I think I’m making a game for the one-page RPG jam.

Currently, I have some ideas, which I’m going to try to make into a playable game in this thread. Maybe that’s a thing other people are interested in seeing? (If not, just skip over the rest of this post.)

The theme of the jam is “Rumors & Secrets”. I had a different idea for a game before the theme was announced. (It’s about backwoods Pennsylvania witchcraft, I might make that some other time.) My thought for the theme is to make a game about an urban legend, specifically Polybius.

Or maybe not Polybius per se, but a fictionalized version of the legend so you have some leeway to invent your own details and aren’t constrained by the real legend.

Current thought on the premise: your friend went missing recently. Police aren’t any help finding them, so you’re going to do it.

They had recently become obsessed with a bizarre videogame urban legend. When you went to their house, you found that game there. You played it, it would reveal some clue, and it messed with your head somehow. Now everything is weird and hallucinatory, you’re not sure what is real, impossible things seem to happen to you.

(There’s a solo protagonist PC, but that role rotates from player to player. You play the PC one scene, then the player to your left plays them the next scene. The other players take on other roles, more or less splitting up the traditional GM role between them.)

Polybius and the friend are both defined by rumors. Players take turns adding rumors to one or the other until each has at least 3 rumors about them. When making a rumor, the player is saying “this is a thing I’ve heard about them, but I don’t know if that is true or false”. Each scene will focus on one of the rumors,

Possibly, there’s also The Mystery, which is defined in a similar way. Instead of rumors for the Mystery, you have theories of the case. During character creation, everyone collaborates to create 3 theories of the case. Each scene about the Mystery eliminates one of those, until the last theory is proven.

Originally, I fiddled with some dice mechanics for the game, but they didn’t feel right for this. Dice are too concrete and certain, you have a set probability and clear outcomes. What I wanted was hallucinatory confusion, paranoia, implications over certainty.

I think I’m going to make this a one-page, paired down version of my game The Mystery Creature of Claytonsville PA.

That game had the right sort of vibe for what I want from this game, I think.

Specifically, I’m interested in the spotlight mechanics as central aspect of play. I wrote about this last year when working on the Mystery Creature game.

If I carefully construct the right list of spotlight questions, I can use repeating spotlight moments to construct the whole story, highlighting aspects that fit the mood/tone/style of the game. This should help get across the hallucinatory, creepy, weird, ambiguous feel of play ina way that dice won’t.

That’s more or less what I’ve figured out so far for the game. There are still a lot uncertain. What are the non-PC roles? Do I keep the same 4 spotlights as in the Mystery Creature game? Do we still use playing cards for role assignment and scene framing? How far should this drift from the Mystery Creature game? Is it still too similar? Can I fit all this on a single page?