itch.io

I think it's a little bit of "obsession", and a lot of "I keep the games as easy to produce as possible". Which might be a problem: I assume good art and high production values mean more people will try the games.

Thank you for your kind words.

Yes, that's right. There's only one die roll per character in combat, and there are no decisions to make per-character. It would be a boring game played co-op, I think.

Best to think of it like a JRPG, where you might have e.g. 4 characters in your party, but are playing solo.

These are great, thank you

Thanks, I've sent you an email with a proposal for a first piece.

Still interested in other artists, if anyone looks at this and thinks I don't need any more help.

I design free TTRPGs and publish them here on Itch. I think some art would help improve them. I am happy to pay, but since my games are all free I need to get a sense of what people charge and how much art I could afford.

If you are a new illustrator and do black and white/pen and ink art, and you have a portfolio I can look at, please let me know. If you also give me a sense of your costs I'd appreciate it. This is not for a one-off piece, it's for an ongoing relationship, so I don't have a budget in mind.

The work would probably include enemy illustrations, maps, images for the covers on Itch, etc.

Got it, thank you. It's relatively easy to change the letters to numbers, so if anyone else brings it up, or if you find it makes things harder to manage, I can change it.

Good question. I decided on letters early on and then I assume the reason I wanted letters stopped being true at some point. e.g. I think I wanted to make the first letter relevant to the entry at some point?

Do the letters cause you an issue?

Ha, I'm not sure how I'd fit the explanation for the split 1-in-6 roll on to the page. Do you find that one of them happens too often? And what do you think should be more common out of the remaining 5 options?

Yes a d8 for the item list. I forgot to add it in parentheses. Also the two rolls means you roll the die twice to get two items. I’ll make that clearer.

That’s correct. But that is a mechanic I could add to make it more dense.

Did you find that you didn’t get much loot with the 1-in-6 chance?

Hey, thanks for the comment. Let me know if you have spot any issues.

Thanks for both of the latest typos as well. I've fixed them both and included them in 1.2.

Well spotted again, thank you. I've updated the PDF.

Thanks for the comment. I did a quick play test myself, and I think it’s got just enough structure to make it interesting. Interested to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for this thoughtful feedback. I’ll think about how to address some of this.

Well-spotted, thank you. I've updated the PDF. Let me know if you have any other feedback about the game.

Thank you. If you play it and have any thoughts, let me know.

Thanks. Because of all the maths involved I never tried to figure out how the enemy scaling/equipment effects compare to each other.

I think at least I’ll lower the maximum stats you get from equipment names.

I’ll also think about ways to make enemies respond to your strength/scale differently as the floors get deeper.

Love to see photos of play-throughs. Especially for a game like this, where it’s hard to keep track of everything. Looks like it requires a lot of notes.

Thank you. It's designed as a solo game but I've realised there's not much to stop you from playing it with 3 other people, since there are 4 team-members. Please let me know if you play, and how it is. It's not had as much play-testing as it should have done.

Luckily the hard work was done for me in terms of the research. I bought a copy of the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore a while ago, and flipped through it and noted down all of the myths that might work.

Thanks, this is great feedback. I'll make a note to add alternating backgrounds. I assume the blue outline was added by you to keep track of what you had?

I've designed a lot of solo TTRPGs at this point, and there's a fair chance that not many of them are fun. I started to think about what makes a solo TTRPG fun.

Here's a list of things that might make solo TTRPGs fun. Do others come to mind for you?

• A setting that you find interesting
• Variety, so that you cannot predict what will happen next
• A sense that you have a choice about/some control over what will happen next
• Mechanics that don't mean you need to keep a lot of numbers in your head, or do lots of maths
• Combat that allows you to be strategic if you want
• The thrill of a lucky roll, and the dread of an unlucky roll

The only thing you're missing is that I'm an idiot. I'll add an email address to my profile, but here it is for convenience: soft.lion2577@publicfacade.com

Since April I've designed and released 12 free solo TTRPGs. I'm hooked. I never plan to charge money for my games. My games are intentionally simple, but I know a little art can go a long way. And art is expected by the TTRPG community.

If you're an artist who wants to doodle RPG illustrations for free, and you're happy to do that with me, get in touch. I've got many more games on the way, and art would make all of them better.

To be clear, I don't expect anyone to take me up on this. Artists should be paid for their work, and I have paid artists to work with me in the past. But there might be someone out there like me, with an artistic skill-set, who wants to do it for the love of it, and who would be doodling anyway.

Thanks for this. I'll think about a way to make things a little more difficult as it goes along.

Excellent. Thank you for the changes.

What do people do if they e.g. don't have a Google account, or don't have the skills/knowledge/patience to set up pandoc?

To be clear, I'm happy to follow the sprit of the submission rules, and I agree with them. But the technical requirements that people must use Google Docs or pandoc don't feel like they suit the spirit of the jam, from the way I've read it. If the intention is that people's barriers to entry are removed, why not allow whatever tools people already use? Assuming they stick to the visual style requirements, I mean.

I assume I can create a PDF the way I usually do (Apple Pages), and use the typeface I normally use (Menlo, which is a monospace typeface), and export it to a multi-page PDF?

This is great, thank you.

When I play-tested the game, I did it in a digital canvas tool (Figma) which let me paste in the grid image from the rules, and then move virtual pieces around to keep track of combatants. I think a chess board is a good way to do this in the real world, or if you print out the grids and use tokens/pieces of paper. Not quite as "pen-and-paper" as it could be.

I hadn't thought much about the difficulty of combat. I didn't want it to feel unfair, but that's about it. Let me know if you consistently win battles, and maybe I'll think about ways to make it harder.

I've updated the PDF to fix those typos. Well-spotted.

Excellent to hear that. I'd be interested to hear more about how you fold it into your Umbra play-through. And also if you have any feedback on the combat system. It's the first tactical combat I've designed, so I want to make sure it's fun.

Thanks for the thoughtful review. Your comment history is a collection of thoughtful reviews, so it’s interesting to read through.

Thank you—always love to see people play my games. I like that you used this game as a one-off dungeon in a larger story. I've made some tweaks to the game PDF based on your playthrough.

Thanks, amazing video. I've made some changes to the game based on your play-through. Two wyrms in a row was unlucky.

I thought about more varied shapes, but I wanted a left-to-right horizontal approach so that you could draw the dungeon across the top of a piece of paper and still have lots of room below for notes etc. I appreciate that the results are less interesting than if the dungeon e.g. turned back on itself.

Thanks for the feedback. I've tweaked the PDF so the Chest and Enemy sections are closer to the Combat section. Hopefully that saves on some scrolling.

Are you aware of any play-through video of RIG? I'm curious about the mechanics of the game, but at the same time I think I'd personally find it overwhelming, so I'm interested to see someone else play through to find out.

I'm working on my own "explore abandoned ships, scavenge what you can" solo dungeon crawler. Whenever I see a game like this I worry it'll be close to mine. Luckily they're all a bit different 😂 Love this theme/setting.

Just reading the rules, and I like the mechanic that if you get 3 glades in a row you have to face the boss. Nice way to balance your good luck, and trigger the end of the game.

Thanks for this comment. It's made my day to see a photo of your play-through. My new game, Dungeons of Pendragon, uses the same combat system. But the next two games I'm designing use different combat systems. Hopefully they work just as well 😅