New Project Leak: A Game for Scribes
Last Updated: 2024-04-22 00:00:00 -0500
In a previous post, I was pretty clear that new projects and new subject areas were coming to Arcana Labs. While part of that is going to be a bit of an overhaul to the site to support it and make it more portfolio than business, I do have one small announcement I wanted to make before I dig into that heavy lift.
Over the last week or so, I have been developing a new solo journalling RPG that I have been calling A Game For Scribes. Over the course of the game, you tell yourself a story about growing from a single small village to a kingdom, through the eyes of the scribes documenting a series of rulers in the area you build yourself. The project is designed to tie into the Wisteria series without having to be married directly to it, and I’ve included variant rules to support multiplayer sessions as well as using the rules to generate adventures for other popular TTRPGs.
In order to play Scribes, you really only need the rules, a way to write, and a deck of tarot cards (or their digital equivalent). The game is divided into turns, where you use the tarot deck to determine a historical event and its outcome, then spend some downtime managing your domain. From the notes you create in this way, you can then fill journals, draw maps, build out wikis - however you like to tell yourself the story of the kingdom you’re developing around yourself.
Ths style of game has been my new obsession for 2024, ever since some new friends introduced me to the similar game Apothecaria and one of my favourite artists announced they were part of a similar project, Dreadfarer. It’s my hope to get through playtesting as soon as I can and get the rules themselves out in the open for other people to play by the end of summer. I’m hoping to get both PDF and hardcopy versions of the rulebook out there, and while I’m not yet firm on licensing, I also hope to build the license out in such a way that if folks want to make supplementary material for the game they’re free to do so. While the core rules I’m providing are pretty simple, simple is good in rule sets - it would be pretty easy to add extra things for players to do using the same basic mechanics.
(And yes, patrons: the PDF version of the rules will be included in your back-end repo access privileges).
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