Design of Runehack: The Asterist

Ahoy! I have something I've wanted to tell you for a long time but kept it to myself for now. While making so many short games is nice and all, I do want to make a bigger game that could be fun to play for a longer time. I want it to be stimulating as a game, fulfilling narratively, but also different from what the market offers. Plenty of designers take the three pillars of D&D for granted like they are meant to be the foundation of every big TTRPG. Combat, exploration, and social interaction are fine, but I have some issues with them. Combat tends to be overrepresented and I'm tired of it. Exploration is okay in theory, but either undefined or unused in most cases I've partaken in. Social interaction is fine as is. So, I've been planning this project for quite a while, as some of you may know, and my first step was actually to figure out my own pillars of experience. In Runehack: The Asterist, I have explored one of these pillars... hacking.

I hope you'll enjoy reading this article, and I wish you all a wonderful day!

This artpiece was created by my wonderful girlfriend Arell with great care. Since one of my sources of inspiration for this project was the video game Transistor, I asked for something a little more surreal. I really like the glitch effects on the character, the lines that connect to the illustrated endpoints in the exact same way as the dice would in the game, and the big clock at the top with 23 spokes that represent the 23 hours during which the city is simulated every day.

In the Beginning, There Was a Line

The origin of my hacking minigame goes back to June 24, 2022. In the afternoon hours after a Friday lunch break, I've been talking to a pal of mine about one of my game design goals: if you want the story to focus on an activity, make it into a minigame. Combat in D&D is very much a minigame, and I'm pretty sure there have to be some minigames out there in games I haven't played as much too. I briefly mentioned how Watch Dogs has this hacking game I like a lot, pretty much a waterpipe-connecting puzzle, and how it does a couple of twists just to spruce things up now and then. Of course, not all hacks are done that way, it's just the really important ones when the game wants to emphasize the process.

But that got me thinking... wouldn't it be fun if this was doable on a board? After a few minutes of pondering this while the conversation continued, I had an idea. Placing the dice down, connecting them into lines using their pips. The dice pips are very underutilized, so much so that plenty of six-sided dice have replaced them with numbers. Eventually, this idea grew from just lines into branching trees. One cool thing I realized is that if the trails these dice make up were traced on paper, they would have no sharp angles, only 90° and 135° angle connections. Kind of like circuit boards. ... okay, those don't have a 90° angle, but it's close enough to remind me of those.

After working out the rules, I had to make up some basic patterns for the GMs to use, and abilities for the players to rely on. Fortunately, this minigame is rich with unexplored metaphors: firewalls, crossroads, pivots, endpoints, and so on and so forth. The turn structure for a player is simple - roll the die, use an ability if you want and can, and place a die on the board.

I'm extra proud of the fact that I came up with a way of explaining the basic rolls players would make to resolve simple things into hacks too. "Solo hacks", as I call them, are required when you would've succeeded on a task, were it 5 points higher than it currently is. What happens here is that you make a minor hack using only a single die, and on a success, the attribute increases temporarily by the necessary number. There are solo grids included in the rules, which are interconnected only by the corresponding die roll, or higher. For example, a solo hack grid for a difficulty of 3 succeeds only on the rolls of [3], [4], [5], and [6]. Yes, I've gone one step beyond and explained how the most basic rolls work, in case the players would like to hack those too. There's an optional rule for it.

Watch_Dogs 2 was rather influential for me, and it is still one of my favorite games. Even if these hacking puzzles are quite easy to grasp, they were enough to inspire me.

Immortals in the Ocean

The setting of Everling is one I had in my mind long before the game was written. Even before technologies anywhere close to ChatGPT have been invented in our world, we've been worried about the rise of Artificial Intelligence. I figured that a fictional world would too, which is why they'd want to test out its behavior in a secluded place, safely tucked away from the civilization. Then, I realized something important: these people are holograms. The entire city can be a hologram. And an image can be hovering anywhere if it's done just using the runes. Even... at the bottom of the ocean.

All this being said, though, the toughest part to figure out was the question of worldbuilding. Being a member of an immortal, theoretically post-scarcity society is fine, ... but how does one turn that into a game? What drives these people, what do they do on a daily basis? How do they identify each other and communicate? And is there anything that could have a price in their eyes? These questions took me literally months to answer, long before I even conceived of the hacking minigame in June. I got answers to these questions eventually, most of which you could find in Everling's article, which is why I'll move on from this point and come back to describing how it affected the game.

Originally, I wanted the players to keep track of their simulation time in the form of "hyres", a modernized version of the term for an hour they'd use as slang. However, while writing the game, I came to realize that that sounds rather intimidating. So, instead of doing that, I decided to group them into six time blocks. I still don't know if it's a good design decision, but it's a bit of an experiment on my side.

Of course, being a simulated mind with a hologram body comes with a lot of other aspects, which I felt the need to outline in the rules in the Ghost's Baseline Traits section. I wonder if this won't be too much for a player to get into, keeping in mind all the things I listed there.

The attributes were a tough cookie to work out because there are so many things a ghost could build themselves for. Ultimately, I decided to go with 11 attributes sorted into three groups: Corporeal (relating to how much influence they have in the world, such as telekinesis-powered strength), Phenomenal (relating to how they are perceived by others), and Intelligence (describing how fast they can retrieve information from the Mistweb). One extra attribute technically exists, but it's just for the unspent points. A player could change their loadout of attributes during any maintenance, giving them a lot of flexibility in expressing themselves. Furthermore, I've provided in the document a table that describes what each of the attribute values stands for numerically.

Finally, there's Corruption and memories, some of my favorite aspects of the game. During the maintenance, a corrupted ghost gets fixed to an extent or backed up if they were completely uncorrupted. You can't hurt a digital ghost, but you could try to corrupt their code. And the more corrupted they are, the higher the chance their simulation gets terminated. If you remember how annoying it is to lose that one document you've worked on for hours without saving it, you can imagine what happens when a ghost gets terminated. They are restored from their last backed-up state, forgetting everything that happened since then. Of course, there's also a way of "killing" a ghost, which is in actuality just hard-locking it by getting the city's servers to back it up while it is terminated. As for how that's done, let me just hint that that has to do with the following paragraph.

Hack the World

I don't say this lightly, but this might be the greatest game design idea I've had in my life. Hack the World is a mechanic available to all player characters in Runehack: The Asterist. To put it briefly, they can temporarily rewrite the rules of the game itself for you, increasing or decreasing some number in the game... by 1. It's usable once per Cycle (term for a day in Everling), after which the effects cease. I honestly can't think of a better setting for this mechanic, a city that's completely simulated and hacked from the inside is perfect. Of course, the rules had to be written around the fact that this can be done, but it wasn't as difficult as I thought. (Though this might be proven otherwise once players actually get their hands on it.)

Honestly, I feel like I could keep going on and on forever, but I've said everything about the game that's important, and then some. I'm just happy it's finally out, and I look forward to testing the rules out, and connecting them to the bigger project I've had on my mind for literal years.

Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!

Watch Your Time

I know this will seem like I'm playing it up because it's the spooky month, but... I don't remember when I wrote this. I found it one day on my computer, copied it without checking for the timestamp, and I've been saving it for October. Yes, sometimes I pre-write my games, but not all of them make it here. Maybe I'll talk about that after publishing the final game in December. Speaking of, I'm not sure if I'll continue this challenge into 2024 or not. It's a nice way of keeping myself engaged in the game design, while also exploring new ideas every month and prototyping quickly. But I'm not sure if it's necessary, and how long can I keep it up. So, I plan to retire this trend after 2023. I will write new RPGs on this blog the way this started—when I feel like I have an idea worth sharing. Most of these were just that, but there were times when I realized I was forcing it. Bars on Mars would be the only published example of that, and my unpublished fae-themed game would be another. There are some games that I regret because they could have used more polish were they longer, such as Clues and Hunches, but I can say that generally most of these gave me some new tool or perspective for designing my games.

 

I'd imagine this system would be perfect for the situations, in which you need to hide away from a monster and move out when the time is right.
This art piece is a cover art for The Dark Eye made by Luisa Preissler.

Watch Your Time

Stopwatch that can be stopped without looking at its numbers required.

The GM describes a scary life-threatening situation. It could be a natural disaster, a slasher movie monster attack, or anything else scary. Play only situations that won't cause actual distress to the players. Each player then describes a character they'll control who's involved in the situation.

Players take turns. On their turn, a player describes what their character does to prevent this situation, escape it, or assist someone else. The player then starts the stopwatch and stops it blindly. They mark X if the final time is less than 50 seconds. Their character dies if they are marked with three X's, or if the last time is 60 seconds or more. Otherwise, the player adds up all the numbers (ignore the third decimal and beyond), marking a success if their sum equals 20 or more. The GM can increase or decrease the difficulty by 5 depending on the circumstances.

The GM must announce when a life-threatening situation is over, beginning a moment of peace. At this moment, each player can remove one X from any character. Whoever ends with none gets to subtract 1 from their future difficulties.

The Adventures of Lua and Nina, by Felipe Cavalcanti

Who doesn't like conflict resolution gimmicks? Sure dice are a classic, and the cards provide interesting complexity to a game. But some people crave novelty. Whether it's playing a game with a Jenga tower (like Dread), or the Rubix cubes, bringing something new to the table is interesting. This time, I wanted to emulate the time-sensitive tasks with something beyond a random die roll. Realizing that the decimals of a stopwatch are pretty much a random die roll, I figured I'd try giving this a go. It's bizarre, and I'll likely never end up using this in a proper TTRPG of mine, but it's a neat experiment regardless.

Honestly, not much else to say about this one. It's quite minimal, and definitely closer to the Proof of Concept side rather than an Actual Game side. But it is what it is, so I'm running with it.

Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!

Design of Final: Sole Survivor

As part of this year's One Page RPG Jam, I made two games this year. Previously, I described the design of Your Royal Slyness but didn't get to talking about my other game. So let's open this year's October with a thrilling and dangerous journey of how I worked on...

Hack of a Slasher

If you've been reading my blog for a while, or you've ever looked at some of my older posts, you might have found one called Slasher Oneshot System. If you've seen both that and Final: Sole Survivor, you might see a lot of resemblance, primarily because this is my updated version of that system. It's mainly focused on fixing what I saw as the weak spots of the Slasher Oneshot System, such as the fact that it's a oneshot system only. While F:SS isn't built for extremely long-term campaigns, it allows for some form of serialization between the games, building up what I like to describe as a "small horror story franchise". Recurring characters that pop up after a while, items that keep their relevance, perhaps even similar places.

The biggest contradiction to fight in this case is the fact that I am looking for a way of serializing a horror game in which the whole point is that nearly all characters will die. How is one supposed to level up, if they are not allowed to survive the game? Well... one person is always allowed to survive. And since I wanted to experiment with this for a while now, I've made it so that several years pass between sessions in-world, aging the character up and letting them grow into someone different from who they used to be.

This means that a player character could grow to be an adult, or even someone old. The older they get, the more encounters with the monster they've survived, making them yet more skilled. I had to replace the labels that were fitting for teens with labels that could apply to adults as well. The Qualities aren't perfect, but I'd say they do their job decently enough. I'd consider growing this list further if I could come up with more "+1" abilities for the players to have, as well as more skills that could be useful to them. To keep the legacy of the Slasher Oneshot System in the new product, I still keep some of the older descriptions on the optional second page, in the table of Archetypes.

Speaking of character creation, can I just say how happy I am with how elegant it turned out? It's as easy as 1-2-3-4, because you get one Quality, two Health, three Skills, and four Items by default.

One main difference some might notice is conflict resolution. Roll 2d6, 7-9 is a partial success, 10+ is a success. This part is taken straight out of Powered by the Apocalypse since it does its job well. However, I've sprinkled in a little twist of my own that I grew to like a lot. Featured in both Double the Zombies and Bars on Mars, something extra happens when both dice roll an identical number. I really like the mechanic because it gives each roll the potential to up the stakes of the game somehow. I could imagine this playing a role in so many of my other game ideas.

Embracing the Edge

I don't like to make things that look too edgy. But as of lately, I've kind of grown fond of such design when it is in place. This is definitely the case that warranted it the most. Red headers, horror fonts, dark red highlighted areas, and a simple outline of a hand holding a knife on the cover art make for quite a visual identity. And since I like to hide the GM side of this game from the players, it's written in a font of the same color as its background, hiding in plain sight. I had to include a little GM blurb as to how to play the monster in the player section due to 1pRPG Jam's rules, which state that the second page must be completely optional. If it were up to me, the GM section would be on a new page, perhaps even in a completely different document, but it is what it is.

The name was what I struggled with the most. For this, I've talked with my online friend NASA to brainstorm some ideas: EXist, Singular, Alone, Lone. Then, we got to ideas that would make for neat abbreviations: "Yet Again, One Survives", Only One Makes It, Just One Makes It Out, Just One Survives, Nobody May Exit/Escape, One Survivor Remains, Surviving on Your Own, Persisting on Your Own, ... until we slowly reached Soul Survivor and Sole Survivor. But since those are already established, we expanded it a little. That's how the title of Final: Sole Survivor came. And it's also the reason why I sometimes still make a mistake and call it Final: Lone Survivor, or Final: Soul Survivor.

That's about it for the design behind this game. What a way to open the October, huh? There's certainly nothing that exciting that happened about a day or two ago that I'll be addressing soon, not at all. See you soon with my 200-word TTRPG for October, an update on something I've worked on for months, and me talking about what I'll be working on in the future. Have a great day!

1d1212

Indulge me, if you may. So lately I wanted to make a game about Orbtech for some time now. This has me thinking about the 12-sided dice because they are one of the most spherical dice out of the platonic solids. I wouldn't want to make a game requiring a player to buy too many specialized dice, which is why most of my games focus on using d6's. The d12 is the one die I would consider worthy of an exception because 12 is a good number. It has many divisors: 2, 3, 4, and 6.

I assume everyone reading this knows how the dice work. 3d12 means three twelve-sided dice, while 1d6 means one six-sided die. There's a peculiar idea within the TTRPG space of a d66 roll table. It doesn't use a special sixty-six-sided die, it's actually a table with 36 results that you get by rolling two d6's without adding the numbers: 11, 12, ..., 16, 21, 22, ... 65, 66. I suspect this type of table was inspired by 1d100 - since most people do not own the singular hundred-sided die that almost looks like a golf ball, most players would roll this type of roll with a 1d10 and a percentile die (which is a 1d10, but with a 0 after every result). This got me thinking... wouldn't this technically make it a 1d1010?

So, these two lines of thought converged yesterday and led me to 1d1212. This abomination of a notation seems to hint at first at a table with 144 elements in it. But unless we distinguish which digits belong to which die, we might get into some complications. Is the row labeled "112" an 11 and 2, or 1 and 12? ... how about both? Don't worry, the only other exception like that is 111, so this table loses only two of its elements.

The only next step beyond this is 1d2020. ... Let's not roll this one, I'm sure plenty of people here still feel off about that number. That being said, ... how about mixing things up? 1d1220, 1d2012, 1d120, 1d200 (technically 1d1210 and 1d2010), and then going into combinations of 3 or more dice.

That's about it for now. Just a silly brief thought I had the other day that I felt like sharing. Maybe I'll actually make a d1212 roll table someday, only time will tell. Until then, it's time for me to get back to my projects. Have a great day!

Bars on Mars

Ahoy once again! This time, I was inspired by a system creating challenge in the community of a youtuber TTRPG designer JFace Games. On his discord server, people tend to roll a couple of random tables for several themes, and then see what comes out of it. This time, the challenge prompts were: modern, sci-fi, scoundrel (like Firefly), diplomatic, and must use a d8. Upon reading these, I had two thoughts that I needed to resolve quickly and surely enough did. "How am I going to make this sci-fi and not cyberpunk?" Well, the answer is simple enough: aliens. Just situate it on not-Earth, fill it up with alien species, have a blast. Well, that'll be difficult to fit into 200 words on its own (though the challenge isn't to write just 200 words, that's a restriction I kept for myself). Now a bigger question: how to combine the scoundrel prompt with diplomatic matters? Well, my answer was simple, and it was illegal substances. It's not a perfect answer, but I ran with it, and created this game. Since it was made for a challenge, I also gave it a bit more flourish with a one page RPG treatment, with an image, and some experiments regarding the formatting.

I hope you'll enjoy this, and have a nice day!

Fun fact: making the rules and the PDF took me about 33 hours and 22 minutes of total time. I was on a roll this one time!

Bars on Mars

You sell narcs in Mars city bars to humans and aliens alike.

GM names and describes the city. GM and all players name and describe strengths of one alien species each and one narc each. Then, everyone gives one downside to their right neighbor's alien species, and one downside to their left neighbor's narc.

Describe your character. They get:

• a Number (between 5 and 13, your choice),
• 8 + 2d8 megacredits,
• species,
• two narcs they specialize in,
• a weapon,
• and their love (not money).

At the start of a day, everyone's Presence is 0, and GM rolls 1d8 to get every narc's current cost. You can get narcs you specialize in for half the price (round up).

Take turns clockwise. When GM tells you, roll 2d8. Reroll either die once when receiving help. Your character succeeds if the result is:

• ≤ their Number and they're selling, lying, or pushing.
• ≥ their Number and they're running, sneaking, or cautious.

Identical number on both dice increases your current Presence by 1. Laying low lowers it. GM picks the threat: competing dealer gang, or lawkeepers.

• 0. Safe
• 1. Tracking you
• 2. Following you
• 3. Catching you
• 4. Caught you
• 5. Killed you

The first image won mainly because I could include more of its stuff in a vertical game page. This one is a cooler, calmer bar.
Alien Bar by KangJason

If some parts of this design seem familiar, that's because they are. I must admit, I really really grew to enjoy the combination of Lasers and Feelings' conflict resolution mechanic with rolling either above or below a number, and with my extra outcome mechanic from Double the Zombies of "something unrelated happens if both dice are the same". Frankly, this is mostly a numbers game still, but I try to add at least some roleplay-ability with the requirement for a character to have a love that isn't money. It's left up to the reader whether that's another character, some activity, a place, or even an item.

My final piece of inspiration for the mechanics has a surprisingly nostalgic source for me, the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Specifically, its Exhaustion rules that came with six levels were kind of inspiring. After I wrote up the levels of Presence in my game, I realized they sort of reflect those, and also that I'm not the first one to come up with this idea. Wild!

I also used this as a learning opportunity to experiment a little with visual design. A crooked box, neon glow letters, colored highlights and a numbered list that flows between colors, it's not a design I am perfectly happy with but it was meant to be an experiment.

Huh, the October is just around the corner. I should get ready to write up the blog post about the design of my reworked slasher horror TTRPG, and prepare the October TTRPG. Time is ticking. Until then, have a great day!

Intercosmic Bonds

Ahoy! The August was a close call due to the fact that I was visiting my girlfriend in another country for a couple of weeks. Both the travel and the visit were as fine as they could be, I had a fantastic time. For a while, I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to make the 200 word TTRPG for August, but shortly before my return home I talked to an online acquaintance of mine I look up to. Irina, also known as SwordMeow, makes D&D homebrews like I used to. My favorite creations of hers include the Atavist, 10th-level spells, and the Way of One Hundred Blows monk. Her idea was a TTRPG that would begin with a slice-of-life group of friends in modern-time world, but over time it would pivot into a multiverse-spanning story of how friendship bonds can cross the worlds. And while that's not literally what I made, it gave me the kick I needed to be inspired. After the prompt, what began my process was a simple thought: if we are a mosaic of our closest people, … what if the regular stats an in-game character has were replaced by relationships? Well, my thought experiment on that can be seen below. Just a note - it will come with an example listed below, but I don't want to count examples as part of the rules (both for the word limit, but also because they're not rules per se).

Thank you for reading, and have a wonderful day!

It's safe to assume that League of Legends kind of inspired this idea. The default ninja character is displayed in the image above as (left to right): a popstar, a cyber ninja, a sushi chef, a blood moon priestess, a nurse, a soccer player, and a fire djinni.
All of these pictures belong to Riot Games.

Intercosmic Bonds

Each player creates a different

• world (they'll GM),
• character (to play while not GMing),
• stat (their character excels at).

Starting Level equals the number of players. Assign whole numbers to relationships your character has with other characters until their sum equals your Level. These relationships remain identical across the worlds even after changes. Relationships needn't be identical both ways.

Make a version of your character for every other player's world.

Select a GM before each session, different when possible. The GM comes up with a scenario that others' characters undergo as a group in one session. Scenarios combine into greater plots.

If a significant action's outcome is uncertain, the GM picks a relevant stat and asks the player to roll 2d6, adding the relationship with that stat's character.

• 3+ success (your stat only),
• 7+ success for simple challenges, 
• 10+ success.

3 failures in a row cause 1 stress to the character. Eliminate the character from the world if your Level equals the stress.

You can increase your character's relationship with another by 1 when relevant, but you must decrease another by 1.

+1 Level after completing greater plots.

Let's have a look at an example of how a single character might look in a game like this below.
Elementalist Lux, by Citemer Liu.

Since this is a high concept game, let's make an example that involves five players. Their characters are named: Aleez, Bhob, Charcol, Daann, and Elvenoore (initials are ABCDE, for easier tracking). Let's see how these characters might be built based on every player's creations before the first session.

Character	World	Stat	Aleez	Bhob	Charcol	Daann	Elvenoore
Aleez	Corrupted Wonderland	Senses	—	-1	+1	+3	+2
Bhob	Post-apocalypse iron age	Might	+3	—	-1	+0	+3
Charcol	Grand conspiracy renaissance	Intellect	+4	-3	—	+1	+3
Daann	Space opera horror	Spirit	+1	+6	-2	—	+0
Elvenoore	Cyberpunk dystopia	Finesse	-2	+1	+4	+2	—

Let's have a closer look at Aleez. If her player is GMing, the setting the game will take place in is a corrupted version of the Wonderland. According to the above table, one could say that she adds the following bonuses to her rolls:

• Senses +0 (but she succeeds on a roll of 3+)
• Might -1
• Intellect +1
• Spirit +3
• Finesse +2

It might seem counter-productive to track them as relationships, but keep in mind that these can change throughout the sessions, and even across the multiverse. If Bhob helps Aleez out in the grand conspiracy world and Aleez figures it's significant enough, she will increase her relationship with Bhob from -1 to +0 (either by also decreasing her relationship with another character, or the next time the group gets a Level up).

While Aleez' player isn't the one to GM, the character has to be adjusted slightly to fit into other worlds easily. A reminder that Aleez doesn't exist in her own Corrupted Wonderland.

• In Bhob's world, she might be an easy to impress gatherer who's curious about the way the world was before its apocalypse.
• In Charcol's world, she's a nosy handmaiden who smokes and seeks everyone's secrets.
• In Daann's world, she's a janitor equipped with special tech that allows her to shrink down for cleaning hard to reach places. (The ability to shrink down isn't written anywhere in the rules per se, but maybe Daann decided to treat the players by letting them have a gizmo of some kind.)
• In Elvenoore's world, she's a spy working for the criminal underworld, pretending to be but a simple delivery girl.

A final note is that there are no rules on crossing between these worlds, or anything akin to that. If you wish to do that and have a way of pulling it off, be my guest, but the game is only so long and crossing the worlds would take way too many words for me to pull off.

Overall, I think it's a promising concept that I might make into a more fleshed-out game someday. Maybe by mixing in a bit of the rubix cube, maybe by mixing in other games' mechanics I've been coming up with recently. But for now, this is what it is.

Thank you once again for reading! I hope that soon I'll get to write up a blog post on the design of my latest TTRPG I've released on itch.io, but for now that's all. I wish you all a great day!

Design of Your Royal Slyness

One Page RPG Jam 2023 began this Monday, and the same as in 2022 and 2021, I wanted to participate. This year, I have a bit of a disadvantage, an extra time limit since I won't be available for a significant portion of August. I had to work quick. Within five days of it starting, I published my TTRPG and submitted it to the game jam, feeling great about it. In this article, I'd like to go through the details behind this system and its development.

I had the idea of using for logo an image with all four suits in it. My girlfriend drew it much better than I could. It's simple and effective.

In the Beginning

A week before the game jam started, my wonderful girlfriend told me about this one show she stumbled upon and convinced me to watch it. Am I Being Unreasonable? is a British comedy thriller that, honestly, at a glance gave me the impression of a low-brow British comedy about an awful mother and her son who's way too emotionally mature for his age. I was quite impressed after binging it for over three hours, having gone through all of its twists, turns, and reveals. It's best to go into it blind, but I think it could be compared to Odd Taxi, another short-ish show that I liked a lot. Thinking about these two shows, and some others, had led me on some interesting thought trains. One of them is the essence of social interactions.

A mechanical way to run a social interaction feels to me like a holy grail within the TTRPG designer community. Some games have done it and are known because of it, but generally, I hear folks say "It can't be done", or "It shouldn't be done". I've given it a try, several times actually. Giving attributes like Trust, Stubbornness, Composure, and others, or mechanizing it, turning it into a social combat as per suggestions on Tribality. But it didn't feel right, something wasn't clicking. When I actually ran the social combat I just linked in my D&D campaign, the novelty wore out quickly and it devolved into a literal name-calling fight. Why? Because I required players to keep making arguments and to roll to see if they convey the arguments well enough. It was a fine thing to try, but I can tell now in hindsight that I likely didn't play it right. After all, you don't require your fighters to describe every single maneuver as something completely new in a battle, right? Of course, after a time it would get tiresome and they'd devolve into something simple. Experiences like that one, combined with never achieving the goal of designing a good social interaction system had led me to a conclusion that it's not impossible, but not worth it either. My philosophy ever since has been that what players need isn't an intricate mechanical system, it's a set of tools they can use to do what they want.

Coming back to the shows, I had an epiphany sometime in the week after. These shows, and social drama generally, are about manipulating the information flow. Think about it: character A finds out about something character B hides from characters C and D. What will they do about it? Will the character B find out? We might assume that character C would react to this fact with sadness, while character D would use the secret in the future against character B, but can we be sure? I was pondering this over the weekend before the game jam began, staying up a little past midnight while chatting with a friend about this, toying with the idea of making it into a game. And then, the game jam began. I put those thoughts on hold, refreshed the game jam website, and waited... That's when the theme was revealed, and it hit me.

This title provided me with the other half of the social dynamic. Sure character A holds the power because they know something nasty about character B, ... but what if it's not true at all? And just like that, I had the perfect game for this game jam.

Finders, Keepers, Binders, Weepers

I started writing down all the rules, slowly but methodically. The structure was clear: secrets, rumors, discovery, revelation and finding out if it's true or not, reactions. To speed up the process, I decided I'll need a basic setting to write this game for instead of trying to make a generic system on my first try. I chose medieval royal courts, and I believe it worked quite well.

What are some basic secrets that I need? I narrowed down the qualities I needed them to have and came up with several, seeking a fourth one online in various group chats. Each secret must be something that can be done rather quickly instead of over the case of days or months. Each secret must be something doable by a single person. Each must harm at least one other person. And each one must be something immoral. I settled on these four:

• murder,
• theft,
• affair,
• and libel.

In the original version of this game, I started with two stats: Composure and Trust. Composure goes down whenever you find out that another person knows about any of your secrets. Trust goes up and down based on who one shares secrets with, whether these secrets turn out to be true or not, and whether the secret could harm you. Based on my theories before, I developed four character roles that you can see in the title:

• Finder is someone who finds out about a secret.
• Keeper is the original owner of this secret, the one it regards.
• Binder is a finder who would use the secret against the Keeper, for example in blackmail.
• Weeper is whoever would be hurt by learning this secret.

Of course, these roles would be dynamic, and related to each secret individually. A Finder of one secret could be a Keeper of another and a Weeper of yet another. One might even have multiple roles at the same time. Sadly, this roles system kind of fell apart the more I wrote and the more I realized just how complicated this system is getting, involving inconsistent dice rolls, as well as some other props. Originally this system was even supposed to be played on a simple building map, with rooms similar to Runehack: Fairy Heist's or Slasher Oneshot System's. I had to ditch several things and simplify it, and the one tool that helped me out the most was a deck of 52 playing cards.

Your Royal Slyness

Cards are great because drawing a card is like rolling two dice and then banning that combination of die rolls for some time. Suits and ranks can represent a lot of different stuff. Inspired by Bang!, I started with cards that would define player characters: one for Class, their social standing, and one for their secret Motive. Unlike in Bang!, I don't use the face-down card for tracking hit points, and these two cards don't come from a separate deck.

Depending on one's Class, they came with several Secrets and Rumors off the cuff. Yes, it's a little on the nose, seeing the theme of game jam is literally that, but I can't argue - it has inspired me. These numbers increased based on your Class card's suit: hearts giving you both an extra rumor and an extra secret, diamonds giving you an extra rumor, spades giving you an extra secret, and clubs not giving you anything extra. That's also why the suits are ranked the way they are: Hearts should get to go first because they hold more Secrets as well as Rumors, and so on.

There were three Classes: Monarch, Noble, and Servant. The only things they determined were the starting amounts of Secrets and Rumors, as well as the turn orders and how they can be possible targets for other players' Motives. Speaking of, Motives could be grouped into five categories: Collect more X than any other player, Silence (kill) X, Slander X, Steal from X, and Seduce X. The first motive's X is a resource that takes the form of one of the card suits, the other X's stood for one character at the table each.

Fun fact, originally I had four resources tied to the cards: hearts for favors, spades for military stuff, diamonds for material resources, and clubs for information and development. I couldn't fit these into the rules, though, so... I guess they'll remain hidden here on the blog.

The game needed turn order, and turns should be made up of distinct actions. I borrowed the basic structure from Bang!, which is: draw cards, do stuff, discard cards if you have too many. To limit how long a turn can take, I decided to make the middle phase a "do one or two of these actions", listing: Bartering with other players (for cards or Secrets), Plotting, and thus creating a new Secret for yourself (and possibly another player), Presenting two or more cards which can possibly earn you secrets or their details, and Revealing a Secret to the public. Each new Secret created by Plot gave you mechanical boons, Revelation of a Secret had some mechanics, and I decided that the game will end after the drawing deck ran out three times. The game was almost done.

But how would one motivate the players to create a new Secret for themselves, if it puts them at a risk? To keep it simple, Secrets are power in this game: you get as many marker tokens as you have Secrets in the game, and at the start of your turn you draw that amount of cards. Though looking back at it, instead of secrets I could have just asked the player to keep track of their number of secrets on a paper slip. But tokens are nice, I imagine them being little stones or poker chips that the player can toy with to show off just how many secrets they have.

You don't need to personally do your secrets. You could let poisons do it for you. Or you could also get a trusty loyal servant (NPC, not a player) to do it for you. I'd count all of those as your own Secret, you were their direct cause.
This artwork is from Gwent.

It was at this point that I knew the game needs a better name. Finders, Keepers, Binders, Weepers was kind of lame for the concept of royals playing dirty. I did my research on the puns and rhymes and settled on... Your Slyness. But to make its setting a little clearer, Your Royal Slyness.

The Second Page

One Page RPG Jam allows for the second page to cover stuff like character sheets, variant rules, and GM tools, so I figured I'd make use of mine. Among the examples, there's a variant ruleset there for longer-term games that span several sessions. You just need to record your characters and make a mark for every time they've succeeded in their Motive while also surviving a session without getting murdered. It's simple, and yet a little complicated. I like the way it turned out.

Hacking Potential

Could this system be hacked? Absolutely! After all, most of it is a card game. You could replace Classes with something else, like school roles (Principal - Staff - Students), and you could establish that there are more or fewer of the highest Class people, that they do or don't belong to different "kingdoms". You could also swap out the types of Secrets and their effects when one Plots to make a new Secret. There's some potential for hacking and reflavoring it all, even adding more actions to the middle phase and magic. Maybe someone can draw an extra card in phase 1 and return one to the top of the drawing pile. Maybe some Plot could let you swap one card with a player against their will. Maybe you could just hand someone a card (maybe this counts as Barter where you get nothing and they get a card?). Plenty of possibilities.

There are some things I could have handled better. For example, if a player does some secret through the Plot action, others will certainly know it's not a rumor, so they wouldn't be afraid to Reveal such secrets. I don't know yet if and how I could fix that. Another potential issue is that players could be killed off before their first turn, which could be not fun. I might update it later on down the line if I'll feel like it.

And that's about it! While I hope I'll get to write another TTRPG for this game jam, because the game is excellent, I'm not sure if I will, because I have about two weeks of time left before I go for a summer vacation. Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!

Cryptosynonyms

This is a little idea I actually came up with more than 6 years ago. I coined the term back then and never returned to it, so I figured I'd share it with the world by archiving it here, seeing how "well" Reddit has been doing lately.

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Cryptosynonyms are pairs of words that would normally mean opposite things, but they can have a synonymous meaning in some contexts. Examples I came up with in English are mostly this way because of slang:

• hot and cool mean opposite things when it comes to temperature, but when it comes to trends they can be synonymous.
• "This sucks!" and "This blows!" are phrases that can mean the same thing ("This is bad!"), despite the fact that suck and blow are antonyms.

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I do want to have some cryptosynonyms in my conlangs, but for now this is it. I have some ideas for conlangs that I'm toying around in my head with, but so far most of them are too raw to really share here. Just as a teaser, they are languages for dwarven workers, some goblins, and for elves from some region I have yet to figure out.

Until then, though, I would like to wish you all a great day!