This jam is now over. It ran from 2022-10-31 23:00:00 to 2022-12-31 22:59:59.

Welcome to the Thálassa Jam!

This is my first jam as an "indie publisher" and I hope to tease your curiosity and creativity.

This is not a ranked jam.

What is Thálassa?

Thálassa is an adventure game set in the Mythical Era of the ancient Mediterranean imagined by Homer and Hesiod. 

Players act as fearless explorers of the Mediterranean of the Mythical Age, studded with mysterious islands, thick forests, legendary creatures, labyrinths and dangers.

It is an NSR and OSR-inspired game with some simple design principles:

  • classless
  • fiction first
  • foreground growth
  • deadly
  • strictly homeric

Thálassa's text is fully released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license and is available on the official website.

If you join in the jam, whether you actually submit an entry or not, you are eligible to redeem a free copy on itch.io. Use the "Jam Participants" tier under "Complimentary Copies" on the game page.

Why this jam?

I published Thálassa last February for the Zine Month 2022 with the intention of releasing the first guides and adventures later in the year.

Unfortunately, unforeseen and unavoidable life commitments prevented me from devoting the planned time for these projects.

I have always believed in the power of community and sharing. That is why I decided to launch this jam: to allow the community to expand and keep this framework alive.

A few guidelines

You can present what you want, considering these guidelines:

  • RPG-related works, such as:
    • adventures modules and sites
    • hexcrawls and pointcrawls
    • optional and additional rules
    • setting focuses that deepen the game world
    • art and graphical assets
    • game-related fiction
    • soundtracks, soundscapes and/or playlist to use during games.
  • you are free to charge your work
  • if you use some of the text in the game, remember to release your derivative under a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license
  • in any case it would be nice if you released your work under an open license, but it is not mandatory

The World of Thálassa

If you want to extend the setting of Thálassa here is a brief summary.

Thálassa is set in the ancient Mediterranean as imagined by Homer and his contemporaries. Therefore it is a world that is familiar but at the same time very different from the one we know. Being based on the geographical conceptions of antiquity, it takes on the characteristics of a secondary world for us.


Earth is a plane in the shape of a shield surrounded by the Ocean River. Heavens are a solid vault which encapsulate the Earth, beneath which Hades extends, the realm of the souls of the dead.

The world is largely unexplored and unknown to the playing characters. Therefore there is plenty of room to fill in the blanks.

You could describe the lands of the Hyperboreans, or the Borders of Night and Day, or even the lands of the Ethiopians. But perhaps you will simply want to describe Crete and the palace of Minos or the shores of Cyprus from which Aphrodite emerged.

Trade Dress

If you want to use the trade dress of the game your are free to do so! Title are in Diogenes and text body is in GFS Artemisia

Duration

The jam will remain open throughout November to the end of December. It will close on December 31 at midnight.

Community

If you would like to share the advancements and line of thinking behind your work, you can use the itch.io community feature on the jam page, or join on the Zotiquest Games Discord server.