Meow Wolf’s TTRPG Lets You Rip Holes in Reality and Meet Sentient Pizza — Kickstarter Coming
Meow Wolf, the arts collective behind large, surreal immersive installations, is developing a tabletop role‑playing game called Tavers: The Meow Wolf Roleplaying Game. The game will be produced by Exalted Funeral and is scheduled to launch on Kickstarter early next year.
- What the game is and who’s publishing it.
- How the setting ties to Meow Wolf’s installations.
- Key features, characters, and mechanics.
- Timeline: Kickstarter page in November, crowdfunding in February.
Where the game comes from
The game grows from Meow Wolf’s hands‑on worlds, created by a collective that began as outsider artists in Santa Fe. As a result, the setting draws directly from the company’s interactive locations and expands them for tabletop play. Also, the group’s early story and growth are documented in the 2018 film Meow Wolf: Origin Story.
Meow Wolf now operates multiple permanent venues and continues to open new spaces; for current locations see their visitor page here.
What Tavers will be
Tavers: The Meow Wolf Roleplaying Game will let players create characters called tavers who rip holes in reality and travel between strange versions of worlds. Players will pursue five mysteries while visiting different realities and states of existence. Importantly, the setting is based on Meow Wolf’s installations and will be expanded collaboratively using the “exquisite corpse” method.
Notable details
Mechanics and examples given by the developers include:
- Characters are called tavers and travel through portals.
- Player encounters mentioned include immortal cybernetic hamsters, underground rat‑punks, and sentient pizza.
- Some mechanics blur game and real life; for example, memories players share out‑of‑game can be used as in‑game currency.
Publisher and timeline
Exalted Funeral, the Ennie‑winning publisher behind titles such as Land of Eem and Monty Python’s Cocurricular Mediaeval Reenactment Programme, will produce the game. The Kickstarter page for Tavers will go live in November, ahead of the crowdfunding launch in February.
Meow Wolf senior creative director of visual development Luke Dorman said in a statement: “RPGs have always been a platform for self-expression and a portal for people to inhabit and explore imaginative worlds, so it’s a perfect arena for us to bridge the gap between our exhibits and everyday life,”
“Until now, we’ve only been able to reach the people who come to us and physically step into our worlds. Now with the RPG, not only can our worlds come to you, but you also get to inhabit and shape our worlds like never before.”
Exalted Funeral owner Matt Kelley added: “Meow Wolf specifically requested a publisher brazen and batshit crazy enough to break the mold, and apply their same genre-defying approach to subvert and shake up everything we know about RPGs,”
“I’m not sure what it says about us that we were the first people they called, but we can’t argue that we’re the right kind of crazy for the job.”
