This is a small,
semi-functional GM-less tabletop RPG for 3 or 4 people. It's a
survival horror game set in a struggling retail store. It was
originally created for the April 2011 round of “The Ronnies” game design contest and
published here on itch.io after some minimal editing and graphic
design as part of the Unearth Your Old Games Jam. I'm releasing it
as an unfinished prototype and don't expect to do any more
development on it.
the design contests called for picking exactly two ingredients from a
set of four to inspire the game, and I picked “amazon” and
“chains”. At the time I had just seen an announcement related to
Amazon Cloud Services, so the “retailing” link between “chains”
and “amazon” seemed like a good thematic starting point. I felt
like it would be amusingly satirical to set a survival horror
scenario in a retail store that was struggling to survive in a world
ever more dominated by the likes of big-box chains and Amazon.com.
Why is it only
The dice and cards
system is a bit clunky in play, and maybe too swingy. But more
importantly, one vital system in the game is the mechanic related to
where items can be found on The Owner's play sheet. At the time I
sort of assumed that typical gamer behavior would be to concoct
convoluted plans to resolve situations, usually premised on using
particular items in creative ways. I figured that people would be
saying things like “do we have any rope?” all the time, which
would cause The Owner's mechanics to kick in, which would tend to
throw monkey wrenches into the plans since the items would tend to not be easily available. However, while people with a more
old-school style might play that way, at the time there were a lot of
popular “declare a fact” style story games which encouraged
people to just say things like “I use some rope to start fashioning
a lasso...” without first checking in about whether their character
had access to rope. If you do that in this game The Owner is stuck in
an awkward flow-breaking situation where they have to use their
mechanics and then figure out how to retcon what the other player
said, since the mechanics often result in the item not being easily
accessible.
But it does kind
of work! I ran a playtest session shortly after it was designed and we had
some zany fun with it.
Any noteworthy design
While not an
explicit Powered-by-the-Apocalypse game, I was inspired by PbtA-style
“fictional triggers” in this game, and it uses them to construct
a GM-less structure. For example, The Regular's “What was that?”
mechanic has them introduce something ominous when there's a lull,
which is a characterful way of doing something that a GM might be
responsible for in other games.
semi-functional GM-less tabletop RPG for 3 or 4 people. It's a
survival horror game set in a struggling retail store. It was
originally created for the April 2011 round of “The Ronnies” game design contest and
published here on itch.io after some minimal editing and graphic
design as part of the Unearth Your Old Games Jam. I'm releasing it
as an unfinished prototype and don't expect to do any more
development on it.
Inspiration
The parameters ofthe design contests called for picking exactly two ingredients from a
set of four to inspire the game, and I picked “amazon” and
“chains”. At the time I had just seen an announcement related to
Amazon Cloud Services, so the “retailing” link between “chains”
and “amazon” seemed like a good thematic starting point. I felt
like it would be amusingly satirical to set a survival horror
scenario in a retail store that was struggling to survive in a world
ever more dominated by the likes of big-box chains and Amazon.com.
Why is it only
semi-functional?
The dice and cardssystem is a bit clunky in play, and maybe too swingy. But more
importantly, one vital system in the game is the mechanic related to
where items can be found on The Owner's play sheet. At the time I
sort of assumed that typical gamer behavior would be to concoct
convoluted plans to resolve situations, usually premised on using
particular items in creative ways. I figured that people would be
saying things like “do we have any rope?” all the time, which
would cause The Owner's mechanics to kick in, which would tend to
throw monkey wrenches into the plans since the items would tend to not be easily available. However, while people with a more
old-school style might play that way, at the time there were a lot of
popular “declare a fact” style story games which encouraged
people to just say things like “I use some rope to start fashioning
a lasso...” without first checking in about whether their character
had access to rope. If you do that in this game The Owner is stuck in
an awkward flow-breaking situation where they have to use their
mechanics and then figure out how to retcon what the other player
said, since the mechanics often result in the item not being easily
accessible.
But it does kind
of work! I ran a playtest session shortly after it was designed and we had
some zany fun with it.
Any noteworthy design
elements?
While not anexplicit Powered-by-the-Apocalypse game, I was inspired by PbtA-style
“fictional triggers” in this game, and it uses them to construct
a GM-less structure. For example, The Regular's “What was that?”
mechanic has them introduce something ominous when there's a lull,
which is a characterful way of doing something that a GM might be
responsible for in other games.
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