#one word rpg

[takataapui]

'We Are But Worms On a String: a one word rpg' by takataapui

Worms on a string is a fan-made sequel to 'We Are But Worms: A One Word RPG' by Riverhouse Games, and the fan-made sequel to that 'We Are But Worm Food' by JackLance. Can be played as an RPG or a LARP. Can be played solo or in large groups.

Enjoy this totally rules heavy, crunchy, ttrpg ;)

[breathing-stories]

Finally released the finale of Lyrical Ludology Season 1!!

This journey has been such a blast, and I’m so happy I finished it off this way, even if it was delayed.

Enjoy this silly-fun bonus episode, and let me know if you play ;)

Listen here (or on your pod catcher of choice):

[psychhound]

[ID: a banner for a game. it is light tan with a crumpled paper texture, and reads "with breath & sword" in large blue font, and "a solo-journaling game that helps you fight anxiety as you fight monster" below it in smaller font. there is lineart of gauntlets lying over a sword with some flowers at the bottom. end ID]

You find yourself tied to the monsters. The scratchy feeling in your chest. The way your hands tremble. The sweat that dots your upper lip when your senses are telling you a monster is close, again, now, and it’s your job to fight it. To stand up for your ideals and stand up to the threat. Whether you tame it, or this is truly a monster that needs to be slain, only time will tell.

 You know you will succeed. You always have before. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be a challenge.

 Grab your gear. Put on your boots. You know how to find it. You know what to do.

 First, you just need to steady yourself.

[ID: a page spread from the game. it shows "step four" on one side, which goes over the five aspects of the game's oracle. on the other side it shows the first oracle component, where something you can taste determines what your heroic core is. the page is minimally designed, with a blue border and text on a white background, tan accents, and one image of a dragon. end ID]

With Breath & Sword is a solo-journaling TTRPG to help players combat anxiety. 

In the game, you play as a monster-fighter, who is being summoned once again due to the presence of a new monster. Each time a monster appears, you struggle with the emotional effects of the magic: effects that look a lot like anxiety. You must steady yourself before you go off to fight: in the game and in real life.

Over the course of WB&S, players will participate in grounding methods and breathing techniques to calm themselves from an anxiety attack. These methods also serve as the game's oracle in order to determine how the story goes. 

What You'll Need:

A safe space to play 

A method of writing or recording

[ID: a page spread from the game. it is the section called "the science" and goes over the psychology behind the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique, the 4-7-8 breathing method, and destroying journaling. it has a few lines about narrative and play therapy, and that the creator of the game used these methods in his social work with neurodivergent teens and adults. end ID]

check out the game on itch now!!

[bootlegdvdmenu]

On one hand I am upset that the new OFF release won't have it's original soundtrack as a toggleable option (the loss of Pepper Steak is upsetting for a lot of people, but losing Unreasonable Behavior, Stay In Your Coma, and Flesh Maze Tango is personally very upsetting for me.), but I fully understand why they couldn't secure the rights for it, and I don't blame ACC in any way for being uncomfortable signing a contract, especially when it'd be difficult to vet a lot of the samples used.

That said, the original game is always going to be there. It's not going anywhere, it will always be available for download and it will always be free. They're not pulling a SEGA and removing the original from online stores to corral you into purchasing the remaster, it's not going away, it will always be there. And frankly, I will gladly take that compromise. A new soundtrack is very, very exciting to me, and I look forward to hearing what the new composers put out for it.

Holy shit, two cakes.

[thecoppercompendium]

A while ago I wrote a 200-word game, so a 100-word game seemed to be the next logical step!

Decided to walk back from my weekly Friday activity instead of getting the bus and wrote a TTRPG on the walk. I would say I hope you enjoy but... well you'll see when you read it.

The Boulder

It takes 21 steps to reach the top of the hill. If you can reach the top while pushing your boulder (d20), you are free. To take a step, roll your boulder. If it is equal to or higher than the number step you are taking, you advance up the hill, closer to freedom. Add a tally to your current total for each step you take. If you fail to roll your boulder high enough, it rolls to the bottom and you start once more at step 1, starting a new tally. Persist. The top is in sight.

This is my second submission to the One-Page RPG Jam 2024! If you like this, you might like my first submission, What Scraps Are Left!

Feel free to reblog with your own sub-100-word game, I'd love to see them!

[heliomanteia]

I need people to have the energy of the Epic fandom for breaking down DATV soundtrack because the way instruments/effects are utilized is phenomenal but I absolutely do not have the musical theory backing to talk about it in detail. I can only point at In Entropy's Grasp and A Warden's Best Friend and like 90% of the released set + unreleased music people found and go dude this is storytelling

[sunsetzer]

Movie tie-in games are kind of a thing of the past, (I hate saying this, it makes me feel so old, this was big in the 2000s/early 2010s damnit that wasn't that long ago 😭) but god do I want a TF One game so badly. Mostly I just want more TF One, and if we've managed to collectively save it from Badly Marketed Movies Hell where it was going to rot alongside the likes of Disney's Treasure Planet due to Paramount's nonexistent marketing, it'll be at least like two years until TF Two and the lack of marketing material means we have Nothing but the film itself in terms of official content. A tie-in game would be so dope, give me an RPG set in TF One's continuity where I can make my own little robot blorbo and choose a side. I think it could work really well with the movie's worldbuilding and where it left off.

[nullcanary]

What's the backstory behind those cool OCs?

Thank you so much for asking about them! There's quite a bit of backstory to them, but I'd love to try and paint a decent picture, especially for Kultober. Mérie and Luc are my original characters from a ttrpg called Kult: Divinity Lost. Their story spans over 30 years, so there is what was and what is. 

CW: violence, blood and injury, mentions of suicide, cults, death

30 years ago, Mérie was an undergraduate when she met Luc. They found instant companionship within one another, intrigued by each other's ideas on the strange, the grotesque, the taboo, and the undercurrent of those themes within art. What defined and defied the boundaries of *art*. How the evocative power contained within such works, extends beyond the lifetime of the artist, bringing the creator triumph over death, through visceral reaction of the viewer. They found them fascinating concepts in their youth, when loss was still a distant, faceless motif. 

They fell in love, romantically and intellectually, and eventually eloped. They had a saying between one another, their own form of ‘I love you’. Je respire pour toi = I breathe for you. The lungs a symbol of their love, instead of the heart. Animus: the soul, the intelligence, the inner self in touch with the unconscious, rooted from the word anima, “to breathe”. This is what it meant to breathe for one another. It was to share the deepest parts of their being with each other, through conversation, through passion, through dilemma. They could always listen to the other breath, watch the rise and fall of their chest, and find themselves in tune with the motion. 

They moved in with each other as Mérie continued into her graduate program. She decided to base her thesis off of the late Gui Vacquelin, an artist known for his progressively darker and nihilistic works -- his final pieces, a triptych, being completed only moments before he violently gouged his own eyes out with the brush, effectively taking his own life. Mérie was fascinated with the concepts he applied into his work and the effective immortality he granted himself in history through his final act. 

Luc was involved with a peculiar group of individuals, which he eventually introduced Mérie into. They were eccentric, lavish, hedonistic, and debaucherous. This society could pluck the strings only the wealthiest had hands for. They shared the common interest in the dark and disturbed, and often hosted opulent, yet secretive parties centered around such themes, with exclusive access to rare collections and performances for the eve. And there was apparently a deeper layer to unpeel, more powerful secrets. Mérie was allowed on the fringes of this odd group and in time, managed to prove herself of similar enough ilk that she was invited to be initiated as a full member of the society. And as a highlight, Gui Vacquelin’s famed final triptych was to be the evening's display. 

Mérie was ecstatic at the prospect, the access to the works, the connections, the secrets. It was thrilling to be in the presence of the works, to see them in the flesh. Her initiation would involve receiving a dagger, having it choose her. The excitement of the evening quickly turned to horror, as Mérie and Luc were descended upon by the members of the society, revealed in actuality to be a cult. A multitude of familiar faces turned cruel. The initiation was a ruse for a ritual to Togarini, the god of dark art. In truth, Vacquelin had been a servant of the wretched god, his paintings being used as conduits to summon Togarini. The pair were torn from one another, subjected to witness as the cult attempted to transform Mérie into a herald of Togarini.

What followed would only be stored in fragments within Mérie’s mind, a series of sounds and images in a broken frame rate. She would remember pain, flashes of her own carnage, the secrets of her flesh exposed, the distant sound of screams. But due to unknown circumstances, the ritual “didn’t take” onto Mérie. The cult instead turned upon Luc, to perfect him where she had failed. The sound of his voice breaking broke her as she tried to drag herself to where he was.

In the blink of a moment, all was silent. Time was no longer in fragments. Mérie was standing in the middle of a street, alone in the cool night air, holding onto a dagger. She was utterly disheveled – clothes torn, hair drenched, every muscle aching, covered in dirt and blood and … without any apparent wounds on her body. Luc was nowhere to be seen. Blade in hand, she considered the worst. Something terrible. Something… unspeakable. She would never….hurt him? Confused, terrified, obviously in shock, she returned to their flat to try and gather herself. Returning home was no refuge from the horror. He wasn’t there. But neither were any fragments of him. Any notion of his former presence only formed an absence. Papers were missing, clothing, cigarettes, even coffee mugs. Empty spaces on the walls where pictures should be. Money had not been touched, nothing stolen. None of Mérie’s belongings had been tampered with, though she noted a weight lifted from her left finger. Nothing legally binding could be located and all her identifications were painted with the shadow of her maiden name. Luc wasn’t just missing, he had been erased from the world as a whole.

She would not see any members of the society again. Friends would never question about Luc. Therapy would declare that Mérie had suffered an episode of stress induced psychosis, due to some trauma her mind had chosen to block and that she had created the figment of a man as some representation of comfort and potentially betrayal. She refused to believe the packaged explanation and feigned acceptance, choosing to pick up the fragments left of her former life, and continue on with her life, always holding her breath that some true answers would arrive. Time continued to pass. A month, a year, five, twenty five years. Eventually, she untensed and allowed the past to be a dream. Save for the dagger which she kept, close and secret. It was real and by some sense, made Luc real, though time made it more and more difficult to hold his appearance in her mind, a ghost that would haunt only her.

Until the events of an evening nearly thirty years later. Mérie was working as a curator for the Cecil Thorne Art Centre. Wealthy patrons had chosen to put together a charity event in the form of a midnight showing titled, The Atrocity Exhibition, which for the first time would bring together the complete collection of Gui Vacquelin’s works. Apprehension? Terror? Anger? It would be difficult to describe what Mérie felt when her director announced the project, but she was in no position to express these notions. However, the evening descended into even worse than what she had feared. The museum became a literal hell and Mérie would find herself lost within some of the deepest reaches of that.

But amidst it all, through chaos and fog and fire, a hand grabbed her and ripped Mérie forward through a war torn hellscape. The hand, the figure, the face. All that of Luc. Though his hair and beard had grown long, no age had touched his visage as time has brought to her own,  She considered the possibility that she was dead to the world, if he was there. The chemical bursts of death come to bring penance or consequence. She allowed her composure to crack. After years of confusion, years of longing, years of surviving alone, she rushed to his arms, to his lips once they stopped running, in desperation to ground herself to them moment, to feel some sense of warmth, to solidify his existence after so long. As the glow of the reunion waned she recognizes two things: that she was still alive and that this man was not her husband, but an imposter, wearing his skin, twisting her with his voice, employing the couple’s phrase as they shared a cigarette. To what end? How would he know…?  An event came to expose this truth, leaving Mérie with a choice: confrontation or continuation of the illusion. A tense pause exchanged between their eyes… and she decided to choose the latter.

Because the option was somehow less painful. Because she spent so long not even knowing if this person existed at all. That this man still represented some proof, trickery aside. And to give it all up again so soon? To deny herself what she had ached for? Rebuild stone walls that had only just crumbled? If this reflektor was to destroy her, kill her… she resigned herself to the idea. If it’s him, his face, perhaps there would be closure. Comfort in the end of this sorry story. Yet she overlooked that the price didn’t have to be her life. It ends up being other people’s lives that are the toll for the imposter’s freedom. People she had a duty to protect. And she carries that loss moving forward. Knowing she brought this weapon into a space that was supposed to be safe because she let herself want too much. And that “it took”. She builds her walls higher than ever after the events.  And yet and YET, if he returned to her again... she's not all sure she wouldn't crumble all over again. She wants to refuse that opportunity should it come.

Through the toil of erecting composure, she will stare at the ceiling every night and sees a familiar face, turned cruel. In her dreams, she sees the full events of what actually occurred the night she lost Luc. And again and again and again, she has to watch as she kills him. It’s the only way to wake up. Bitterness replaces yearning. Defensiveness replaces trust. Paranoia closes around her throat. Even the memory of him bastardized by the swing between the charade and the truth.

What's to come of their story? That's for my DM to decide in our next campaign....  

Lokorum’s piece is a representation of Mérie’s loss. Consistently revisiting the space where she last knew him. He’s been gone now for more years than she was alive when she met him. Half her life, defined by before the loss. Another half defined by its aftermath. She’ll come back here again and again trying to piece together what happened. Until she finally learns the truth and can never leave. If only she could forget after one last dance…

Ptr-sqloint’s piece is a representation of the weight of shame that Mérie carries. The mirror offers back a reflection of a reflection. She is confined in its frame. The imposter, a reflection of Mérie’s desires, vices, weakness. He exposes them, points them out, makes her bare witness to them, the secrets that are not physical, twisting love into a vice. What is it that she breathes for? Be honest now, Mérie.

[thegreatyin]

ffxiv and fallen london feel like the same genre of fandom in the sense that upon getting invested in them you're forced to sign a contract stating you must make a weird little guy to potentially nerd over. and you Will.

[takataapui]

a simple guide to getting through all this.

download 'How To Survive: a one word rpg' for FREE/koha/pay what you want, here:

[alexjcrowley]

I accompany my Italian friend group of straight men to the Imola gp, huffing as I pull my hair up in a messy bun and wear the first hat I found in my closet: the 70 years anniversary of Ferrari cap. I pull up to the gp reading my printed copy of the 6+ million words SebMark ao3 fanfiction while my friends scream at some guy- Chuck Leclair- to notice them. I roll my eyes. In the middle of the race, one of the red cars stops as it drives next to my spot and a guy hops off of it. I have no idea who that is. "It's Charles Leclerc!" screams one of my straight Italian guy friend before he passes out. "You're not like other girls" Charles tells me. "I know who beat Lewis Hamilton in equal machinery in 2016" I say. "These are paddock passes, see you after I win the race" he winks badly at me. He goes back to the car and immediately DNFs.

[2nd-mushroom-circle]

lines that made me cry in my 3rd relisten to the chaos protocol ep 32 (MAJOR SPOILERS):

- “brother heed me, as you ought.” something about the way connie says brother this time… i will never be ok about sing and seir

- i mean i could say the entire rest of the opening monologue. but the little hesitance on “lover, hold me”? OW.

- THE WAY VAL’S VOICE SOUNDS ON THEIR FIRST LINE. illegal.

- similarly, the sobbing after “it is lost. forever.” always catches me off guard and RIGHT IN THE HEART

- the way connie just moves on to lumiéra after val says “something snaps”. cause there’s nothing more to say. nothing that can fix it.

- “a door that had been so carefully pried open slamming shut, and… he doesn’t feel.”

- “and he just… looks at where he should have been a shield.” have i ever mentioned that cai is a masterful storyteller? cause cai is a masterful storyteller and god. i’ll never stop feeling things about xainan esch

- this whole scene with xainan crumbling into dust destroys me.

- “you have always been half dead, xainan esch”

- connie calling oblivion the most beautiful person you’ve ever seen as xainan is drifting away from his own life sure is something, huh.

- “i think im just exhausted with being a coward” no cause i have so many feelings about lumiéra waiting, waiting, always a little too hesitant and afraid to tell sing how she really felt, even though sing felt the same, because it’s too scary because it’s too complicated because lumiéra is literally just fucking HUMAN and it takes so much to make that step - only for her to finally do it and it’s just. a moment. too. late.

- the moment when we move from lumiéra’s flashback to the present. the imagery of happy, triumphant, hopeful lumi giving way to lumi crouched over sing’s body, tear tracks staining her face.

- and the imagery of seir holding up lumiéra with his sister. fuck me i guess.

- THE FUCKING PERSPECTIVE SHIFT

- ok being fully fr seir’s monologue here is when i actually started crying in earnest this time. what the fuck val. not one line. all of them

- “the knife that is xainan” always hits me a little bit

- “whelming it’s pitiable vessel” is just such a good phrase. didn’t make me cry but i love it

- the music cue when artemis appears did make me cry though

- “eyes that immediately fall upon sing’s body” if i think too hard about artemis’s relationship with sing (artemis singing the twins to sleep, artemis signing her transfer request because artemis can see right through her, artemis giving them all the warning she can, artemis knowing when they die and appearing right away but unsurprised, with grief that has always been there, artemis making a choice) i will break. and start making some not-yet-canon assumptions about artemis’s own emotional state. so we are not thinking about that!

- “a lance in her chest” “bleeding.” ow ow ow the multiple possible readings of this line. connie and sea kicking off their insane narration chemistry with a lance to my chest. ow

- “those warm, gentle hands, that do not touch, that are so careful with their love” ok so when i said we weren’t feeling things about artemis? i lied

- “and when her hands pass through your flaming horns, snuffing them out like a candle at the end of its wick, it is not violent. it is not to put a cap on your grief, not to quiet you, not to for you into a box or a body that cannot contain you -“ “it is a mercy.” “it is the sweet mercy of rest when you have no tears left to cry.” the actual reason i’m relistening to this episode is to memorize all the words. so i can hold them like precious things in a box inside me. btw

- and artemis sings you and your sister to rest one final time.

ok. *wipes away tears.* anyways.

- artemis wiping a tear from lumiéra’s eye and calling her the bravest girl in the room .

- we interrupt your regularly scheduled tears to bring you: i’m gonna pull an øka* and punch fate in the fucking face. “this pain has a design”. yeah it’s called fate’s a BITCH and a BAD PARENT. and you can quote me on this

*i have not yet watched the second stranger only seen the clip of øka punching fate. so many times. i replayed that clip quite a bit after this episode.

- “and you cannot hold on to your life much longer. you are a dead man walking and you can go no farther than this.” ok back to crying! this is the sequence i was originally most abnormal about. and you know what? it still hits. so much. xainan my beloved

- sea and connie narrative trading my beloved.

- “do you want to live?” “i don’t know.” “then why don’t you come with me, and you can tell me your answer later.” god what a line. what a perfect response. there are no words that can fix this, but maybe with time and love and care someday you will want to live again. why don’t you come with me.

- “and she carries you home.”

- i don’t think i fully internalized the imagery of sing’s sword being driven into the earth by the roots of the world tree and the roots growing up around it before, but this time i imagined wildsailors hundreds of years from now coming upon this site and approaching it with reverence and love, knowing that it was here that something bigger than their world changed forever, holding sing’s eulogy in the very heartwood of the wildsea—yeah.

- “i love my dad, ok?” thanks abasi already sobbing.

- “it is effortless, the care that they hold for you. it is a reality unto itself.” just. cause. this is what i was hoping the whole time in the lead up to this episode. i know it would be awful and crushing and it would break them, and i was so worried that they would have to just. find a way to push on somehow. make plot happen anyways. but this, nova being cared for and held and protected in their grief? someone carrying them home when they can’t do it themselves anymore? this was just what they needed. and what i needed. i cannot wait for arc 2.

[cavetalesz]

Collection of 200-word rpgs!

For anyone who's enjoyed my submissions to the @200-word-rpgs challenge this year, I've put together a bundle of artfully decorated one-pagers for an easy print-and-play experience! If you've liked any of my stuff, this is a great way to support me and my work

[thecoppercompendium]

I have a new game out!

I've been very busy (see how many games I'm currently working on on my website) but I took a break today to join the 36-word RPG jam! I've been intrigued by the concept since I heard about the jam and love writing to restrictions, but was afraid I wasn't going to have time to join. I managed to find time!

The game is called (In)Visible and is about taking a game you love and cutting it to pieces. There's two versions, a 36-word redacted version and an unredacted version which is significantly longer. The base play experience is the redacted version, but if you want to change the way you look at the game, have a read of the unredacted version.

Oh, did I mention it's also a bookmark?

[rollforthings]

Tried writing a minimalist TTRPG (24 words)

Writing an SRD-style framework for my family of simple one-page games (based on Mountain Hike), which focuses a lot on the importance of playtesting, iteration, and (most importantly) cutting the fat of the games I write. (Don't take a hundred words to say what can be said in ten, two good options are better than twenty meh options, that kind of thing.) I must've dreamt about these ideas, because I woke up this morning and wrote my first 24-word RPG. It's not a part of the Hike Framework I'm working on. I think it's the extreme end of the philosophy. It's minimal but still actionable and still a game, I think.

Downscaling (the rpg) is about designing game rules and then deleting them. Don't worry about the quality of your designs, just get them on a page and play them. Delete the stuff that doesn't work.

[arvale-artist]

ARVALE 2 - THE GOOD ENDING

[Anna Rosen] "John? What is it? You act like you haven't seen me in months... "

Download Arvale 2 : Ocean of Time for free here.

I saw this post and had a vision haha.

Phew! This painting took a while. So... let me indulge you in some details about this.

I didn't choose to bathe it in very warm, sunset colours just because they are pretty. Those are the colours of Arvel's 2 title screen. In fact, you can bathe my entire blog in those colours by clicking the option to switch to light mode =] (on desktop at least)

The dark night colours are based on Arvel 1's title screen. And the entire switching between day and night is a refrence itself to Arvale Short Tales, where night and day play a huge role! Heh ehe heh.

The room itself is based on... well, Anna's room!

The kid in the foreground is Alex, another character who has a close relationship with DeMenchev. He even appears in the good ending screen so of course I had to put him in here as well. =)

I compiled it all into one little image here:

Arvale 2 is a really lovely RPG from 2005 (I think) please check it out!