Harvest

You don’t spend the game wondering whether you’re a good person. You instead wonder if you are ready to kill for the island or die for it — whether it’ll be your friend, lover, or father who will hold the knife and whether they’ll smile as they do it. 

— Thomas Manuel for Rascal News

Harvest gives us laden orchards and barren fields; desperate fervour and doubts grown thick as weeds; calves born and pigs slaughtered; proud traditions, failing wealth, and hostile stares; juice-stained lips and dirt under nails; and always the questions echoing down through the generations: ‘Whose blood must be spilled to feed the land?’ and ‘Whose hand will hold the knife?’

In Harvest, you play the residents of a remote island community stranded somewhere off the British coast around the end of the eighteenth century. On the mainland, old traditions are fed into the engine of Empire—languages crushed and folkways flattened under the imperial heel. Trains chew through the countryside as industry marches grimly onwards. Yet here, separated from towering smokestacks by the fathomless sea, they survive unchanged.

The Island is a sheltered paradise, cradled by the churning waters and blessed with rich soil and perfect weather. Folk live simple and contented lives off the fat of the land—the sea offers up teeming nets, the orchards fill our baskets in abundance, and our fields produce record yields, year after year. Life is good. And here the old rituals and stories still endure, stubborn and hardy, as full of stark beauty as the twisted willow.

But this golden haven comes at a price—the Island hungers, and demands that its generosity be repaid. There must be death to pay for life—hot blood soaking into the thirsty black soil—and no-one can know until the time comes whose blood will feed the land, and whose hand will hold the knife.

Harvest is a game for 3-5 players across 3-4 sessions, and uses the Belonging Outside Belonging system, invented by Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum for their paired games Dream Askew & Dream Apart. 

This system is a diceless, GMless, token-driven engine that rewards the characters for taking complicating or compromising action with the resources they can spend to embody the community’s values and hold it together in a tight, circulating economy. But temptation beckons—calling them to sacrifice tokens for good to invoke the vast and ancient Powers of the Island’s folklore (and the cruel Imperial forces of the mainland).

As play proceeds and the stock of tokens dwindles, there is only one way to unlock more: discover omens of the Island’s terrible hunger and advance the progress of the Sacrifice.

In a game of Harvest, each player will choose a member of the community to play – such as the established Old Name, the restless Young Blood, or the conflicted Homecomer. Together, you will sketch the landscape of the island: its beauty and its terror. Across three escalating acts, you’ll explore the island’s buried secrets, succumb to community pressure and private desperation, and turn against each other.

Because this much is certain: One of you must die, blood spilled to feed the land. And another must wield the knife. The only question is – who? 

If you want a physical copy of Harvest, you can buy one over on Warehouse23 here.

Rascal News wrote about Harvest's relationship to folk horror, and Thomas Manuel described it as "probably his game of the year".

Luke was interviewed about Harvest (and its sister game, Grand Guignol, and Belonging Outside Belonging design) on the Yes Indie'd podcast.

Luke was interviewed about Harvest (and Grand Guignol, and the history of Australian convention roleplaying) by Craig Shipman of the Third Floor Wars podcast.

The defining choices this game will ask you to make offer answers that lay bare the cruelty and anguish beneath the Island's idyllic veneer. They reflect sacrifice, poverty, violence, punishment, old ghosts, and social pressure, and do not shy away from the failings of institutions like the British monarchy, the Church of England, the academic establishment, and the family. Nor do they shy away from mentions of romantic intimacy, danger to children, intoxication, mortality, and terminal illness, among other things.

Some of these choices—and many of the omens of the sacrifice to come—also feature frightening or gruesome depictions of death, gore, decay, burial, transformation, drowning, flaying, cannibalism, nightmares, and sleepwalking. 

You need not always—or indeed, ever—choose these answers, but if their presence on the page will distress you or you find no appeal in any of them then Harvest may not be for you.