This Tactical RPG Has A Cool Tabletop Game-Master Feature; Please Overlook Her Railroading Faux Pas

Sunderfolk, a four-player co-op turn-based RPG, is looking like the next game to encourage folks to experience the joy of tabletop games. It sees players fight together through a story where every NPC and player choice is narrated by a game master, allowing a group of friends to party up for weekly game nights to play through a campaign together. Sunderfolk doesn’t offer the same level of narrative freedom as a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 (or playing an actual tabletop game with a real person as the game master); instead, it honors binary choices in a curated narrative. Even if that means Sunderfolk’s game master is technically always railroading the players (a major faux pas in the tabletop community), I still think this feature sounds incredibly cool, potentially doing enough to still emulate what it’s like to play in a story-driven tabletop campaign with your friends.

In Sunderfolk, each player can pick from six different classes: the spell-slinging Arcanist, support-focused Bard, frontline fighter Berserker, area-of-effect specialist Pyromancer, sharpshooter Ranger, and slippery Rogue. You play as the titular Sunderfolk, anthropomorphic animals who reside in the Sunderlands, which have come under attack by the corrupting influence of shadowstones. You can play Sunderfolk with everyone in person or virtually with some or all players in different locations. While the action happens on one TV or computer screen (meaning someone will have to stream the game if you’re playing virtually), each player interacts with their phone (sort of like a Jackbox Party game), allowing you to dictate what your character does next from anywhere.

Sunderfolk uses its own system, but it’s built on the backbone of existing tabletop games. “The game that had the biggest inspiration on us, gameplay-wise–I think even some of the audience has kind of seen it in the way that the game plays out–is Gloomhaven, which is a board game. Gloomhaven and Frosthaven are kind of our biggest inspirations,” game director Erin Marek told me.

“We at the studio love tabletop RPGs, but we also love board gaming and especially tactics-turn-based board games, and we know they’re not super accessible for a lot of folks. There are some challenges that board games can have around long setup times, lots of reading to understand what the rules are, but there’s also something really magical about getting together in person and playing in-person that is kind of that synergy, like can we make something that’s like this but is more accessible to either folks who aren’t familiar or maybe have opted out in the past from that experience for whatever reason and create it as that entry point. So that was our early inspiration. We’ve diverged from it over time, but I still think you can see it in some of the design.”

One of those diversions is a relationship tracker, which allows each of the players to befriend and/or romance NPCs. “[We’ve made] some of the NPCs romanceable, and I think that that’s a particularly exciting feature if you’re somebody who loves dating sims and stuff,” Marek said. “We have this cast of NPCs in town that you can engage with, learn about them, and then choose to either go down a more platonic path or choose to go down a more romantic path. And you get some really awesome rewards too if you get all the way to the end of their path.”

Like Gloomhaven, Sunderfolk is divided into two repeating phases. “You have the mission phase, which is high intensity, everybody’s working together, taking turns, trying to beat monsters, etc.,” Marek said. “That’s where you might see things like cinematics or the game master voiceover. Kind of at the tail ends and beginning of those missions, you’ll get the story content that Anjali [Bhimani] helped voice. And then once you’re in town, it’s a little bit more of a breathing moment. It’s the opportunity where it’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve got [a chance to] take a break. I’m going to go grab a snack.’ And you’re not hindered by other people not being there to continue your experience. So in that [phase], you can go on your phone, you can talk to different characters, have your own stories happening. And one of the things that is my favorite feature of the game is–we call it Mad Libs–you can name things. [You name things] in the plot, in the game, and it’ll pop up in other places. …And so it provides this opportunity for each group to leave little surprises and gifts for the other players, create inside jokes or feel like they have some sense of agency over some of the pieces of the world.”

There is some semblance of choice beyond these Mad Libs, but Sunderfolk isn’t a huge branching RPG, so the degree of agency that players have is curated by the game master’s narration. “There are main story missions, which hit at certain points in the progression that you will always play,” Marek said. “But in between those, you’re provided with three to four different mission options and you’ll get to pick which ones you want to play or don’t want to play. So there’s a little bit of agency [there]. …And then once [a mission] is selected, the [game master] helps bridge the gap, [going] ‘Okay, so you chose to go there and here’s why you’re choosing to go there.’ So a little bit is reactive, a little bit is more railroad-y. There’s a little bit on both of those sides, and I think it’s a decent balance. We’ve also tried really hard on the writing side not to have the game master put actions into the players, not to enforce an action upon a player.”

To enforce how hands-off the game master is in dictating the player characters’ motivations, those characters do not speak. The game essentially leaves it up to the players to roleplay their characters as they see fit. However, every other character is voiced by the same person, and that person is also the sole narrator of the action and the player characters’ choices: the game master. Actor Anjali Bhimani (a game master in her own right, and the voice behind roles like Overwatch’s Symmetra and Apex Legends’ Rampart) is the narrator and game master in Sunderfolk.

“What appealed to me the most about this job was the actual make of the game,” Bhimani told me. “When Chris [Sigaty] from Dreamhaven hit me up, and we sat and talked about it, and he explained to me exactly what they were trying to do with the game, how they were trying to reinvent game night, essentially, for families, for people all over the globe, and bring the simplicity of turning on a video game to the collaborative nature of tabletop, combining those two parts, those really, really wonderful parts of gaming to each other, just made so much sense to me. And I, like them, have had a similarly difficult time getting some of my friends to play a TTRPG, because there’s a lot of setup and there’s a lot of learning. And convincing friends that you don’t have to worry about all the rules, it’s an open-book test–even sometimes that doesn’t get them over the finish line.”

“We knew we wanted somebody who had experience in the tabletop RPG space,” Marek said. “It’s so hard to describe, but there’s this nuance between when you’re narrating something versus when you’re talking to your friends at a table. And I feel like anybody who plays a tabletop RPG kind of intuitively knows that difference. They experience it enough to get it. And so when we were looking at our own script, there are these moments where the narrator is a narrator, but there are also moments where they’re a game master at the table talking to their party, and that is so hard to parse through without really knowing the space.”

“Before we even started, I asked to sit down with them and see all of the characters that I was going to be voicing this whole time, so that we could plot out [voices], and I could plot out in my head, which voices I was going to use,” Bhimani said. “And not even for each one of them, but just in a sense of where in my range certain ones would live, and make sure that I really was being distinct with each one’s voice. You don’t know if all five of them are going to be in the same scene at any given time, right? We want to make sure that they sound a little bit different. So, we can go through and take a look at all of those and see which ones we’re going to be around a lot more, and which ones we’re going to be doing scenes with each other more often, and stuff like that.”

If you can’t bring a group of people together to play even over a Discord call, you can play Sunderfolk solo. “It’s not really our intended experience. I wouldn’t say it’s the best experience [to play solo], but yeah, absolutely you can,” Marek said. “So we know some folks also might struggle to get their groups together or maybe they don’t have groups that they want to play with, and so we didn’t want to prevent them from being able to experience this game as well. So the only caveat is they have to control at least two heroes. You can’t play it as a solo hero. You have to play at least two heroes. And you can always, if you start solo, somebody else can join you, they can leave, you can pick up their character. So there’s a lot of flexibility too in just making sure if something happens to you partway through the campaign or to your group partway through the campaign, there are lots of options to continue to play without that hindering.”

Sunderfolk is set to launch for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC in 2025.