itch.io

Good question, it is a little ambiguous.

When I wrote the rule, how you've described it was the intention. Fighting two foes with a strength of 4 each is essentially fighting one foe with a strength of 8. While their strength is combined, their HP pools aren't, so as soon you reduce one foe to 0HP, the foe side has 4 strength. But yes, running into two foes without a certain level of strength and/or HP pretty much guarantees a bad time. Mirroring the Dark Souls inspiration, it's intentionally brutal and stacked against the player.

All that said, I think I prefer the way Jake Zemeckis handles this! It remains punishing on a bad roll, but it isn't guaranteed to hurt you a lot even if you roll well. IMO Jake's version is probably the more fun way to handle double enemies using furtive grasp rules.

This is awesome! Glad you're enjoying my little game. I appreciate sharing the typos you caught, and thanks as well for sharing your experience and pics of your setup! :)

Hi, about this project's inclusion in a compilation document. I'm fine with it being included, credited with my itch handle. But only if this project (at 10 pages long) doesn't, like, dwarf the other projects that would be in the shared doc.

Hehe, thanks :)

Hey, just wanted say thanks for the SRD! It's a great, compact system, and I recently used it as a basis for a one-page game, 59.

Thanks so much!

A print-friendly version is in the works.

Thank-you! I'm excited to check out your games, too. I had a great time playing Little Dung Guy last year so I was happy to see Sleepy Badger pop up in this Jam's submissions.

Thanks so much, Euan, for playtesting and for the praise!

Thanks so much!

Thanks so much!

Hey, thanks! I'll admit that this game is only lightly based on the real-world history. I took the premise and spun it out into something more fantastical. 

I figured it'd be handy to have a thread sharing SRDs and other frameworks to help springboard the game-making process. Here are a few (free) SRDs I'm currently reading and considering.

Passkey, by Penflower Ink. The focus here is that when facing a decision point, a player can either rely on the dice with a luck roll, or choose to succeed by spending a finite resource (Effort Points): the more EP spent, the fewer strings attached to their success. https://penflower-ink.itch.io/passkey-srd

Lumen, by Gila RPGs. Lumen uses d6 pools, weapons, powers, and round-to-round health/energy drops to produce tactical but fast conflicts inspired by video game action shooters. The Lumen games I've seen are a bit more complex than a one-page limitation, but a small make would probably fit. https://gilarpgs.itch.io/lumen

Breathless, by Fari RPGs. In Breathless, stats are associcated to a size of polyhedral die, with roll-high success (5+ is full success, 3-4 is success with complication, 1-2 is failure). Each time you use a stat for a roll, its die ticks down by one size, gradually wearing out your character. You can "catch your breath" at any time to restore your original dice, at the cost of the GM moving in a big way. https://farirpgs.itch.io/breathless-srd

CaltropCore, by titanomachyRPG. CaltropCore features d4 dice pools, with each value on the d4 mapping to a different tier of success/failure. The SRD outlines two different modes of play: stat-driven, where a host of stats will tell you how many d4s to roll; and token-based, where you build a dice pool out of tokens spent to better your odds. https://titanomachyrpg.itch.io/caltropcore

Please feel free to share any other system / game design toolkits you're familiar with!

Community copies are added when this title (or the base game) are purchased. Which just happened today! I've added a few community copies.

Hi! Glad you're enjoying my little game.

Furtive Ash is handy for the following situations:

• If you used Running Away / Running Past rule to escape a previous encounter, and you don't want to attempt the same on the way back to the Bonfire
• During a fight when you're concerned you may die, and you don't want to leave escape up to the luck of the dice
• Escaping Bosses, since you can't use the Running Away / Running Past rule in fights with them

Thanks so much! I had a lot of fun with this concept. And yeah, since the game is about specific regional language I wanted to make sure it was accessible to people beyond that region.

Hi! I'm Jake (RollForThings), a Canadian from the Muskoka region living abroad in Taiwan. I enjoy designing and writing games, especially one-pagers and ttrpgs in the "story game" sphere. I'm Magicalflyingart's partner and we've collaborated on a few projects as co-designers and as a designer-artist team. Excited to get into some specifically Canadian inspirations for game-making!

Me again with some good news! I had some free time recently and made some cards for the various types of Equipment, you can check them out here! 

By the way, would you like me to credit you on the project page for the suggestion?

Hey, thanks for the detailed feedback! Squire is definitely still rough in places, and I'm considering fully replacing one or two of the Skills. I'm gonna be fairly hands-off with the Class until it goes through some playtesting, but all feedback is greatly appreciated and I'll take it all into consideration when I do a revisit. I'm pretty glad that my design goals for the Squire came through -- you spotlighted them exactly!

Hey, thanks! Glad to hear this little project is useful.

I hadn't thought of cards for weapons, but that's a good idea! I'll put it in on the to-do list. :)

Community copies are added when someone purchases this title or its base game. I've just added a few copies at time of writing this comment, feel free to snag one.

Thanks! TBH I had the idea a little while before I found this jam, this was just the excuse I needed to sit down and make it.

Amazing, thank-you!

Would it be possible to extend the duration of the jam, just a little bit? I think I can get my project done in time for the current deadline, but December has been a busy month and less crunch over the weekend would be awesome.

A delightful, humorous romp of a game. I had an excellent time playing a one-shot of this with my group. The shifting GM role was a lot of fun and let the normally-players of the group try out running a game in bite-sized bits. Great stuff!

Awesome! Aw man, I love seeing how people set up their tables, and using dice to track the numbers is a great idea (there's lots of writing/erasing in this game). And yeah, it's definitely an opportunity for people to test their vast quantities of dice. 

Speaking of, another part of the supplement is a rules variant that uses less dice, which I'm going to release early for playtesting. Essentially, just the player rolls dice, with 4+ counting as success vs enemy Strength as a flat value, and a few other rules are tweaked to mesh with foes not rolling dice. This variation is focused on streamlining solo play, but if you give it a read/try please let me know what you think!

Hey, thanks for playing my game, and an extra thanks for telling me about it!

1. Running back to the Bonfire is completely unrestricted. You can do it as much as you want. This means, just like the in the video games it's inspired by, a player is free to farm the first zone and over-level themselves. However, it gets more and more expensive to level up the more you do it (three times your current level) and enemies in later Realms drop more Souls per Encounter. Ideally, a player gets bored/impatient with the weak stuff and moves forward, but when that happens is up to the player. Some players want a safer experience than others.

2. Brutal is meant to trigger when the Hollow has zero successful or tied matchups in a round. Leftover Hollow's dice that don't find pairs are effectively discarded.

3. The intention with Volatile is that rerolls allow the damage to be avoided. The Hollow decides in which order the conflicting dice pairs resolve (p3), but the rules aren't clear about when non-dice things resolve. Thanks for mentioning this, I'll try to update the rules for greater clarity.

4. The Lost Soul and Hidden Cache secrets work as you interpret them: you can gather up to RN+1 of that thing over the course of several Bonfire resets. I wrote it this way to emulate hidden drops that scale up as you reach tougher areas in Dark Souls, and to pepper the gameplay with several rewards over try-die-repeat attempts rather than a one-time lump sum and then an empty Encounter after. An alternate rule, "you find [RN] Souls/Items (does not reset)" might vibe better with some players, but I haven't tested the idea yet. I'm also working on a supplement that introduces more impactful, found-once-only items, which might scratch that itch. That should come out later this month.

Once again, thanks! Feedback means a lot to me, and I'm always happy to answer questions.

Thanks so much! I use Affinitiy Publisher for layouts and Designer for some of the graphics.  (It's currently 50% off for Black Friday and there's a 6 month free trial for anyone who wants to try it out.) Formatting is based on a one-page zine guide that I got from Star West. And the header font was availble free online (Optimus Princeps).

Thank-you! I'll get to cookin'!

Hi friends!

Earlier this year I made a Dark Souls-inspired one page game, Hollow Hike. For this jam I'm planning on making a sort of expansion for it, including pre-made play material, expanded rules for navigating branching maps, and a new optional mechanic for damage typing to deepen the combat a little more. If you have any ideas or recommendations, please let me know!

Excellent game! Fun and relaxing, and it really brought me back to the nostalgia of those "find it" books where a whole lot is going in in a massive illustration. Plus some cheeky stuff in there, hehe.

Just sent you a message :)

Hi! I'm definitely interested! Tiny Tome is super cool :)

Thanks for the feedback! Glad you like it

Affinity currently has a 6-month free trial going on. It's a bit of a learning curve if you haven't used a layout pr graphic design software before, but there are a bunch of online and in-program tutorials to help you.

I used Scribus starting out, which gets the job done but has very basic features and an honestly terrible UI, but is completely free.

Fantastic little game! I really enjoyed the feel and gameplay!

What I liked:

• The art, sound and UI come together to deliver a wonderful vibe. It's cute, it's a cat in an apron making cakes, there's a cute little soundtrack, awesome
• The conveyor belts are intuitive and fun to plan around
• The bounce arcs are very satisfying
  
• The enemies (Schrodinger's Cats?) are predictable enough to outfox, but unpredictable enough to keep you on your toes and keep the gameplay interesting

What I think could be improved:

• The player character keeps getting stuck on the edges of the platforms
• A sound cue on gathering a cake ingredient would be sweet
• Let me jump! The jump is automatic off the edge of the platform, but I'd prefer a manual jump (up button when not on a ladder). It would let me strategically fall off the platforms and try to leap over the enemies instead of just trying to out speedwalk them
• Longer i-frames please. I found myself repeatedly getting hit by the same enemy without much I could do about it. I would even take a lower max HP if there were more i-frames after each hit.

Hey, thanks! :)

Here's a recent solo session of Detour I did, using mostly the roll tables included. I think it turned out pretty well!

Thank-you! The body text is Constantia, and the header text is OptimusPrinceps.

Hey, thanks so much! I've been on a Dark Souls kick recently and I do sometimes find myself just walking around and appreciating the backgrounds and other art, but I never thought of that when writing this game lol. Glad you had a good time, and thanks for the comment!

Wow, that's some very high praise! Thank-you so much, I'm glad you like it