Love, Career & Magic Brings Bite Sized Fantasy To Reality TV

A spoonful of fantasy helps the genre go down. This often applies to role playing games set in historical eras such as Deadlands or Call of Cthulhu. In the case of Love, Career & Magic from designer Wonmin Lee it applies to a genre of television. This game is about being part of a reality show in a world where dwarves run the IT department and dragons are middle managers. This boxed set is aimed at giving people a CostCo sized sample of roleplaying in the hopes of enticing them into a deeper experience. Is this game buzzworthy? Let’s play to find out.

Love, Career & Magic casts players as participants in a slice of life reality show called Sharehome. The object of the game is to get good ratings for your season by completing the “unscripted” moments set forth by the people behind the scenes of the show. In addition, each character gets an arc of three personality traits that give a big batch of points if they are all resolved during the season. The main adversarial presence of the game is the clock. Each episode of the show takes place in three minutes of real time which means playing out a “full season” in a half-hour or so.

Three minutes doesn’t seem like a lot of time and, indeed, it gives a very chaotic energy to the game. The prompt cards come in three varieties. Director cards give players a chance to monologue about their character or the world. Producer cards get two characters involved with doing something together. Showrunner cards have the player make a choice. The main rules here come from improv where players “yes, and” their stories and also try to make the narrative work even if it gets weird and convoluted. It seems like dominant players might take the spotlight too often but the game has a couple of built in brakes. The time limit encourages people to get in and mix things up rather than stay on the sidelines. Producer cards are also worth two points and they require the party asked to join to offer resolution to the scene. Once a player gets over their initial shyness they often make some of the most dramatic contributions to the show.

Everything in Love, Career & Magic nails the vibes of low stakes, high drama reality TV. The 25 character cards illustrated by Carolyn Frank give players a sturdy springboard for their basic character even as the game offers unexpected turns and twists. Just like the genre that inspired it, you can be blindsided by how much you get emotionally invested in characters that are barely a sketch. Even though the game leans towards silliness, I found the burgeoning romance between a gnome stand up comic and an orc hacker strangely compelling. The game clears away a lot of the artifice of roleplaying to focus on friends sitting around a table telling a story about elves and dwarves.

The design is also meant to be flexible. The book includes plenty of options and modifications for the game. I found that five minute rounds made the stories a bit more cohesive with players getting a few seconds to think about how they want the story to progress. This game is built as something to bring to a board game night for a quick roleplaying hit but I could also see this as a warm up before a campaign game. I might even consider mixing it to a game like Shadowrun as the TV show the crew watches during those long boring stakeouts only to be shocked when the next time Mr. Johnson calls, it’s to rescue the character they hate the most.

Bottom Line: Love, Career & Magic offers a great sampling of scenework for roleplayers at just the right length to get non gamers into the idea of pretending to be an elf on a regular basis.