Tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons are fun but often intimidating to newcomers, what with all the complicated rules, pages of character sheets, and fiddly dice. The following tabletop RPGs, made by passionate solo indie developers, defy this trend through narrative rulesets and story scenarios crammed into the space of five pages or less. Read through this short article to learn more about these short RPGs.
What is a roleplaying game? Strip away the setting lore, artwork, monster manuals, etc., and tabletop RPGs boil down to this: a group of people sit at a table and tell a story through conversation. Sometimes there's a Game Master who drives the story forward, and other times the players take turns narrating. When characters are faced with challenges or dangers, players roll dice or invoke rules to see what happens. If the principles of an RPG can be summed up in just three sentences, there's no reason why people can't make functional RPG books the size of a pamphlet, rather than a textbook.
There are two potential downsides to miniature RPGs like Tunnel Goons or Honey Heist. One, they mostly have narrative-heavy mechanics, forcing players and GMs to improvise a lot. Second, they often focus on telling a single type of story - scoundrels searching for treasure in a ruin, thieves planning a heist, survivors banding together in a post-apocalyptic community, etc. Still, if every player is invested in the game's premise, these pamphlet-sized RPGs can be extremely fun despite their brevity.
What's So Cool About Outer Space?
What's So Cool About Outer Space? is a five-page sci-fi RPG designed by Jared Sinclair, a contributor to quirky RPG publications like Troika. Character creation is as simple as writing down a description: a name, a job, a list of useful stuff and skills, etc. Two pages out of five in What's So Cool About Outer Space? sum up the basic dice mechanics (roll 2 d6 dice, add +1 for every advantage) and principles of storytelling (every choice should have an interesting consequence, be excellent to fellow players, etc.). The last page of WSCAOS? has multiple space-opera scenarios to get a game session going, such as getting swallowed by a space whale or running afoul of space pirates stealing black market eggplants.
Honey Heist
In Honey Heist, a two-page RPG made by veteran miniature RPG designer Grant Howitt, players portray a group of thieves banding together to pull off an intricately planned heist....of honey. Because they're bears wearing hats. With but a simple roll of a six-sided die and the consulting of dice tables, both players and the GM can create their characters (a Rookie Honey Badger Hacker with a Fez, for instance), put together a heist scenario, and use either their Bear or Criminal stats when they need to roll skill checks.
Cthulhu Dark (Free Version)
The free version of the Cthulhu Dark RPG is a 4-page survival horror RPG made by veteran game designers Graham Walmsley, Kathryn Jenkins, and Helen Gould, and is focused around telling stories in the "Cthulhu Mythos" cosmic horror setting created by H.P. Lovecraft. True to its more complex predecessor RPG Call Of Cthulhu, insanity is one of the primary stats in Cthulhu Dark: players must roll their six-sided Insanity die every time they encounter something terrifying and otherworldly, and their investigators gain a point of Insanity each time they roll over their current Insanity score.
Players technically can't fail their mundane skill checks in Cthulhu Dark unless they choose to: on a low roll, their characters just barely succeed, while a high dice roll means they succeed with style. However, investigators who try to stand their ground and fight a Lovecraftian horror will inevitably die in the process, incentivizing running and hiding over confrontation.
Tunnel Goons
Published by the Highland Paranormal Society, Tunnel Goons is a simple 4-page fantasy RPG that's inspired a horde of spin-off "Hacks" on websites like itch.io. In Tunnel Goons, player are "nice people" who explore dungeons in the vein of old-school Dungeons & Dragons; when faced with a challenge, they roll 2 six-sided die and add bonuses from their three Abilities or inventory items to see how well they do. Character customization revolves around acquiring useful gear and tools. Tunnel Goons's backstory-generating character table implies a world setting of magic, caverns, and clockwork recently devastated by civil war.