Re-Writing Your Adventure: Stewpot & Narrative Therapy
Stewpot is a 2025 TTRPG from Evil Hat where you and your friends play adventurers who have retired to start a tavern. The book is marketed with a cozy, slice-of-life theme, and you could even bring characters from another more traditional campaign that you’d like to retire. Stewpot cleverly uses mini-games to explore the variety of ways that your characters make their transition from adventuring to tavern management.
When I read through Stewpot, both its themes and mechanics reminded me of the practices of narrative therapy. This modality focuses on the stories we tell about ourselves and allows us to rewrite those stories in order to see ourselves as better equipped to handle our problems. This is not quite a review, but more an examination of the themes in practice.
Now, I’m not saying that Stewpot is therapeutic. But, I think it’s interesting to look at the parallels between narrative therapeutic practices and Stewpot, especially as a blog that examines cozy themes. This game is undeniably cozy, but it also addresses some difficult ideas about identity, loss, grief, and change. It’s in these places that I see the most resonance with narrative therapy. I’m curious if, by examining these moments, we can see how a cozy setting handles difficult experiences and feelings.
Narrative therapy is based on the idea that we process the world, our relationships, and our understanding of ourselves through stories. However, these stories aren’t set in stone, and we often carry multiple ways of framing the same experience. Part of using this methodology is listening to the narratives that we use to frame our understanding of our lives.
This is pretty abstract, so let me give an example. If I was really sick and had to cancel plans with my friends, I might say “I feel like a flake, but I didn’t want to get them sick too.” One story I’m telling here is that I’m a flake because I canceled. But another, less prominent story is that I care about my friends and don’t want them to get sick.
Re-authoring is the term narrative therapists use for identifying our narratives around ourselves, and recognizing the stories that might be more helpful, even if they’re not the most prominent ones. Re-authoring isn’t about making a new story, but instead finding the story that’s already there, and focusing on it so that we can use it to face our problems.
One of the clear early moments of resonance with re-authoring in Stewpot is the poem before the character creation steps. It poignantly concludes:
Aching scars and restless nights,
The cold inside your bones.
Hands so skilled at taking life,
Must learn to help it grow.
When discussing your character’s appearance, the rulebook says “Your character can look like anything, but their clothes, the things they carry, and how they move through the world reveals their past. What parts of being an adventurer still show? What have they worked to change?”
These passages express the idea that our identities are supported by external things, like our clothes and scars. Stewpot recognizes that the things we surround ourselves with can be the external signs of internal narratives. So when Stewpot asks what parts of being an adventurer still show, they might as well ask “How strongly does your character identify with the narrative of themselves as an adventurer?”
This is especially clear in the mini-game Shields and Skillets. Essentially, the idea is that unused adventuring equipment becomes volatile, likely to miscast spells or explode with pent up magic. The summary for this mini-game says “You have to let go of your old equipment before it’s too late.” Letting go of your equipment might reflect letting go of your identity as an adventurer. Perhaps, like the equipment, those who can’t move on become volatile.
But it’s not about destroying those things entirely. In the resolution for the Shields and Skillets mini-game, a coin flip reveals whether the equipment is safely disenchanted and forged into something new (heads), or only a bit of material is left to salvage (tails). This relates to the way your character advances in Stewpot. As you create your character, you list out Adventurer Experiences, skills or abilities like shooting a fireball or sneak attacking. After every mini-game, you cross out an Adventurer Experience and replace it with a Town Experience. Yet as the text says, your experience “doesn’t disappear. It served you well at one point. It might be hard to see yourself as someone who doesn’t do that anymore. But you don’t need it here. You can put it away for now.”
I think this shows an incredibly emotionally mature way of thinking about our shifting identities. Best of all, these changes don’t come without recognition. In Shields and Skillets, you’re asked to share stories with the table of how you came to possess the equipment that must now be disenchanted and how it helped you on your adventures. In narrative therapy, this would be called a definitional ceremony. You’re celebrating the external signs of this identity narrative before either reforging both that external marker and the narrative it represents into something else or saying goodbye to parts of your story that were difficult to salvage.
That’s a strong, recurring theme in Stewpot: remembering and letting go. At no point does it villainize adventuring or those who do so (which would probably be very alienating to the players at the table), but it does frame an identity as an adventurer as potentially damaging and difficult to let go of.
The book describes the end of gameplay this way: “All games come to an end, and hopefully, you can walk away from Stewpot knowing your adventurers have settled down comfortably.” I wonder if a double meaning was meant there. Yes, the session of Stewpot has come to an end, but I also see this as another note about identity shift and retirement, recognizing that all experiences come to an end. Perhaps now I’m overthinking it.
Overall, I think the places where Stewpot might bring up difficult emotions are handled wonderfully by the text and mechanics that encourage communally remembering, celebrating, and letting go.
I wonder for those of you who have run Stewpot, did you notice these themes? How did they play out at your table? Did you feel that the emotionally challenging aspects detracted from the cozy slice-of-life theme? Or did they enhance and deepen the themes? I’d love to hear from you.
