ALAS VEGAS is a dark journey through a bizarre and terrifying casino city where sinister forces war for control and lives are worth no more than a handful of gambling chips. Caught in a struggle between rival factions, the players must find allies, the truth, and a way to escape. Memories are recovered, secrets are revealed, old debts are settled, and nothing is what it seems.

Your character sheet starts as blank as your memories, but your character gains skills by having flashbacks to their earlier life, so as the game progesses their backstory does too - creating a twisted web of links between the characters as they piece their past together and work out what's happened to them.

The conflict mechanics are based on the casino game Blackjack played with Tarot cards, creating high-stakes narrative showdowns, and spinning elements of the game's story from the cards that come up in play.

PLUS THREE EXTRA CAMPAIGNS

ALAS VEGAS runs on the Fugue game system, built to tell stories of characters with amnesia. It uses Tarot cards and rotating GMs to create unique, high-tension adventures, heavy on character and narrative. As well as 'Alas Vegas' itself, the book contains three extra complete Fugue campaigns:

• YET ALREADY, frantic time-travel to save a chaotic, collapsing universe, written by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan;
• WARLOCK KINGS, paladins returned to life as generals of a dark army, by Allen Varney and Johnstone Metzger;
• REMEMBERING COSMIC MAN, in which you play two characters: one of a gang of superheroes whose leader has just been found dead, and one of the police investigating the crime, by Laurent Devernay and Jerome Larre.

Plus all the Fugue mechanics, of course.

'Alas Vegas' lasts four sessions, structured like a high-budget HBO miniseries, leading to a revelatory final climax that's a fitting end of the campaign. It’s Franz Kafka’s Fear and Loathing. It’s The Hangover meets The Prisoner. It’s Ocean’s Eleven directed by David Lynch. It’s like nothing you’ve played before.