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WatcherDM

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A member registered Apr 08, 2021 · View creator page →

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Yeah, no worries. So the Random Encounters section lists which cards become blank on defeat. King, Queen, Jack, and Nine can all become blank. Turning blank is explicitly stated in the rule for each territory when it happens (except queens). All other cards retain their effects. Also, you have to defeat those cards (or activate them in the case of Queen and Jack) as they can be flipped remotely by map, oracle, or mountain climbing and in the case of Jacks, there are special rules per wonder. For instance, the Garden of Plenty only goes blank when the party rolls a one or two on a spoil check, and the vault only when it has been opened with the vault key and looted. The oracle never goes blank, nor does the Twisting Pyramid.

Grinding does require that you move and come back, think of it as restocking the dungeon. You have hunted the beast in its homeland and need to clear the area so they have time to repopulate. The rules for this are in the play procedures; each turn, the party token must be moved, unless prevented by a hard land.

Megabeasts are actually once per game, per beast, as each Megabeast is a different creature with a different Weapon of Legend in its hoard. This allows each of the four players to collect the weapons needed to defeat the end beast. Also, it’s super satisfying to go back to each of the lairs with your specialist (suited character) yolked out with Elven Cloak, maybe a holy rod and a spell book to really add some dice to that encounter and mission impossible the treasure out from under them. Also worth noting here, you cannot kill a Megabeast, they are too large and powerful for that. This is why magic swords and weapons of legend provide no bonus there. The idea is you are robbing their hoard.

Hey, thanks for writing! I’m happy to answer some of your questions. First: yes, playing solo is very dangerous and 7s and up are considered deadly without the right equipment. The solution in the core game (RAW) is to prioritize carrying a compass, but if it breaks you would be dead. We also have 2 house rule solutions that can work pretty well:

  1. Every day spent lost in the hardlands, reduce the difficulty of the hardland by 1. So you will spend at least 2 days in an 8 and 1 day in a 7 lost, but eventually, if you have enough supplies and few enough injuries, you will escape.

  2. Easy mode: every day spent in the hard lands add a bonus die. This basically makes it very unlikely to spend more than 1 or 2 days in a hard land and works well if you want to have a game where you are more continuously exploring.

Supplies are used to tend your wounds in that if you are injured, you require additional supplies. You are correct that there are only a few ways to heal injuries, though you have ignored the oracle (Jack of Clubs) who offers healing. Also, the Holy Rod technically allows you to remove an injury from one player, by adding an injury to yourself. So its not really healing in the traditional sense. It is the intention of the design that you do exploration loops, each time you come back to town you get an opportunity to purchase a random magic item, and the need to choose whether you will stock up on supplies or spend your treasure another way is one of the critical strategic anchors in the game.

It’s also worth noting that as you get more powerful and flip more cards you become better able to venture farther. Knowing where beasties and hardlands are so can avoid them, or knowing where goodlands are so you can resupply on the way can be the difference between dying on a run or ridding the realm of the unearthed evil, or even, the end beast! Scouring the land for the weapons of legend and using maps to reveal difficult to reach sections all play into the fun. You should also remember that the beasties and the good lands are always there, so once you are equipped to defeat a beastie, or find a weak one (a 3 of your suit for example) farming it for treasure is a good way to prepare for an deeper expedition into the wilds.

Once you have acquired enough power and magic you will not need to return home as frequently, or at all. But then once you have acquired the last quest, you can not return home without facing the end beast. So you will have to rely on the second town for healing services, and then only if you have defeated the City of Thieves.

As you can tell, I love this game so much. I could talk about it for hours lol. You might be excited to know I just commissioned a bunch of new human-made art to fill a new version of it for a print run and an expanded edition. We will be packing in lots of optional rules, house rules, fun alternate play styles, and all kinds of fun in the upcoming release, so check back. In the mean time we wrote a blog post about doing QuestDiving to add under sea exploration to your QuestCrawl game: https://watcherdm.com/2025/04/08/questcrawl-underwater-rules/

https://meatheadsrpg.carrd.co/ is giving me page not found. Am I missing something?

I just realized you have a task here to fill one in and photograph it, I have used this a number of times and have some results:

Anyway, I love this thing. I hope these are useful to you somehow.

Thanks for using my stock art! I love this dwarf too, you’ve got good taste

Got a print copy of this, so good!

Yeah I had considered just adding more contact information to the bookmarks, but wanted to try making something smaller anyway and the business card printer doesn’t do bookmarks ;)

Thanks man.

Awesome. Thanks! I’m glad you like it. Look forward to seeing more games from you!

Great, I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please feel free to leave a review and tell us about your sessions. One of my favorite things about QuestCrawl is seeing all the cool stories arise out of the geography created from card placement.

So, I live in Canada, same hat. Also, the entire game is just the two pager you see in the screen shots. There is a 20 page zine version you get by buying it (also available in print) but if you want to play, just download the screen shots. They have all the rules. That said, I’ll throw a couple community copies up. Nobody buys anything on itch anyway.

Done

Amazing. Super fun read! Spellchecker in me found player winds instead of player wins in the witch section.

Wow, thanks. Yeah you can reach me at gabriel@watcherdm.com.

Nice. Just started playing this the other night. Great stuff!

Absolutely, worth the read. Keep creating, you’ve got talent.

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This is solid work. Excellent choice in art. The writing is clear if not concise. Organizationally I think this works for what it is doing. Interesting conceit to make protecting the village a board game hex crawl kind of thing. Lots of cool magic items. I think you go a hair lighter on the grey colour you use on alternating rows for random encounter table and monsters.

Crazy fun art, I love the colour palette. Very fun ideas. I thought it was a little strange that all the NPCs had stat blocks except Pelegrine. The tower layout slaps. And yeah, I love / hate bianca. She gives me the ick and I am here for it.

That makes more sense. Either way, cool entry.

Pretty fun to read. I like the concept. Wondering though, if the players just go along with the devil, accepting that this is a dream, this seems like it would be over pretty quickly. There is also some contradictory statements made about Morpheus. For example, it says he is incapable of lying, but then in The three doors he says it is impossible to open doors 1 and 3 despite the check for doing so being only 14. Over all I like the idea and I think the art and design of the document are very high quality.

Yeah the cats themes were heavy in this one and I am loving it. During play test my character latched onto Twice Lion immediately and the Mirrormane Monster Parts came from a moment where my character (a tailor) asked if he could make a cloak out of the pelts. Love the ShadowDark style of your submission, we have a project on ice that has a town being turned into rats, love that concept.

I thought the layout and art were very fitting and evocative.

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I think I like the punchy npc descriptions in this the most. Cool stuff.

This is great. Really a toolbox for this little region you’ve made. Punchy evocative text feels highly usable. Well done.

What an incredible idea. Well executed. Look forward to running it.

Wild read. Dense as they come. Would benefit from more structure to help use the information at a glance, but that just may be down to how much information is here. Having the maps in the middle of the layout is cool. Man, this thing is just wild. You made a 53 room 2 story dungeon, one of two mind you, and not a single room is empty or uninteresting. Insane. Bravo.

Really well done. Had a lot of fun reading. Love the ideas in here. I especially like the telegraphing you did in the mini coliseum. Totally gonna steal that idea. Well done.

Amazing ideas here, I love it. Very fun. I think the concept of the page numbers on the map is dope, the execution was a bit of a miss for me. Excellent presentation overall.

Thank you so much. Very high praise coming from you. I love the work in your module. The art takes me straight to the cave with a 60’s fabulous furry freak brothers vibe. I dig the hell out of. I hope your players loot lots of pirates!

That’s super interesting feedback, I wonder which interactions you mean? All the spirit freedom interactions are on the spirit page, and the boons are all on one page so they are ideal for tracking those mechanisms. But yeah would love to learn which interactions you are referring to. Thanks a bunch for reading and rating. I think a final commercial release of this will include some fun stuff like labeled maps and hand outs. We are also going to do a foundry module.

Thanks, I really admire your submission. Looking forward to giving a thorough play through. Totally get it with the bullet hell, it was a shot I was taking to fight back against the absence of white space. Also structured lists get rid of so many filler words so it was a trade off we made to buy back lines ;)

Thanks for rating! And yeah you nailed it, we tried to put as much in as we could fit, which definitely cost us some white space. Tried to fight back against that loss by using structure to ensure it was usable at a glance. Definitely considering making a hand out for tracking spirit status and other stuff, just was out of scope for the jam. The map art is definitely intended to be abstract and evocative, so yeah not likely to get a good sense of actual scale from it, later versions include the hex grid overlay. Hope your players enjoy it!

What a kind thing to say. We’ve been working pretty hard to hit the level of some of the other creators we admire. Glad you like Zotel, its a favorite of mine as well, LONG LIVE TROIKA!

Dude, thanks so much! I am really inspired by the art in your module as well, going to be rating it soon. Hope your players enjoy Gezeri as much as we did!

That’s fair, I think this level of density is for a certain breed of OSR DM. Sorry it was a miss for you. Hope you’ll steal the parts you like.

This was a great read. Really enjoyable. Traps were a bit complicated to parse. Good structure. Well done.

Fun to read, interesting setup. Good layout and organization. Probably will need to flip to map regularly in book format.

Nothing to download?

Our submission is built on top of that mechanism as we found it super compelling as well. Its not really canonical but might help show how one creator did it. Let me know what you end up coming up with yourself.

https://watcherdm.itch.io/seven-sealed-spirits

I’ll admit I hadn’t played Knave until this game jam. I got the book, and used it a bit for tables during our SoloDark sessions, but I was floored when we actually got into the play testing. The rules are so elegant and flexible. Really enjoyed the play test and dev process on this. Thanks for the kind words. Thanks for playing!