February OMGAM Singer Moon
filed under game design on 02 Mar 2019 tagged narrative, d6s, theory, rpglet, singer moon, one microrpg game a month challenge, omgam, pbta, cards, everway, and weylandt
Here’s February’s game, Singer Moon. It’s a stripped down, barebones, pbta variation on an unpublished game I’ve been working on for a while, tentatively called Weylandt.
I’m pretty happy with how it distilled down, and with the card mechanic (printable file at the same link and there’s a stripped down table version in the game file).
It’s solo/gmless, has no explicit theme, and should work for any genre. It can also be used as a simple framework/oracle to guide the story while using another system for the mechanics, especially if you work in a motif table.
Essentially, it’s designed to model a GM who says “yes” fairly often as the first “layer” of play. You narrate going into danger, collecting volition tokens each time you do. Then when there’s an oracle question or point where you’d normally go to dice, you draw a card for the GM’s answer (50% yes, 50% no and a stated lesser danger comes to pass).
If you don’t like that answer, you can spend volition tokens to challenge it and use your system’s mechanics or Singer Moon’s, but the stakes are upped. The built-in mechanics are pbta-inspired, use two d6s, and should be very easy to remember.
It has no explicit scenes or wound gauge, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. It seems very common sense that if your hero passes out you jump to a new scene, but perhaps that should have been made explicit. A bit scary to run with no requirements to yell, “cut!” and shift to dire straits!
As usual, these are not playtested by anyone but me yet. Let me know if you see anything weird or odd or just want to discuss.
Note: if you don’t have a d14 or want to use a dice roller, you can model a d14 by rolling 1d8 and 1d6 (or flipping a coin). Reroll the d8 until it shows 7 or less. If the d6 is 4,5, or 6 (half the time), the result is the d8’s value plus 7, otherwise, it’s just the d8’s value.
