Welcome to the State Fair!

Fried food! Farm animals! Carnival rides! Armpit-to-armpit humanity! A weekend here will help you forget your weekdays, but leave your dignity at the gate. Nestled within, 90 pounds of grade-A butter has been hand-sculpted into the likeness of the Butter Princess, and you have a stake in the fate of this dairy sculpture. A darkly-humorous modern folk-horror story game based on Trophy Dark.

In honor of the Minnesota State Fair, I am running Brian Sago's surreal Butter Princess, based on the horror game Trophy Dark. This is a story game of doomed fairgoers whose overindulgence will take their bodies and minds to the very limits and beyond, all while seeking control of the Butter Princess, a 90-pound butter sculpture of the winner of this year's Minnesota Dairy Princess Program competition. One way or another, this will likely be the end of these characters' stories; we play to find out how they meet their fates.

Butter Princess is rooted in Trophy Dark, a rules light but highly structured narrative/story game with collaborative worldbuilding and story development. It takes some mechanical influences from Cthulhu Dark and Blades in the Dark but is very much its own thing. In addition to exploring the fair and seeking out the Butter Princess, players help develop their characters and the setting by answering GM questions and offer each other Devil's Bargains that radically alter the course of events.

The game plays out over five "Rings" or chapters, each taking the fairgoers deeper into horror and dissolution. By the end of the fifth Ring, they will all either be claimed by the fair or forever changed.