After an AMAZING weekend at GenCon, our lead designer Matt came back inspired to do some one page TTRPGs. So here they are - one already release, and one soon to be released by the end of this month.
If you've never played or read a one-page TTRPG before, they are a fantastic way to try something new with your game group without having to crack some ponderous tome of new rules. They play more like board games, but can be even faster to set up. They typically involve some sort of tight, focused narrative ("you are criminal bears stealing honey", for example) that is conveyed with minimal stats or mechanics. Everything is focused around telling the game's narrative, and they are rarely designed for long running campaigns. But that doesn't make them any less fun. In fact they make for fantastic one-shots that can even flesh out existing campaign worlds with fun side-stories.
"Did you hear..."
Designed with more traditional board games like Coup and Resistance in mind, this is a GM-less roleplaying game all about secret keeping & sharing. It is setting / genre agnostic, allowing the secrets to be about whatever you'd like them to be. You could be spies overthrowing a tyrannical government, or vain aristocrats stirring up drama against your rivals.
Everyone takes turns roleplaying as their characters and exchanging secrets (or lies) on strips of paper. Each person has their own secret goal, encouraging some to lie and hoard secrets while others want to spill as much tea as they can.
You can embellish the story as much or as little as you can. You could even use the game's Key Secret mechanic to establish a primary goal for a group, thus adapting it to enable a scene of social intrigue and deception into any other TTRPG.
You can find "Did you hear..." along with literally hundreds of other one page TTRPGs on the Unknown Dungeon 2023 One Page RPG Jam. Not all are using this year's "Rumours and Secrets" theme, but ours certainly is!
"Slime Time"
One of our favorite tropes for One-Page TTRPGs is anything that lets you play as the monsters. We spend so much time fighting off these classic dungeon denizens; it's time they got the spotlight!
In "Slime Time", you play the part of one of our favorite creature types: slimes! Or oozes, depending on your original system of choice. These little shlorpy bois rarely get to speak or center themselves as primary characters, so we thought it high time that we get to follow a group of slimes as they dissolve their way through the world one bit of wood, stone, or metal at a time.
Are you a group of captured slimes escaping an alchemist's secret lab? Or are you moving in to a new dungeon to claim it as your own? Or maybe you're infiltrating a gelatin cooking contest in order to score the delicious trophy for yourselves (by any means necessary). The world is your very dissolvable oyster in this fun one-page romp.
Thanks to RPG Elise and the rest of the Red Knight Inn folks who helped peer review this creation of ours. You can find it and all of the other fantastic one-page submissions from the crew over on the Red Knight TTRPG Summer Jam page.
Update: Slime Time is live! Go pick up your copy today.
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