In my A Game Per Year project, my goal has been to read one roleplaying game corebook for every year they’ve been published. However, I soon started to feel that it was hard to decipher how the games were really meant to be played. For this reason, I decided to start a parallel project, An Adventure Per Year, to read one roleplaying adventure for each year they’ve been published.
A Day at the Office is something extremely rare: A scenario about ordinary life. And not just the dramatic events that happen to ordinary people, but rather the fairly mundane travails of working in an office. The characters are a lackluster bunch of ordinary schlubs working for an anonymous company. Their boss presents them with a challenge: They must out together a project plan within a very limited time.
This could easily become comedy in the style of The Office but the scenario is more sincere than that. It’s about the possibilities for dignity for ordinary people, for shaking themselves from their stupor. Or not.
The very lack of world-shaking drama or terrifying human violation is what makes this scenario work. It has a pivotal surprise but even that it the sort of thing that you really do sometimes experience in a work environment. Nor does it propose that what office workers need to do to bring glamour to their lives is to become hippie artists. Just a tad more respect is enough.
Because it runs on such everyday level, the scenario is hard to describe. Still, in a landscape full of dragons, vampires, broken families and traumatic pasts this is refreshing in its own way.