One-Page RPGs
Kris likes to design little one-page RPGs.
Are they good? Sometimes. A lot of these Kris put together during a ‘publish 1 one-page rpg per day’ sprint, so they’re rushed, for sure.
Are they free? You can pay us for one if you want, or join the Patreon if you’d like to support what we do more generally, but you don’t have to. They’re all released on a pay-what-you-can model.
Why do they, uh… Look like that? Kris started with hand-drawn and hand-written games. He feels like it helps make it really clear these aren’t AI slop. These are Grade-A human-made slop!
Too High - Print Version
A cleaned-up, easier-to-read version of my game Too High from my 30 Games in 30 Days challenge.
The Game:
You don’t know where Jared got that weed, but it was crazy potent and everyone is too high. And it was laced with something because you’re all hallucinating that you’re video game characters, with powers and everything. You have the munchies and it is time to go to Taco Bell!
What I Like About This One:
This is the first game I’ve made for this challenge where I asked someone else ‘Hey, what game do you think I should make?’ My dear friend Lindsey suggested this.
I live in Canada where marijuana is legal and healthcare is free. You don’t need a weed spot - there are two dozen places withing walking distance of my house where I could pick up quality ganja. I don’t actually smoke, myself, but it’s nice to know that I never have to worry about this happening if I do.
The idea of ‘death’ being that you just sober up is legitimately hilarious to me.
What I’d Do Differently Next Time:
This one is maybe a little basic for one of my games. I’d probably look at a resource management track that’s a bit more interesting overall. Maybe a couple of different levers to balance.
Coffee of the Damned - Print Version
This is a cleaned up, printable version of my 30 Games in 30 Days game "Coffee of the Damned." This one was a great candidate for early updates because the original formatting was absolutely awful, and I even noted in my "What I Would Have Done Different" section that this one went way off-grid.
The Game:
In Coffee of the Damned you are a barista at 24-hour cafe. That means dealing with drunks, insomniacs, and uh... Dracula, sometimes. This is also the local hangout for all of the creatures that go "Bump!" in the night. Your job is the same - make and serve delicious coffee. But the consequences could be your untimely death!
What I Like About This One:
I've worked these sorts of jobs, and met some of my lifelong friends doing them. They are literally the worst, but coming into contact with so many weird people in a short span of time can introduce you to ways of being that you've never considered before.
What I Would Have Done Differently:
I almost feel like this one would be better as a board game with RPG elements? I think the mechanical focus feels like a Red November type of thing, and if I do go back to the drawing board on this one, I might actually make it a board on which I draw.
I draw/write all of these on medium card stock, and I picked up some new paper from a local art store. They told me it was 8.5x11, which was the format I'd been using up until this point, but it's actually 9x12 and this was the first game I made in that new aspect ratio, so it went kinda off-grid this time. It's also encouraged me to further nail down the layout for these and bust out some of my old art supplies. For future games, I'm actually laying out a template with a non-photo-blue pencil before I start work on the game itself, and you'll see some improvements in the formatting in the next week.
Forget Me Before You Go - Print Version
Forget Me Before You Go is one of my favorite projects from the 30 Games in 30 Days challenge. Today someone asked me if I could put together a typed version of it because trying to read my handwriting is a Problem, and like… Believe me, I get that. When I was in seventh grade my teacher told me I had to print everything because my handwriting looked like a serial killer’s. And to be honest, even when printing all upper-case like most of these are, the legibility still isn’t where I’d want it to be. Dave Sim, I am not.
The next goal is to eventually make a print version of all of these projects, and take that opportunity to shore up some of the weaker ones, include some of the “What I Would Have Done Differently” notes into the work, and see if I can make them stronger games on a second pass.
The far goal is to put together all of these into a print book of some kind, with the original hand-written monstrosity on one page, and the nicely laid-out, print-ready, translated version on the other. Like Chaucer!
Anyway, if you want to find a typed-out, print-ready version of a solo journaling RPG about forcing people to forget you so that they don’t disappear from the world forever, you can find it here:
My Favorites
There are two hazards that come out of doing any kind of endurance challenge: the first is that quality tends to vary wildly over the time that you’re doing the challenge; the second is that you’re going to get drained by the end of it. If you start from the beginning of this journey, you’ll see that the quality of the layout, and the information density, and the quality of the games starts pretty rough, but over the course of the month those things get more refined. Towards the end, the well has run pretty dry and my enthusiasm for the project was lower, and my opinion of the work definitely declined. Going through this blog in reverse chronological order, you’re met with some games I’m not super keen on first out the gate because they were me more or less stumbling over the finish-line.
I’m not proud of every game I’ve made this month, but there are some that I really like! Some of them did something I thought was interesting with the rules or setting, some are just fun ideas. So I wanted to highlight a few of those here at the top of the list. Click on the title to go to that game’s page!
Accounts Receivable
The second game in this challenge is built around one of my all-time favorite tropes - the idea that even in the face of the end of the world, there are some people who are still going to go to work and do a job that doesn’t matter anymore, if it ever actually did. It kind of just highlights how utterly senseless and abstract most of the work people do really is. But also, the idea of a latest-stage-capitalist apocalypse feels a little like a prophecy.
Forget Me Before You Go
I’d never written a solo role-playing game before, and this felt like an idea that really, really wanted to be a solo journaling game. I know that, for myself, gaming is often something I do to connect with others, and the idea of a solo game felt antithetical to some of the ideas I consider to be integral to role-playing games. But in discussion with some of the folks on the NaGaDemon discord, I found myself intrigued by the idea, and I kept coming back to the idea of the profound loneliness that sprouted from social anxiety. The idea of needing everyone you love to forget about you to protect them, but struggling against your own need to be close and be loved… I don’t know if I managed to fully encapsulate that in a one-page game, but even writing about it now has me feeling some things.
Shoots, & Leaves
This one admittedly got away from me a bit, but I think that actually kind of helped the game a bit. It’s abstract. It’s weird. It’s about protecting and promoting the Oxford comma. Which like… Kay, I’m a bit of a language nerd, but not in the way most language nerds are. With nothing but love: English is the Swamp Water of languages, that horrifying amalgam of every flavor of Slurpee poured into the same cup and stirred. I talk and write like I do because that’s how I was taught, but like, I also recognize that the way I was taught has some inherent problems.
Anyway, this one’s probably the weirdest game in the list, and for that reason alone I kinda love it.
Let Me See that Rulebook
Not an RPG in the strictest sense, I think this one is the best idea I had all month. Basically, I turned rules lawyering and cheating into a meta-game. Play D&D, and change the rules as you play. Feels like it’s destined to end in complete fucking chaos, and to be honest, I’m super here for that.
Me, My Demon, and I
I really liked some of what I did in Noah’s Yacht, but it was early in the project and both the formatting and my own myopia kept it from being the game it could have been. I think in a lot of ways, Me, My Demon, and I is the game Noah’s Yacht should have been, just with the theme flipped. And to be honest, I think the theme is stronger on this one, but I do really want to make more good TTRPGs that lean into Christianity someday. I’m not Christian myself, but Josh is, and we’ve sometimes discussed the fact that there just aren’t enough good Biblical role-playing games. This one ain’t that, but I think there’s still a lot of potential for something like Noah’s Yacht to work.
Eureka
I find this one legitimately disturbing. I wrote an article in art school about the idea of true artificial intelligence being entirely unknowable and detached from humanity because human beings are gross and weird. Like, the fact that you’re in a body and your body has needs and meeting those needs results in you expelling some nasty stuff from that boy is super gross and weird and deeply, utterly human. Computers never have to deal with that. They don’t know what it’s like to get ‘hangry’ or sexual frustration. So I wanted to explore what happens when you’re freed from those constraints. And my first thought was that it would be sort of utopian, but it didn’t take long for me to trip face-first into the reality that you just… Wouldn’t be human anymore…
System: A Suburban Apocalypse
This one is neat because I knew, even as I was writing it, that it wanted to be a bigger game. I love me some Progression Fantasy in fiction, and one of my favorite genres of that (despite the fact that there’s some asshole gatekeeping the term) is a System Apocalypse - the type of story where the world ends, at least in part, because the laws of the universe have been rewritten to be the rules of a game. But a game about a world in which the game system is diagetic really desperately wants a super crunchy system for the players and their characters to interact with. For a one-pager there just isn’t enough space. When I come back to look at expanding some of these, this one is the first one on my list for like, a super-chonky 4th Edition-inspired slug-fest of a game.
Castelia City
My role in the podcast is to be the weird pretentious one, and this is probably the most pretentious thing I’ve ever committed to paper. It’s a serious-business TTRPG setting about Herman Hesse's Glass Bead Game, a weird kind of aesthetic holy grail of game design. It also has one of my favorite resolution mechanics.
Which ones were your favorites!?!?
30 Games in 30 Days Retrospective
Over the month of November, I wrote 30 one-page RPGs, one for every day of the month. It was an interesting challenge and revealed some neat facets of my own design aesthetic that I think are worthy of a bit more exploration, so I wanted to take a minute and talk about them here.
There are Mechanics I Gravitate Towards
So I seem to have a nigh-endless appreciation for abilities and skills that are self-defined. I believe it was the FATE system’s Aspects that first introduced the idea to me - “come up with some things you’re good at, and some things you’re bad at, and those have a mechanical impact when a thing you’re doing touches on one of them.” I especially like this in mundane games, where you’re just meant to be some person who gets caught up in a Weird Thing, because it feels like a very natural extension of everyone’s lived experience. I’ve got some things I’m good at and some things I’m bad at, and I can put names on those.
I also adore group resources. There is something about the idea of group hit points that tickles me, especially when the stakes aren’t about a character’s physical body. The idea of ‘hope’ being a communal pool of ‘hit points’ has some poetry to it that really deeply resonates with me and I felt the urge to include something like it in basically every group game I put together this month. Everyone working together being mechanically represented is something I think we need to see way more often, especially in things like fantasy heartbreakers. It moves us away from an individualistic superhero narrative to something inherently community-oriented. You want to represent that your party is like a family? Now they share a hit point pool. “If you go down, I go down with you.”
3d20, take the middle, is the best randomizer I came up with this month. It has the potential to swing like a straight d20 roll, but lives on a curve for more consistency. It also has advantage/disadvantage mechanics built into it, which I love and reduces the need for numerical bonuses (which is a huge benefit in one-pagers, where progression isn’t really The Thing).
I Don’t Know What People Are Going to Like
This was particularly prevalent with Left Socks Only. I expected that a game about gnomes stealing socks, with an adorable picture of a mostly-naked gnome, was going to be popular. It was absolutely middle-of-the-pack. I didn’t expect The Long Way There, the Short Way Home to do well because I thought it was a bit heady - spend three years on a space ship with people you only barely tolerate? Weird, but fun to make. That one got more than average upvotes and got shared a lot and someone gave me dollars for it.
I know some part of it has to do with timing. When I post has an impact on how many people see a game. Some of my games didn’t make it onto the /r/onepagerpgs subreddit at all because of foibles in reddit’s anti-spam filters (makes sense, they were basically just a list of links to the same website, but still). So some outside factors definitely play into it. Also, I think sci-fi is kind of generally under-represented in the TTRPG sphere right now, especially hard science fiction, so that might have something to do with it? I expected people to be into whimsy. They really want to be stuck in a tin can slowly hurtling to an unknown chunk of outer space.
There’s No Place for Philosophy
A few times over the course of this challenge, I got involved in discussions about the aesthetic philosophy of games, once on reddit and again on Discord. In both of those discussions, the main talking points referred back to some of the structuralist philosophy espoused by Edwards, Baker et al on the Forge back in the early 2000s, and lemme tell you, it made me yearn for those halcyon days, but probably not in the way you’re thinking. Reddit user BreakingStar_Games pointed out an AMA with Baker about why there is no “Forge 2.0,” (being that there isn’t a similar designer call-to-action as there was in the late 1990s), but I do wonder if maybe it’s time. Games philosophy and aesthetic philosophy have both progressed in the 20 years since the Forge was in its heyday, and in classic RPG Theory fashion, it feels like we’re about four decades behind those advancements.
What this exercise and those discussions helped solidify, for me, at least, is my stance as a metamodernist designer and games critic. What’s interesting about metamodernism in terms of games design is that it still engages with the old models espoused by Edwards back in The Day, but with the learnings of post-modernism fully baked-in. Does structuralism have something to offer games theory? Yes, of course - the fundamental observations are still valid. But being critical of the conclusions that we came to, and coming to our own interpretations of that information, is important in establishing future-forward RPG theory. Oscillating between the heroic evidence-based approach of GNS breakdowns and the ironic detachment of post-modernism and the hopeful earnestness of metamodern approaches is how we evolve and strengthen our understanding of games. I do wish there was a place for those discussions, though, that was a bit more centralized - right now it’s happening on university campuses and social media an in ‘walled gardens’ of thought, and as someone who is interested in the cutting edge of TTRPG theory that’s endlessly frustrating.
Publishing Across Platforms is a Lot of Work
I published my games on Gumroad to start, and people made it pretty clear that they needed to be on Itch and DriveThruRPG, too. Getting them onto Itch was fine, but DriveThru has a whole validation process for every game you put out that I wasn’t anticipating, and so there are still some games that I’ve got uploaded but aren’t public.
I can absolutely see the value of having multiple venues for your games, but holy hell did it turn this into an absolute chore every day. It took way longer than I was expecting to publish each title, and that started to eat into my design time, especially early on. I eventually got into a rhythm with it, but only towards the final five or six games.
There Aren’t a Lot of Ways to Get People to See Your Games
Look, I’m no good at marketing myself. But it’s also true that the number of avenues for telling people about your work, especially free avenues, is shrinking small. Especially if you don’t have money to throw at it. I understand if the folks at /r/onepagerpgs are super done with my whole thing (I am too! No one is more annoyed by me than me!), and the Promotions chat of the NaGaDeMon discord is similarly chock full of my nonsense because it felt like that’s the only place to get my stuff seen! I also posted on my facebook and threads and whatnot, but none of that even came close to the traffic generated from those two sources, and the traffic was in the mid teens per day - not exactly blowing the doors off the hinges! Anyway, if you read this far, please share my games out and around - they’re all available on Gumroad and Itch.io and I’m still working on getting them published on DriveThru RPG. They’re all pay-what-you-want, but I’d be stoked if people played them!
If you’ve been hanging out with me on this journey: thanks! I’ve appreciated your company and I hope to have something new for you soon. I plan to collect all of these games into a single volume with typed versions of them (with some edits and updates) at some point in the near future, but I plan to take my time with that.
The Extreme Library
The Game:
This is one that’s been kicking around in my head for a dozen years or more - a library that is also an infinite source of dungeon/adventure, a weird connection to the demesne of the Gods of Knowledge. There are a few ways I’ve considered building this one out, and one of the ones I keep coming back to is Daniel Solis’ system from Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. Writing a journal as a game about a library feels… Fitting.
What I Like About This One:
Basically nothing. I needed to get a game out, I’m out of ideas, and I’m super, extra done. I’ll come back and re-do this one later.
What I’d Do Differently Next Time:
Everything. lololol
Quest Board
The Game:
Quest Board is a simple contemporary modern RPG until it isn’t. The idea is simple - there’s a quest board in a local grocery store where people post odd jobs and the like, but none of them are actually what they seem. Each one has a genre twist that pulls it out of the ordinary and into fantasy, science fiction, science fantasy, or horror.
What I Like About This One:
Honestly, the quest board mechanic can and maybe should be stolen for basically every standard quest or odd job type game. Quests tend to be pretty stale in the way they’re followed, and this provides a framework for a Big Twist of various kinds.
What I’d Do Different Next Time:
I don’t love this one, tbh. The well’s a bit dry after posting a game every day for a month, and this one feels a bit like I’m scraping the bottom. The mechanics are simple and I’ve used variations of them all over this project so far, and this one kinda feels slapped together and generic because of that, I think.
The Chosen One (Is a Moron)
They’s just a dumb lil’ guy.
The Game
There is a prophecy. The person who is meant to fulfill that prophecy is a well-meaning idiot. Your job, and the jobs of your fellows, is to make the prophecy come true at any cost so that the big dummy can thwart the Big Evil.
What I Like About This One
It’s hard to do the Chosen One trope in RPGs because the entire medium of games is agency. Not to get too into the weeds on theory, but the choices that we make and the free will we exercise are the tool we use to create the Art Moment of a game. That experience isn’t necessarily undermined by narrative tropes around destiny, but those tropes can feel really restricting, at times in ways that can de-value the artistic experience of the participants. So having your player characters be the Chosen One without explicit buy-in as to what that means can be kind of disastrous.
Making the Chosen One a) a non-player character and b) a dummy presents some interesting opportunities for how to utilize free will and agency towards a specific goal - how do we get this moron to fulfill the prophecy in a way that will actually let us destroy the Great Evil?
Also, I love the idea of a random prophecy, so mad-libs!
What I’d Do Differently Next Time:
I’d maybe consider a few different types of prophecy? I feel like this one is really cute in concept but kinda lacks in the execution department, so if I do come back to this idea it’s going to probably require I go back to the drawing board completely. It’s playable as is, but I think I could find ways to execute on these concepts better with some more room maybe.
System: A Suburban Apocalypse
The Game
A floating blue holographic screen that appears when you say “status.” Monsters that spawn in your neighborhood. Electronics have suddenly stopped working, and your neighbor Frank is carrying around a sword the size of a door. It appears reality has been replaced with some sort of System, and it is leading to some sort of Apocalypse.
What I Like About This One
The idea of a ‘system apocalypse’ is intriguing to me. It suggests that, given an alternative set of values (survival, understanding of gaming tropes), different people would end up being particularly successful. It skirts objectivism in much the same way that superhero stories do. But it’s also just kinda fun to think about - what if reality was suddenly governed by Final Fantasy rules? What if the world was suddenly a reality tv show run by aliens and the challenges often resulted in mass murder? What if there was a weekly competition where you could fight to get your resources instead of having to go to a job you hate and do work for people you barely tolerate?
What I’d Do Differently Next Time
This idea really, really wants to be a much bigger game. Like, a 4E style powers-based game or a PbtA game or something. It wants cronch so goddamn bad. Out of all the games I’ve made this month, this is the best candidate for expanding into standard publication size.
Grim Reapers
The Game
Space is a big scary place, and it’s full of salvage for those who are willing to go out looking for it. Your crew is a salvage ship, finding derelicts adrift in the stars, and bringing them back home for a hefty reward. Specifically, you’ve found an old cryoship filled to the brim with frozen people on their way to colonize some backwater moon. But something on the ship is desperately, horribly wrong…
What I Like About This One
This one’s really self-contained. It’s only really got the one idea in it - salvaging a ship full of frozen people and realizing it was a trap. I specifically don’t lay out what laid the trap or how, but the mechanic of the players who have died becoming antagonists is both hilarious and horrifying. Definitely took a bit of inspiration from some of the Among Us videos my kid’s been watching on YouTube…
What I’d Do Differently Next Time
Mechanically, this one’s real wee. It doesn’t have a ton going on rules-wise. Which I think could maybe be a good thing in a horror game? But I spent way too much real estate on the idea and not nearly enough on the nitty gritty bone-shaking bits. If I’d been thinking, I would have named this one ‘Grim Repo.’
Too High
The Game:
You don’t know where Jared got that weed, but it was crazy potent and everyone is too high. And it was laced with something because you’re all hallucinating that you’re video game characters, with powers and everything. You have the munchies and it is time to go to Taco Bell!
What I Like About This One:
This is the first game I’ve made for this challenge where I asked someone else ‘Hey, what game do you think I should make?’ My dear friend Lindsey suggested this.
I live in Canada where marijuana is legal and healthcare is free. You don’t need a weed spot - there are two dozen places withing walking distance of my house where I could pick up quality ganja. I don’t actually smoke, myself, but it’s nice to know that I never have to worry about this happening if I do.
The idea of ‘death’ being that you just sober up is legitimately hilarious to me.
What I’d Do Differently Next Time:
This one is maybe a little basic for one of my games. I’d probably look at a resource management track that’s a bit more interesting overall. Maybe a couple of different levers to balance.
Whoops, All Bards!
The Game:
You put out a quest call, put a poster on the jobs board, and got ready to attack the dungeon. Only problem, the only people who answered were bards. And you’re a bard! But the quest has a time limit, so you’re going into the dungeon and you’ll just have to figure it out as you go!
What I Like About This One:
There aren’t enough games that make violence a non-answer. I mean, the number of times violence solves my problems in a normal day? Zero per day. The number of times seduction solves my problems? Very closely approaching zero… But my whole job is diplomacy! Diplomacy is how I handle all of my problems! So the idea of a game where beating monsters up is verboten appeals to me.
This is probably the worst version of the roll xd20, take the middle, that I’ve put together so far but I still kinda love it in its ridiculousness.
What I’d Do Differently Next Time:
I’d probably make the failures not equal death early on. I had to come up with stuff to get around it for some of the mechanics that came later, but it was funny in the moment.
Get Out of the Robot… A One-Page RPG About The Families of Child Soldiers in an Intergalactic War
The Game:
My son just turned fifteen. His older sister d… Died. When she was his age. Three years ago, now. And it’s really hard to not compare them. He has her laugh. Her mannerisms. He looks so much like his mother just like she did. And he’s starting to drift away from me the same way she did. And like, I get it. That’s supposed to happen, right? They’re supposed to get their own friends and start to assert their independence, all of that. So I’m trying really hard to let him have the space he needs for that, but every time he’s out late, I start to run through the scenarios, sizing up his friends, looking for signs he’s going down the same path his sister did. And then… Then last night I found it. Just sitting on his dresser drawer out in the open, as if it isn’t the exact thing that… That KILLED his mother and his sister. And I just… I can’t even look at him. I can’t be near him. I’ve… I’ve never hurt my kids, but in that moment I wanted to just… I wanted to HIT him. To hit ANYTHING so that I can get some of the… the pain. The pain out of my chest and into something else. So I just get in my car and drive for a while. And before I even know where I’m going, I’m at her school. Or what’s left of it. And I know. I’m staring at that thing that attacked us, the graveyard for so many of our children, and I know it’s going to end the same way. The only way it ever ends. He’s going to die in this stupid, endless war…
Get Out of the Robot isn’t a game about child soldiers recruited to fight an intergalactic war in giant robots. It’s a game about the people who love them.
What I Like About This One:
Somewhat similar mechanics to yesterday’s game insofar as the selection of a friend and a rival. Mechanically I love the idea of playing with real-life time limits. Part of me wanted to find a way to smash this into 22 minute episodes, but for a role-playing game that’s a SUPER tight deadline and it would need to be streamlined as hell to play.
There’s something about the idea of a half-way-point where all hell breaks loose that’s so fun to me. You can play two completely different scenarios, but if you can tie them together through a theme or through characters, it has a lot of potential to become something beautiful.
I grew up secretly loving the Power Rangers. I wasn’t allowed to watch the show because it was so violent, which makes a lot of sense because my best friend and I used to pretend to kick the crap out of each-other with hockey sticks while pretending to be Rangers and I knew nothing about the show. But I always wondered what it was like to be the people on the sidelines, trying to survive weekly kaiju attacks and dealing with the fact that your kid might die in a robot fight.
What I’d Do Differently Next Time:
Probably make it about robot fights actually? I also have this killer idea for a larger thing where the Power Rangers are a villainous organization, but that’s gonna need a lot more than one page to get out.
Lonely Hearts Home for the Elderly - A One Page Role-playing Game About Old Romantics
The Game
Lonely Hearts Home for the Elderly is a game in which you assume the character of an old person at a retirement home. It’s a romance!
What I Like About This One:
One of my favorite things to do in other role-playing games is establish relationship roles. Like, even in D&D I’ll have people pick a best friend and a rival in the group and provide small mechanical benefits to those roles, because I think that sort of thing helps role-playing. Making it into a specific rule felt right.
I also love games with secret win conditions
What I’d Do Differently Next Time:
Mostly in the formatting on this one. Tried something different and holy hell did it not work. Lil dude’s just floating off the end of the page there.
31 Floors Up - A Horror Elevator One-page RPG
The Game:
Based loosely on the iconic Roblox horror games, 31 floors up is an existential horror game about people stuck on an elevator to hell. How do you survive to reach the final floor… and freedom?
What I Like About This One:
This is the most direct use of the screw-you mechanics I’ve ever put together. If you fail horribly at a thing, you don’t decide how YOU die - you screw up so bad it gets someone else killed. I feel like this really reflects some of the best horror tropes, where people doing the tropes correctly end up dying, but the people who mess up really badly have to watch their best friends be horribly murdered.
What I’d Do Differently:
I should have included an option for creating a new character in the levels themselves for when you die so you can get back in the action, but also have a secretly-determined Imposter score that determines how much (if at all) the new character is actually an eldritch horror in a people-suit.
Get it on Gumroad!
Long Live the Empire
The Game
A high-stakes game of reputation and manners set in a galaxy-spanning empire, like a Star Wars regency drama starring that guy Vader choked that one time.
What I Like About This One:
I love player-driven drama. As we saw in Me, My Demon, and I, there’s something I find compelling about mechanics that let you screw with other people, or the idea that another player around the table can be like ‘Nah, make that harder.’ It’s a fun political level to play with, giving players a bit of pull in deciding how difficult something should be.
The idea of high-stakes social is also something that intrigues me in games. We have a ton of games about high-stakes physical striving, but the truth of the matter is, we’re much more in tune with the socio-political dangers of the world. Maybe that’s part of the escapist ideal of games like Dungeons & Dragons, but I find the idea of “Say it politely or die” much more compelling in my fiction.
What I’d Do Differently Next Time:
Pens! Why do you thwart me so!?!? The section that starts with “Play Begins” is kind of out-of-order in a way that I would find infuriating as a player. I remember one of my biggest pet peeves with Palladium books back in the day was the way that their core books were laid out, with rules for character creation and races and classes all over the damned place, and here I am with specific interjection moves before I’ve completed the basic play loop? Well, I never…
Me, My Demon, and I
The Game:
Everybody's got their demons. You can see 'em. Some people got angels watchin' over 'em too. But you ain't got an angel. Nobody who can see 'em gets one. Wonder what that's about.
What I Like About This One:
A demonic answer to Noah's Yacht, this one has a very similar diceless system, right up until you run out of Grace. I think this one is a better game, though.
I'm not a Christian myself but I love Christian imagery and art and a lot of the concepts that are rolled into it. In Nomine is one of my favorite game milieus of all time, and I think of these little diceless games as a sort of love-letter to/crack-ship of In Nomine and Nobilis.
I love the idea of your friends taking a point of damage to make your punishment worse and I'm almost certainly going to use this in other games. It's so beautifully petty.
What I'd Do Differently:
I think I did it? A lot of the things I'd have done differently in Noah's Yacht, I did here, and I think it worked out pretty well. I like this one and I can't wait to play it.
Lo-fi Beats Tour
The Game
Travel around the county playing weird little shows in weird little venues meeting weird people and having a chill time. You and your friends are in a lo-fi band, making chill beats to study to and touring around in a big van.
What I Like About This One:
I’m trying to find ways to get more ‘cozy’ role-playing games into my life. The vast majority of role-playing games have huge epic stories that span the world stopping the Apocalypse Dragon from raining hellfire down upon the unsuspecting people of Vale Innocen or whatever, but there’s seldom enough focus on the sorts of cool experiences people have all the time.
I played in some cover bands when I was a young man. Didn’t do a ton of touring but played a few shows, and it was pretty formative for me in a lot of ways.
There’s no way to actually fail in this game. You always do what you set out to do, but sometimes it comes with a setback or ruins your vibe. And I feel like that’s an ideal way to handle personal, emotional stake rather than worry about whether or not you can pick a lock to stop the Doom Minotaurs from flaying your friends.
What I’d Do Differently Next Time:
I’d probably expand on song seeds and songwriting mechanically. I kinda liked the idea of just having a little nugget of a song, a thing you can carry with you out of the game, but songwriting is such an integral part of the band experience that I think it deserves to be represented mechanically.
Castelia City - A One-page RPG About Games
The Game:
The Glass Bead Game is the most important, beautiful, perfect game that has ever been created. It is the ultimate expression of humanity’s artistic drive - harmonious, strategic, elevated. The game is everything, and mastering it will elevate you to heights beyond your wildest dreams.
What I Like About This One:
The Glass Bead Game comes from Hermann Hess’ novella Das Glasperlenspiel or Magister Ludi, and it’s sometimes seen as a kind of a Holy Grail of game design. The game itself is never actually laid out for us in Das Glasperlenspiel, the rules are never really expounded upon, but it is often described as being an abstract, formalized interdisciplinary pursuit that pulls from art, music, history, mathematics and more. Players utilize symbols and forms that create elegant, harmonious connections between seemingly disparate concepts, making it something between a game, an art, and an intellectual subject of intense study.
So I turned it into Yu-Gi-Oh! I love me a Serious Business milieu.
What I Would Do Differently:
Get the name of the city right. I didn’t dig out my copy of Magister Ludi to reference, and I ended up using the name of a city from Pokemon?
There’s gotta be a way to make a Serious Business game multi-player, but I didn’t, so everyone else gets to be Joey on the sidelines yelling “You got this Yoog!” while someone else is battling it out with little shiny rocks.
Eureka - A One-Page RPG About Digital Ascendence
The Game:
You play as the first humans to upload your consciousnesses to a digital form. The process was not perfect. But maybe, with some practice, the world you now inhabit can be.
What I Like About This One:
There’s a theory of AI that suggests that the only way we’re going to reach the Singularity is to evolve humanity in parallel with the technology. Humans are gross and weird, and the theory goes that being gross and weird was a necessary part of becoming truly intelligent - we have complex needs, and getting those needs met requires complex thoughts. Now that AI is being rammed down our throats in every possible way, the idea carries a lot less appeal for me.
I’m an early adopter in general. I picked up AI early when there was still some excited buzz about it, and I learned one thing very quickly - it is not good at the things a computer should be good at. And if you want to plug that directly into my brain, that ain’t gonna fly. So there’s a horror element to the idea of uploading my thinker into a little black box that I think I maybe captured here.
What I’d Do Differently:
I’d clarify the Imperatives a bit. I would want there to be a lot more options for how to set your world up and how to make that world different and weird and wonderful and horrifying. This one is a good candidate for expansion, I think, because it could benefit from a couple of extra systems and some world-building clarification, for sure.