Cursed! (Prototype)
A downloadable game
The cold wind howls against your face, raking icy fingers past your cheeks and through your hair. Above you, a sliver of moon hangs in the sky, coughing up wispy gray clouds. The footprints you leave in the mud of this swamp are joined by others. You all walk together. You all seek The Hag.
...
Cursed! is a rules-lite game about a group of misfits hunting down the hag that cursed them. Their lives have been torn to shreds by them, and now, they move as one to put an end to it.
This game is a very early prototype, so curse with caution and feel free to share your experience! Things may be broken, but together, we can get them fixed. After all, that's what this game is all about. I made this for a small game jam with a couple of really cool folks based on a playlist I received as inspiration. Shoutout to Whimsy Machine for providing the tunes!
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AHHH I love the writing in this and the aesthetics of the game!!!! This is so cool!!! Awesome work and really cute layout/typos! Is that font a josefin sans? (I just really like josefin sans lmao)
I love the way you tied the basic move with the risk management of the cauldron, and the agency/decision layer it can provide to the DM. It reminds me of fate tokens kind of. I think there's some work to be done here but I feel potential! Really cute and interesting!!
omg thank you so much!!! 💚💚 yes, definitely some ways to go but I'm so glad you like the cauldron so far. Taking a temporary win in exchange for delaying the inevitable really just felt natural for a game about people with absolutely rotten luck
and yeah I LOVE josefin sans, it's one of those fonts I keep coming back to. I think it's the tilted e's that rly do it for me 😂
I'm just wondering if skills ignoring 4s and just 25% chance of a failure per dice might not be a little too generous? With a skill of 1 you're going to have 74% chance of clean success, which raises the skill immediately, and then your chance of clean success is 94% with a skill of 2..!
And even if the DM is adding 2d4 every roll, you get 52% of clean success at skill level 1, and only 16% chance to make any cauldron dice back as the DM! At skill level 0 with 6d4, you still have the 52% chance of success, but only 18% chance of a clean success so there's that! But I'm not sure of the overall experience that those distributions are going to yield!
I think if I try it I'll see how it feels at first but my first design pass on this would be to really iterate on the ebb and flow of the cauldron and the DM moves tied to that, maybe really go full DM-moves list a la PbtA?
Oooh yeah you're absolutely right, I think I pulled my punches with that resolution mechanic (and this certainly isn't the concept for me to be doing that 😅). I had an early version of it that was wayyyy too harsh, but I must have overcorrected and made it more forgiving than I wanted. Live and learn, but now that the jam is over I have all the time in the world to fiddle with it!
And going PBTA/borrowing some ideas is soooo tempting. I absolutely love PBTA and how those systems inject narrative beats into the game. I think those design principles would work well here, especially for The Cauldron like you said. DM moves as a concept were probably floating around in my brain somewhere when I started The Cauldron, but ty for helping me make that connection! I really appreciate you taking the time to give your feedback on this, I'll definitely be using it when I salvage this for a more concrete version someday 💚
I love the aesthetic!!
thanks Strep! 💚