# Fiasco tags: #game/rpg/fiasco ![[Fiasco (cover).png|600]] **Fiasco** is Jason Morningstar's cooperative storytelling game about small-time capers, big ambitions, and poor impulse control — cinematic stories of plans going catastrophically wrong in about two to three hours. It's GM-less, it's powered by its **playsets** (each a pocket scenario that gives you your cast, your needs, your locations, and your objects), and it's the rare game where the hobby's love of watching characters self-destruct is the entire point rather than a side effect. The pitch is basically "Burn After Reading, but you roll dice to find out who ends up in the wood chipper." ## Setting Fiasco never has one setting; it has dozens, one per playset. A Fiasco playset is a compact sheet of tables that sets the mood and hands the table their starting ingredients — the relationships, needs, locations, and objects that are about to curdle into a fiasco. The library's collection touches a fair spread: the medieval wizards' service class in **[[A Grog's Life]]**, the burned-down covenant of **[[A Covenant on Fire]]**, American disasters, a telenovela hotel, a sharknado, and one man's time-travel story. The genre barely matters; what matters is that everyone at the table wants the same thing and nobody can have it. ## Mechanics Fiasco is built around a **three-act structure**. In Act One, players take turns setting scenes and resolving them by drawing dice from a central pool — **white dice** for scenes that go well, **black dice** for those that go badly. At the **Tilt**, the table rolls the dice to decide the escalating turn, and Act Two plays out with everyone's ambitions and grudges at full boil. In the **Aftermath**, each player rolls the handful of dice they collected and reads the results against tables to narrate how their character ends up — the better your white-dice haul, the better (or at least more heroic) your wreck of an ending. The structure is the point: there are no stats, no skill rolls in the conventional sense, and no referee to keep the rails on. The dice are a counting mechanism for who's been having a good scene or a bad scene, and the game trusts the players to make the mess. That's why it ports so effortlessly across genres — the playset does the heavy lifting of making the same machinery feel like a heist, a horror movie, or a medieval wizard's abbey. ## Editions & playsets The **Fiasco core** (the classic edition) is in the library, along with the **Fiasco Companion** and the expanded **American Disasters** playset. The library's other playset holdings include **Sharknado**, **Living Dead**, **10 Minutes in the Future**, **All The Damn Time**, and **Transatlantic** — plus the two Ars Magica playsets above, **[[A Grog's Life]]** and **[[A Covenant on Fire]]**, which each have their own note. Jason Morningstar's games have since grown a Fiasco family (the *Fiasco 2nd Edition* / *Fiasco Classic* split and the broader Bully Pulpit catalogue), but the core loop here is the same one the playsets have always hung on. ## References - [Fiasco - Bully Pulpit Games | DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/70096/Fiasco) - [Fiasco - Jason Morningstar | RPGGeek](https://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/63660/fiasco) - [Fiasco Core Set - Bully Pulpit Games](https://bullypulpitgames.com/games/fiasco/) - [Fiasco Review - Shut Up & Sit Down](https://www.shutupandsitdown.com/review-fiasco/) - [Fiasco Gameplay - Wil Wheaton on TableTop - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXJxQ0NbFtk)