#storythreads

[story-threads]

Squire by Storythreads

One player TTRPG, tellings stories about a squire apprenticed to a knight

ALRIGHT, THIS IS MY BIG ONE. I've been working on this game for over a year now, and my 2024 resolution was to get it actually published, so B+ to me on that one. Right now it is available as digital and print-booklet PDF for optional donations, to gather broad playtesting before finalizing a sale edition.

Squire is a storytelling game meant for replay across genres, telling stories from the perspective of a squire apprenticed to a knight. It is a solo RPG using cards, dice, and prompts to generate changes in the story. The instructions here are detailed and illustrated (with public domain art until I can fund or make original illustrations which I am determined to do because I like the image of a horse mech so much).

I can't count how many games of this I've played developing and honing the process, and how many hours I've logged on writing and editing so far. I've got it to a place I'm proud of. I am certain someone will immediately find ten typos but that is okay because now is the time to hear what is confusing in the rules, or works really well, or needs a fix. I want people to play this game because I made it but also because I am genuinely excited by it and I think you might like it too. And I really want to hear from you about whatever your experience with it is, to help inform any needed changes or updates.

Commenting, sharing, downloading, and donating are all incredibly appreciated.

[story-threads]

Plugging away with Squire, my game about trying to work for a knight and become a knight and decide if you even want this, all at the same time! Thanks so much to everyone for your support.

I’ve been wanting to make a demo game for Squire and the trouble is I keep getting distracted by playing the game. So: let’s pre-make some setting & character decisions so I can hopefully streamline a demo!

First off: setting/genre?

Medieval mishmash (history-ish but dragons are real, Ren Faire style)

Mech pilot & mechanic in space opera

Medieval mundane (no openly supernatural things)

Superhero & sidekick

Voting ended onJan 6, 2025

[story-threads]

Visit Original Link

Squire demo (introduction, since Tumblr can't handle my five-star runtime)

Still would like to get this in a more presentable format with cheerful music and visuals etc. but sat down and just did the damn thing with my cheap frickin' headphone mic because it wasn't working out to keep hoping I'd somehow make a good audio setup some weekend.

Hopefully it sounds listenable enough for a demo!

(I think about these demo characters too much since I played the game that I transcribed for this script over a year ago. Godspeed, Jennet.)

[story-threads]

working on my game about the world during the time during an RPG when the chosen hero is in an enchanted sleep during a timeskip and no one else can kill the evil warlord so everyone else just has to deal. really torn between

Every player character playbook is intentionally a feminine RPG supporting character theme (The Farmgirl, The Princess, The Diva, etc.), you can play them as whatever kind of character/gender you want but it's intentionally calling on the idea of "what if all the cute girls that the game assumes the male player character will crush on got together and had secret adventures and relationships" which feels very fun and queer to write. Partly I do think it would be fun to have a default all-girl party a la Sailor Moon but I truly think you could play a boy Farmgirl and that it would be awesome and it would be a different vibe than if I named it Farmer or Farmboy.

Or: opening up the character creation so that you could theoretically play any kind of character including those that would be monsters in the "actual game" like skeleton warriors or dino-men, opening up questions about why the chosen hero kills them on sight and who is Good which is very fun to write about for different reasons

Now theoretically could do both of those but in my experience it's hard to get a big group of people together. It's hard to have the feeling from option A of "all the girls are getting together" if there's only 3-4 people playing and one or two of them are playing love interests and one or two of them are playing dino-men. And of course the easiest option here is that you can absolutely be a Dino Diva. But if I'm true to the premise that basically remakes the world so that Dinos are no longer monsters but had at least some dialogue options so that the Hero knew one of them before he went into the timeskip.

I think what I'm kind of settling into is one where every player has a main role-playing Girl Type and also can create and pick up NPCs to play, and hopefully that brings some weirdness into play.

As I've been putting this together I'm vaguely falling into a rhythm of writing moves as Power/Responsibility/Risk where Responsibility is a roleplay condition that has to be met in order to use or reuse the power, and Risk is how it goes wrong if it goes wrong. But I'm not actually feeling a place for dice yet. It may be from listening to so much Realis but I am kind of thinking in terms of tokens. I've never done a straight up hack of another system but I think I will read up on No Dice No Masters because I like a lot of it.

[space-stegosaurus]

started writing haphazardly on the very self indulgent document and it’s one of those ohhhh I was queer things

in middle school I wrote like a found fiction book that was a prima guide to a made-up sequel to ocarina of time because I so desperately wanted the story of zelda in the time link was missing and I kind of thought if I did well enough at making a strategy guide someone would make the game. (it was not very good and had a long meandering first chapter about being turned into a fairy but I was very proud of how I drew zelda/sheik’s eyes.)

but like. yes! world that seems almost exclusively occupied by cute interesting girls (and Weirdos, and Creatures) because the assumed-straight-male player character is not present and there are basically no other boys in the world is a pretty interesting thing to explore when you are a middle schooler who is going through some stuff! girl who maybe sometimes is not a girl roaming the world having adventures with other love-interest-coded girls is kind of cool! for reasons! girl who maybe isn’t always a girl has clearly explored the whole world and found her way around all these desecrated temples and has done what she could and knows enough to get you right up to the door but spends her days staring her failure in the face because she cannot wield a magic sword.

(what does it mean to adopt the symbols of the dark and bloody past of your own royal family as your identity. what does it mean that someone got the civilians to safety but her entire army is dead or corrupted. what does it MEAN that she has an adult version of her royal dress ready to go. did she weave it. has she been resizing her childhood garments of her deposed kingdom in secret every year just in case it’s time for her to reappear on the political stage, knowing that it might also be her undoing. the AMBITION. the angst. what does it mean that wisdom belongs to the girl whose whole world hinged on her mistake.

so anyway I’m busy dissecting that old idea and harvesting themes that I can make into something new cause I don’t want to just file the serial numbers off but I am deep in remembering why I was obsessed with that game. that’s what I’m working on in a very loose early phase. I think this one is actually for a group. and it means I have to/get to try to draw out all my made up fantasy creatures. and it’s interesting to me after trying very hard to be neutral with gender in precious projects to lean hard into feminine-default. and I have a lot to chew on.

[space-stegosaurus]

I had an “oh, that’s funny” thought so I shared with a friend that I had realized that by my game definitions, a grad student could be a squire if their professor (knight) worked with finicky and expensive equipment (horse) since they were working in academia (a violent, self replicating system panoplied in idealism) and after a pause I got back “I’m going to be honest, I thought that was fully the intention.”

anyway play squire! explore my various traumas and failed hopes which are apparently fully visible in the text!

[space-stegosaurus]

I think I'm just going to have to embrace having a very sketchy style and go with it. This is Jennet, from a demo game of Squire I put together and am still working on getting into audiovisual form. I'm calling this done except maybe all the bits of bad erasing I'm noticing. realized 80% of the way through that I needed a black background after drawing on white so this got... interesting but whatever, I kind of like how it adds some weirdness to it. very glad to have found Krita software, I was trying to use GIMP and I just couldn't get a handle on it and this seems more intuitive for me.

[story-threads]

Ok, have been thinking about trying to film or record this demo and wondered what the preference actually was for checking out something new, cause for me it's a complicated math of when I would actually watch a video vs. listen to a podcast vs. read.

In your own personal opinion, if you were kind of interested in a new game and wanted to find out more about it and get comfortable with the mechanics before playing, what kind of presentation would you opt for?

Assume there are written and illustrated instructions available already, there's no other podcast/video options for observing a playthrough, that all these versions are available, and that you are interested in the game.

Preferred way to engage with a new game demo:

Video of a playthrough (separated into short chapters)

Podcast of a playthrough

Written walkthrough of a game with photos included

Mini videos of individual mechanics

Something else in comments?

View results

Voting ended onJan 16, 2025