Nora Katz has published a few RPGs over at Itch.io including but not limited to Cowboy Take Me Away a game about growing something unruly and You Want it Darker an RPG about music and death.
Nora’s latest is a duet RPG, played with two people, called Nude on a Yellow Sofa. One of you is the muse, and one is the artist. You both decide who was who only at the very end of the game.
It’s a provocative RPG and not straightforward in two ways. Firstly it requires you to create art, and I cannot, but since I convinced myself I could join the doodle games in Jackbox TV during the lockdown, I also convinced myself to try. Secondly; Nude on a Yellow Sofa demands that you think.
Here’s what the game has to say about being a muse.
What does it mean to be someone’s muse? Often, it means being a young woman at the beginning of a creative career in an exploitative relationship with an older, more well-known male artist. At its worst, the relationship between artist and muse can be unethical and abusive. At best, it’s a recipe for a creative collaborator to be undervalued and misunderstood.
In this game, both artist and muse can be any age, any gender, any sexuality, and any race. All of the characters’ actions and experiences are rooted in enthusiastic consent, and the X-card should always be a part of game play. This game is dedicated to Henriette Darricarrère, the nude on the yellow sofa.
You play over 9 rounds and a conclusion. There’s no dice, but there are playing card draws for random prompts.
Each round has a prompt, a narrative silver thread to keep the drama unfolding and give you something to talk about.
You talk and create something inspired by the prompts and that chat in each round. I fear this RPG has invented Schrödinger’s Timer as there was never enough time and too much time, all at the same time.
We’re reassured it doesn’t matter if you don’t finish your artwork for each phase. Art is like that. I still found it frustrating, but less so over time. Some rounds, though, it felt as if we had too long to talk, and a shorter, snappier period would be more impactful. We rolled with that.
A glance at NoraKatz.com will confirm we’re dealing with a very talented, and smart, game designer here. Far smarter than I am. I worried about getting art history wrong, so my three games of “Nude on a Yellow Sofa” have been set in the future, in fantasy and one cosmic horror. Perhaps not as Nora intended.
The future game took a wonderfully dystopian slant, and halfway through, it looked like one of the characters was probably an AI, and at the end of the game, we confirmed this was the case. The AI was the muse, inspiring the human, who artistically created more AI.
My drawings, done with Google Drawings so my Discord RPG partner could see and play for free, are all worse than I feared. I resolved this by becoming increasingly abstract, which negatively affected the game. I got chuckles when I was trying to be serious, and I had to describe what I was trying to draw.
I wish this could be one of those “It’s the effort that counts…” stories of good intentions. But it’s not. You’ll enjoy this RPG more if you can worry less about creating art.
Overall
Despite my lack of illustration skills and the valiant efforts of Google Draw to be weird and frustrating at times, I actually really enjoyed “Nude on a Yellow Sofa”.
I enjoyed the co-creation of the story and the two characters; I enjoyed knowing there would be a big reveal at the end. Perhaps it was because the word “nude” was present in the title, but all three of my games became comfortably mature and thoughtful. A rare treat and one I found well suited to late-night Discord play.
Overall? Recommended.
“Nude on a Yellow Sofa” is free.
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