itch.io

Good to know. Tks.

Another question. When you’re looking at what is adjacent, do you count the dice on the diagonal as well? I’ve been doing both (i.e. counting and not counting) and seeing which result feels better. Just curious as to your original intent.

Also, are you on reddit? If I post something there I’d like to be able to tag you.

Well, it’ll be either on reddit or twitter/X. Having problems with getting launch energy and the courage to actually post, but I’ll let you know if I do.

A rough sandbox and a few things to start the PCs off (e.g. an initial job, or patron) is often how I do things these days, but once the starting phase is over the players have normally grounded themselves in the world and start following up on the things they’ve found that interest them, so I’m used to a certain amount of improvisation. Good to see you’re looking at a longer view for the game. 35-40 sessions is a long campaign for us these days, and I’d like to get back to something like that. TEA is something I’ll be keeping in mind.

That matches my intuition. Smalller numbers are good to start with. I think I tried 4,5 then 6 dice just to feel my way into the system. It started to feel good when I got to 8, 9, 10. Thank you for such an entertaining little game. I now need to make a bit more time to start drawing what the dice reveal. 

This looks fascinating, both the rules and the world. I’m curious as to what level you’d expect game play to reach. It looks like it would sustain up to level 7 or 8 fairly easily on a first skim of the rules, but I’m wondering if you’ve any experience in play for this?

Thanks for confirming that. I was thinking of using this to get into a #Dungeon24 type mode for this year. Just creating and drawing at least a couple of places using Wallet dungeons each week.

Any particular thoughts on the numbers of dice to roll? I’ve been using 9 or 10, but I could see using more might work. Then again, I can see just rolling 9 or 10, working out what that looks like, then combining with a building done previously.

…and thanks for such an interestingly simple game.

Hi. I’ve been finding this useful for inspiration, so I bought a copy. I don’t however quite understand the optional bit about room extra detail. Can you provide an example? E.g. the example in the pamphlet, or if you rolled [6][6][3][4][2] for example. The [6][6] is a hall,  so you go for the lowest neigbouring die, which is [3]. Does this mean the hall is ‘OPULENT’? Thus, would room [4] (also lowest neighbour), be based off the [2] result to the right, and thus be “PRISTINE”? Whereas room [3] should be DAMP?

Liking the extra stuff I see you’ve written. Hope you get to add the missing levels 8 & 9 that you mention in your level 7 description. This looks like it might actually be a ‘dungeon’ my player group could cope with, so hoping to try it out on them some time this year.

looks good. I like the clear setting and premise of the game, as it certainly avoids people not knowing what they should be doing.  I’ve only been able to skim the rules so i can’t tell if there are any gotchas, but it looks a reasonable adaptation of Cairn. I’ll probably be using it with my slight hack of Into the Odd, but I’ll try it out RAW first.

Question about formatting: you have odd [] and [][] ‘bars’ appearing in odd places - are they intended and I’m just not getting their usage? Also the Adventure Creation Guidelines looks like it was meant to be a table, but if so the formatting has been lost.

I like this so far (I’ve only looked at Lvl 1). The neat hand drawn maps plus the choice of fonts & colour red for highlighting for the numbering, text etc are vary clear. Looks intriguing. Also the reflections on the process from doing it as a one room a day thing for Dungeon23, that is rather interesting too (for me at least).

Update: Lvl 2 looks interesting. I’ve got too much on at the moment to really look at this but I’m making a note to come back to this later. Keep up the good work.

I like the basic thrust of your system. I have played a couple of other games that do a similar thing. One of them, if I applied its method to your game, you’d just erase the checks that you converted into an increase. That game works by the GM telling the PCs what they can put their checks against though, based on using a stat or skill etc in a scenario. I do like the idea that a player can put the checks into anything though. That is rather thought provoking, and could take the game in lots of interesting directions.

Thanks for answering so promptly. I hope to find time to try this out sometime this year because it really is quite intriguing. 

So when you level up you only increase one thing that has 3 checks, plus roll for your stats. Then erase all your check marks, right? - so there is no reason to check a stat unless you want to guarantee an increase or develop something else related to a stat, and no value in splitting checks between different things because they all get erased when you level up? Or is it only the thing you level up that has its checks erased?

You say starting HP = CON. I don’t understand how you increase your hit points. I get that you can increase once you have 3 experience checks against HP, but what does it mean to say that to reach level 2 you roll D6+[the level you’re coming from], in this case it’s L1 so the roll is D6+1. Does that mean you get D6+1 hit points extra?

Liking the simple clear format. Refreshingly concise. Even though I’m tired at the moment, reading isn’t a chore, and the concepts come across quite well. The world building is great. It feels familiar from much that I’ve read in the past, and yet quite different from then endless variations on certain other games I’ve seen.

This now seems to be just a link to a Notion database. Is it possible to get it in PDF still? It is a fantastic piece of work, very evocative.

Can I suggest that a version of the map be included with this to help interpret and ‘place’ the descriptions?

Amazing. One of the more imaginative uses of Craiyon or similar that I’ve seen. Really like the images you’ve managed to create with Craiyon.

An idea of the page count, and more previews would be nice.

Will we have to pay separately for volumes 2 & 3?, or does getting this game entitle one to the others (thus explaining the price rise)? Otherwise, $7.50 (or more) for a 16 page book of which 5 are full page illustrations seems a bit much.

I agree, a print friendly version would be nice. Printing out white print on black background uses a lot of ink, and for a reference table that gets handled frequently it is (depending on your printer) quite smudgy.

The very gothic large letters, like in ‘Helm’ on your character sheet, or on the Armor-Shields-Missile Weapons table is nigh unreadable for me half the time. The other font used for headers, and the ‘stat names’ on the character sheet isn’t much better.

When I use the non-itch version, the dungeon generated and the descriptive notes don't always fit on the screen. Using the itch.io version I was able to use  'CMD' & '+' or 'CMD' & '-' to adjust the browser screen size to zoom in/out to fix the 'fitting on the screen' issue, but not on the non-itch version.  There also don't seem to be instructions visible on the iPad view on how to interact with the generator.

Update: to clarify, I have a keyboard with my iPad. It has become my main digital tool (partly because my computer is quite old now).

I find this difficult to use on an iPad. Any tricks to using on this device, or should I just keep to using it on my iMac (which works fine).

Cool. Look forward to seeing what else you come up with.

Like the intro blurb. Persuaded me to consider it, especially when I saw it is based on Knave. After downloading very glad to find the colour scheme goes to readable B&W once you’re past the covers, because it is truly hard to read.Aside from that though looks quite interesting.Looks to have included some nice ideas from games like Into the Odd, and feels like I could run an old fashioned Gamma World game with it, amongst other possibilities. 

PS: found your blog. Looks good. Will be checking it out for your Vaarn posts and such.

No probs mate.

Is there an actual download or is it all in the images posted on the right?

Got via the KS. Looks good. Are there any plans for a print friendly version? That might also fix the issue with pages loading a bit slowly on ipad. 

Enjoyed reading this. Very evocative. Running my first Into the Odd game at the moment, and slowly pulling in things from Electric Bastionland. This will also do very nicely. I could see it being inspirational for a lot of other games too, just for the ideas.

Cool, thanks for that.

That is more understandable. Perhaps if you included the above explanation in the game to make it clearer. 

The rules mention something called ‘the ambient’. What is this exactly? I couldn’t find it explained anywhere.

I think so. Less is more when it comes to hacking, sometimes. I was thinking I could adapt a lot of your ideas to a Traveller/Mazerats game, or to an Over the Edge 2e game. Especially in the setting of OTE, 2e — the idea of some people collecting demons on a rather odd, corrupt, island (Al Amarja) that is the home of the dissolute, depraved, desperate and potentially deranged strikes me as something worth following up. One day. 

Nice bunch of demons, well thought out and organized. I could use this in plenty of other games.

Only play will show how well this works, but it reads well, is very concise, and looks a lot of fun. I particularly like the simple and useful way you use alignment. On the strength of this I’m moving on to check out your compendium of ~60 demons.