itch.io

This is the best one pager on this website.

I ran this for a small group last night, and we had a lot of fun! I agree with the other comments that GMs need to have fleshed arcs and points of conflict. I struggled with challenge levels and always having them go easy, medium, hard- it felt sometimes like I was really reaching for ideas of things which could feel unnatural- also a turn failing after an easy roll fail occasionally makes it hard to tell the story or move things forward. Otherwise we had a lot of fun.  I made one big tweak because my players like to work together and it felt like having to share their turns challenges stifled them from doing different things in the same place, so if two people went to the same place I gave them option of having their own challenges or assisting on specific challenges. If the specific challenge they assisted on worked it counted towards both of their challenge of whatever level.  I was worried about the intensity of one of the players having to die for the summoning, but the players had a lot of fun with it and it ended up having a witch player who the entire game had insisted that she was only considered a “witch” because she could read using real magic to get out of being the hanged man, which was hella fun.

I also had the town meeting be immediately followed by a cult meeting, where they could all talk and share info and plan the next day in character- which the players enjoyed.

the commenter below covered most manual confusions I had- I will add one thing which is that I assumed all the non hanged-man-contest roles during the summonings were + weird but I don’t think that’s explicitly laid out anywhere. Overall a lot of fun, definitely good for a one shot. The constantly changing stats are an interesting effect.

We ended up naming all the NPC’s variations of rhymes on Tom Hanks as a nod to I Really Love You- and taking some CRJ lyrics out of context and having a demon/ghost say them really makes them spooky.