We’ve had lots of excitement in the world of M. Allen Hall games these past couple of weeks! Read on to hear about the Godspark Kickstarter campaign and some thoughts on my game design process for Godspark.
Inside
Godspark Kickstarter is Live!
Game Design Thoughts: Urgency in Tabletop Games
Recently Played: One Page Left
Content Corner: Things Down the Well
Godspark
By the time you are reading this, the Kickstarter campaign for Godspark will be live. The campaign will run from today until February 6. I am very excited to see this game get out into the world, so if you are interested in one-player tabletop games, definitely check it out.
I recently talked to John Farrell at GamingTrend about TTRPGs including Godspark and some of my thoughts on its design. You can listen to the interview here.
Urgency in TTRPGs
When I started writing Godspark, I set out to write a tabletop role-playing game. I thought, “It would be super cool to play the part of someone resurrected in a graveyard of gods who then goes on to explore the bodies of dead gods.” The first version of the game used the Carta SRD to create those dead gods for the exploration phase of the game.
I did not want to write a journaling game, however. I wanted a game with stress. I wanted to make a game with resources that matter in a life-and-death sort of way. For that, I made your energy (the godsparks) decay over the course of the game. This forces you to action, seeking out gods and collecting more godsparks.
Early playtests quickly exposed an issue. While exploring the gods using the large arrays of playing cards described by the Carta system, that stress disappeared. You could take your time and wander through the gods, collecting resources without any threat of losing them.
I wanted to keep that stress; I wanted there to be an urgency to both the travel and exploration phases of the game. So, I changed how the gods work. In the final version of the game, you explore the gods in a series of levels, and each level has a limited number of areas for you to look through. Also, and importantly, the later you get to a god after it arrives on the map, the fewer areas are available to you.
The stress was back. Now, you need to make the most of every godfall as your life fades away. If you do not get to each godfall quickly, you will have fewer areas to explore and fewer godsparks to find. This forces you to use your godsparks on transportation and movement when you might otherwise focus on weapons. And all along you must also be saving up godsparks to use to cast the game-ending miracle of Ascension.
I had a lot of fun making Godspark, and I think I was able to capture the urgency that I was going for. Now, whether I succeeded in making a tabletop role-playing game or not is still up for debate. You may notice that on the Kickstarter page, I talk about the game as a “solo tabletop adventure game.” I would say that this game walks the line between TTRPG and board game, but that might be a discussion for another week. (You can read some other opinions on this topic over here.)
Recently Played: One Page Left
Last summer’s One-Page RPG Jam 2023 on Itch.io is brimming with quick, one-player TTRPGs (among them is one of my entries, Sneaky Witches). One of the most popular entries (as decided by Itch’s obscure “Popular” sorting algorithm) is One Page Left by M. Kirin.
In One Page Left, you take on the role of the (potential) victim in a horror movie, trying to escape your (attempted) murderer in a labyrinthine mansion. You begin the game by creating your character as well as the murderer using a few random tables. These details are written on the single piece of paper on which you play the game. That single page is the titular “one page left;” if you ever run out of room, the game ends (badly for your character).
While this game did a great job of creating tension, as well as recreating the Escheresque architecture of horror movie locations, the bit of game design that I liked most was how it advanced the writing prompts. The first time you roll any given number on the D6, you get a prompt that is more or less realistic (you hide in a closet). But with each subsequent re-roll of that number, the prompts get more and more bizarre, as the scenes in horror movies tend to do. Roll any number four times, and you have reached one of the several endings of the game. This approach gives the game decent re-playability, which I have found is an issue for both 1-page games and journaling games in general.
The game is (still) free, so if you have been considering trying out a journaling TTRPG, this would be a great place to start. You don’t need a big setup or hours of free time, and you can retry it a few times before it will feel repetitive.
Content Corner
We have another random table, this week with stats for both D&D 5e and Mörk Borg. Put an old well in a room of the dungeon, and you can be sure that curiosity will get the best of at least one player
Thank you!
That’s it for now. Thank you for reading, and don’t forget to check out the Godspark Kickstarter, running until February 6, 2024. Ink & Dice will be back in 2 weeks to recap how the campaign went and share a bit of the behind-the-scenes on running the Kickstarter.
— MAH