Making a One Page RPG

Big ideas in a tiny space

Tahitian sailing canoes by Henry Byam Martin

I’ve wanted to put together another one-page rpg for a while. I’m not a one-page maestro like Grant Howitt (I have a very soft spot for his Mechanical Oryx) but admire the form, how you can get the kernel of an idea into a pretty much playable form in such limited space. It really helps you as a designer to consider what is really necessary to play, and is also a great way to test ideas out. You can look at the final one page and think… is this actually a fun idea? I saw Chris McDowall’s One Page version of Into the Odd a few years ago and it totally blew my mind how much flavour and gameplay could fit into such a small space. [Chris has a very cool crowdfunder on at the moment, you should check it out] . And there’s a One Page TTRPG Jam on right now (organised by Ennie-nominated Unknown Dungeon) so I thought I’d have a stab at putting together a bunch of ideas that have been steadily perculating.

The main (simple) concept was that I wanted to take Eco mofos to the seas- somehow mix Legend of Zelda: Windwaker with Waterworld and scifi like Ballard’s Drowned Earth and Verne’s 20000 Leagues Under the Sea. There’s also Joan Slonczewski’s Door into Ocean which really made me think about the potential for storytelling in the sea.

The sea has so many facets. There’s the surface, that changes dramatically with the weather, from smooth like glass to ferociously deadly. There’s the whole world that exists under the sea, dark and mysterious, a secret other world. And then there are the possibilities of Islands, of each island having it’s own micro-world, like in Homer’s Odyssey or Kurtz in Heart of Darkness/Apolcalyse Now. And the sea is at the heart of the climate crisis, from pollution to sea rise to the impact of those changes on the movements of people. So yes, as you can probably tell, I’m into it as a place to explore.

So, the game.

So I have an A4 sheet to work with (slightly longer than US Letter), and know a few things. I want the rules on the left, as that’s the first place people read, and more reference material towards the right. I decided to try 5 columns across the page. I would have liked to have used 4, as then you can fold it in two, but I wouldn’t have been able to fit nearly as much words.

Now, this is obviously a Mark of the Odd joint- the chassis is the Into the Odd rules, with some of my Eco mofos twists like HP defining your Adaptation and Burdens (something Chris was trialling in early versions of the majestic Mythic Bastionland). So that’s column 1. It was most of 2 as well, but I trimmed and trimmed from the bookmark version of the rules I had already. One page RPGS require a ridiculous amount of concision, to the extent that you start implying things rather than explaining fully, and hope that the reader gives you some lee-way!

Which brings me on to the meat of what I wanted to include in this thing- the new rules I’ve been cooking (with the help of the Copy/Paste Discord and gestaltist in particular) around sea travel. Partly inspired by the wilderness travel rules in Emiel Boven’s The Electrum Archive, they turn travel into an Encounter roll, assuming the length of time of travel is roughly constant, but adding advantages to travel means that you’ll encounter less diffculty. It’s elegant, and worked really well for seafaring, as you could factor in things like wind-speed, rowing, currents, skill, all as things that tip the odds in your favour (or not).

The part I’m really proud of is the Wrestle with the Elements aspect, which takes advantage of Into the Odd’s unusual HP system (it is a cushion for damage that recharges when you take a little breather) to simulate the buffeting of the seas, and the bad luck of hitting a submerged rock. Your boat can withstand a certain amount, but taking her out in a storm is a fool’s errand- you’ll have to be lucky to make it to your destination in one piece.

But the system makes no sense without a map, so I knew I had to fit some map-making rules in too. I wanted to use point crawls, as I like them, but it seemed to feel wrong that a game all about freedom, about the infinite possibilities of the sea, was defined by lines on a map. So I decided on an open form of mapping. In the end I decided on squares rather than hexes as gridded paper is so easy to get hold of, and maritime maps are based on squares (as is Windwaker’s).

Beautiful work by chriee on Gamefaqs (apologies for spoilers of this 20-odd year old game).

It’s a dice drop system, mostly just using d6s, as that’s always fun and has a nice element of randomness. The seas being tied to the vicinity of islands felt simple and intuitive, and means that all Islands in the Deep seas will be Volcanic, which works.

Finally, I needed to add everything you’d need to actually play- tables of Quests (which imply a little Windwaker/Nausicaa community on your home island), Encounters at sea, different Corpo bases and random islands, so that each map and each adventure becomes unique, even within the scope of a one-pager. And the Adaptations, which are Character Classes by another name, I suppose, all themed around sea travel. In each case, I was borrowing from notes I’ve been woking on for an expanded setting, but trimmed everything down to just a flavoursome nugget, trying to give as much gameable ideas in as small a space as possible.

So there you have it, a One Page RPG. Hopefully see you in the Jam!