Odds

Welcome to Sad Press Games. Most things here are free and/or pay-what-you-want. You may also want to visit Sad Press Games on DriveThruRPG and/or itch.io. If something costs money but you'd rather not pay for it, please drop me a line via Twitter (@jolwalton) or Gmail (josephclwalton), and I'll send you a PDF. Sad Press Games is basically just me (writing either as Jo Lindsay Walton or Alice the Candle); Sad Press Poetry is me and Samantha Walton.

Current Status

Things are pretty busy what with this and that (especially the solarpunk and utopias game jam and editing and publishing the associated collection of essays). That said, if you write, design, develop games, and you have something very cool and unusual and experimental idea that is looking for a home, do get in touch. Sad Press Games would be especially interested in games with political themes, storytelling engines, immersive storytelling, ludic writing, games about the future, games that help us to think / learn / imagine differently, generative aesthetics, data perceptualisation, games that create games, writing for immersive experiences, and things like that. Artists and layout designers, also please feel free to get in touch with your portfolios. Also check out the links list below for more interesting independent games.

SRDs

System Reference Documents are lightweight rule sets which may be a minimum viable version of a game, and/or offered to game designers as a chassis to build upon or to hack. Sad Press has created some SRDs, all free to use and most oriented toward narrativist game design:


Includes:
  • Rules Art Games Stories (RAGS), based on a token economy.
  • Spice, which has a distinctive approach to 'stats.'
  • Hat Adventure, which adapts a Taboo-like mechanism for storytelling.
  • Glimpse, inspired by tarot cards, memes, Mysterium and Dixit.
  • Engine, which features a little more strategy and crunch than the others.
  • Duplex, where every roll has a magnitude of success/failure.
... and more. There is also a crowdsourced list of SRDs and hackable games. Please feel free to suggest additions.

The Shrike

The Shrike is a GM-less storytelling game for one to four players, set in the skies above and the skies within.

RPG Generator


RPGs were my first introduction to procedurally generated content and aleatoric storytelling. So I wonder: what happens when you procedurally generate RPGs themselves? This is an experiment in development. See the pilot here. I would love to do a lot more with this one day. Who knows.


Scenario Exploration Tool

Connections is a storytelling game and scenario exploration tool, designed to help experts, policymakers and other stakeholders narratively explore risks and opportunities associated with technological, ecological, and social change. If you're running a workshop or other event and you'd like to use Connections or something similar, get in touch and I'd be happy to advise on facilitation.

Shrike Deck


A deck of playing cards and story prompts. Not yet in PoD or print-and-play formats, but hopefully coming soonish.

Dungeons & Drapers
The rules are complete, although the setting and the Spellcaster's Handbook are not. Realistically I don't see much opportunity to continue work on Dungeons & Drapers in the near future, sorry! Why you might be interested anyway: Dungeons & Drapers is a fairly extensive (90 pages) fantasy RPG with an OSR energy, and quite a few interesting quirks, especially in its setting and its approach to healing. Also known as Hunger Games & Dragons. Play a candle-maker moonlighting as a mage. Try not to get swept into the Prosperous Game ...

Ends

Ends is a diceless system where you search for your lost friends in a semi-submerged New York City. Ends has no dice or random number generation, and has a really unusual approach to character progression, incorporating almost board game-like elements. It has some PbtA energy, although it's not really a PbtA game.

Fury Road Trip

Fury Road Trip extends Ends's theme of soft apocalypse. It's Mad Max: Fury Road meets road trips with family or friends. It's a game about getting mad. It's a hack of Remi Porter's Family Road Trip, and very faintly inspired by compassion-focused therapy. It was originally created for Conjured Games's Soft Apocalypse anthology (forthcoming 2022, hopefully) but ended up getting a little big.

Bunnies & Cyborgs

Not out yet. A GM-less one-shot mini-TTRPG about doing your best, written for Conjured Games's Soft Apocalypse anthology. A bunny is anything cuddly and a cyborg is anything that goes bloop bloop bleep bleep, and in this game you play dozens or billions of both.

The Sorcerer Sends for a Sandwich

The Sorcerer Sends for a Sandwich is a two-player storytelling game about taking the time to eat properly when you're taking over the world.

The Vale

The Vale is a solo RPG ruleset for use in conjunction with AI Dungeon.

Daiquiries & Demigods

Daiquiris & Demigods, also known as Dungeons & Drinking, a featherweight universal system where drinking replaces dice. Play (if at all) with all the safety tools, and maybe a few extra of your own devising. The politics of this game are really something I should revisit.

Drama & Dice

Drama & Dice, a featherweight universal system with a core mechanic you can retrofit to most tabletop RPGs.

Shadows & Shapes

Shadows & Shapes, a lightweight dungeoncrawler based around a trick-taking card game. Of particular interest is the collaborative, puzzle-like aspect of combat.

Hacks, generators, and miscellaneous
  • Dungeons & Dead Presidents, brief guidelines on adding gambling to tabletop RPGs. This could really do with a reboot one day, incorporating material about alternative and complementary currencies.
  • Hack Health, an approach to HP and death in D&D (or any RPG).
  • Ambershadow Ambler, an experiment in collaborative game / story authoring, using Twine. Star Trekky.
  • Strange Cities is an excerpt from the larger Shrike generator, again using Twine. It explores speculative divisions of labor.
  • Bardabracadabra is a ridiculous bardic magic supplement for use with any fantasy tabletop RPG.
  • Dungeons & Decks is a ridiculous hack for using Tarot cards to cast magic in DnD and other fantasy tabletop RPGs. Instrumentalizes the numinous & numinizes the instrumental. What if you do real magic while you're doing fake magic? Includes Excel grimoire.
  • Worldbuilding Inspiration is a living document of interesting-looking books for worldbuilding purposes, leaning postapocalyptic / solarpunk.


Tabletop RPG Concept

Dreams & Dystopias: near future mutant teen adventures, based on the diceless Disempowered by the Apocalypse (TM) rule set. Working on this is at the bottom of a really long list, but you may be interested in the very distinctive and curious conflict-resolution mechanics (Chess moves!). I created the alpha edition, created a few materials for a more streamlined beta edition (Gifts list and sample play), then got bored and stopped.

Interactive Fiction


Skycrawl: to teach myself the interactive fiction engine Twine, I started building a little text-based dungeon crawler. It got a lot bigger than expected. You're very welcome to play. The setting is similar to that of Dungeons & Drapers, though without the "adventuring in secret" premise (it's set a little earlier, perhaps, in the Second Age). Related: here's a very short unseelie bit excerpted, and a YouTube video describing one of the techniques (using arrays to create locations). As of 2020, I may work on Skycrawl on and off, but the fragment is big enough to play and probably get killed by baddies (or ARE they?! I mean yes actually they are) before you reach its glitching edges. And if you do get to its glitches, maybe you can finish that story in your mind ... ?

About Me

This site is mostly Jo Lindsay Walton, sometimes writing as Alice the Candle. My other sites are here, here, & here. I'm on Twitter as @jolwalton. I run @sadpresspoetry with Samantha Walton. Despite the similar name, I'm not the author of a number of SFF novels including Among Others, Tooth & Claw, The Just City, etc. (But I recommend them!)

Links: mostly tabletop RPGs
Links: software, engines, tools
Links: other
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