Kaiya’s Indie RPG Folder: Games 001-025

For more information about what this list is and why I’m making it, check out the Index for this series!

This is not the first indie TTRPG I’ve ever played (we’ll get to those shortly). It’s not even the first worldbuilding-focused indie TTRPG I’ve played; that honor goes to Dawn of Worlds, which I played with friends in 2008, but I no longer have the PDF for it. Microscope is simply the indie TTRPG with the oldest download timestamp in my indie TTRPG downloads folder, per my self-imposed rules for this list.

I downloaded Microscope before I had really gotten into the indie TTRPG scene. I think I got it as a worldbuilding tool to help flesh out a homebrew setting that my husband and I were developing, rather than as a game to be played. The difference is subtle but important – the pages and pages of meticulous procedures and examples that provide safety rails for it as a game seem extraneous and long-winded for a tool, and that may have contributed to why we never got around to using it.

It speaks to how historically significant Microscope is that when I first posted about this game on Bluesky, as the first entry of the Indie RPG Folder list there, and mentioned that I hadn’t played it yet, multiple people chimed in with their own experiences of the game and encouraging me to play. I did finally get to play a game of it in March 2025, thanks to the generosity and indefatigable scheduling efforts of Aaron Voigt, who I suspect immediately regretted what he had done when Cassi Mothwin, Josh Peters, Nathan of Reckless Attack, Matthew of AbyssalBrews, and I promptly built a pun-based slapstick space comedy with it.

This game and Dread (#140) were my first real doorways to indie RPGs. I first played this with larp friends at a house party around 2011, and was enthralled. I didn’t realize at the time how relatively small and tight-knit that particular corner of indie TTRPG design was, and that the friends I was playing with weren’t just Kickstarter backers for this game but would continue to pop up in the acknowledgements, credits, and playtesting sections of games I’d come across a decade later. In a sense, it feels like a missed opportunity – if I had gotten into indie TTRPG design in 2012 rather than 2022, how many more pillars of the community might I have met, how many fascinating design theory conversations might I have read on G+? But in another sense, the opportunity hasn’t been missed at all. Communities form, collide, and persist over decades, and I came to indie TTRPG design eventually by my own circuitous route, and somehow Nathan and I are social media mutuals now.

I backed this game on Kickstarter because the premise sounded cool, but when I read it, I was somewhat baffled by what to do or how to play it, because I wasn’t familiar with journaling games yet! I had expected a sort of artifact map-making game where most of the mechanics and the player’s creative energies were put into expanding the dungeon on a gridded map. I set the game aside without trying to play it because of that confusion. Revisiting it now that I’m much more familiar with journaling games as a genre, I can see the hidden scaffolding, and recognize that it’s primarily narrative scaffolding.

This is less of a game and more of a collection of roll charts. (But it’s in my Indie Games folder, so here it is.) Handy for quickly filling in flavorful details for a pirate-themed adventure!

Another case of not using something when I got it due to not quite understanding what it was for. Now that I’m more experienced and comfortable with reading and using SRDs, my impression is that Motif is several systems held together loosely – ripe for taking apart and modifying or bolting on to other SRDs.

These two games, taken together, provided the push that propelled me into indie TTRPGs. They’re both primarily lightweight solo journaling RPGs (although The Queen Returns has a light two-player mode), but my friend Adina and I combined them to form a two-person letter-writing larp: she played the titular Princess with a cursed sword, on the cusp of her queenhood, writing letters back home to her younger sister. I responded to these letters by playing The Queen Returns. Having someone else to co-construct a story was a good introduction to journaling games, especially in the areas where the open-endedness of the games didn’t provide much narrative structure.

From here on, my rate of acquisition of indie TTRPGs speeds up considerably, as I was downloading lots of games people were posting on Twitter Self-Promo Saturday. I didn’t yet know what was out there, so I didn’t know what I liked, and consequently a lot of these early RPG downloads aren’t to my taste today.

An extremely sweet and somewhat heartbreaking single-page RPG. A solo constellation-drawing game in honor of the early Soviet space dogs.

This game was marketed to the D&D crowd as a session-zero game to set up a shared party backstory around the death of an important NPC before a D&D campaign, but it was designed as (and functions quite well as) a standalone game.

I love tarot-flavored games in general, but frankly, I bounced off of this hard. Not sure if there was some logical leap about the game structure that I didn’t make, or if I’m just not suited for OSR games.

Disclaimer: My impression is NOT of the current version of the game. The copy I have is version 0.2 of the core rulebook, from July 2021, and it looks like development on the game has continued since then, with the latest version released in December 2024.

That said: I find it impossible to grasp what’s going on in this document. I’m not aiming to tear it down, but for me, it has served as a curious example-by-negative of what a TTRPG rulebook needs. The placement and pacing of introducing lore and mechanics, the layout and formatting, the font choices and how they’re used – this game doesn’t commit any overt Design Sins that someone can point to and highlight as an obvious example of a mistake, but taken all together, the game exerts a force of antipathy on me so powerful that I can’t help trying to study and analyze it.

In the distant future, space raccoons/possums/pigeons do the same things in orbit as they do on Earth now: dig through human trash for treasures. A cute premise that made me smile when I read it. I was never going to be in the target demographic to get a table together and play, though. (Maybe you are?)

OSR is not my jam. I think I really grasped that for the first time when I printed out a copy of Down We Go to show to my husband’s best friend, a man who’s been in the same 2E D&D campaign for twenty years. He almost immediately started going through character creation and talking through different builds and strategies he might expect to use, while I was still struggling to understand what the layout placement of each of the game elements on the sheet meant. Where I saw only a confusing jumble of pieces, he could see an entire Lego kit, illustrated instruction booklet and all.

Here we are: the SRD that launched me into writing indie TTRPGs. A month after downloading the Caltrop Core SRD, I had a playtest version of Her Odyssey.

Lex did a great job of choosing and distilling a single mechanic and making it incredibly approachable to newbies, myself included. The benefit is that there was a boom of new designers with a Caltrop Core game as their very first game. The drawback, insofar as it was a drawback, is that lots of the games I downloaded over the next few months were Caltrop Core games by brand-new designers, with identical or nearly-identical mechanics. There’s not a lot to say in those cases that doesn’t devolve into just criticizing the paint job on the framework, but I’ll try to be fair and reasonable.

I backed the Kickstarter for this game on behalf of the Twice Bitten crew, planning to play a quick fun session as a palate cleanser between Twice Bitten and Frost Bitten. By the time it was released and I downloaded it, we had canceled Frost Bitten. It was a perfectly normal span of time between the time the Kickstarter concluded and the time that the PDF was published – the timing just happened to line up with the shift in Twice Bitten group dynamics and burnout. It seems like a fun game with well-thought-out mechanics supporting its premise; I’m just unlikely to play it because of that association.

I wanted to play this game ever since I downloaded it. It’s very rules-light – it’s a single page of simple and straightforward instructions – but those instructions get at exactly the sort of balance between revelatory honesty and veiled-metaphor that I adore.

When I finally did play, it was a much rawer and riskier experience than I had expected. This is not a warning against the game at all: your experience is one hundred percent dependent on who you choose to play with and what you each bring, how willing you are to open up. I deeply trusted the person I was playing with. Even so, I was shocked how effectively a single innocent-looking page of instructions constructed an experience of profound vulnerability.

A compact and fairly straightforward action noir/heist skin on the Caltrop Core framework. I don’t know much about the genre, so I can’t judge how on-the-nose the tropes are.

A fairly straightforward space fighter combat skin on the Caltrop Core framework. The document includes an example mission with enemy timings and stats, which is quite convenient!

After reading Whispering City and Trench Run, I decided that I didn’t want to make a Caltrop Core game in the same mold – genre-heavy, rules-light, multiplayer games with character classes that each provided one or two stat tweaks. I didn’t want my game to be just one more standard Caltrop Core game, interchangeable with all the rest. I ended up writing Her Odyssey instead, and this was the start of my penchant for taking SRDs apart and changing them, augmenting them, or mashing them together.

020. Hollow Knight: Masks of Fate by BluBirdJay

Downloaded 12/6/21

This is the sort of project that stands as testament to what one enthusiastic amateur can accomplish. Of course you can argue endlessly about how “faithful” to the original it is – and obviously I could offer criticism on the layout and graphic design. But I didn’t produce a 39-page game with deckbuilding elements, level-up mechanics, and dozens of NPC/enemy statblocks as my very second game ever, so really, what ground do I have to stand on?

[This game was still accessible and available for download when I was originally putting together the list. The designer has made it private since then.]

This game continues to be a personal attack on us all.

An adorable and wholesome solo game about being a housecat for a day, mapping out your activities hour by hour and seeing how good your day ultimately is.

023. Puppies & Pawprints by Robert Vance

Downloaded 1/1/22

I was telling a friend about Domesticat and he said “if you’re interested in games where you play as cute pets, you should look at this!” So I pass that advice on to you.

This game hits me right in the immigrant feelings. The family business/convenience store side is less familiar to me, but the generational conflicts and misunderstandings really resonate.

This game is a personal attack on me.

I mean this quite literally. Hannah, perhaps better known as the creator behind Chaotic Shiny, is a larper who was local to me for several years; we ran a small larp convention together in the Sierra Nevada Mountains each year from 2021 to 2023 (with half credit for 2024). She quickly noticed my tendency to sacrifice myself whenever possible in larps, and wrote this joke game where every character has this tendency and must fight for the right to throw themselves selflessly on the Doom Sword. The working title of the game was Attack on Kaiya 1.

The name stuck – both of them. In our local larping circles, “doom sword” is now a general term for a situation that requires a player to volunteer to sacrifice themselves. And Hannah has written two more tragicomic Attack on Kaiya larps since then! Ash and Rowan (“Attack on Kaiya 2”) and The Inevitable Death of Princess Marjani (“Attack on Kaiya 3”) are also available for sale in her Itch store.