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I'm glad you finally got the joke.

When I have run the game at conventions I usually got some people familiar with the song and some with no idea, but everyone seemed to enjoy the game.

The procedure for that isn't explicitly mechanized. It's up to the players to enact it (using scene framing questions and other tools to guide the story that direction).

The line about "it's every knight's immutable destiny" is important, though: this is the end every player should be playing toward having happen, and it's the responsibility of every player to see that it happens. That player buy-in is really key. If they don't want to see a Knight's tragic downfall, they should probably play another game.

The main difference between scene types is the number of Change tokens each role gets. This will influence the story and how it progresses, as each role gets varying levels of narrative authority.

For example questions, I think a good scene framing question will point the story in an interesting direction but not be so constrained that there's only one answer. A good question is something like "Why does Sir Alphard, last of his line, betray his oath that he gave to his mother on her deathbed?" This gives us a clear direction to play toward (breaking the oath) but a lot of flexibility in how that happens. (We may have a lot of flexibility if this oath has never been established in the fiction before, and we have to define that oath as well as break it.)

The overall story is one of beautiful tragedy and the downfall of the Knights, so anything that builds int hat direction would be good: "What makes the demon so appealing or tempting to the Knight?" or "How is the last great work of the glass sculptors of Polaris finally destroyed?" or "Upon the knight return from their long exile in the wilderness, how do they find the city has changed?"

To a big extent, these questions are up to the players, so that they can guide the story in directions they are interested in it going. (It probably also would help to read the original game Polaris to capture the tone and feel of the setting. Then try to imagine scenes and actions from that game, and use the scene framing questions to help move the game in those directions.)

I forgot to create / upload those files. They've been added to the game files now.

I will have to investigate and try some different settings when I get a chance. Did you try with a different PDF viewer? It looks fine to me, but I know that Firefox renders things differently than Adobe, etc. and that might be part of the issue.

If you play it, I would love to hear how it goes!

We played this last night and everyone had a very good time. We created a really interesting town on an alien planet built into the walls of a canyon (because the environment up outside the canyon was dangerous and inhospitable). In the time between Then and Now, a stonemason union led a communist revolution and overthrew the old government. Both the Remained characters had complicated feelings about what they did during the revolution, while the Returning characters had to find a new place within this changed society.

This game did everything I wanted, of telling a emotionally moving story through drawing maps and of making us think about the passage of time. It's really great.

I'd be very much in support of you translating the game into Italian. (I made the game Creative Commons licensed specifically to allow people to make their own versions, including translations.)

If you want to publish it somewhere online, that would be great. Or the Italian files could be included on the itch page for the game, as the French files are. Or both. Whatever works for you.

If you need any of the files I used in creation, you can email me at nickwedig@yahoo.com and I'll give you access to whatever I have.

That's a pretty reasonable shift to operations, to make the game play smoother. I'll have to try that next time I play.

We played it with my home group a couple weeks ago. I couldn't wait for the physical book to arrive, so we just used the PDF. It was a big hit with my group.

Thank you for saying so.

I think your game Under the Autumn Strangely is my favorite new game that I played this year.

Now I see that you did email me, but it got caught in my spam filter. Replying there.

But the same is true for anyone else who wants to translate the game.

If you send me an email at nickwedig@yahoo.com, I'll send you the files for the game so you can modify them with the translated text.

Hey wow, this is really great. Thank you!

Sorry, it went into my spam folder by mistake. I'll reply to the email shortly.

That's amazing. It makes me happy to hear that my game inspired you.

I am really glad you enjoyed this game! 

I think it is the best game I've ever made.

Thank you for the kind words and the actual play recording! 

We played a fun game of A Very Small Life on the Mountainside last night. I had a very nice time playing. 

Our first adventurer was a teenager who'd pulled a sword from a stone and was destined to become king. We convinced him to abandon the monarchy instead.

My tiny villager draped some cloth over his abandoned crown and turned it into a yurt.

Update: Thank to the efforts of Matthieu and DeReel, the game can now be played on ForTheDrama.

https://www.forthedrama.com/games/urban-legend

Update: Thank to the efforts of Matthieu and DeReel, the game can now be played on ForTheDrama.

https://www.forthedrama.com/games/urban-legend

Okay, I've sent you an email to the address I have. If that doesn't come through or there's anything else I can do to help, please let me know.

Thanks to the generous effort of DeReel, this game is now available translated into French as well. I'm surprised and pleased by this, and maybe you will be as well if you have some Francophone players that want a spooky sort of time.

If I send you the game can you help me get it added to the site? Or you could just download the file and add it or something.

Or just let me know which language I should select for an English language game. Then I could add the game myself. There are English games on the site, but there doesn't seem to be an English language option when I go to create a game?

I think it really works better with more people than that, ideally 10 or more players. When we tried with 6 players, it worked but wasn't quite enough people. 

Were you aware of the previously existing game that already uses that title? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rune_(role-playing_game)

Having two games with the same name might cause some confusion. 

You're absolutely allowed to. As long as you give some credit, so that users know who wrote the text, then I'm fine with you copying and pasting chunks. If you post vast swathes of the game text, then make sure you include the Creative Commons license and credit that are found at the end of the document.  I'm not going to sue any human being over this game, though.

I don't think it was ever added. I emailed and never got a reply. Then I sort of forgot about it.

I tried to add it myself, but there isn't an option to add an English language game to the site (the dropdown has German, Spanish, French, Francais and what looks like Chinese or Japanese. Not sure how French and Francais are different, but neither is correct.

If you do play the game, I would love to hear about how it goes.

The EM has primary responsibility for this narration. But in practice, either the EM or the treasure hunter can describe things. Just as when you're playing other RPGs, sometimes the GM describes what happens when a PC attacks a goblin, sometimes the player does. Probably different groups will find different ways that they think are comfortable: some favoring the EM as storyteller, some the other players, some treating this as purely a guessing game and not an RPG at all, so having very few fictionalized details. I think that all should be fine, so long as everyone's on the same page.

If your Fulcrum starts at 7 and can only decrease by 3 points (once for each lost Anchor), how can it ever reach 0? Should it be when your Fulcrum reaches 10, the game ends?

I've made the same mistake before.

The game is listed as released, but there don't seem to be any files I can download?

After some reflection, I have chosen to withdraw my games from the jam for this reason. Sucks that you have been put in this position, though. I was excited for the jam.

Increasingly feeling like I'll finish designing the game, but never write it up and release it. I'll still finish it, but that doesn't mean publishing it.

I'm leaning toward working on "Back on the Flail Snail Farm", a laid-back pastoral game about raising giant snails like cattle. It'll have some deckbuilding elements and a focus on people's emotional states. We'll see how well that works out.

I might make something else weird instead, though, Who knows.

Medical Bay Three doesn't get a lot of attention or play (roughly one download per month on Itch, a bit more on Drivethru), so I don't know that there would be much for the Crash Cart  people to gain from such a cross-promotion.

Thank you for saying so. I was pretty happy with how the game turned out. 

The names of characters took some thought and effort, just because most human names wouldn't work for animal characters (since they don't have the same cultural background that we do).

Hollyhock is named that as a joke for fans of Nobilis and/or the Victorian language of flowers.

That's a good call. I think there's a lot to be said for the feeling of simultaneous discovery and creation, where you start to realize how bits of a narrative fit together even as you are creating the story. The Skeletons does this very well. (Some other games, too.) 

It would be hard create the same effect in other media, because the audience and the creator aren't the same person. You can have a feeling of slowly discovering who a character is (in a movie like Memento or a book like Susanna Clarke's Piranesi). But the feeling of seeing how narrative threads tie together and then tying them together yourself isn't really a part of passive media like that. A bit more like the experience of being an author writing the story. The thing is, in the Skeletons, you're experiencing the story, discovering the story and creating the story all at the same time. 

And the experience of the story is more internal than in most other media, as well. A lot of immersion that happens more in larp and tabletop RPGs and is very difficult to find in other media. The Skeletons has a lot going on that would be extremely difficult to do in other media, if it was even possible.

In every RPG, you're constantly spinning out possible courses of action and then accepting some and rejecting others, in a way that isn't really typical in other media. But in A Penny For My Thoughts, you take those alternate possibilities and really make them central to play. The main mechanic of the game is simple: two players describe what might happen next, then the player whose scene it is picks which is true. But the thing that is important to me is that those rejected possibilities still matter, even if they aren't "true". Those rejected fictional possibilities are still voiced, and everyone hears and considers them. and in practice, this means that people remember those, nearly as much as the ones that were accepted. This gives the game a dreamlike feeling, where later on things are vague, where you sometimes have trouble remembering what is true and what wasn't... which fits the game fiction perfectly, and couldn't be done in a different medium.