Crescent Moon.

Adventures through The  Daydream

Crescent Moon is a fantasy RPG where you’ll play as a group of kids traversing The Daydream; a mysterious place you must find a way out of, and where you must resort to your wits, deftness and burning power of friendship to overcome obstacles and return home.

Although sometimes a harsh place (and one where you'll definitely be getting into trouble, for that matter) The Daydream isn't necessarily hostile; the kids are encouraged to find solutions  without resorting to violence.

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Crescent Moon is a hack of Mausritter. It is very much inspired  by classic fairy-tales like Alice in Wonderland, and dreamy games like Link's Awakening.
Mechanically, I'm aiming for a mishmash of OSR  mechanics with storygames sensibilities. My main inspiration besides Mausritter is Lady Blackbird.

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I'll be to posting updates to this thread as I work on rolltables and structure, as well as any art or visuals I develop along the way 
Comments are always welcome , of course <3

-ema

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Current Drafts 🌙

Draft 0.0 - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iuhAED4PfnoLRVcetZFdN0zQtT8P-2sn/view?usp=shari...

Draft 0.1 - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vpArdkxZxU5wWknNPtBzRlzv4Lj1Tsu-/view?usp=shari... 

Draft 0.2 - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fCYsnVEt_48zakVtzGWrIHSn6pioJNIZ/view?usp=shari...

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Looking to playtest! ⭐️

The first playable draft will be soon ready, so if anyone is kind (or crazy) enough to want to playtest a session or two of this, I'll likely be running a game before the end of the month. Feel free to shoot me a private message here on itch or contact me at superdupermeal at gmail dot com !

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To-Do List ~

◆ Finish moving text from google docs to indesign

◆ Start work on rolltables for the character creation

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◆ Getting a Barebones playtest:

• Make said few touches to the character creation
• Add condition items
• Make an online setup that can work with the cutout items. An online whiteboard will be the easiest
• A starting situation/mini adventure, which will actually be the base for basic gm tools (90% of this will just be a list of character ideas. the setup should be stable enough to hold a session or two)

◆ For long term goals, see current outline:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cUzjj6WXjTiQyjnt8vJNAcyhWVE6Vw4Zr99C97jUryw/...

rough visual ideas to set tone. I want to work on B/W for this even though it's not my strong suit at all. which might be a fun challenge

i hate doing rolltables,
and this game has a trillion of them
suffering—

also i'll make the descriptions fit into a single line, pinky promise

{screams into the void, endlessly}

Crescent Moon 0.0 - preview aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaa a

Lots of typos, unfinished lists and draft text, but I wanted to have a basic outline up as milestone of sorts. ✨

I'd say the first draft is 70% there, and I'll start to look into playtesting  soon! if anyone is kind (or crazy) enough to want to playtest a session or two of this, I'll likely be running a game before the end of the month. Feel free to shoot me a private message here on itch or contact me at superdupermeal at gmail dot com !

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As it stands, some notes on development: 

* Character Creation: I'm confident in what I've got so far for character creation, will probably polish a bit the upbringings, add a couple items, and leave the details for after. 

* Inventory: I'll probably run with the items I have at the moment, and fill the blanks with the upbringing items for now, don't want to start adding stuff without knowing what's relevant.

* How to play: The core of the game in theory is in place. The Kids will alternate between free play, exploration sessions, encounters and breathers. Right now is a bit unclear what kind of currency might or might not help grease that cycle (the glims? hmm probably not). The approach list and dice scale are still placeholders depending on how it plays out. 

* Magic: Pretty happy with this actually, at least flavor wise. The spells' themes are a bit unclear in terms of practicality vs. emotion, but I'm fine with that for now. If it doesn't work I might review Lady Blackbird and do something similar with specific tags. But I'll put some hope in the loosey goosey approach I want to try.

* Down the rabbit hole: Forgot to add a list of hooks, but besides that it should suffice for a oneshot. had a lot of fun with this actually, hope i get to add more weird scenarios if i have the time and it seems useful

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In order to run a playtest, what's left is:

* Make said few touches to the character creation

* Add condition items

* Make an online setup that can work with the cutout items. An online whiteboard will be the easiest

* A starting situation/mini adventure, which will actually be the base for basic gm tools (90% of this will just be a list of character ideas. the setup should be stable enough to hold a session or two)

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so yeah! written like that it doesn't seem like a lot. long term ideas will be added later to the first post. 

late night ideas on some sketch complications, coming to you straight from the notepad! (though i had to paste them in a page so that they're actually legible)

As with everything there is a mixture of mechanical sparks for consequences vs. narrative ones I'm not loving. I think the one that I get the best feeling for at the moment is ANGRY. (But that's because the mechanics are pointing to a narrative consequence I guess.) I also like the tension of either waiting for a breather or doing something now, it would be cool if every one had something like that

Still wondering if there should be a currency players can expend to get around some of this or what, but we're going to keep vibing communism until i get to try this and get a feel for it

Notes:

• Lost might become Trapped or vice versa, a bit redundant
• Missing is a mess please don't look at it
• These are way too wordy for a 2.5x2.5cm card! I might have to find a way to abstract them or make the card format fit more text

Update from the next morning: 
Right. So I think I'm sticking to 12-13 total (Probably a sheet for the near side and another for the far side), but all the babble on how to use these is probably going as more detailed advice on the booklet. The actual condition sheet will be a lot shorter. These will probably morph into something more specific to the Daydream (ie. they will get trippier most likely) but let's stick to this for now

five days before the deadline, i've reached the conclusion that the game page will not make itself, sadly.

probably gonna work on some rough assets to have it up over the weekend. and upload the current version of the text, which stands on its own ground. is it functional? will found out tonight!! fear!!!!

thumbnail ideas for the cover image. gonna drop the b/w aesthetic for now just to make it faster

Had the first playtest last night. It went well, but left me with way more questions than answers. And that's fine! I wanted to have a first experience with the game without trying to do anything  in particular to get a sense of what this is, and move from there.

I'll leave the the play report I wrote so the internet can see how ocd i am about this stuff 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Uk7iViyXlEUcCfydbuXU8QNdB_ubEmGvx0_-oZIjp84/...

hey all, I just wanted  to follow up on this to say that after having had the last playtest, I've decided to go back to the drawing board and reframe a lot of the mechanics so they better fit the kind of game Crescent Moon is.

On the one hand that's great because it's giving me a more clear direction to work towards and I'm already pretty excited about the shape that the new version  is starting to take, but it also means that I'm not really comfortable having the current version up publicly, and the new one is going to take a  bit more than 12 hours, I'm afraid!

Because of that I've decided not to officially submit to the jam, although, naturally, version 0.1 , 0.2, and the playtest all happened under the deadline. 😉

Big thanks to everyone who took the time to read through the thing, and was kind enough to give some feedback (or actually play it!), and of course to Tanya for hosting such a cool event!! It's been a great learning experience and I hope to be able to do more of this in the future (although my crippling work schedule pleads otherwise, hehe)

see you soon <3
there will eventually be an itch page for the game. But in the meantime, I may be posting devlogs  and prototypes over on https://crescent-moon-rpg.tumblr.com/ (turns out doing so it's more fun than i thought!)