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!
Coffee of the Damned
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
The Game
The people closest to you have started to go missing. Not just moving away or ghosting you - no one remembers they ever existed. And it seems to be tied directly to you. If someone loves you, they're just... erased. Now, you're caught between the human need for love and community and togetherness and the need to protect those people who are most precious to you. You're forcing people to forget you, but... Can you?
Forget Me Before You Go is a solo journaling role-playing game.
What I Like About This One:
This is my first attempt at a solo journaling game, and I'm not as familiar with that genre as I am with other role-playing games. So this one's kind of raw, probably probably amateur hour, but it's fun to try and encapsulate an idea into a new framework.
I have a weird obsession with epistemological philosophy. How do we know that we know something? If memory can be manipulated, how can we ever be sure of anything? If the memories of our most important pillars in life were to disappear, how would we know what was missing? And there's something about epistemology that I find incredibly lonely. Like, what you know is what you know. Nobody else knows what you know, how you think, what goes on in your head. But part of the human condition is striving for connection with others, and I wanted to put together a game that evoked that, a bit. Did I succeed? I have no idea. People who are more familiar with journaling games will need to let me know.
What I Would Do Differently:
Again, we come to the problem of pens. The randomizer system should not contain the words 'succeed' or 'fail.' Those are so subjective in a game like this, and the terminology really matters. It do think it creates an interesting ambiguity and dissonance, but at the cost of a more crystalized version of the idea. But I wrote 'success' before I realized that wasn't ideal, and was already on the next sentence, so it stayed 'success' and 'failure' for this version. If I go back and re-do this one, I'd replace those with more evocative terms like Episteme for 'rememberance' and 'amathia' for forgetting.
Come to think of it, Amathia could have made a better title for this game...
Cavemen with Laser Guns
The Game:
A post-post-apocalyptic game about a humanity blasted back to the stone age - but now they've got alien laser guns, too.
What I Like About This One:
This game came about as part of a conversation I was having with my No Plot Only Lore cohost Josh about L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth. The first part of that book set up an enthralling setting of humans living as nomadic pests in a world controlled by an overwhelming, technologically advanced enemy.
Then the humans find a mountain full of F-15 jets and learn how to fly them or something. I don't really remember, but I do recall that I found it infuriating and put the book away and never read another thing by L. Ron Hubbard. You ever seen a jet's cockpit? I couldn't figure out how to fly one of those things, and I have computers and a flushing toilet and stuff.
But there is a level of advanced technology that I think stone-age humans could probably figure out. "I point the wand at an elk, and push this bit of it, and an elk is now both dead and cooked. It happens every time I touch that bit of the wand. What a wonderful wand."
We again have the group resource statistics. I like the mechanic of your name also being a representation of the natural things in the world that you resonate with.
What I Would Do Differently Next Time:
Y'know what? I kinda just like this one. The system is simple and straight-forward, but open enough to tell a lot of different kinds of stories, and I represents a lot of the things I like about one-page RPGs. I'm not sure I'd change this one at all.
Left Socks Only - A One-page RPG About Gnomes
The Game:
You’re gnomes. You have a MIGHTY NEED for a sock. If you ever have more than one sock at a time, you explode.
What I Like About This One:
Love me a heist. Love me the Blades in the Dark style flashback mechanic. Love me some gnomes.
What I’d Do Differently:
This one’s really straight-forward. I’d maybe have put some more thought into how to make it more focal on gnome… ness? Work in some notes about their size or something. What do they do with the sock? How do we enable future heists if you can just keep your one sock secret and safe?
Obviously any time you’re making art, you’re going to borrow from your inspirations. Nothing exists in a vacuum and every piece of art is an amalgam of things you’ve stolen from other art that you’ve appreciated. That said, looking back on this game, as much as I love the Blades in the Dark flashback mechanic, I feel like invoking a version of it here was a little lazy. It’s such a great mechanic, though, and I’m not creative enough to think of a better way to hit that trope.
Employee of the Month - A One-page RPG About Ambition and Authority
The Game:
Convince your colleagues to do stuff you don’t want to do. Steal the tasks that the Dungeon Boss values the most. Prove your worth, establish your leadership style, and get the big promotion to Mini Boss!
What I Like About This One:
I love the idea of running a dungeon like a corporate job. Probably because I work a corporate job, and also appreciate dungeons. The idea of a bunch of monsters vying for a promotion is cute.
I like the idea of rewarding people for exercising authority, especially when everyone has a vested interest in not letting that happen.
I love competitive role-playing games and there aren’t enough of them.
What I Would Do Differently Next Time:
Mechanically, I think this one could use a complete overhaul, honestly. It’s fine, but there’s a lot of ambiguity in the system that I’d like to tie down.
One of the hazards of working with pen, and something I have to deal with more often as this series progresses, is that once I’ve laid something down… That’s it. I can’t go back and edit it. So as I was writing this, I’d already come up with better ways to handle the mechanics, but it was too late (unless I wanted to throw away a bunch of writing and a cute drawing of dungeon’s #1 Best Skelly).
The Long Way There, the Short Way Home
The Game:
It takes years to fly to a new star system and build a new wormhole gate. Thankfully, the tech has gotten to the point where it isn’t hundreds or thousands of years - just like, three or four years in a tin can in the most hostile environment imaginable with three or four people you can barely tolerate.
What I Like About This One:
There’s something intriguing to me about bottles. The idea of a group of interesting people trapped in a small space and relying on one another for survival is endlessly compelling to me.
There aren’t a ton of sci-fi one-pagers, so I wanted to throw down in that space a bit. Get it? Space? lol
Again, we have group ‘hit points,’ which is pretty quickly becoming a hallmark of my systems.
What I’d Do Differently:
The math on this one is admittedly kind of on the rougher side for a supposedly ‘cozy’ game. It’s entirely plausible for the ship to fail three rolls in. That’s pretty on theme for SPACE but not super fun in a playable sense. It’s alright when you track with your Job and your Obsession, but if you’re doing something outside of those I think the difficulty of rolls is kind of prohibitive.
Bye, Bye, Bye - The Last Boyband on Earth
The Game:
Demons are appearing all over the world, and the only thing that seems to drive them back is a perfect four-part harmony. All the K-pop groups have been defeated. Now it's time for a bunch of retired middle-aged men to slip back into the sequins and tight pants to stop the end of the world.
What I Like About This One:
The come-back of the 3d20, keep the middle mechanic, this time keyed into things you're Good at and Bad at, and with more dice if people help. This might be my favorite randomizer right now because it's a d20, so has the potential for big swings, but it's on a proper probability curve, so less inherently swingy than systems that try to use 1d20.
I also like the evolution of the drama mechanic. As I've been working through this project, I'm starting see some common themes come up, and one of them is communal stats, like hit-points for your whole crew. Shoots, + Leaves had Ambiguity, Noah's Yacht had Hope. I seem to have a fascination with group resources, and I think I'm going to lean into that a bit.
What I Would Do Differently Next Time:
I'd want to focus more on the situation or the worldbuilding on this one. This one might be the tightest game I've put together so far. Not my favorite concept, but it feels mechanically cohesive and thematically consistent, I just wish there was MORE to it.
Is it just K-pop Demon Hunters with the serial numbers filed off and aimed at middle aged dads? Did I just draw Creggy G doing the Chubby Z pose from Gravity Falls' Sev'ral Timez? ... NooooOOoooo... Shut up.
My Parents are Aliens - A One-page RPG About Vulnerability and Belonging
The Game:
In My Parents are Aliens, you play the children of freedom fighters in an interstellar war. You’re a slightly abnormal kid trying to live a normal life.
What I Like About this One:
I like the popularity-as-resolution mechanic and I might find other, more complex uses for it.
Was this just an excuse to draw some mediocre gender-swapped Steven Universe fanart? Mmmmmaaaaybe.
What I’d Do Differently Next Time
I’m not a huge fan of character creation elements that don’t tie into the mechanics of the game. I made the choice to have the stuff you’re good/bad at and the parents’ Dark Secret disconnected from the mechanics to give them some separation - weird alien shit gets mechanics, normal life is just life and it’s messy and doesn’t have clean separations between success and failure. Looking at it again, I don’t think that was the right choice - I think if I’m going to have you come up with character defining traits, those should have some sort of mechanical definition within the framework of the game.
Poly Cule - A One-page RPG of Polyhedral Romance
The Game:
It's a little harem/reverse-harem romance game where all of the characters your character is in a relationship with are dice. You spend energy on your relationships and talk about how those solve problems in a role-playing game session, and also deal with any drama that comes up (including the occasional DRAMATIC BREAKUP!)
What I Like About This One:
It's just a cute, dumb little idea of a harem anime where 'best' girl/guy/nb is your D12.
I know for a fact that my podcast partner would hate this one, for several reasons, and I find that low-key hilarious.
What I'd do Differently Next Time:
I feel like I didn't utilize as much of the page real estate as I could have for some fundamental things like: fleshing out personalities, or adding some additional context to The Situation. If I end up re-writing this one using a keyboard, there's a possibility that this one goes beyond the one-page format. Still a micro, for sure, but maybe like ten pages.
Live, Die, Repeat - A One-Page RPG for One Player and One Game Master.
This is the sixth game in my "Write a one-page RPG every day for a month" project. You can find the others on this store or at www.noplotonlylore.com.
The Game:
A simple regression arc - you wake up, you live your life, you die, you wake up on the same day you started. Every time you wake up, you're a little more prepared to face the challenges that resulted in your death the last time.
What I Like About This One:
I think this is my most elegant game design so far. The regression mechanic is simple and illustrates growing knowledge and wisdom in a very clean way. The 3d20-take-the-middle fortune mechanic might be the best one I have ever come up with. And I like the art!
What I Would Do Differently:
Not sure I would do anything different, but I might want to expand this idea out in the future. Scenarios, types of challenges, types of regression, etc. Also, I didn't realize going into it that there were other games doing this, so I'd probably research those a bit better.
Shoots, & Leaves
The Game
You play as a team of scholars, defending the Oxford comma from all of its detractors! Descend into the darkest annals of academia to discover the Apostolic Order for Serial Clarity and join their esteemed ranks. Fight the forces that look to steep the world in chaos over chamomile! Clad yourself in tweed armor and battle against the dreaded Red Pen!
What I like about this one:
Role-playing games are a linguistic and semantic pursuit. The shared imagined space that we create when playing a role-playing game is built on nothing but words - the descriptions given to us from the GM, the actions declared by the players, and assumptions that fill in the details. Sometimes that shared imagined space becomes confused when something was unclear, or if one of the participants describes something in a way that another participant incorrectly interprets. Role-playing games are almost entirely built on language and communication, so it's kind of funny to me that we don't engage with language more directly.
The fact that I got to name a mechanic "Syntactic Collapse," thrills me.
Having your skills named after other punctuation is also a unique joy to me.
What I would do differently:
I got real in-the-weeds on this one, conceptually. It’s a really abstract idea, and considering that it’s a game ostensibly about communicative clarity, I think I donked up the communication and the clarity on this one. Also, I make a disparaging note about the art on this one, but it’s not as bad as I thought it was, and with the next couple mocked up, the art is getting an upgrade. This one made me realize I should probably pay more attention to the graphic quality of the thing, and I’m starting to see what I think is going to be a more prominent format going forward - centered graphic, two or three columns of text. Noah’s Yacht really threw me for a loop…
Let Me See That Rulebook - A One-page Meta Game?
The Game:
Let Me See That Rulebook started as a one-page RPG and turned into something else. It's like a layer you can add to your current RPG. It's a codification of the idea of house-ruling, but done on the fly and with a small limitation built in - you have to change the number of words equal to the number rolled on a die, and you can't roll the same die twice in a row. The goal is to eventually make the game you're playing a chaotic jumble of house rules and nonsense.
What I Like About this One:
Honestly, everything except the art. Writing in upper case and simplifying the format were both good choices.
What I Would Do Differently Next Time:
The art, for sure. Don't get me wrong, it has some appeal, but it's not as good as the art on Accounts Receivable, and kinda in the same design style.
Also, I might restrict dice choices more. Like, you have to run through every die in a set between repeats or something?
I swear to every god I have a name for, DriveThru is coming.
Noah’s Yacht - a One-page RPG
The Game: God's doing another deluge because people suck. But this time, more people have boats. Like your neighbor Noah. He's got a big boat. Not like, two of every animal big, but y'know - a solid yacht. And a lot of people (and critters) want to be on it...
What I Like About This One
I have an abiding fascination with diceless systems, and I think that for something with a vaguely Judeo-Christian theme, the idea of Faith and Hope being non-random levers at play kind of tickles me. Seven saintly virtues as stats, also fun.
What I'd Do Differently
I thought I was being clever with the way I laid this one out. I was not being clever, I was being a dumb-ass.
I wish that I'd put some more mechanical depth into this one. I think I got kinda swept up in the idea of something like Honey Heist, that's just a bunch of hilarious random tables, and was like "I can make a funny list!" And then I did that instead of making a more interesting game.
Notes
It's pay-what-you-want on GumRoad. If you'd like to throw me a dollar for the ink, that'd be awesome! If you want it for free, just put $0 in the 'name a fair price' section. Either way, please enjoy this stupid little game I made and I'll see y'all tomorrow for the next one!
Still figuring out other publication platforms like itch.io and DriveThru, but those platforms are coming!
Accounts Receivable - A One-page RPG
The Game: You are office workers at the end of the world with a responsibility to get the last invoice delivered to your client.
What I Like About This One
There is something uniquely hilarious to me about continuing to Do Your Job even when doing so is patently ridiculous. I have this idea that’s percolating about how participation in corporations is, in fact, a game, and that to do so you need to suspend the aims of real life to care about the goals of The Game, similar to Huizinga’s “Magic Circle” in gaming, because I cannot personally fathom how anyone actually gives a shit about the company’s EBITDA if that is not the case.
I love the idea of a rolling system based on the Fibonacci Sequence for a game about people who do math for a living.
What I'd Do Differently
The space-handling on this one is a little better, but I wrote straight-up to the margins on it and there’s some spots where the scan cuts off.
Notes
It's pay-what-you-want on GumRoad. If you'd like to throw me a dollar for the ink, that'd be awesome! If you want it for free, just put $0 in the 'name a fair price' section. Either way, please enjoy this stupid little game I made and I'll see y'all tomorrow for the next one!
Goose Union - A One-page RPG
Goose Union is the first one-page RPG I put together for my November Write a Game a Day project. NaWriGaDa? Nah, that’s dumb.
The Game: You are goosedeses. Geeses. Gooses. You've unionized and your demands are simple! More bread! All the humans out! MOAR BREAD.
What I Like About This One
It's a silly concept and a super basic execution. I think it was good to get the juices flowing, but they're gonna get weirder/better from here on out, I think/hope.
What I'd Do Differently
I don't like how I've handled the space in this one at all. My handwriting is kind of awful. And I wish I'd hammered the union theme a bit more. It's a whole lotta gooses and little bit of union.
Notes
Mostly just wanted to do Untitled Goose Game as a dumb one-pager, so uh... Here we go.
It's pay-what-you-want on GumRoad. If you'd like to throw me a dollar for the ink, that'd be awesome! If you want it for free, just put $0 in the 'name a fair price' section. Either way, please enjoy this stupid little game I made and I'll see y'all tomorrow for the next one!