Walking into a Meow Wolf installation is more of a personal mystery than an exhibit. There are no clear instructions, no linear path, and no villain waiting at the end to be defeated. Instead you make your own way through an experience that deliberately defies explanation. Turning that into an RPG game is both a radical and a natural decision, which brings endless challenges along the way. I spoke with game designer Andrew Bellury of Exalted Funeral about ahead of the game's anticipated retail release in December 2026. I still have no idea what to expect from the final product, which in this rare case feels like an intentional part of the design.
The Kickstarter is ongoing now, and a free primer was just released, if you want to find out more information or learn the basic mechanics yourself.
The Core Loop: Memories, Moves, and Meow Wolf Dice
Tavers does not comport with what we might call "traditional" RPG structure. There are no character sheets locked in at session zero, no sprawling bestiaries of monsters, and no experience points for killing foes. The team wanted to capture the feeling of walking into an installation exploring without preconceptions about what you would find. The game mechanics revolve around a narrative circle. The Storyteller (ST) begins with an "Episoda" a thematic prompt and the players dive into a group huddle to talk about where they want the arc of the story to generally trend.
When actions are necessary in a tense situation, players can make a Move to affect the present and rolling your skill (2d8+skill vs. 10) , or you can go back in time to create a Mem (Memory of prior relevant experience). If you come upon a body of water, you could make a Mem about a time you were snorkeling with your family, to add texture and skill to your character. When creating a Mem, the active player begins by telling a backstory, with the rest of the group contributing to flesh it out. From this collective storytelling, the group distills three keywords, or Fragments. These Fragments serve as your resources, acting like skills that allow you to do special things or grant bonuses to future dice rolls.
Each character also has a Spark, a general goal. When you fulfill a Sparkyou then make a Discovery Roll. When Meow Wolf approached Genuine Entertainment, the initial pitch was for a standard 5E adventure module. But Bellury saw an opportunity to do something different. They wanted something bespoke that feels like being at a Meow Wolf. The experience of exploration and uncovering mysteries brought to the gaming table.
This led to the creation of the Episoda system. Rather than writing a traditional railroaded adventure, Bellury writes a classic beginning, middle, and end, and then "pulls the skin off of it." (his words)
TI pull the connective tissue off the story beats, leaving just the bones. It’s almost like a soothsayer rolling the bones." Each Episoda is a short, 1,500 to 2,000-word introduction to a mystery, followed by a series of open-ended prompts. Bellury has ideas of where the story could go, but he refuses to dictate the trajectory to the players.
"We had a few people in playtesting who felt welcomed and included, but they told us, 'This isn't for me.' They like to exclusively swing swords at monsters, and that's fine," Bellury says with a shrug. This is to expand the audience. In Tavers, combat is resolved like any other move. It's discouraged because it can limit your ability to move the story forward. There are no combat-focused Sparks; they are all character-driven. You aren't rewarded with loot or levels for fighting. Instead you get story bits for pursuing your Spark.
One of the most striking aspects of Tavers is its physicality. The book itself is being designed as a diegetic tool. At roughly 150 pages, it extremely very art heavy and contains no blocks of dense text. At the time of our interview they had just unlocked that the inside of the box would be printed with additional schemes. The book will be light on text, itself an artifact of the fiction and the experience.
Reinforcing this feeling of wandering through strangeness, Tavers contains no rollable tables. If you want a random item, you have to flip to a random page in the book. The bottom of each page features GM-useful tools like NPC names, turning the book itself into a random generator.
The game also adopts a tactile inventory system similar to Mausritter or Cairn, but with a twist. Inventory is a 20-square grid. Items are represented by a series of shapes (of 1-4 squares) that you draw or write on. You only have the ability to move shapes under special conditions. Further, if you pick up a large item, the shape you get is random. You have to prep for the future, or you might run into problems. Similar to Mausritter's curses, are Dark Items dead weight that can only be dropped under specific conditions.
The timeline for Tavers is ambitious. After getting a heads-up from Meow Wolf, Bellury visited several exhibits for research. The full retail release is currently slated for December 2026, aturnaround only possible with experience and pre-planning.
Partnering with Exalted Funeral for distribution was a natural fit. "Their crowd and cred leans towards the weird and underground," says Bellury. The collaboration with Meow Wolf has been a designer's dream. "They respect doing something weird. It’s core to their identity. They are encouraging artists to create in their world. Disney wouldn’t let an indie designer take a stab at something this off the wall."
Tavers is shaping up to be an experimental artifact designed to bring the analog, exploratory wonder of Meow Wolf into the hands of players.
