Kaiya’s Indie RPG Folder: Games 026-050

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

Where do I even start with Bolarius? Such a beautiful and gentle and fabulously impressive setting, offering peace in the everyday complexity of ordinary life but teeming with secrets for the adventurous. Bolarius is technically a 5e-compatible product, but in my opinion it shines better as a standalone product.

Interesting premise and immaculate vibes. The layout looks just like a Penguin Classics paperback. I feel like there was a LOT of hype around Dethrone when it came out; I’m surprised I haven’t heard more about it since.

[butterfly man meme] Is this OSR?

Downloaded for a streamed playtest with TPK Roleplay (now defunct). The author wrote a retrospective calling it a mostly failed project. I’m not sure I agree. The biggest tripping block probably was the rule that the major PCs have the same name as the players at the table, yet are explicitly not you – it did lead to the expectation that you could only dictate “your” PC’s actions and outcomes. But I think there might have been ways to lean into that.

If the premise sounds interesting at all to anyone else, I highly recommend you give the ashcan version a try. I think it’s too promising an idea to only ever be played/playtested by one group.

(More recently, the author wrote a second post about it with some thoughts on how to improve it.)

This download was the first serious interaction I had with Shawn and Navi Drake; I got the HEDGE ashcan as a free game for interacting with a giveaway they were doing. I’ve always wanted to round up a group and play it – and perhaps, now that the full HEDGE Kickstarter has funded, I’ll be able to get that game together!

A short and sweet game that takes a much kinder perspective on my Wicca-poseur teenage self than I do. Originally downloaded for a thoroughly enjoyable actual-play with TPK Roleplay.

A clear and concise guide to making a Wretched & Alone game. I came back to this (as well as several other SRDs) when I was writing Aspire, as one of my references for how to best structure a readable, usable SRD.

What’s there to say about Yazeba’s that hasn’t already been said? Reading this ashcan gives you a very clear idea of what the game is about and how it plays. It actually convinced me not to back the Kickstarter, because I immediately saw that it would be a poor fit for my regular table. I am, however, eternally hopeful that someone in my local TTRPGsphere will successfully get a game together and invite me.

Someday I will write a LUMEN game; I just need to find a good mechanical and narrative premise first. The Tags are the most interesting part of the system to me – I see them as the ludonarrative key, the crucial interface between the flavor of the setting and the limits of the mechanics. Until I can devise a sparkling new take on the Tags that will enable my LUMEN game to stand out, this will stay firmly on the back burner.

A worldbuilding/mapmaking/history-making game, much in the vein of Dawn of Worlds. If I were to guess, I probably downloaded this for comparative research while I was designing Pearl & Provenance.

A first-day download to support one of my then-Twitter-mutuals. BBEG is a garden-standard variety of Caltrop Core game: a lightweight multiplayer game with character classes that give you slightly different roll bonuses, and that leaves all narrative gameplay structure to the GM’s imagination.

A gorgeous, glorious game. It’s possible that if I came across it after I had already read dozens of Wretched & Alone games, it wouldn’t have hit so hard. But it was one of the very first, and it opened my eyes to the depth of the potential emotional impact and personal catharsis of solo journaling TTRPGs. You can see the influence of Paramour’s philosophy all throughout Galatea.

The precursor game to Cataclysmal (game #029). I downloaded it in preparation for playing in a TPK Roleplay actual-play series where we would have played our way through a list of collaborative worldbuilding games. The series was canceled when TPK Roleplay dissolved, and putting together some kind of similar series of worldbuilding games (either streamed or as a private group) has been on my list of eventual projects for years.

A multiplayer Caltrop Core game about resisting the will of a supernatural being who thinks they’re entitled to run your life. Not my jam, but I can see how it can be cathartic.

I feel like Clean Spirit is underrated amongst Cassi’s games. Even in this bare-text playtest version, the warmth and heart of the game shine through the rules text.

If I were to put together a shortlist of solo TTRPGs to learn from, Root & Knot would be at the top of the list. I have a huge respect for games that play with diegesis and ludonarrative harmony, and the mechanics to selectively change the rules text here are a prime example of how cleverly that can be executed.

I have an immense respect for lyric games and their writers. I don’t think I’ll ever play them, where “play” may or may not be identical to “appreciate them the way they’re meant to be appreciated”. (This doesn’t rule out me trying to write one someday.)

Just looking at The Wretched, you’d be hard-pressed to distinguish it from the host of Wretched & Alone games that came after. The layout is simple, the rules succinct and straightforward. It’s prominent and well known because it came first. But there are so many other games that have taken inspiration from it and built on top of it since then, that I have to wonder, at what point do those later constructions completely eclipse the original foundation?

I’m still not really conversant in the ways of OSR, but this Caltrop Core OSR game seems to highlight how lightly OSR rests on any specific ruleset and how much it rests on vibes and rules formatting.

A chillingly delightful one-page musing on navigating through liminal spaces, built on Caltrop Core. Lex had just hosted the second Caltrop Core game jam, for which I submitted Pearl & Provenance, and I was downloading a lot of other entries on this particular day.

The first edition is, in my opinion, one of the best games to come out of the second Caltrop Core jam, and I’m thrilled to see that it’s been picked up for a spruced-up second edition by Plus One Exp. A lovely communal city-building game, passing through a single evening in the emerging city’s life.

A cute game about a group of animals making a perilous journey to a safer home. Notably, one of the few multiplayer Caltrop Core games that has a specific, defined endgame encounter.

Another of the best games that came out of the second Caltrop Core game jam. Thomas really took aim at all the depressed and burnt-out millennials out there with this game and then threw his fishing harpoon as hard as he could.

Reading these for the first time was a fairly strange experience – I kept wondering whether I was reading a TTRPG or a secrets-and-powers theater larp. The character sheets look like condensed larp character sheets to me, with building-block pieces of potential scenes embedded in them and everything. I’ve always wondered whether I could adapt these, tweak each sheet a bit and add enough of an exterior framework to serve as a GMless larp.

The flavor of HEXFALL is breathtaking. The hex dive mechanics are understatedly evocative. I find myself wishing this wasn’t a rules-light game, and exploring what it could become with even more ludonarrative structure.