#journaling ttrpg

[junkfoodgames]

Moon Rings, a new solo journaling game, is out now!

In the game, you play as a witch who wishes to end the reign of the cursed Blood Moon. Venture into the labyrinth, find the Moon Rings, and cast the ritual to change the moon! The labyrinth is deadly and the Blood Moon is watching, so you’ll need your strength of will, magick, and good fortune to make it to the end!

This game is based on the Carta and Aspire SRDs. It was made for the Below a Bad Moon jam!

Check it out and please share!

[dungeonofthedragon]

Kiwi RPG Week: Day 2

It's Kiwi RPG Week: a celebration of tabletop games, shows and other goodness from kiwis across Aotearoa and beyond!

Each day I'll spotlight three pieces of tabletop goodness from kiwi creatives: one single player game, one multiplayer game, and one supplement for an existing game. Today I bring you a solo vampire scenario, a game of heroes wielding evil sentient objects, and a horror overhaul for D&D 5E!

Fresh Blood

gothHoblin

Dramatic

Solo

Journaling game

You're a young vampire in a big city. Your sire is dying. It's up to you to collect the ritual ingredients to save their unlife.

Instruments of the Chrysanthemum Throne

Dale Elvy and Imaginary Empire

Rules light

Mythical Japan

Tense

The Instruments of the Chrysanthemum Throne are a collection of sentient objects that possess remarkable magical powers.  They have been locked away for generations because of their abiding malice and hatred of people. Now in desperation the Emperor calls on heroes to wield these artifacts for good.

FiveEvil

Morgan Davie and Handiwork Games

This game isn't so much a supplement for D&D 5E as it is an experiment in how far the system can be pushed before it breaks. With full character creation rules, scenarios, and awful creatures to confront, this is a great horror game based on the popular d20 system.

[tyhulse]

Pooh and the chishire cat, because thier conversation would be hilarious. What strange philosophy might come out of that?

[strangelove-aeronautics]

Free RPGs for Free RPG Day

I've been designing these one page RPGs as a fun little design project for myself. It's been fun! and today I learned that it's Free RPG Day, so I figured I ought to release the ones I have so far. I'm planning on a full fledged itch.io release once I hit some undefined bigger number (10? 20? basically until I lose interest).

For now, here are 5 one-page games and RPGs made for ease of print. They're yours to do with as you please.

If you make anything with these, do please tag me. It would be cool. Also sorry that some of the rules are vague. This is somewhat intentional. Something something these games belong to you, and you're free to play them as you please.

[modoreadsttrpgs]

Game Log: cyan starlight

I posted a reaction to reading this game recently, and somehow I've also actually played the thing! I've debated posting about it though, as I was quite high on the game from reading it, but really struggled with it in practice, but I'll get into why.

It's tough to explain my issues, as they're mainly mechanical, so bear with me as I cover some of the basics to give context. In the game, you have essentially two character sheets, one for your human, and one for your ship. Each one has six attributes, using a stepped dice system. So when you roll a check, 1-2 is a failure, 3-4 is success with a cost, 5-6 is a success. But you may be rolling a d4, d6, d8 etc depending on the attribute.

Every time you roll a check on an attribute, you reduce the die size of that attribute by one. So if your character starts with Shoot at d8, when you shoot it drops to d6, then if you shoot again it drops to d4. If your attribute is at d4 it cannot drop further, so instead you mark a stress on your character sheet.

Your have four boxes to fill in for stress. When you fill in the fourth, you mark a despair box. There are 15 despair boxes, and filling in all 15 ends the game.

You can take an action to 'lay low' and remove one stress. There's no explanation of when and how often you can do this, I assumed once per jump. You can also take an action to 'catch your breath', which restores your character's attributes to full. Your ship attributes seemingly cannot be restored at all.

Each time you jump to another system, you roll on a flight table. This is 2d6 and on a 10-12 you're safe. That's 17% of the time, so 83% of the time, you are making an engine check. Engines are one of your ship attributes, so in 83% of jumps, you are reducing your engine attribute by one. This very rapidly drops to d4 and triggers a stress every time you have to make the check.

The next step after your flight roll is a sensors check. This is another ship attribute, and the check is performed on 100% of jumps, so even more rapidly drops to d4 and triggers a stress every time you jump, without fail.

As noted, you have four stress boxes to fill in, and can lay low once per jump (admittedly the once per jump is an assumption on my part, because no parameters are established around it). This means on 83% of jumps, you are checking 2 stress and can only clear 1, so very soon you are triggering a despair on every jump. This is all before you even know what is in the system and decide whether to disembark and deal with the obstacles planetside.

In fairness, the game is about you being the last human alive, so perhaps this is all intended to support the bleak nature of the game. I had expected melancholic though, and this ends up feeling more like the first time you play Dark Souls.

Combat was also confusing, as enemies will be listed to do, for example, a "standard attack", but the impact of that is not defined. You don't have HP, so my assumption is that an attack causes you stress (especially since it uses heart shapes for the boxes). This makes the most sense, but ramps up that stress collection even more. One enemy has an ability that says "You suffer 1 harm in addition to any triggered consequences", but I have no idea what 1 harm means, it's not a term I can see used anywhere else in the book. Again, I assume it means an additional stress, but I'm really not sure.

One last point. Your ship has 24 'resources', split equally between rations, fuel, shield, and structure. A lot of the game is structured around the push and pull of these resources. The cost for failure or partial success will often be losing resources, you can regularly be boarded by pirates who will take a lot of resources, and the most common reward for actions is also resources. However, once I was in a downward spiral of despair, and hesitant to land in any system because everything I did would cause more stress and despair, I ran out of resources entirely, and realised that ... nothing happened. There's nothing to say what happens if you run out of resources, and they're completely disconnected from the stress/hope/despair system.

It was a shame that this didn't play as well in practice as it read. Additionally, it felt clunky as a solo journalling game, because the procedure has you making a flight check, engine check, sensor check, system scan, location check, and further rolls on tables to determine possible rewards. This is all before you decide whether to go planetside. At first I tried to journal through each roll, but subsequent rolls can introduce elements that don't gel well with your established fiction. So I ended up going through all of those rolls, then surveying the output and crafting a narrative that fit all of the pieces. It works ok, but felt disjointed.

I should caveat all of this with the possibility that I'm entirely an idiot and just read the rules wrong in multiple ways. That's definitely possible! It did occur to me while writing this though, that it's based on the Breathless system, which I've looked up and originally powered a survival-horror group TTRPG about zombies. This definitely has more of a survival-horror vibe, mechanically. By default, that system also only has the one character sheet, no ship with permanently decayed attributes causing continual stress. This also explains the disconnect of the resource mechanic, which is brand new to cyan starlight. By virtue of being a group game, and also the context of the zombie setup, the pacing is much different and makes sense of 'catching your breath' and 'laying low', which confused me when I spend most of my time alone on a ship. There's also a 'stunt' mechanic which gives you a d12 once per 'catch your breath', which is entirely missing here.

Seemingly every change from Breathless to cyan starlight makes it more punishing, to the extent that (for me at least) it feels brutal more so than it is melancholic.

[avanciia]

My first solo TTRPG is Thousand Year Old Vampire and it’s such an interesting experience. I decided to draw my Byzantine artist of a vampire, Ives Basiliscus, who slowly forgot how to paint, with her sapphic lover Megaris.

[el-does-ttrpgs]

Game: song a scene by @psychhound (found through this tumblr post)

Rating: 4.5/5

I loved this one. I'm also a huge fan of very structured writing prompts, so this is very much up my alley. The biggest thing I would have done differently is picking a different starting playlist that was more cohesive. My scene playlist ended up being a bit too eclectic, and not exactly matching the vibe I actually wrote. (I used this to write a backstory scene for a D&D character that's new to the ongoing campaign I'm playing.)

Oh and here's my playlist, Waves Whisper Something...which I maybe should have titled something else because my character is deaf and can't hear whispers....

[zyurp]

Playing a run of Thousand Year Old Vampire!

[wolfpitmachine]

Reviving my art blog to announce that I released a new collaborative journaling game! You play as younger characters journaling together in a passed around notebook as they solve a mystery playing out in their area/community. Ideal for paranormal mysteries and building a beloved game artifact. Check it out -- it's free!

[companionwolf]

[planes-of-fate]

Throwing our own very small very free game into the ring!

A dungeon crawler randomizer in which you explore a dungeon trying to gather ingredients and flavours to prep a delicious meal for the Dungeon Overlord hoping they're satisfied and wont make... Morsels out of you!

There's an interesting alchemy by which, for certain TTRPG fans, WotC's misbehavior makes it more moral to play D&D if you're broke.

The logic goes something like this: WotC is bad, and therefore it is good to steal from them. Indie creators are good, and therefore it is bad to steal from them. Therefore, if you don't have money to spend on games, it is moral to play D&D and immoral to play indie games.

For some reason, the fact that this unimpeachable logic only benefits WotC and only harms indie creators is not relevant.

[junkfoodgames]

Print run just arrived, so took some new glamour shots!

[takataapui]

a new solo-journaling game about being small, hopeful, and belonging to something

'it is a beautiful day on the marae and you are a baby pūkeko' is a game where the title says it all, really!

play as a baby pūkeko on your marae (Māori meeting house) as a group of guests comes to your home. you'll play through a pōwhiri, which is a formal Māori process where guests are welcomed on. you'll talk to some old friends, make some new ones, and help the pōwhiri run smoothly.

you'll need some dice (d4, d6, d8, d10) and a way to record your story.

no prior knowledge of Māori culture or language is needed. most words have a translation, and there's a provided dictionary link for the ones that aren't.

community copies (free copies!) are available, and additionally, every copy bought as well as $1 above the base price will add another copy.

play out your wildest pūkeko dreams for only $2USD here:

[tyhulse]

[roguecentaur]

You are something ancient.Something terrifying and unknowable. You are rage itself.

You are Fantomah, Mystery Woman of the Jungle.

My newest SoloRPG has dropped today! Play as a vengeful goddess of impossible strength, as she struggles to restrain herself from destroying the world.

Can a god be so mighty and unstoppable that they cannot stop even themselves? Is it possible to overcome instinct? Are we more than our ugliest moments? It seems inevitable that you will only grow colder. Change feels like an impossible task. Maybe it is already too late for you. But you must try, all the same.

[modoreadsttrpgs]

Game Reactions: cyanstarlight (lonely sci-fi solo ttrpg)

Link: https://cyanstarlight.space/

cyanstarlight is a game I backed on Kickstarter in January of 2024. It was pretty, it was science fiction, and it had very melancholic vibes - what more can you want? I’d been out of the country for work this week, and when I got home it had arrived. In a surprising turn of events, I’ve read it within days, rather than putting it on my bookshelf to be admired for an unspecified period of time. I got the deluxe edition:

Yes, that is a cassette tape! It contains the soundtrack for the game. No, I don’t have any way to play a cassette tape (you get it in mp3 as well). The nostalgia factor is real though. Although tapes are obviously not the choice for audio quality, opening the plastic case and sliding the tape out stirs something in me. Aside from that, it came with a specialised notebook for your journaling, and a supplementary zine with optional tables for creation of planets.

The core rulebook is 108 pages, in a delightfully small 5” x 8” format. I enjoy a big weighty tome as much as the next nerd, but books that aren’t a pain to actually hold and use are nice indeed. I love the design of the book as a whole. The titular cyan is the only colour you’ll see alongside the sketched art and the clean layout. Small book, a nice legible font, a good amount of white space - it’s fantastic.

The writing matches the minimalistic approach to layout as well. Only the required information is given, there aren’t a ton of box outs or format changes, overuse of play examples or random fiction dropped in. Partway through I began to worry that it was only describing the mechanics and doing nothing to set the tone or create vibes. But actually, this minimalist style is largely what does generate the lonely vibes. When you are the only human left alive in the universe, why do you care about flowery prose, or embellishments or stories? Speak only what is needed, no more, no less. It really works for me.

Mechanically, your character and your ship each have 6 stats, and the system (apparently adapted from the Breathless system, which I’m not familiar with) uses stepped dice (e.g., one stat is a d12, one a d10, and so on down to d4) that decrease upon each use. I’m interested to see how this feels in play, but it seems like it reflects well the inevitable decline of your situation as the last human in a world that has been afflicted by… something. There is an ultimate truth to what has happened by the looks of it, that you ‘unlock’ in your playthrough and go to the game’s website to access, which is a fun idea. Reaching an ending to your game (and there are multiple possible pre-written endings) involves filling up the Despair track on your character sheet - another neat mechanical manifestation of the themes.

Alan Bahr really nailed the vibes on this. I’m looking forward to playing through it, and given it’s a solo game the chances are pretty good I actually will! Now just to get those mp3s so I can get the soundtrack going…