Cuticorium

I would love a copy of this if more community copies become available. :)

This sounds like a blast! Been looking for a good insect journaling experience! Finances are kind of tight at present, but I'll gladly trade a review for a Honeycomb Copy!

This game is tagged as GM-less but the information presented here says that it's not. Can you play Cuticorium without a GM?

I'm getting very excited to try Cuticorium and I haven't shut up about it since I found it. I do have a question about the rules though, and I hope the comments on itch is a good place to put it?

I'm wondering how and if NPC bugs use moves? When games I'm familiar with use capital M Moves they are all rolled by the player and the GM simply calls for the players to roll appropriate moves. The fact that NPCs use their webs to affect player rolls (and not the other way around) seemed to support this. But NPCs have favourite (panic?) moves as well as Features that modify their moves. Do NPCs in Cuticorium attempt to Scar and Comfort other players, or Transform their image in the player's eyes? And does it work the same as players doing so, but with the GM rolling the die and spending webs?

If you ever print more physical copies, call me! 

The art in here is wonderful! Just skimming through it I could already see several of the themes mentioned in the playtest represented through visuals alone. The whole book has a captivating aesthetic element. Even if one isn't able to play Cuticorium, one can get quite an experience just reading the guidebook. Thank you, Duck.

Also, I was involved in a pre-release playtest of Cuticorium. Our characters started a skyclad cult, invented electricity, and accidentally killed our profit (RIP Kukato). It was a wild ride, and one filled with self-discoveries very different from both what the players and game creators expected.

Reviewing trpgs is sometimes a bit like entomology. You'll think you know what they all look like, but then you'll lift up a rock and find something wholly new and bright staring back at you, forcing you to reevaluate all your preconceptions.

Cuticorium is one of those games.

It's loosely PbtA, in that it uses Moves and most rolls tend to produce success with a complication, but it's evolved in so many different directions that it feels like a fully different system.

In Cuticorium, you play as an insect that has been affected by the radiation from a unique stone. As long as you stay within the wide area around the stone, you can think and socialize and suppress your instincts. Many other bugs in the vicinity of the stone have done the same, and have built up a society of peaceful, self-aware critters.

I went in expecting Hollow Knight, but Beastars or Animosity might be a good point of comparison too. And unlike any of those stories, combat is *not* a point of focus for Cuticorium. In fact, if anything, I'd say it plays like a larp.

Most of your Moves as a PC are social, and many deal with personal growth and transformation. One Move is used for combat, but violence is positioned as a terrible thing that results from insects falling back on their basic nature.

Instead, the gameplay revolves around Webs. Webs are like Strings in Monsterhearts, in that you gain them on other people and places and can spend them for bonuses to rolls, but Webs are also your HP. Run out of Webs and your moveset is severely reduced, not to mention a single bad roll can kill you. This incentivizes you to socialize with other bugs, build up webs, and play a peaceful game instead.

Gameplay in Cuticorium is divided into scenes, and scenes take place in locations, which players can spend webs to claim or transform or link to other new locations. The point of a given scene is often defined by the players, but the GM can introduce an overarching plot as well and use that to stir up player conflict.

The interaction between PCs feels like the soul of the game, and it's what I'd suggest players lean into. Don't be an emotionless slate looking for battle. Have needs. Have regrets. Fight the nature your body was built for. There's a *lot* of room to customize PCs with unique Features that add new Moves, and every Feature plays into the serious physical differences between the types of bugs that all are trying to coexist in the Cuticorium.

There's *tons* of illustrated examples of these bugs in the book, by the way. It's dripping with high quality art. Every piece is gorgeous and creative and clever. Even if you never play it, it'll *still* be an inspiration to look at.

But the book does have some weaknesses.

One is purely a matter of expectation-setting. If what you want is Hollow Knight the rpg, this isn't that. Or at least, it's Hallownest before the fall, not after. Things are peaceful and busting, and you're not going to have cool nail-duels in the streets.

My other critique is a little more mechanical. Cuticorium's gameplay encourages you to dig into the thoughts and emotions of your character and slowly build up their relationships with the other PCs and characters of the setting. But if you leave the range of the Cuticorium and a beast shows up, there's a chance they just autokill you.

Beasts are monsters that can show up in scenes that take place at the edges of the Cuticorium's influence. When they show up, they roll a d20 and everyone present opposes them with a d4. You add the d4s together, and if you meet or beat the beast's roll, it *doesn't* autokill a random PC. So if you don't have enough PCs in a scene, and a beast rolls randomly to show up, and it rolls decently on the d20, one of the characters you've been building evaporates.

There isn't a ton the players can do to prevent this if the dice go the wrong way. So while this does create a cool threat that makes some areas terrifying to visit, it feels like it also has the strong potential to randomly zero out player agency. If this is something that might put you off, I'd recommend adding a "wound" system to your home game, where players can survive a beast attack at a cost.

Overall, though, I think Cuticorium is a gem. If you like the roleplaying part of rpgs, or if you're looking for something a little unusual to run as a larp, grab this. And if you're looking for fantastic character art, double grab this. Character creation in Cuticorium is fun, the web system is great, and there's a ton of potential for amazing storytelling in this system. I would absolutely recommend it to anyone who's reading this.

Hey Duck. I'm one of the cast members of Technical Difficulties Gaming Podcast (https://www.technicaldifficultiespod.com/). Would you be interested in a recorded interview about Cuticorium?