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
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?
