Notes on Every New System I Play this Year #3: :Otherscape

Disclaimer: I encounter many of these systems for one-shots at meetups, where I sometimes won't even know what I'll be playing going in. Because of this, I'll often only have taken a deeper look at parts of the book that relate to character creation, and flipped through the rest. But I'll always have played them!

Played/Mastered on 21.01.2026 with 5 other players and 1 GM.

:Otherscape was my first Son of Oak game, despite me having been curious about trying one of their tag-based systems for quite some time. Though I gotta be honest here: I knew about City of Mist, and Legend in the Mist, but somehow I had completely missed :Otherscape's existence until I sat down and was handed my pre-made character sheet full of tags.

Broadly, tags are words or short phrases you can "use" in a given situation. Each tag you use will give you a +1 on a 2d6 roll, which determines if the action you're trying to perform succeeds (≥10), succeeds with a consequence (7-9), or doesn't succeed (≤6).

The character I got was called Valkyrie, a corporate owned humanoid weapon cyborg. Tropey as hell, but really well done. In general everything I saw of the other pre-mades looked stellar as well. Mostly very cliché, but extremely playable. And there's definitely a certain logic to cranking up the familiarity of your premade characters, so people can grok them quickly. This seemed to work well at the table, as everyone seemed to get their character immediately, despite all of them being pretty different from each other.

This was actually one of the first strengths of the tag mechanic manifesting itself: it allows for wildly different characters with minimal mechanical overhead.

The scenario we played was a pretty straightforward extraction mission in cyberspace, which the GM did a great job of bringing to life through well chosen narration and many mouth-made sound effects, which I always love.

The game flowed very well in both the social encounter based meat- as well as the more combat-heavy cyberspace, with everyone freely applying tags to any situation as they saw fit. It quickly became clear why this is such a strong system for narrative play: the tags basically act as prompts for the players to get their creative juices flowing, thinking about how they might apply to a given situation. At the same time, they are open enough to not feel constraining. And since there aren't many rules that they might interact with, they also don't feel overwhelming. You're still playing from your character sheet, like in more traditional games, but in a more effortless, creative manner.

Once you've chosen which tags you want to try to apply, the negotiation about their applicability with the GM begins. This is great. It's often said that roleplaying games are a conversation, and this is an elegant way of forcing this conversation to actually happen. Every tag you apply acts as its own synchronisation point for you to ensure that you have as equifinal an interpretation of a given situation as possible. Does the GM think the tag applies as well? Great! If not–why? (If you know the board game "Codenames", it can kinda feel like that sometimes.) It's so much more freeflowing than looking up if a pre-written rule applies to a given situation, while still providing a lot of structure and "inspiration" some players crave. It's also a lot less overhead than juggling all the moves the typical Powered by the Apocalypse playbook provides you with in your head.

The only thing I'm kinda "meh" on is the same thing I don't like about all the Son of Oak systems: their settings are pretty much the most tame version of the genres they implement. :Otherscape's version of cyberpunk is passion-curbing Cornflakes, whereas I'd like to have some sugar-coated Frosties. If you know what I mean.

Also, their books are far too wordy and long. It's like they used up all their ability to be succinct when creating the tags.

Overall, I liked :Otherscape very much though. It's a very fun system that achieves its goals very well I think. You as either the GM or player will have to bring a few ideas to make the scenario interesting, but it's still a very strong foundation to build on. It would definitely make for a great campaign, but I was still surprised how well it works for a one shot despite being a pretty maximalist game.

Loved it. | Liked it. | Didn't care for it.