Meow Wolf and Exalted Funeral are collaborating on a tabletop RPG, with a Kickstarter schedule in 2026. This is a combination I never would have imagined, but my talk with EF founder Matt Kelley and designer Andrew Bellury ended up teaching me a lot about art, RPGs, and the nature of interactivity. I’ll be very interested in seeing how the details come together, and what kinds of stories this project inspires.
For those not in the know, Meow Wolf is a series of immersive interactive art exhibits. That description doesn’t really capture the dreamlike, entrancing nature of these enormous installations. Meow Wolf has locations in 5 cities with a 6th opening in Los Angeles next year and NYC in 2027. If you’re in more eastern United States, you might have attended Otherworld installations, similar in concept and inspired by Meow Wolf. These building-sized experiences allow visitors to explore immersive, interconnected worlds at their own pace. They don’t give you any maps or direction, but let you travel through surreal environments. Installations often feature hidden areas with new stories to uncover. They let individual artists run wild, spinning up ambitious worlds with their own aesthetics and feel.
Very little about the story is explicit. The scant documents tell you only broad generalities, your mind and experience filling in the rest. At first I was worried that this would make an RPG an impossible task; how can a designer translate a narrative that’s barely written down in the first place? The answer comes from the strengths inherent to roleplaying games. Strengths that books or movies cannot share. It all comes from the interactivity of the experience, and trust in the player to build their own narrative.
David Lynch used to talk a lot about the power of dreams, and the importance of leaving interpretation up to the individual. He would go so far as to refuse to elaborate on his specific ideas of what a particular story meant, or how he wanted his use of symbolism to be read. To him, that was a limitation and degradation of the story. To put it down into words would be to make it lesser, because the emotion and meaning he was trying to communicate was bigger and more fundamental than we could fit into the crude rules of language.
Meow Wolf and its upcoming adaptation are much the same. I often decry poor layout in RPG books because they use too much text to communicate too little. If a setting book is a long, detailed explanation of every bit of trade, geography, and politics, it becomes useless at the table. That gives you something to read, but not something you can parse and develop in front of a group of people. It’s a bad tool for practical purposes, but it also doesn’t give you room to fill in the gaps and syncopate with your own group. With that in mind, the Meow Wolf RPG won’t be as interested in the specific details of how Tavers got their ability and what each Meow Wolf exhibit means in hard terms. They do have a team of writers making the exhibits, each of which have their own story, but there is a deliberate uncertainty about how much is implied and how much is canon.
The concept of Tavers–interdimensional travelers who can open portals between worlds–is an emerging concept that bridges the existing exhibits with new storytelling possibilities, and gives the game its title. The team has shared documents and thoughts on their creations with Exalted Funeral, but the game will be its own beast in many ways. RPGs give more room to players as creators than linear narratives. The book or game is less than half the experience. That is just a framework for you, the players, to engage and create your own story.
This work wouldn’t be possible without the vision of Joe LaFavi of Genuine Entertainment. He has worked with Meow Wolf for a while, and knew there was some interest in a tabletop adaptation. After all, they were already artists with a long history of experiential works. With his eyes on the aesthetic and design talents of Exalted Funeral, who were already fans of MW installations, the two groups made a natural fit.
In hard terms, the result will be a book with its own system, likely with special editions and surprises coming during the Kickstarter campaign. Meow Wolf exhibits have space for events and while there are no promises of collaborative projects, the potential is there. The interest, I suspect, will be strong. This will be a story-driven game driven by d8s, in a classless system that offers character growth but not dense mechanics. At time of writing, they are in the heart of playtesting and refining the engine.
To keep your eyes on this project as it develops, you can sign up now at the Exalted Funeral website to get notified and see early peaks at future development.
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