord and disagreement, or chart a new course altogether?
What’s in the Box?
The Core Ritual Box for Siren’s Oath contains everything needed to play a session of the game.
- A well-designed core rulebook which leans into the aesthetics without impacting clarity
- A playing board (if it’s a bit fancier than it needs to be, it adds nicely to the vibe)
- Five miniatures of the pre-generated mermaid-witch characters (the Abysswalker, Reefshaper, Songweaver, Stormforged, and Whisperer)
- Character cards for each of them
- Three cauldron minis
- Six-sided dice
While I didn’t get to hold the game’s physical components (teleporters haven’t been invented yet), they do look lovely. For those who enjoy a bit of atmosphere to their games, they also included a recommended song list (I created an iTunes playlist from them which you can find here).
Playing the Game
This is a game that heavily favors narrative over crunch. There aren’t any statistics or numerically-represented characteristics for each character. Rather, the character cards hold a series of storytelling prompts as well as random-result tables for determining each round’s “Secret Words” for each character.
A game of Siren’s Oath takes place over three game rounds (“Rites”), with an overall duration of a couple of hours.
For the first two rounds, the players go around the table telling a story about their character. While there are rules in the book for creating your own, the five pregenerated characters are well-defined with solid story prompts. I’d recommend using them over creating your own for any first-time players, as beyond the initial prompt this story is entirely improvisational. That’s a level of immersion that will likely be more familiar to those who enjoy Live-Action Role Playing than those whose idea of an RPG is a hack-and-slash dungeon crawl.
Siren’s Oath recommends a length of around two minutes to be ideal for a player’s story, minus any questions the other players may have for the storyteller. And those interjections are crucial. This is a secret-word game, so as you’re weaving your tale the other players are hanging on your every utterance, partly to enjoy the game and partly in the hopes of hearing you say one of their Secret Words.
While not allowed to say or hint at their words, they can ask you questions while your story is in progress in the hopes of steering you in the right direction. Players are encouraged to do this in the voice of their own character rather than as player-speak.
Once your story concludes, though, their window of opportunity has closed and it’s on to the next player. During the course of your tale if you said one of the Secret Words, that player would have revealed their list of Secret Words and moved their playing piece one ring closer to the center. Players who did not hear their words retain the same words for the following round.
The second round is essentially the same as the first in terms of mechanics, though the prompts for each character move the story in a deeper direction. The first round’s prompts encouraged players to talk about their lives in the City, what things were like for them before they came to the ocean and were reborn into a mermaid-witch. In this round, you move beyond background and into what you might consider your origin story. What prompted you to give your life to the ocean? Why did you turn your back on the City? And what, do you think, should become of the City (and its people) itself?
Mechanically, the first two rounds have given you the opportunity to advance your gamepiece closer to the center ring. If you’ve managed to have someone say one of your Secret Words in each round, congratulations! You’re two-thirds of the way to the center of the board.
The third and final Rite shakes things up a bit. Rather than each player getting to tell their story, this is a timed, fifteen-minute free-for-all debate. Every player has had the chance to talk about their character, its feelings, and its motivations. Now the fate of the City needs to be decided.
Will your coven cast the spell to have the sea overtake the City, potentially drowning those within and letting nature reclaim it? Will you instead forego the devastation and seek to reconcile civilization and nature to the benefit and prosperity of both? Or will the discord of the coven throw the world into chaos? All players must decide if they want DESTRUCTION or HEALING to prevail, and must use these fifteen minutes to persuade, plead, and cajole the others into coming around to the same choice- all while keeping an ear out for someone uttering one of their secret words.
If a player’s secret word is spoken by another, they immediately move their piece to the center of the board. Once the timer has run out, each of those players who managed to get their piece into the center gets to draw a ballot to decide the ultimate fate of the city- majority wins.
After that there’s one more round of role-playing, with each player getting a chance to explain their decision or what they’d like the future to hold for the world. And with that, the game is done!
Playing the Game
Last month the game’s designer held a live performance of Siren’s Oath at the Tate Britain Museum in London, a snipped of which has been posted on YouTube by Twisted Spire. It’s a great look at what can emerge from the game when you have the right group who are very into their roles and came to the game prepared, and I’d have loved to be a spectator in the audience.
My playtest team, however, was a far cry from that level of performance. Role-playing games can be fun and rewarding at all levels of participation. I’ve enjoyed games with players who tried to inhabit the person of their character, just as I’ve enjoyed them with folks who are just there for the table-banter and the dice-rolling. But it’s important to match the game with the audience. Just as casual players might not enjoy a super-crunchy system with loads of min/maxing options, Siren’s Oath strongly encourages immersive storytelling.
Indeed, it’s fair to say that the mechanics of the game are simply there to provide structure and direction, much like the spine of a kite. It’s that middle-area, the crossover between storytelling and game, where our group most experienced the loss of immersion. While we certainly enjoyed listening to one another’s tales during each Ritual, interjections quickly devolved into what often felt like ‘fishing trips,’ as we tried to get the speaker to say our secret word. Some players- sensing where they were being led by a bit-too-obvious line of questioning- would even start to verbally ‘duck and weave’ to avoid saying what they suspected was a secret word.
Another point of tension between Siren’s Oath as a game and Siren’s Oath as an experience came in the Third Rite (“Deciding”). According to the rules, a player who gets their secret word spoken in the Third Rite immediately writes their decision (DESTROY or HEAL) on a slip of paper and puts it with the Cauldron in the middle…
“The centre of the board now holds the coven’s collective will.
“Once the third rite is complete, each player with their piece in the central space on the board should draw a voting slip randomly and reveal it. If no one is in the central circle, then all players on the innermost occupied circle draw instead.
“The majority wins.”
In our playtest, we had our most successful player manage to get her Secret Word spoken in both of the first two rites, but not the third. Our least successful player didn’t manage to get his word spoken in the first two, but did manage the task in the third- the only one to do so, as it happened (our table got so into debating the finer points of their position that I strongly suspect some Secret Word utterances went unnoticed).
That meant that our least-effective player decided the entire game, since he was the only one who had earned the ability to vote. That’s a shame, because it renders the first two Rites as more or less mechanically meaningless by vesting all voting power in the winners of the Third Rite alone.
This made our game’s conclusion feel somewhat anticlimactic and even unintuitive. One suggestion that came in our session post-mortem was- rather than letting players zoom to the center in the Third Rite- to give each player a vote for each ring they managed to land on. That gave everyone a say in the final outcome while rewarding those who had through craft and guile consistently managed to get their Secret Words spoken.
Moments of Magic
But even if we didn’t fully connect with the mechanics of the game, it didn’t put much of a damper on our enjoyment of it overall. That’s because the emphasis on the storytelling and interaction was the real heart of Siren’s Oath far more than moving our pieces on the board. One player described her own murder so hauntingly that her teenage daughter (one of the other players) was just struck silent. We shared the quiet for awhile, then together resumed our game.
To its credit, Siren’s Oath has a laudable self-awareness about the directions this game can take. “A heads up,” the rulebook cautions. “This game touches on some heavy stuff
(eco-anxiety, loss, death, violence, patriarchy, capitalist extraction, etc.), and that can hit home.” There’s a full page in the rulebook dedicated to making sure the journey is a safe and comfortable one for all involved. “We’re diving deep, but always with care, curiosity, and the power of collective storytelling.”
We also particularly enjoyed the way the game’s final third was structured. After two rounds of around-the-table storytelling, the pressure of a fifteen-minute timer and free-for-all environment really opened things up. It was every bit as lively as one imagines a Thanksgiving-dinner family argument about politics can be- but without the personal animosity and exasperation. For the players, the change in mode from “presenter” to “participant” really let them flex a different set of role-playing muscles, and the back-and-forth produced some of the most fun we had interacting in the guide of these characters.
I was also delightfully surprised by the way the game handles its conclusion, with a series of questions for each player to answer based on the final outcome. I’d worried that once the ‘winner’ of the game had been decided that the players would be keen to call it a day, but the interest with which they wanted to participate in the post-call customer satisfaction survey let me know they weren’t quite ready to depart the world of Siren’s Oath.
Final Thoughts
Given the heavy role-playing component and overall content, Siren’s Oath clearly has a certain kind of audience in mind. This is a potentially heavy game with a lot of deep themes, and so it’s not really a box you’d pull off the shelf when looking for something to do for an evening. Rather, this is a game that you invite a select group of friends over to play and make an event out of it by mailing out their character sheet to them in a fish-scale envelope a few days in advance.
As a result, you’re not likely to be playing a lot of sessions of the game in a short time. I can’t imagine getting to the end and saying, “that was great, who wants to play again?” Siren’s Oath does try to keep the game experience changing with random tables of Secret Words, though, so there’s enough variety to ensure the game can be enjoyed more than once (unlike, say, one of those boxed mystery games).
But I don’t think replayability is a central consideration to a game like this. With the right group of players and vibe, that one session can be something truly memorable- and well worth the price.
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