One of my longest-standing "maybe someday" projects has always been trying to make an as-faithful-as-possible recreation of the titular ttrpg from one of my favorite modern creepypastas, Escape from Terminus.
I haven't really given it much thought beyond the "I wanna do this someday" level until recently, but I kinda have some ideas about it.
The end result would be more of an art-project than an actual thing you'd probably want to olay, it should be playable but it's explicitly meant to be an extremely archaic ttrpg from 1965 and The text explicitly mentions that Rolemaster was a "simpler" game to play by comparison (although this might be a tongue-in-cheek remark from our point-of-view character and not completely literal) so it should be overcomplicated, overengineered, and extremely cumbersome to actually play.
It should also eschew not only modern design sensibilities, but also a lot of *traditional* design sensibilities. Since it's supposed to be a game that predates the original edition of D&D by almost a decade, any concepts invented by D&D should be either entirely absent (preferrable), or visibly independently invented from first principles.
It should be almost entirely table-driven, with most actions resolved by rolling on a table, and probably with most tables directing you to a different table. The text explicitly mentions "hundreds" of tables modified by bonuses from everything from surrounding rooms to recent player actions, so that's going to be fun to figure out.
The creepypasta mentions that the game uses a 6d7 roll plus a coin flip to generate results with an "inverted bell curve" probability distribution. My first idea for this was something like rolling a 6d7 and flipping a coin, on heads keep the highest result, on tails keep the lowest result, but I realized this was probably going to be hard to work with, because it would result in the roll *very rarely* showing anything other than 1 or 7, and a probability space of 1-7 is kind of limiting for a table-driven game. So my idea rn is doing the same but instead keeping the 3 highest or 3 lowest dice depending ok the coin flip, with maybe some special effects for special results such as matching numbers (1 1 1, 2 2 2, etc.) and consecutive numbers (e.g. 1 2 3)
The thing that I think is going to be hardest to pull off is the spawning of the "exit hex", the story explicitly mentions that there are strategies for maximizing the chance of generating it, but that the reason no one has been able to do it is because any attempt to optimize for it also increases the chance of intervention from a sabotaging presence that the game's play culture has collectively personified (and probably unintentionally brought into existence by themselves through decades of houserules) as "the minotaur".
This necesitates that 1) the chance of spawning the exit hex is influenced by a complex web of factors affected by player actions, and 2) that the same web of factors also influences the "minotaur"'s activity.
Idk just putting some ideas down, probably a project that would take me a few years if I actually decided to commit to it, but I'm at least trying to outline the shape of what I'm aiming for.
Tables should probably have overly technical names such as "Ceiling integrity index", "Internal obstruction matrix", "Door hinge noise severity" or "Footwear degradation speed"
Actually if anyone's got ideas for table titles that would be fun. The higher grade of implied needless granularity the better. Shit like "vermin migration table" or "light source reliability" or "writing instrument failure" or "mold growth severity" or "water contamination index"
Another thing about the "actions that optimize for spawning the exit hex also increase minotaur activity" part is that, if I'm aiming for accuracy, this connection would need to be achieved through some obscure and roundabout means (e.g. not simply through stacking modifiers that add to the chance of both things) because it textually took the playerbase years to figure out there was a statistical link between the two things.
A couple thoughts on the creepypasta itself that I've had for a couple years. The author has noted in the discussion section that the "Once you died" and "before the last player vanished in 2008" lines are meant to be taken literally to imply a "if you die in the game you die in real life" thing, but I actually think the whole thing is more interesting without that idea.
Both because if that was meant to be the case I find it hard to believe that the pov character wouldn't be more explicit about the most directly paranormal aspect of the whole thing, because I think that's kind of a cliché sp00ky twist that very rarely comes off as anything other than extremely silly, and because I think that "there's a hostile presence inside this game that was not part of the original rules, makes the game essentially unwinnable, and no one really knows where it came from because the full text of the original release is essentially lost media and the versions people play nowadays have been filtered through decades of reconstructions of missing mechanics and houserules being mistaken for part of the original text" is an interesting and unnerving enough premise on its own.
The first thing that comes to mind for how the connection between the exit and the minotaur could be obscured is that if most tables call other tables, rolling the exit hex might require hitting a particular path through the hex-generation tables (or one of several) and near-misses on that path could be filled with "minotaur" effects. This could even entail parallel paths that would further obscure the connection.
E.g. to get the exit you might need to roll a 24 on the Primary Hex Generation Table, which takes you to Hex Generation Sub-table x on which you need to roll a 19 to get to the infamous d777 Special Hex Table (which gives you an unmodified 1-in-343 chance of getting the exit). In order to maximize your odds of getting a 24 on the PHGT and then a 19 on HGS-T x, you need to get as far from the entrance as you can, collect a trinket from each hex-row you've visited, play a reed pipe before you open the door, etc.
But if you get a 23 on the PHGT, you go to HGS-T w, which is likely to lead to a trapped hex if you're far enough from the entrance. And if you roll a 17 or a 11, you go to HGS-T q or k respectively, which both have rooms with a chance of being dead-ends because of a locked door or blockaded passage—more likely every time you collect a trinket. And if you roll a 28 you go to HGS-T β, which is pretty safe—unless there's food scarcity in too many map sectors, in which case it's likely to generate a hex with a frayed rope bridge over a deadly chasm or with every surface covered in broken glass. And of course each time you play the reed flute, there's a small chance to increase Rodent Disturbance in that sector, which increases the likelihood of generating food scarcity when you roll on the Vermin Migration Table you mentioned.
You know, that sort of thing.
