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Fair enough. Once you decode it, it's a journaling game / solo RPG. I know those aren't everyone's idea of an RPG anyways, and this one, in particular, is strange. I understand if it feels too weird to be an RPG.

That said, please don't think this game is only for super-smart people. Anyone with patience (and an internet connection) should be able to solve it. Because we've got some prizes for first five solvers, I don't want to give too many hints publically, but I will offer three tips on getting started:
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1. The upper right area is full of hints and keys.

2. Start with the upper left box and work down that column. The right-hand chapter is the last (and the longest).

3. It's a substitution cipher; each of those strange glyphs corresponds to a letter. I'd start by trying to recognize single-letter words, then try to puzzle out vowels and common endings (like -ing or -ed). Once you've got a few letters, the others should fall into place.

I hope that helps! If you get stuck, please email us at dontplaythisgame@watcherdm.com for private hints. Checking Wikipedia's entries on ciphers and codes might help as well. Good luck and remember:

DON'T PLAY THIS GAME!

Wow, thank you for the kind words!

I love all those suggestions! Honestly, one of the big appeals for us during playtesting was how thin the line was between in-character talk and strategy talk, but obviously, each group will find their own style. Gabe Hernandez wrote QuestionCrawl as a sort of Worldbuilding addendum, but perhaps we should circle back and add a more character-centric version.

Thanks so much for the review! Sorry you found the AI art off-putting; obviously, we used as much illustration as we could get done in the Jam period, but we ultimately decided that the AI offerings were a better option than any other low-cost art we could find, such as clip art. We felt that the product looked better with art on each spread than with the text walls we were getting in the first layout. You may be interested to know that Gabe actually retouched each AI image (I believe); they're all human-AI collaborations.

Glad you enjoyed the writing! It's kind of my first effort at a mystery, so I'm grateful for the feedback. If I take another crack at the genre, I'll be sure to include more clue lines. Thanks again for taking the time to leave a review that is both encouraging and thoughtfully constructive.

This is probably my all-time favourite two-page adventure. I wrote a long-form review of it on my blog, but in brief: Five Stars!

Playtest version of Drawn from the Margins is up! We just had the first playtest, but we'd appreciate anyone else who wants to read or run it giving feedback before we move into final versions. :D

We were somewhere outside of Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the Marginalia began to take hold.

I was thinking Troika as well, but maybe I'll stick to 5e.

Our first playtest was relatively cooperative. The second was more fun. I think, much like real TV shows, the vendettas and rivalries will kind of snowball as you play.

Very cool! I look forward to trying this out!

Hey, thank you! I loved Unreality/Strictness by the way.

Awesome! Great work!

Amazing one shot, with great production value. Probably the best Troika! 2-pager I've seen so far. Cool and evocative locations, and I like the Happenings system used here. It was easy to tie in hooks from the starter adventure in the core book, which is a great feature.

My one issue was that the tables called for d20s and d10s, and since I'm traveling, I only had d6s. Obviously, you can just hop online, but it would have been nice if the random tables worked on d6s. Anyways, one small quibble about what is otherwise an amazing module. 

My run's climax came with the summoning of a Lemon Titan. Very nearly lost some players on that one, but they triumphed and an excellent time was had by all. Some Wafer and Marshmellow Droplins were exterminated, and the Sugar Queen was well pleased. 10/10 would read two pages again.

Really fun! Quick and easy to run, with some very memorable scenes. Domesticated Sphinx was a favourite.