Welcome to the first ever Dice Exploder game jam!

What is Dice Exploder? Each week, Sam Dunnewold and a rotating cohost break down one tabletop RPG mechanic as deep as they possibly can.

For the duration of the third season, we're running a game jam inspired by the podcast's premise. You can join the DE Discord , where there's a channel for this game jam, to discuss your submission with other participants and fans of the show.

Explode a game you love (or want to love) and remix, remake, or reinterpret it in part or whole.

Dice Exploder is about zooming in on a part of a game and making it everything. This jam is about taking your favorite part of a game and dragging it to the center of the experience. Want to turn that 400 page tome you can never get anyone to play into a single-page game? Go for it! Is there a combat sim game you're pretty sure is actually about running a coffee shop? Write those rules. Taking a setting apart down to the molecules and rewriting it as barely an echo of the original? Totally fair play.

This jam is about tearing games apart, NOT tearing them down. Even if you're exploding a game because it doesn't work for you, the goal is to celebrate the piece that inspires you — whether that's mechanics, themes, setting, or, I dunno, the fonts — by using it as a springboard for something new.

Take these as examples of the possibilities:

Doskvol Breathes by Sam Dunnewold

This is a supplement, expansion, or hack of John Harper's Blades in the Dark, though it technically does not require Blades in the Dark to be played. It is meant to pry downtime open a little more, and to encourage quiet, intimate, reflective moments with characters, both PC and NPC alike.

So Now You're a Time Traveler by Nick Wedig

So Now You're a Time Traveller is a simple nanogame about traveling through time and dealing with paradox. The rules only take up two sides of a sheet of paper. It is a minimalist version of Continuum by way of Cthulhu Dark.

World of Dungeons by John Harper

World of Dungeons is a simple, quick-play, fantasy adventure game, conceived as an imaginary earlier edition of Dungeon World.

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Things to keep in mind with licensing:

Because this jam encourages participants to riff on existing games, it's important to familiarize yourself with the licensing of any game you're considering.

• Many games have their own licenses, or cite a Creative Commons license. Be sure to read the terms of the license, as this will tell you if you need to include certain text, logos, or other trademark info in your derivative.
• If you want to put a price on your game, please make sure the license of the parent game allows it.
• If you think your game has been changed enough from its parent material to fall under fair use law, remember that it's still courteous to credit your inspirations.

Guidelines and Best Practices

• Previously created games/supplements welcome!
• This jam is intended for analog (tabletop/pen and paper) games but if you wanna give making a video for it a shot, go for it!
• No AI writing or art is allowed in the submissions for this jam.
• Credit your inspirations and all artwork appropriately.
• When you submit your work, please indicate whether or not you're comfortable with Sam potentially discussing it in an episode of Dice Exploder.
• There is no length requirement or limit, but to quote Sam, "I love minimalism and think most games are too big"

Resources

• Art Assets (some free, some paid)
• Vintage Illustrations (public domain)
• Smithsonian Open Access images
• Basics of Laying Out an RPG

If you have any questions, you can catch the collaborators for the jam in the discord, or post in the forums here.

Let's explode some games!