It is game-reviewing season on Ferretbrain. This being the case, I will review Dan Hemmens' own The Sun Never Sets, the competition version of which is available here.

At first glance, the premise of The Sun Never Sets seems dauntingly complicated, involving as it does immortal sorcerer-spies advancing the millennia-old agenda of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten by promoting and supporting the British Empire and defending it against its enemies, supernatural and mundane alike. This is far from the case. Although it is a game with a strong historical theme, the action of The Sun Never Sets is focused on what is happening in the game right now, with an intriguing Flashback mechanic allowing players to reveal new details about their backgrounds as and when they become relevant to the game.

The Flashback mechanics are simple: a player spends a point from one of five pools in order to initiate a Flashback, which must reveal information relevant to the in-character situation at hand. Each pool of points corresponds to a different theme for a Flashback, and is based on the different parts of the soul in Egyptian mythology; spending a point of "Shadow", for example, allows you to provoke a Flashback which reveals your hidden influence over a situation. (It is important to note that this is not time travel. The characters do not go back in time; the "Flashback" is merely them recalling, IC, an incident which happened in the past.)

Masturbatory excursions into a character's tangled backplot are thus discouraged, in favour of thrilling revelations about the matter before the PCs in the game's present day (1864, the height of Victorian England and the British Empire). "My character is a box of angst because he killed his brother in 1400 AD," isn't a valid Flashback; "My character is a box of angst because he killed his brother in 1400 AD... so why has my brother shown up working for the enemy?" is. Furthermore, any player whose previous lives coincide with the time period of the Flashback can "gatecrash" the Flashback, allowing them to incorporate their character into it. (This, and the ability of the GM to declare a Flashback "over", combine to prevent a single player from dominating the game with a prolonged Flashback.)

The Flashback mechanic is an excellent way for players to introduce new information and elements to an adventure, but does not go to the same extremes that other experimental RPGs do: the GM still adjudicates what happens in a Flashback once the player establishes the situation (thus introducing the new information), and indeed can also use a Flashback to introduce new information of their own. In a playtesting game GMed by myself, a player used a Flashback to reveal that certain villains were aware of an NPC's identity, and I was able to extend the Flashback by a few seconds in order to imply that that NPC was, in fact, an ally of the PCs. It is also highly versatile: Flashbacks can be as long ago as ancient Egypt or as recent as "five minutes ago, before we went into this room". However, Flashbacks are not overwhelmingly powerful or useful: although the GM cannot trigger Flashbacks, he or she doesn't need to: the GM can always introduce new information in play at any point, and the "That Was Then, This Is Now" rule means that players cannot constantly get out of trouble by saying "Flashback! The bad guy is a life-long friend of mine who cannot bear to hurt me!"

The upshot of the Flashback mechanic - and this is what makes The Sun Never Sets a joy to run - is that it provides for exactly the sort of plot twists and convoluted schemes that espionage games demands, and yet are so difficult to come up with beforehand. Grant Morrison's graphic novel series The Invisibles became tedious in the later volumes because Morrison pulled the "No, wait, it was all a trap by the bad guys! No, wait, the good guys expected that trap and set one of their own! No, wait, the bad guys knew the good guys were expecting it and set up a counter-trap to their counter-trap! No, wait, the good guys are the bad guys and the bad guys are the good guys!!!" once too often; specifically, what frustrated me were the constant revelations that the current situation was part of a massively complicated and barely-credible setup on the part of one faction or another, without ever showing the efforts that said factions go to in order to actually set those things up. The Sun Never Sets allows the players to engage in byzantine conspiracies without having to sit through he boring bits, simply by having Flashbacks to the important incidents.

Most importantly, however, the Flashback mechanic encourages a free-wheeling, improvisational approach to play: in fact, I would argue that The Sun Never Sets has achieved a certain Holy Grail of game design - a game which can be played without any prep work on the part of GM or player, beyond reading the rulebook. From the players' point of view, all they need to do at game start is allocate their character's various points and come up with one-line descriptions of two of their previous incarnations: character backstory can then be established through Flashbacks. (But remember that Flashbacks can never be invoked solely to explore backstory - Flashbacks are always, therefore, interesting and relevant to the other PCs and the GM).

The Game Master, meanwhile, can potentially run a The Sun Never Sets game with absolutely no preparation at all, throwing improvised and apparently-meaningful encounters at the players and allowing them to decide what it all means through Flashbacks. The GM's plans can be upended at a moment's notice by a player's Flashback - or, in certain wonderful cases, they can be confirmed. In the playtest I was planning to reveal that the Order of Osiris (the arch-enemies of the Hands of the Aten, the organisation PCs work for in The Sun Never Sets) was led by the Egyptian Gods themselves, who were actually aliens. Before I made the big revelation, however, a player initiated a Flashback which involved a shapeshifting horror, introducing a fat dose of the supernatural and the alien to the situation and providing me with a perfect opportunity to introduce the alien gods.

The Sun Never Sets is a product of the author's continuing examination of roleplaying game design, traditional and "indie" alike, and thus - to my mind - fuses the virtues of both schools of thought. The game's traditional player-GM divide, refusal to dictate a particular narrative theme for the game to explore, and open-ended nature will appeal to fans of traditional games, while the improvisational element reminds me of the best of the "new wave" of small press RPGs.

For those of you who want a hard copy of this or Grunting, Modus Operandi intends to produce a compilation of these games and my own Dictatus Papae in the near future, in which we are promised a "tidied" edition of the game to smooth out the rough edges that are inevitable when you only have 24 hours to design a game. Meanwhile, I encourage anyone with the slightest interest in RPGs to check out the free PDF version. It's the best new game I've seen all year.