READ & REVIEWED: Last Sabbath

by Sharang Biswas

In his influential 1937 book Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande, English anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard documented and commented on the many magical practices of the Azande people of central Africa. Among them was divination via “Poison Oracle”: by feeding a chicken a certain kind of poison, evidence of a suspected witch’s identity could be gleaned (To the Azande, you could be a witch without knowing it: all you needed to affect magic was the mangu-substance located among your internal organs).

While chicken poisoning might be the most innovative divination methods I have encountered, divination itself—the practice of seeking knowledge via magic—has been a human preoccupation all over the world throughout history. At the New York Historical Society’s “A History of Magic” exhibition in 2018, I encountered engraved Chinese oracle bones from around 1046 BCE, 18th century, hand-coloured tarot cards from France, palmistry guides from 14th century England, and a 19th century Thai astrology manual. Astrology, notably, is particularly universal: in Magic: A History, British archeologist Chris Gosden writes that “each age and culture has its own astrology, with which it experiments and tinkers.” Divination, in the forms of "foretelling the future” and “understanding the past”, constitutes elements of Gosden’s “general categories of magical practices found across time and space.”

I spent the first 200 words of this article telling you about divination because Last Sabbath, Atropo Kelevra and Valentino Sergi’s journaling-RPG about witch covens, spends 12 of its 48 pages—a full quarter of the book—teaching players how to engage in four real world methods of divination. 

Last Sabbath’s core structure consists of going round the table in turns, narrating a portion of the story, and writing down a “Record”, the essential elements of what was narrated. Divinatory tools are how the players come up with scene prompts and further the narrative. Additionally, “it is possible to to [sic] perform a reading at any time during the game to invent characters, places, and situations or to converse with the creatures and entities that populate the world you create.” Thus, Last Sabbath teaches players a simple Tarot card technique that uses only the major arcana, three different ways of divination using Norse futharc runestones, how to interpret patterns of colorful Mikado sticks, and the rudiments of tea-leaf reading. During my initial flip-through of the book, I was enchanted: how cool that players engage in real-world magical rituals in a witchy game!

The choice of four divination techniques is without a doubt, an interesting decision for a player. Each method of divination offers something different. Tarot cards, for instance, come with images that can spark their own form of inspiration. As written, using the mikado sticks or runestones give the players a greater degree of control over their interpretation, and thus, the narrative. Tea-leaf reading inserts, well, tea into the mix, a ritual of making and drinking that injects its own rhythmic lilt to a session of Last Sabbath. I used two techniques (tarot and runestones) during my playthrough, but I would hazard that for the best experience, players should use all of them, picking and choosing as the situation calls for it. Some methods are clearly better than others for different situations. For instance, the listed “River” technique for reading runestones is supposed to “allow for clear and precise Diviniation”. Less helpful for a scene prompt, where you simply need something to spark your imagination (tea leaves or Tarot might work better), but useful if you’re looking to answer specific questions within a scene. The game does not tell you this; it’s up to you to figure that out. This is a frequent issue, in an attempt to be rules-lite, the game unfortunately falls into guidance-lite; this is not a game that helps newer roleplayers. Or even solo players, to whom barely any attention is given, despite the invitation for this kind of play.

When Last Sabbath does offer creative guidance, it often feels at odds with the tone the designers are trying to set up. A story of darkness and demons, of sacrifice and hard choices, of mystery and strange magic, the game buttresses this tone quite well through certain mechanics. In order to enact more powerful magic, witches need to sacrifice core memories or literal years of their lives. There is a specific death mechanic: when a witch dies, they might be reincarnated as a powerless animal familiar, linger as a restless spirit, or return to haunt the living as a traumatized, malevolent ghost. But the examples offered to illustrate these mechanics are often wishy-washy. There is a whole page about “alternative costs” of spells, for instance, including a suggestion that a necromancer might pay for their power with “the consumption of their spiritual energies”. What does that mean? Is it as consequential as losing the literal memories you wrote down previously? By using vague, fantasy-speak, this example—like many others in the book—undercuts the game's attempts at a clear tone.

The biggest offender in this regard is the “Power Prompts” section. Fresh from learning about the horrible prices and painful sacrifices required for magic, a player is then told…that they could roll a d6 to specialize in fire magic. An abrupt departure from the shadowy mysteries of the previous twenty pages, this sections gives players a selection of hyper-specific origins (“an infection contracted while playing with a satyr”, “you spent your youth in a herbalist’s workshop”) and power types (“telekinesis”, “control over water”). In fact, this is the only real character-creation prompts the game provides. It felt like the designers worried that their game didn’t feel “gamey” enough. It really brought to mind NK Jemisin’s ideas about the feel of magic: “I blame D&D for systematizing so many things that don’t need to be or shouldn’t be systematized.”

Finally, what really bothered me about Last Sabbath was the art direction. My initial impression was absolutely: how pretty! A greyscale color palette interrupted by sharp orange-reds. Unsettling, monstrous heads that confront you from various pages. A lush matt black cover featuring a wolf-skull monster looming over a witch deep in magical thought, with accents of silver embossing that add a rich texture. 

But when I paid a little more attention, my admiration ebbed. I looked closer at the illustrations. They’re certainly well-made. But out of the 25 or so illustrations in the book that feature people (or people-ish beings), 19 spotlight young, anime-style women. Out of these 19 women, 11 are depicted either naked or in sexually provocative stances. And every single woman fits into the same body and beauty standard: young, thin, and pale-skinned, with delicate features, long hair and perky breasts. Facial expressions of rapture and ecstasy dominate. 

Based on its rules-text, Last Sabbath is not a sexually charged game. There is little mention of romance, erotic, or even bodies. The suggested narrative arcs do not suggest a focus on that layer of human intimacy. So I found myself a touch…skeeved by the art direction. “…Each participant is free to interpret the role and character they prefer without gender constraints,” the writers exhort on the first page, the underlined emphasis theirs. If inclusivity is such a consideration, why the blinkered choice of illustration, uncomfortably aligned with a lecherous hetero-masculine gaze?

In the introduction to Magic: A History, Chris Gosden articulates how magic is an act of participation: "Human beings participate in the universe directly, and the universe influences and shapes us.” It's easy to draw a parallel to roleplaying game narratives: they only exist as a creative, participatory back-and-forth between players, rules, and game settings. Last Sabbath relies too heavily on its players (especially for its under-explained solo mode) to do its heavy lifting, preventing it from rising to true TTRPG greatness. While it includes some neat game mechanics, rules vagueness is a weakness; perhaps some of the page-real estate spent on divination could have instead been spent offering players gameplay guidance. And Last Sabbath’s attempts at defining a strong tone are, time and time again, undermined both in the game text and in the underconsidered art direction. 

Sharang Biswas has won two IGDN awards, four Ennie Awards, an IndieCade award, and a Golden Cobra award for roleplaying games, as well as the Brave New Weird Award for fiction. He has showcased interactive works at institutions such as The Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, the Toronto Reference Library, and The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. He has worked on games such as Avatar: Legends, Pathfinder, Vampire: The Masquerade, Spire: The City Must Fall, Moonlight on Roseville Beach, Jiangshi: Blood on the Banquet Hall, and Dungeons & Dragons Live, as well as boardgames including Holi: Festival of Color, Mad Science Foundation, and Sea of Legends.  His fiction and poetry has appeared in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Augur, Strange Horizons, Baffling, and more. He is the co-editor of Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Art Games (Pelgrane Press) and the author of science-fiction novella The Iron Below Remembers (Neon Hemlock Press). Sharang currently teaches games at the NYU Game Center and Fordham University.

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