Spotted while resting: a ruin by a gentle river

January 24, 2020 11:40 AM

Takuma Okada's Alone Among the Stars is a journaling game for one person. You play an explorer encountering strange animals, plants, ruins, and phenomena on far-off planets. All you need to play are a six-sided die, writing implements and a deck of cards. There is an online Twine adaptation, by Adam Roy, and an interactive Twitter implementation, by Matthew R.F. Balousek.

There are also a great many hacks, which port the game's simple deck-die-and-journal structure to other settings and genres.

posted by Iridic (6 comments total)

This is lovely -- thank you for sharing it! I played the Twine adaptation for one planet's worth of journal entries and found it meditative and beautiful, but it could be very different depending on my mood (or the player). I also have a feeling that this might make a great writing warm-up -- I'll definitely be trying it again.
posted by ourobouros at 12:06 PM on January 24, 2020 [2 favorites]

I tried the Twine version. That was neat! I don't write much these days so it was nice to have some very low-pressure, simple prompts. I actually like what I wrote! I'm surprised how evocative it minimal setup was.
posted by treepour at 12:58 PM on January 24, 2020

I love the sound of this; I'd really like to sit down and do it with pen and paper and dice. There's something oddly magical about manual procedural generation stuff like this, the way it makes concrete the capacities of simple systems and a creative angle to produce bits of (figurative and literal) worlds out of nothing. Something in the space between a tarot deck and an RPG, a gap-filling kind of interactive creative/interpretive prompt.
posted by cortex at 1:21 PM on January 24, 2020 [2 favorites]

This is incredible. I had never even considered this genre of game to be a thing that existed. Thank you.
posted by sleeping bear at 1:47 PM on January 24, 2020

Bought and downloaded. This looks fantastic.
posted by Zumbador at 2:44 AM on January 25, 2020

Oh man, the itch.io TTRPG rabbit hole is a deep one, once you discover it... I mean, even just now, I found a beautiful pamphlet-sized TTRPG that's basically tabletop Stardew Valley. Love it.

Here's one of my favorites: a LARP where the players are a group of crows investigating the death of another crow.

Hey!:
If a crow ever speaks while another’s hand is on top of the stack, or
two crows attempt to speak over each other, or there is instability
in the hand stack, or a crow begins speaking with an uncrowlike
understanding of the environment, ALL the crows should begin
shouting “Hey, hey, hey!” until the situation is rectified. If one crow
hears another crow saying “Hey!” they should take up the cry and
repeat it until the problem is identified and solved. Think about the
scolding and arguing of crows; this is what you are doing.

posted by kaibutsu at 11:54 AM on January 25, 2020 [5 favorites]