Dream Askew, Dream Apart

Dream Askew, Dream Apart is a set of two tabletop role-playing games about marginalized communities struggling for survival, published together in 2018 after a Kickstarter campaign raised more than 62,000 Canadian dollars. Dream Askew, designed by Avery Alder, follows queer survivors of an apocalypse fighting threats and gathering resources together. Dream Apart, designed by Benjamin Rosenbaum, is set among Jewish protagonists in a fantasy nineteenth-century shtetl, with six playable archetypes: the Matchmaker, Klezmer, Midwife, Scholar, Soldier and Sorcerer. Both games use the Belonging Outside Belonging system, a set of dice-less mechanics built around collaborative storytelling; the system went on to inspire later games such as Wanderhome and Sleepaway, with more than 211 tagged products carrying it on the platform Itch.io as of July 2024. The games earned three nominations at the 2019 ENNIE Awards, including Best Game and Product of the Year, and an early Dream Askew prototype won the 2014 Indie RPG Awards for Best Free Game.