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A jam submission

No Ivory No RoseView project page

A game of complacent survival and surreal propaganda in horrific wartimes. GLORY TO OBEZKIA!
Submitted by Sable Nolte, Jake_317 — 1 hour, 27 minutes before the deadline
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No Ivory No Rose's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Mechanics#13.9173.917
Overall Appearance#24.5004.500
Overall#23.8963.896
Quality of Writing#63.8333.833
Use of Theme#243.3333.333

Ranked from 12 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted

The mechanics in this game are very cool. The stakes for the players seems urgent, and giving them a checklist is a great idea. The horror pool is also a nice way to make GMing simple. 

Seeing the order of the first pages descend into the chaos of the last was a wonderful surprise in the game book itself. 

I like the tone of the setting, but would want a bit more guidance if I were to run the game... perhaps a suggested starting map? I'm not sure. 

Submitted

The mechanics in this game are very cool. The stakes for the players seems urgent, and giving them a checklist is a great idea. The horror pool is also a nice way to make GMing simple. 

Seeing the order of the first pages descend into the chaos of the last was a wonderful surprise in the game book itself. 

I like the tone of the setting, but would want a bit more guidance if I were to run the game... perhaps a suggested starting map? I'm not sure. 

Submitted

Congrats on getting an entry in! And actually the first horror one I've seen. So here are some thoughts I had while reading:

  • The art... I mean... creepy as heck haha. Seriously, it's great and sets tone.
  • As far as theme goes, I think you may want to establish a bit more narrative / lore if you are going for gritty horror. Cause I'm not sure I ever landed on exactly what your theme was truly going for. The mechanics may work better for something like a Wolfenstein game? 
  • I really enjoyed your dice pool mechanic. That was a way to do it that I haven't seen yet. Also, what a great way to build tension.
  • The Classes are fun. Not sure about all the class skills or what they do? But the checklists and secrets are great!
  • I like that the health is hidden from the players but will they know the keywords for over and under 50%? Either way is fine, just curious.
  • The horror pool needs to be drawn by the players! They'd draw something cryptic and read it aloud to the group. GM then launches into description! At least that's how I'd play it. If you can't tell by the previous, I see some massive potential in your horror pool.
  • So, I got to page 11 (the one with the bulleted list of the Reported Issues)... and I got the vibe you were going for. Which is a bit like Wolfenstein! That might need to be earlier in the document.

So to reiterate, your art is terrifying at 3 am in the morning haha. But seriously, you have a nice horror game with some cool mechanics. Great job. 

Developer(+1)

Thank you for the comments!
I really like the idea of the players reading the horror pool draw! I hadn't thought of that.
as for tone wise we wanted it to be ambiguous to give the spooky stuff some room to breath.  We knew we wanted to make a fake country that was trying very hard to convince everyone that everything was okay but real bad at it.
I've never played wolfenstein other than 3d, but I'll have to give it a try now!

Submitted(+1)

Wow, this is really great looking.

Developer(+1)

Thank you! We kinda wanted to make more of an aesthetic than a setting if that makes any sense.

Submitted(+1)

This might be my favorite of the dozen or so I've read so far. Good job!

Developer(+1)

Hey thanks! It means a lot.  It was some of the most laborious fun I've ever had lol.

Submitted

Tell me about it, I bit off more than I could chew with my game. 

So I wanted to leave some feedback. I like your dice mechanism a lot! It's just so intuitive that your odds increase with better dice,  even if the probabilities are extremely inscrutable if you don't know shortcuts for doing binomial distributions. But you don't have to, the odds just feel right on a gut level, and getting to choose your own target number reinforces that gambling mentality. I also really love that you can exert yourself and roll more dice by paying life. That was one of my favorite mechanisms from the Conan board game and I'm happy to see it used in a horror context.

My only complaint is needing up to 6 of each die. I'd need a randomizer app to play this but it's still preferable to the d20 algebra of 5e. What inspired your design?

Developer (1 edit) (+2)

The game is definitely heavy on dice and that's something we talked about when we were building the mechanics but decided we liked the idea enough to roll with it even if it lost a bit of accessibility. One of the reasons we chose 6 as the max dice cap is so that the game could play reasonably smoothly with only 3 sets of dice as you'd never have to roll more than twice, which, while not ideal, shouldn't hurt pacing too much.

As for the numbers that's something we had to watch carefully. This was a pretty big project to tackle in 48 hours, plus we all had our actual jobs cutting in to some of our time so we didn't really have time for a playtest. I sat down and calculated the odds of success for every potential roll and charted everything out and we decided that we were happy with how it looked and went forward with it.

As far as inspirations are concerned I'm not sure there's any single thing to point to really. We're all fans of narrative systems like Powered by the Appocolypse but our mechanics ended up being a combination of a bunch of different systems we brainstormed. Specifically two of the systems we talked about were a 6 skill system where each skill was assigned a die and your goal was to roll under a set number, as well as a d6 system where you called a number and the more that number came up the more successful you'd be. This ended up kind of being a love child between these two systems with some added twists coming later on down the line.

Developer

Whoops looks like we published the game with out the soldiers move.  If you were looking to play it before we update the version its supposed to read:

SKILLS: Firearms, Tactics

Move: You have a revolver, start the game with a firearms test, every success is a bullet missing. You can spend health to add dice to this roll like normal.  You cannot gain bullets.