Indie Systems: Wretched & Alone, as a Designer

Wretched & Alone is a game system that has seen a significant amount of use since its creation. Chris Bissette’s collection of Wretched & Alone games on Itch.io has nearly 100 entries, but there’s no way that accounts for everything on the site that uses this ruleset. For me, this framework is also one of the most challenging that I have attempted to work work.

As I say “attempted” because every single game I have tried to create using the Wretched & Alone system has ended up on the cutting room floor. Every single one, in my opinion, had (and still has) viability, but I struggle with fitting together all the mechanics into a cohesive whole.

In our post last week, we discussed the different mechanics of this framework: The cards, the dice, the tower, and the tokens. Generally, my biggest hurdle has been the cards.

For example, I have an idea for a W&A game based around the story Romeo and Juliet: Two lovers who can’t be together because of their family’s status and hatred for one another. The tower represents your relationship: Stable at first, but deteriorating and wobbling as time goes on under the pressure of what you have to do to be together. The dice function as usual, giving you the number of prompts each turn.

But the cards. What do the cards represent? What does each suit reflect? The individual cards are easier: The King, the Patriarch of the family. Queens, the Mothers. Jacks, a close friend or family member. But how do those relate to each suit, and what does each suit mean, and how in the hell do we get prompts for every single card?

And so, I continue to struggle with multiple concepts for Wretched & Alone games that I can’t figure out how to build and put into words.

All of this is to say: Wretched & Alone is complex framework with a lot of moving parts that all need to weave together to create a comprehensive game for your player. It’s incredible to me that so many designers have made this system work for them and helped their players create unique stories that stick with them when they finish. I hope that there will be many more in the future, mine included.

The takeaway from this post, I think, is that we’re all learning. No matter what stage in our design journey, we’re all learning how to build new things and orchestrate the flow of mechanics and create a game that has a last impression on their players. The important thing is to try, and learn, and grow. Not every game you build will be a success, and that’s okay. Just don’t give up! You’ve got to keep trying, because you will get it. It will happen. You’ll see.

If you enjoyed this post, you can find others like it in the Game Design tag. Be sure to scroll all the way to the bottom and sign up for our newsletter - A biweekly roundup of our posts, games we’re playing, and a sneak peek at what’s coming up. Thank you for your support!

Indie Systems: The Wretched, as a Player

The Wretched, a game developed by Chris Bissette at Loot the Room, has a bit of a reputation. It’s said to be brutal and unforgiving, while at the same time masterful in how it evokes the sort of high-strung, tightwire feeling of anxiety one gets from movies like Alien. That is a reputation well deserved, in my opinion.

The Wretched is a game with unique mechanics, as it’s one of the few titles I’ve seen that utilized a block tower (think Jenga) as a core feature. I feel that the block tower is the most anxiety inducing part of the game, because the mechanics account for “acts of God” working against you and causing your tower to fall prematurely.

In short: Don’t play this game on a wobbly table. Or with a cat. Or breathe too hard while playing.

You get the idea.

Overall, the mechanics weave together to create something unique: A sort of brittle, edgy energy that I haven’t felt in many other TTRPGs. In this game, there is something out there to get you. You know this, because it’s destroyed your ship and killed your crew, and now it’s coming after you. You’re the last one on the ship known as The Wretched, and it’s up to you to repair the distress beacon so you can escape.

As you read through the mechanics of this game, it can be a little easy to become overwhelmed: You have your tower, your cards, your dice, and your journal to keep track of. Personally, I found that once I sunk into the rhythm of the phases in the game, it became much easier. If you’re giving this game a shot for the first try, I suggest taking your time and giving yourself an opportunity to understand how everything works. It can feel a little complicated at first, so don’t feel bad if you feel overwhelmed.

One of the things that The Wretched does so beautifully (which is explained more fully in the SRD, which we’ll cover next week when we discuss Wretched & Alone from a design perspective) is create hope for the player. Yes, there are overwhelming odds that the character in this story will not make it out alive, but that’s the beautiful thing about this game: People have so much hope and find deep reserves within themselves when faced with the impossible. We want to survive, even if it’s just to tell the story of how we did it. We all want to leave a mark on this world, some way, somehow.

The Wretched taps into that innate desire, the urge to keep going, the need to survive even though everything within you says that it’s impossible. This story you create is one of human resilience, even if you don’t make it out alive in the end. Someone will know your story.

And that’s a beautiful thing.

If you enjoyed this post, you can check out the others in the Game Systems category for more like this. Remember to join our mailing list - Scroll to the bottom and add your email address for biweekly updates with all our posts, photos and the occasional discount code to the shop. See you next time!

Indie Systems: Princess with a Cursed Sword, as a Designer

Using the Princess Sword framework as a base for design feeling strikingly similar to playing a Princess Sword game. As with any other framework, the designed needs to figure out how all of the different mechanics weave together to create a toolkit for them to build their game with. Each piece has a different reason for being in the kit, and the Princess Sword System Resource Document (SRD) is extremely helpful when explaining the mechanics of the game.

Princess Sword is one of the most-used frameworks for my game (as long as we’re including those that are forthcoming, anyway…) just because of the versatility inherent in the mechanics. The games mostly leans on a tarot deck to guide the narrative, with five different suits available to create unique groups of basic prompts. Each suit refers to a specific thing, then provides a small list of ideas to help the player generate inspiration. For example, in my upcoming game To Inflame a Missing Sun, I use each suit to represent a different room on the spaceship and provide a small list of things that could happen in that room, like a whispered conversation in the crew quarters, or an oxygen garden sabotage in the laboratory.

In the original Princess with a Cursed Sword, the mechanics also utilize a coin flip to determine if the player character succeeds during challenging encounters. This is a mechanic that I personally struggled with during play, as I wanted nothing more than for my Princess to survive. In my game, I use the upright and reversed statuses of the cards to create a complication or challenge for the character to overcome. To me, this feels a bit more organic as the issues are presented naturally by playing the game and the player needs to figure out a way to adjust to the new narrative.

In To Inflame a Missing Sun, I did choose to use a coin flip mechanic, which isn’t something I had included in previous Princess Sword games I’ve designed. Because the game takes place on a spaceship with a crew, I used it in order to have the player determine if they were experiencing whatever the card has presented them with on their own or with another crewmate. This use of the coin flip, again, feels organic to me and helps create another fold in the narrative of the game. In such a small space, the player character could be extremely isolated… Or they could always be around others. Leaving that up to chance is an interesting way to help forge the character into who they become through the story.

While the Princess Sword framework has helped me create so many of my games (four, now), I have expanded on it and made tweaks that I think lend my games to more short-term, structured play, such as the inclusion of a dice roll at the beginning of play to determine how many turns your game will last. Something like this is totally optional for the player, should they choose: If they just want to go until the story feels completed, they don’t have to roll at all.

If you’re interested in creating a Princess Sword game on your own, I highly recommend purchasing a copy of the SRD from Anna Anthropy, and taking a look at the document yourself. This is one of those systems that I truly feel has so many possibilities for storytelling, and I’m really excited to see what you choose to do with it in the future. You can find other Princess Sword games here in this collection, if you’re looking for more understanding of what you can do with it.

Thanks for joining me for another Indie Systems breakdown! If this sort of thing interests you, you can check out the rest of the series here. Remember to join our mailing list - Scroll to the bottom and add your email address for biweekly updates with all our posts, photos and the occasional discount code to the shop. See you next time!

Indie Systems: Princess with a Cursed Sword, as a Player

At the beginning of the pandemic I was, like so many, laid off from a job that I had held for over seven years. It took me a while to pick myself up after that happened, and one things that helped me out of my rut was reading tarot. Just prior to being let go, I had started a multi-tiered Patreon where I was providing tarot readings for my Patrons every single day. Some days, there were multiple readings, depending on the moon phase or holiday.

Soon after losing my job, I also joined the case of an actual play D&D game called Saving Feyce, where I played a witch-flavored warlock. My interest in TTRPGs grew around this time, as nearly all of us at that table were using custom subclasses for our characters. This is where I discovered the indie TTRPG scene and Reader, let me tell you: I was a goner.

I still remember sitting in bed with my tarot deck, the instructions for Princess with a Cursed Sword on my phone. The framework for the game was so elegant, so easy to understand. It was perfect for someone like me, who loves writing creative stories but thrives with direction. The rules and cards give you just enough of a framework to guide you, but not so much that it stifles your ability to write a story of your own.

One of the most refined parts of Princess with a Cursed Sword is that it leaves so much open to the chosen narrative of the player. Are you wanting a classic princess in a large ballgown, who is forced into this journey to rid herself of a cursed sword? Or maybe she’s a warrior princess, built and trained for battle who decides to give into the sword’s demands? Even still, you could create a princess who is the second son to a spacefaring race of people and needs to return the sword to the “rightful” heir. There are so many options within the given framework.

Princess with a Cursed Sword is one of the first indie TTRPGs that I had the pleasure of playing, as I’m sure that’s where some of my warm and fuzzy feelings for this game come from. Truly, I feel like it’s a great place to jump into solo journaling games, so if you haven’t given this one a shot yet, I recommend it.

If you enjoyed this (short) post, you can check out the others in the game systems category for more like this. Alternately, if you like the idea of Princess with a Cursed Sword but want something a little more spooky, you can check out my Princess Sword game You, and the House. Remember to join our mailing list - Scroll to the bottom and add your email address for biweekly updates with all our posts, photos and the occasional discount code to the shop. See you next time!

Indie Game Systems - Trophy, as a Player

In this “Indie Systems” series, it’s my hope that I’ll be sharing some indie game systems that you might not have heard of before, and give you my thoughts on each system through the lens of either a designer or a player. We’re going to kick this off with the game Trophy, and my experience as a player.

Trophy is a collaborative storytelling game, based around the concept of treasure hunters. You and your party have heard a tale, or perhaps been hired to find a treasure, and you’re goal is to get in, secure the prize, and get back out again… But the odds are stacked against you and the chances of you getting out whole - let alone alive - are diminishing from the first step of your journey. Jesse Ross has created an interesting and unique world, full of rumors and myths and labyrinthine locations that do not want to give up their treasures to anyone, and certainly won’t do so without a price.

There are two are version of Trophy, and they each serve different purposes: Trophy Dark is a game that centers around one-shots, or very short-term games, whereas Trophy Gold has adapted the rules of Dark to allow for longer campaigns. Because I have only played Trophy Dark, we’ll focus there for this post.

One thing to be said before launching into the mechanics and such: Trophy is a game that requires a certain amount of trust between each of the players, and the game master. Because of the intensity of the themes within the game, it’s imperative that the players and game master have each other's safety in mind. Hosting a session zero prior to their first game is critical, so everyone understands the lines and veils that they need to respect for everyone to feel safe.

Now! The system itself utilizes d6’s, and so it’s best to have a pool of them. There should be a few in your pool that stand out from the rest: These will be your dark dice to your light dice. I don’t want to go too much into the mechanics, save to say that compared to some systems that have a full battery of dice with different sides and meanings, a d6 system feels refreshingly light. Rolls are really only done when something is considered “risky,” and you may continue to add dark dice to your rolls if you’re not happy with the outcome… But if you roll too high on your dark dice, well. You’re on your way to ruin. And too much ruin leads to the forest warping and twisting you, which will ultimately be your downfall.

My favorite part of the initial Trophy Dark setup is character creation. The designers have given rolling tables for everything: Names, occupations, backgrounds, the thing that drives your character forward, and what sorts of rituals they have access to. As a first time player of Trophy, this was really interesting and helpful, because it allowed my game master and me to collaborate on what some of the terms meant in our game (which may or may not be accurate to the greater Trophy lore, but it worked for us). While rolling on the tables isn’t required to create your character, I found that it still gave me a lot of options while taking away a lot of the stress that usually comes with making a new character in a TTRPG.

Additionally, the character sheet is one of the least intimidating that I’ve come across; it’s literally half of a sheet of paper. That includes everything you need to know about your character (and the official sheet actually has a space for recording your character’s pronouns), including conditions that arise during the course of the game.

Overall, my experience with Trophy Dark as a player is very short lived: I played in a two part series that was hosted by Sword & Key called A Warm and Pleasant Hum (part one can be found HERE, and part two HERE), and it was… Both horrifying and incredibly rewarding. Being introduced to new games is always a challenge for me, but I found Trophy Dark to have mechanics that almost felt like second nature, once you got your feet under you. I highly recommend it.