[2024-10-03] 📜 Barkeep on the Borderlands is a pubcrawl pointcrawl system-neutral adventure with 20 detailed pubs, 5 factions, and 36 detailed character backgrounds to play with. Created by one writer, 11 guest writers, 3 editors (also guest writers), 17 artists, and 1 cartography credit. This gamebook was so fully illustrated (and has 100 random tables) that I will need to go through it a few more times to really take it all in. There is a plot to play through the pubs like a dungeon-crawl (specifically "a timeline detailing a precarious political situation that the players can interact with and disrupt"), but one could also see this as a directory of unique pubs that can each be dropped into any existing campaign where drinking holes and mingling spots are needed— including a sober spot with library vibes.

[2024-10-03] 📜 Welcome To The Habitrails is a surreal solo freeform storytelling game using a tarot deck. The game creator says it is "impossible to cheat" and invokes "feelings of depression, mental illness, horror, helplessness." Each day in the game's given setting, the player draws 2 tarot cards and chooses one to represent an event (a moment or fragment of a day). There are no states, so events suggest consequences on you and the neighbourhood you are in. There are four anchor plotlines represented by face cards from each suit of the deck. The game ends when the final face card of any suit is pulled. The creator estimates the game world lasts 25 days on average, and about 3-4 hours of real-world times.

[2024-09-29] 📜 Green Skies is a solarpunk game where you practice kindness and caring for others and those around you in and out of game. You play a sentient sustainable building with three actions a year: (1) Tend to yourself, (2) Tend to your stress, (3) Tend to others. Each in-game action is paired with a commitment to making to yourself, loved ones, and community. The game ends when your building has 13 floors / homes / residences. Despite instructions to do so, the game doesn't offer any frameworks for recording and designing resident(s), names, ages personalities, or their problems. This makes me think it would be a good container to 'retire' characters designed in other games or settings.

[2024-09-29] 📜 ECO MOFOS!! is an eco-punk rules-light OSR near-future adventure where a group of misfits who have found each other in the wastes and ruins of the fallen world. Bears the Mark Of The Odd. It was fun to read but I likely won't try a gameplay: even though there are so many possibilities in this future, like mutation and evolution, the game world still imagines a future full of weapons and where the rich have successfully (and easily???) left to Mars. However I did like learning about the O.R.A.C.L.E approach for solo play: Observe environment; Resolve goals and obstacles; Act, taking consequences; Conclude what impact is; LEave evidence by marking your character sheet and writing in your journal. And I really like the comic panel gameplay example and the practice of listing all the cultural influences in the Appendix at the end. The list of Burdens (emotional debts that take up an inventory slot until they are relieved) was also interesting: Weary, Arrogant, Shamed, Vain, Sad, Enraged.

[2024-09-29] 📜 Badger + Coyote is a cozy asymmetrical duet game of mischief and survival. Two good friends live by different rules and find working together most beneficial to achieving their goals. Needs four D6. Each player takes a turn describing a scene and a complication that happens. Badger is focused and determined, but cannot speak. Coyote wants to play, eat, and can socialise. Adventure prompts invite stories about: Beavers and a dam; a dispute between raccoons and cats involving berries; a fox vs. rabbits; a little bird, hawk, and environmental pollution; returning a lost wolf pup to its hungry pack.

[2024-08-30] 📜 Anamnesis is a solo journaling game about self-discovery, reflection and identity. You play a person who wakes up with memory loss, fill the blank spaces of your past, and learn more about your present. You play by drawing tarot cards to remember who you are, where you are, and what you care about. I picked this up because this was the system that NeoCrystal Elegy was based on.

[2024-08-29] 📜 Lunar Echos is a solarpunk hack of Wanderhome. It is also based on one of my favourite novellas of all time, A Psalm for the Wild-Built. I'm trying not to let the missing 'e' in the title bother me.

[2024-08-24] 📜 NeoCrystal Elegy is a solo journalling game that deals with feelings of hopelessness, environmental collapse, and death. “Eco-terrorism is a word made up by those with blood on their hands.” You travel a barren pink city laid to waste by crystal salt, reliving the memories of others and trying to return alive. The story unfolds by drawing tarot cards. At the start, a Major Arcana card defines your character's motivation, and a Minor Arcana card sets their destination. You play by drawing cards, each represents a moment in time. After 4 phases of 3 cards each, the 15th and last card closes the game and story.

[2024-02-26] 📜📜 Kids on Bikes is both a collaborative game system and small-town mystery game inspired by coming-of-age movies and shows. Teens in Space is its space opera counterpart. Both games emphasise character relationships and shared storytelling, capturing the essence of youthful adventure and discovery in different settings.

[2023-10-07] 📜 Monster of the Week is an urban fantasy action horror game for 3-5 people. Inspired by shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Supernatural, it focuses on episodic storytelling, with players hunting down supernatural threats while dealing with personal drama.

[2023-09-05] 📜 Wanderhome is a slow and introspective game about traveling animal-folk, the beautiful post-war world they inhabit, and the small meaningful moments in nature and life. Game mechanics are built on the Belonging Outside Belonging engine. The game system is structured around the cyclical passing of time, without using dice or even needing a GM ('guide'). Internal conflict takes center stage more than exogenous conflict. Focuses on cooperative worldbuilding and character exploration by encouraging empathy, self-care, and tending to others as noble acts. Players choose playbooks and describe the journey and world they encounter as their characters travel together and find ways forward. Characters grow to find out what home means to them in a world where wars are now over but generational scars remain.

[2023-07-03] 📜 Mörk Borg is a gloomy and grim tabletop game inspired by heavy metal music. In the game, the apocalypse is rotting away the reality of the megacity. Its brutal, minimalist ruleset and vivid, doom-laden world in flux evoke a sense of inevitable despair.

[2023-04-06] 📜 Troika! Numinous Edition is a whimsical science fantasy role-playing game where travellers use D6s to explore the wonders and horrors of the multiverse. A fever dream of a rules-light game where weird characters explore the cosmos any way they want as long as they have a couple of D6 dice to roll. Characters roll up three stats and a random profession. The skills list is limited on purpose so people can come up with more as they go. Instead of rolling for initiative, you assemble a pool of tokens and pull at random from that pool to see who goes. Backgrounds function like classes or playbooks. Reading the included backgrounds together paints a flavourful picture.

[2023-03-19] 📜 Heroic Archivist is a solo micro-RPG about saving a community. Players are archivist-mages cataloguing texts for a great library in a pocket dimension. They earn points for reading, rating and reviewing small and independent RPGs. Points are redeemed to protect the library from intermittent attacks.

[2023-03-16] 📜 Cairn is an adventure tabletop game about exploring a dark & mysterious forest filled with strange folk, hidden treasure, and unspeakable monstrosities. The game uses a simple, rules-light system built on Knave and Into The Odd. Random and quick character generation. The story advances based on fiction rather than levels or XP. A fast and class-less game that feels like a D&D experience without the crunchy math. Available for free in several languages.

[2023-03-13] 📜 POWER COUPLE is a journal-writing game about saving Earth from catastrophe while being in love. My partner and I played this the day we read it. We told the story of a couple. Bishop was born off-planet and inherited manipulative powers from his father and a deep love for Earth from his mother. Alex has superhuman strength and healing powers. They were raised by radical parents who once admired the same political faction that Bishop's father represented. Over the years after being in relationship, Alex's views soften and they become committed to protecting Earth. The couple's ability to protect the earth is tested when a mysterious star enters the solar system and interferes with their powers. They struggle with their powerlessness and the growing panic among Earthlings who fear further crisis. Lacking further information about how long the planetary interference will last, Bishop and Alex guide their community through it by encouraging them to take care of each other instead of relying on two people's guardian superpowers. Their community comes to see them as equals.

[2023-03-05] 📜 Fate Accelerated is a minimal approach-driven universal RPG system. It is simplified from Fate Core by dropping skills in favor of six Approaches: Clever, Careful, Flashy, Forceful, Quick, Stealthy and Sneezy. Simple and flexible enough to run any setting. It uses a special type of dice called Fudge dice, but you can find dice rollers for it online like here or here.

[2023-03-05] 📜 Advanced Lovers & Lesbians is a collection of settings, adventures, and playbooks for Thirsty Sword Lesbians. I really enjoyed reading the new playbooks and scenarios that come with questions, locations, and NPCs to love or battle. Lots here to inspire characters and narratives in general. I still can't shake the feeling from reading the original game that I will overall find this more fun to revisit and read than play with friends.

[2023-03-05] 📜 Thirsty Sword Lesbians is a narrative-focused tabletop role-playing game about feeling deeply, found connections, and messy queers. Designed for a safe environment for emotional roleplay. The playbooks are road maps to what players want to see in a game. Since each character playbook is designed around representing an emotional conflict, players have to consider what they want their characters to grow past. Since this doesn’t have to be figured out before the game starts, playbook moves read like writing prompts.

[2023-03-03] 📜 Mausritter is a simple yet dangerous game about mice on an adventure, built on the mechanics of Into The Odd. It captures the vulnerability and bravery of small creatures in a big world. I love how this system does magic. Built on the bones of Into The Odd in the most charming way.

[2023-02-27] 📜 Into The Odd is an industrial cosmic horror tabletop dungeon-crawler and critique of imperialism. The first game system I found when looking for streamlined and simpler rulesets outside of D&D. Got hooked. Into The Odd has incredibly uncomplicated mechanics and an emphasis on fast-paced exploration. I like that you only have to roll dice for saves, when characters have to react to something out of their control.

About

Playing as Ayda the Archivist, I get 5 points for reading a text, 3 points for rating the text where it is distributed, and 5 points per paragraph of a review I write about it for others. I spend these points to level Ayda up, so she and Rawlins can defend the library from the unpredictable pirates of the Leviathan.

• Fictive Fun: "Heroic Archivist is a micro-RPG game / Habit Builder / Habit Tracker / Solo LARP / indie RPG promoter. That is a lot of slashes for a something that can fit on tri-fold 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. Here is the gist of the game: In 48 BCE, ships in the harbor of Alexandria were set on fire. The fire spread to the city and the great Library of Alexandria. While many of the great texts burned, the archivist-mages opened a portal and moved the more magical texts to another dimension and started a whole new library there. Now they send archivist-mages to different eras to catalogue as many books as possible before they are destroyed by human folly. You are an archivist mage, my mage's name is Folgun, and you are tasked with reading and engaging with as many tabletop RPG rules, supplements, or quickstarts as possible […] So get reading and reviewing! The only caveat is you have to engage with products from indie publishers and designers, the big guys don't really need the extra visibility."
• In the Heroic Archivist by Richard Kelly, players of the RPG are agents of the Shin Mecha Library of Alexandria II, tasked with the retrieval and curation of written documents from across recorded history and defending the library from Roman legionnaires who want to burn it to the ground despite the library being nestled away in a pocket dimension outside time and space: "The game’s frame narrative and antagonists center on the motif of censorship, albeit casual and disinterested rather than maliciously oppressive. Consequently, the play dynamic transforms players into lone guerillas waging war against the de facto loss of indie titles amidst the inexorable, indifferent march of time. Heroic Archivist’s argument is implicit: it is unconditionally incumbent upon us, the readers and the players, to lift up obscure indie creators and help save their games from the towering trash fire that is modern history."
• In Dimension 20, Ayda Aguefort is the half-phoenix mistress of Compass Points Library in Crow's Keep, the highest point in a vast pirate city made up of multiple shipwrecks floating in the sea: "akin to a Library of Alexandria... but splintered and fractured as it had to be fought for and protected from the drunken deprivations of pirates that might not have as an active an interest in the preservation of their own pirate culture."