itch.io

very cute!! chasing down endings is a fun way to spend an hour. only the fact that this was made in 7 days prevents me from assuming there are more hidden endings. stacking personality traits is absolutely the most fun part, and I love that a shiny payment gives you a double trait. that only being relevant for like 1/3 of traits and the possible infinite (?) expansion of the token box possible from particular combinations makes it feel even more fun bc it's something that feels unintended, even though... it definitely was intended. I also really like how Death starts to call you his old friend after the first few deaths. 

in my dream version of this game there's more persisting effects from previous actions, that maybe track which character you're playing (like, does seducing death in one life have an unintended bad effect on future death behaviour? if you bribe that cop enough times do they give in??... probably not.)

I had a lot of fun, thanks for sharing :3

Thank you so much for the kind & thorough comment! This is lovely to read. You finding a second unfinished construct as your First card pull is so incredible, I love that so much. That changes so much about the scope of that playbook. And then playing the second construct legacy style……. augh. I‘m glad the prompts worked for you. I‘m really feeling the joy of something going beyond me to make something I wouldn‘t have imagined. Games!!

I hope if you do/did play the second construct it‘s a good time :) I‘d written off playing this game myself until I get better at punctual epistolary but this makes me want to give it a try solo. Thanks again :3

! Hello!! Don‘t feel embarrassed, I Did see this and then ‚my reply has to be perfect‘-ed my way into not replying for a month! Nobody‘s perfect I guess :) I‘m really glad that I didn‘t accidentally start a dramatic nemesistude through having a similar idea (I didn‘t Really think this, but, you know, in my mind it was like a 10% possibility). 

Thank you for replying so thoughtfully!! I‘m glad you liked it. It Is really cool to see the divergence of ideas - it’s a nice reminder that my perspective is mostly invisible to me but nevertheless comes through in everything. I can‘t believe you played using my playbook holy shit!!! Very extremely exciting. Gonna go over there real quick.

oh my goddd the QUILT. So many lovely crafts extremely cutely and nicely presented. like reading a little booklet full of wordless love and care! the gorgug collage struck a particular chord with me. thanks for making + sharing stuff + putting it all together!

This game is so beautiful, and even though I was reading it for research I very quickly wanted to figure out a proper afternoon to sit down with a pile of old magazines and play it. The visual design is gorgeous and an immediate enticement to become engrossed in collage, and the guidance (imo) manages to strike a difficult balance seemingly effortlessly, feeling complete, supportive and inspiring without feeling constrictive, overwhelming or needlessly arbitrary. Both the experience and the physical artefact at the end are so appealing. The different Works you can devote yourself to during your character's stay at their sacred place read as fun little games in their own right - especially the Text Work, which absolutely could be its own enthralling game, while looking completely at home in this larger mechanical setting. I hope I'll find time to print and play this lovely game, I'm so glad I stumbled on it!

This is for Your Friend in Witchcraft by Kay Marlow Allen! Here's a link: https://earthlybody.itch.io/your-friend-in-witchcraft

ooh, I‘ll check it out, thanks!

a friend & I played this yesterday and had a really awesome, 'talking afterwards about the design decisions we liked and how we wanted to play it again'-level time.

Experience needed: this was both of our first Descended from the Queen game, and neither of us have read The City and The City. It worked great. We ended up both separately referring to Bodies (2023) as a kind of style touchstone. The prompts offer a very smooth way into the world, letting you focus on cinematic details that strengthen your understanding of the story and your characters and their cities (a meal that evokes powerful emotions in one of you, a footprint leading away from the body, a political disruption in your detective's day). They also, from what we saw, don't require your characters to be cops. I think playing one detective as someone who just has a strong personal interest in the murder rather than being sent by their city could be great in this game. (Sorry, I'm planning for the next one already...)

Keeping your theories about the murder secret from the other person throughout the game is really fun. Even with two players adding increasingly specific clues, our final theories were intriguingly different.

Playing it 2-player, we got through less than a third of the cards (and so less than a sixth of the prompts), meaning it's very replayable! and we both would love to play it again. It took us about an hour and a half? You could definitely go in a more mind-bending time travel direction, or magical realism, political intrigue... I think the game gives good support for making what's happening personal for your characters, if you want to. Next time I think playing a more Inland Empire/Dale Cooper-type intuitive detective could be a lot of fun with these mechanics.

This could very easily be a framework for an epistolary game where you write the communications between your detectives... I'll stop musing out loud. I had lots of fun, thank you for writing and sharing your game! It was a great introduction to Descended From The Queen mechanics.

These supplements are lovely to read. I feel like the original preoccupations of the game come through with some new twists and additions that feel very natural. The additional questions at the end of each archetype are fantastic and open up so many interesting possibilities for play (Is your novice from a place you have schemed your way through before? Were you more skilled than your expert before you lost your powers?). The visual design also looks so polished, I'm taking Canva notes (the cover for The Foresaken is particularly awesome).

I love how you took the Charlatan in a darker, less slapstick direction than I took the Impostor, more focused on actually avoiding detection than near-inevitably being caught. I also love that both of us put in an unimpressed familiar of the previous witch. The 'problem you're facing' prompt of a magical artefact wreaking havoc almost writes the scene by itself, while keeping storytelling options wonderfully open. The idea of the Expert Charlatan as a magical shopkeeper is just perfect.

I hope me leaving a comment isn't too awkward, I think it's awesome that we saw some of the same possibilities. I would love to play the Avatar sometime. Thanks for sharing your work!

aw thank you!! that means so much coming from you. I’m really happy to have had the chance to contribute :33

I’ve had this for 3 yrs and finally played & had a really nice time with a friend the other week! We played from scratch in about 50 minutes, but it definitely feels like it would be a great modular addition to a worldbuilding game/phase - it changes and suggests interesting things about the town and world that can go in a lot of directions. I like immediately wanted to slot this into cloud empress, I think it would fit v interestingly in the lowlands in that setting. Thanks for a fun game!

I am not good at this game (tank controls...) and it's still really fun! which is a good game marker for me. I keep leaving it on in the background bc the music is so great, it reminds me of the emotion a really good mario soundtrack inspires in me, like a super mario galaxy deal. This made a couple hours of covid recovery pass like nothing, thanks :)

Thank you so much! Those are very easy guidelines to agree to. I'll let you know if I make something I like enough to publish!

I love the concept and the execution rules. These mechanics are simple to grasp and fun to play. Definitely love knowing the estimated play time (it took me about 40 minutes) and the suggested background music playlist (yayyy). I got 3 sixes pretty quick and wanted to spend more time with my killer and survivor, I'm attached now!! well, maybe I'll play a sequel movie.....

drawing scars was the only thing where I felt like I was guessing about what I was supposed to do. the examples on this page make it clearer though! definitely going to play this more.

I want to write expansion tables n alternate settings for me to play, like, as soon as it's not 2am. If I do, are you okay with me sharing them on my itch (+ any particular way you want this to be credited?) or is that the kind of thing you'd prefer to keep in house?

bc I went to put this in the actual comments: the themed DIK party & the explanation of that theme made me laugh out loud. game moments of all time to me

this made me think differently. thanks for making it!

I played this with a friend (having literally just searched 'slime' in physical games) and had a lot of fun!! There are some great tables in here, and the way you set up the area you start in before starting roleplaying helped us really quickly make a setting we were excited to play around in. The range of starting creatures, being able to choose from a wide range of strengths and weaknesses with roleplaying implications and being able to choose which level of the dungeon to start on were things that helped this feel particularly fun and un-punishing. I particularly liked the list of potential PC motivations! Our dungeon is built into a massive volcano and our Dark Lord is big on micromanagement, especially of the deeper levels within their stolen castle; our characters are a finely decorated roaming mimic and a jealous, ambitious slime created to clean, and we are Rival Predators of our floor. I'm excited to play out more and see what we can do - and especially excited to play around with the dice-swapping mechanic, that's really cool.

If you are interested in fiddling with this, it took a bit of guesswork to figure out what order to do things in after character creation and when roleplaying was supposed to start. We still figured it out and had fun though.

Thank you for sharing!

I played this with a friend and had a lot of fun doing that. It seems like it's going to be very simple and then patterns and ideas come out in play and it's really really cool. Playing it with a boardgame fiend we both had an urge to complexify it and add 200 different mechanics, and I might still do that for fun! but I think the simplicity in this game is really powerful, and helps get across ideas about cycles of connected life in a way that's really easy to just start playing. Hopefully I can play this some more!

I played two games of this anthology with a friend, 15-30 minutes each, and really enjoyed them!

In FULL MOON: Destroy // Embrace, we took the game in an anime body horror kind of direction, which was a lot of fun. The moon called to us like a howling, like a distant song, but when we looked at her we knew it was a call to us. Our powers mostly revolved around gravity. She entered our eye from long looking, so everything we saw we saw through her. We tried to shrink her to our size, but lost heart, and died when the gravity debt we owed came due and we plummeted down to her rapidly growing surface. It rocked.

The Traveler's Cloak is just a great concept. I love the stuff it makes you think about. Early on, my friend made one of the high-value Curious creatures a piece of old technology lost down here on the sea floor, that has just enough consciousness to want up and to whisper questions of the surface from its seat at the top of the traveller's spine. It makes me want to play a version of this where you start with stuff defined about you before the fall and blot, replace, eat, decay it over time. Got me to imagine things I love imagining :)

Thank you for sharing! We will probably play more of these conveniently brief & randomisable & interesting games when we next have too little time for a longer one.

I enjoyed this a lot! love the stan rogers cairn. I absolutely thought they were dogs all the way through even when two of them fell in love.

:]] thank you sasha!! that means a lot!

this is fantastic!! Thanks so much for making and sharing this, I‘m definitely going to use it.

Oh, I immediately want to know what happens next. It's always nice when it's hard to choose a favourite cast member! I think..... Cassidy...... but maybe that's just the ghost hunter allure......

The alternate Sappho is a really fun worldbuilding detail. And how come Lirion seems to have the same mysterious problem you do ??

Excited to play more of this sometime! Thanks for sharing!

Wow this rules!!

This is so beautiful, and the movement is so cohesive with the art...! The part at the end felt really magical and mysterious. I'm glad to have seen this!!

I came here from the Zines and Zinesters discord! you got this done so quickly, it makes me want to make something for the jam too.

The aesthetic of this zine is really fun - I love the use of little pieces of text characters as a colourful decorative element, I feel like I haven't seen that before, and it works especially well on top of that sick Circe painting. The background of this itch page is a nice touch. I also LOVE (this is actually why I decided to write a longer comment) the links for further reading and your fiction recommendations. To me that kind of interlinking between stuff, especially online text, is always what I'm hoping for in online zines. Circe has been on my radar for a while, maybe I should finally read it... 

ahh this makes me want to make stuff!! I'm going to go try and do that. thanks for sharing!

https://worshipthesquid.itch.io/trans-trio

ow! this looks simple and does a lot. I hope it is like this less and less.

!! I want to play this!! thank you for the playdough recipe :)

The section describing Flow of Play is short - if you're coming from games with a strong GM or a tighter framework of play then you might be looking for more guidance; what made this kind of play make sense to me was listening to people play, for example, belonging outside belonging games like dream askew. Once you're familiar with that there's plenty of structure here - the threat pages especially have a lot of tools for progressing the story.

I don't think I could play this safely at the moment, but ohh I want to see it played. This is a clear and beautifully written set of instructions for character creation, setup and progression of Threats. I spent way longer than I intended reading every bit of it, because every bit of it is aimed at the heart of the matter.

pretty! crisp! cathartic! full of cats and cool backgrounds! this scratched an itch to read. thank you for sharing!

incredibly tasty visual design, stark and gorgeous writing. this evokes the pain and anger of fighting against what feels like the world, and the joyful anger of seeing these struggles depicted and the act of perseverance recognised, themes that many games about trans perseverance strike on but that there's still not enough of in the world. I bet this will make many more people feel less alone.

I'm so glad to be able to download this! The drafts spoke a lot to me. This is short but imo perfect, and I'm definitely going to come back to it when I'm feeling stuck. Thanks for putting it up!

Sludgepunk!!

Sludgepunk Manifesto lives up to the promise of its opening page, laying out a genre of mutation, mutability and implacable, seeping, crumbling change. This game looks at the imperial fear of decay and imperfection and its proclamations of eternal perfect empire and instead of presenting an image of unassailable might says, yes! here is the seed of its destruction. it's short & sweet & got really cool visual design. this makes me want to make and play stuff based on its vibes and tenets immediately. 10/10 would read again

rib-eting!

I had such a fun time playing this. The photos are really well chosen, especially to evoke, uh, the salient locations in one specific tall lady castle game. That said I played this as someone who's only interacted with Resident Evil through 10 minutes of letsplay and had a lovely time imagining and writing about my weird monstrous creature reluctantly chasing after the visitor stumbling through their mansion, accidentally coming off like they want to eat them, and growing increasingly frustrated with the number of plant-beasts and decorative urns they're damaging.

The establishing questions hit the right balance for me between specific enough to inspire and to set up enough worldbuilding so that you don't have to catch up with it during the 'action' part of the game, and broad enough for flexibility. The intro text did a great job of setting up the Vibe.

It was late by the time I got to the finale, and I jussst didn't quite trust myself enough to set parameters for the final 1d6 roll without mechanics. I can see it really working, and if I played this two-player deciding it with another person would scratch the external challenge-setting itch for me, but maybe if I play this again (pretty likely) I will decide or roll for the die probability at the beginning based on my initial idea for the intruder, and modify it if it feels right during the game. My addition's certainly clumsier than the game itself, which feels like not a moment's wasted, and can be played without reading ahead.

Thanks for sharing!

aw, this is very cute. The art of the fish pond is very beautiful, and I like the formal quest-giving door (or narrator?). A nice game to have played just before sleeping.

: O that is so unexpected! I’m glad!

This came out the day I started my solo game! I’ll know more as the seasons progress and I dig into more moves and playbook progressions, but this was a very nice way to set up a character. I like the laputa and neurodivergence inspiration (I have a little square of satisfyingly textured fabric that I lost years ago and still fondly remember…). It made me curious what other inspirations you drew from! The little prince? Thanks for sharing this, I’m very excited to explore through this playbook!