One-page RPGs Vol. 1
In 2016, Grant Howitt decided – flippantly – to write a one-page roleplaying game every month and release it for free online. Little did he know that the barely-intelligible pen-and-ink scratches he turned out would go on to define his career, and the shape of roleplaying games, for years to come. Played by thousands of people all over the world, Grant’s one-page games run the gamut from strange to silly, daft to deadly serious, and powerfully original to potentially copyright-infringing.
This pack includes 13 main games and 13 back pages, which are:
- THE WITCH IS DEAD, where you play murderous woodland animals attempting to gain revenge for the death of their mistress.
- Back Page: LITTLE HELPERS, in which you play demons accidentally summoned by a good witch and now must help her go on a date to the county fair using only your nightmare hell-magicks
- THE GOLDEN SEA, a D20 game of traders and mystics setting sail across a trackless ocean of sand
- Back Page: Additional material for The Golden Sea, including equipment, portents, encounter tables and Upsearchings, crystalline miracles from the Goddesses that grow up from beneath the dunes
- WE THREE KINGS, in which you play the three dudes from the bible and stop King Herod’s plot to kill the baby Jesus with swordplay, necromancy and two-fisted sorcery
- Back Page: THREE KINGS’ HILL, an unrelated fantasy dungeon that nevertheless contains an eye the size of a small house
- ADVENTURE DICE, a simple numberless storytelling game for kids, which includes special dice to cut out and colour in
- Back Page: An adventurer generator for Adventure Dice, or really any fantasy game
- WE THAT REMAIN, a survival horror game played with a single deck of cards, in which you will all probably die
- Back Page: A map of the Space Station Elysium, designed for use with We That Remain, that details an abandoned space colony that accidentally opened a portal into Hades
- HONEY HEIST, a game in which you are a criminal bear with two stats: CRIMINAL and BEAR; also contains an optional D8 hat table
- Back Page: 36 spells for Honey Heist, including Summon Chandelier, Summon Mexican Standoff, and Jesus Take The Wheel (or: Summon Jesus)
- BIG GAY ORCS, a game in which you play a load of orcs trapped in a doomed fortress, and generally make out a bunch
- Back Page: SAD GAY SPACE ROCKS, a hack of Big Gay Orcs, which emulates the Steven Universe Cartoon
- JUSTIFIED ANXIETY, a game set in a suspiciously familiar paranoid dystopia where you shoot trouble for Companion Machine
- Back Page: TRUE PARANOIA, a game which involves dumping all your dice in a pile in the middle of the table and punishing your players whenever they dare to touch them
- THE RAPID AND THE RIGHTEOUS, a fast and furious game about living your life a quarter-mile at a time
- Back Page: SPIN THE BOTTLE, a game played by spinning a bottle, about a tumultuous teenage party
- HACK THE PLANET, in which you are a console cowboy or cowgirl, and the man is trying to keep you down so you jack in, hack in and get revenge; contains a grid of inaccurate techno-jargon to use at random to give you benefits to computer use
- Back Page: RUN THE SHADOWS, in which you and a bunch of other street samurai put the metal in the meat and do corporate espionage for Mr Johnson
- GENIUS LOCI, in which you play a post office in a 1960’s Suffolk village, and you eat the spirits of other buildings to survive invasion from the city
- Back Page: GENIUS LOCI: MALL EDIITON, which is largely similar to the regular game except it takes place in a late-2000’s midwestern mall and you can eat inquisitive teens for power
- DEAD CHANNEL, a game of straight-to-VHS horror, where each character has an individual set of misfortunes and injuries that shape the plot as they play out
- Back Page: DEAD CHANNEL: CHANNEL HOPPERS, which includes rules for getting bored and changing the channel only to have the characters and monsters from the horror film invade other TV shows
- TRASHKIN, a fantasy game in which you play the races who get left out of the stories: raccoon-kin, ratboys, half-possums, goat girls, etc, then embark on a stupid quest for very little gain that will probably get you all killed
- Back Page: TRASHKIN: THE ZINE, which includes rules for Ibis-kin, Trash Bardic Music, alternative dice rules and a fun wordsearch with rude words in it
