Kiss Dating Goodbye

Courtship! Church denomination rivalries! Religious drama! 

Kiss Dating Goodbye is a Penned to Good Society game played in North American evangelical and fundamentalist purity culture of the 90s and 00s.  

Kiss Dating Goodbye is still about romance, about relationships, about trying to find love and connection in a world where your reputation and family background are paramount. It's still about how rumours can destroy or create romantic prospects. It's still about how your desires cause you to act, sometimes in alignment with society and sometimes in contravention of society. It just throws in a lot more 'biblical' standards, sprinkles in some dubious theology, and turns decisions into moral quandries.

The game is designed to keep the focus on interpersonal relationships and romance. It's more about the people than religion itself. However, religion is a major influence, just like rumours and scandals. Christianity works in much the same way that money, peerage and family backgrounds work in regular Good Society. Spiritual capital, aka 'godliness', holds weight in Kiss Dating Goodbye as wealth and reputation does in Good Society. 

Kiss Dating Goodbye assumes you are familiar with base Good Society, and requires base Good Society to play.

This game deals with Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian culture, characters and themes. Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism intersect with misogyny, racism, homophobia and transphobia, as well as other systems of oppression. The instruction guide and the game itself explore these topics, so please take care of yourself, and take breaks or avoid engaging with this material if those topics are triggering for you.

The instruction guide talks about Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian culture in broad strokes, and there are mentions of things like abuse (spiritual, sexual, emotional, financial, physical), patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, racism. The Character Roles and Desires directly quote Bible verses, as does the section on Evangelical Culture. 

Kiss Dating Goodbye. . . 

• New roles, desires, and family backgrounds
• Adds supplemental relationships
• Adds a Denomination dynamic (Two Societies)
• New Playsets (five)
• Suggestions for locations and modern-day epistolary phases
• Information about emotional safety and Bleed
• Information about the culture of Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism

Aug 4, 2024: This is the first version, which has not yet been playtested. I'm currently in the process of playtesting and revising. If you want to be part of a playtest, give me a shout on BlueSky, @lyndallcave.bsky.social or Twitter @LyndallCave

The Penned to Good Society logo is © Storybrewers Roleplaying and is used with permission.