How To Play Community Radio

Firebreathing Kittens

Greetings and welcome to the Firebreathing Kittens. This is a short overview of how to play Community Radio.

Community Radio is a story and improv focused game. We don't have character sheets. Instead, the players play out slice of life moments from a strange community, while the GM plays the Host of the community's radio station.

The mood of a Community Radio game captures the voice of a community the way Welcome to Nightvale or Northern Exposure can capture the voice of a community. The game is written by Quinn Murphy and is available at thought crime games.itch.io. A second edition is currently in development. The Firebreathing Kittens will be playing version 1.2 of the game. Community Radio is also the basis for the excellent game Radio Free Kaiju, which centers on a community surviving a world populated by giant, deadly monsters.

Prior to the game, all the players have submitted to the GM the following ideas:
* An Innocent Person
* A Terror
* A Place of Interest
* A Mood
* A Strange Item
* Up to 3 original songs or poems to be aired on the radio station.
* Optionally, up to 3 decrees from the Niqamui Community Council, to be read on air.

The GM has taken these elements and shuffled them into a very loosely connected series of slice of life scenes that the players will play out in an improv manner. Each slice of life scene is 3-5 minutes long.

After a slice of life scene, there is a short musical interlude. During the musical break, players who were just in the scene write decrees, sometimes about the scene, or about a previous scene, or just about something else entirely. These decrees are secretly passed to the Host, who selects from the available decrees during the Radio Scene.

Radio scenes have a bumper, a report from the Host reacting to and interpreting the slice of life scene, and lastly a decree by the Council. The Host is not allowed to break Council decrees, and the decrees often respond to actions during the slice of life scene.

You'll notice there is nothing about "how do you fight in this game" or "how do I convince someone to do what I want." As an improv-heavy game, Community Radio relies on players to adjudicate using "yes, and" to narrate what their characters are doing and how successful they are. The game is heavily player-generated, with the Host acting as an interpreter more than anything else.

For purposes of the Firebreathing Kittens format, I have added some structure to the scenes so they aren't as random as suggested in the Community Radio rulebook. The key elements are all provided by the players, however, as are all the decrees.

I hope you enjoy our episode featuring Community Radio.