OVERZEALOUS: Inspirations, Illustrations

"Out-of-control fantasy cultists in a cute cartoon style" is a compelling idea, and I've had glimpses of it in lots of different media. That's how Overzealous, my solo game of cult mayhem, came to be! Let's get into it.

First off, if you haven't checked out Overzealous, it's funding now on Kickstarter! Take a peek:

Inspirations

I’ve mentioned that the idea was sparked by the cartoon zealot artworks made by Gordy Higgins, which he generously released into the public domain and which have informed much of this game’s look.

These little characters get up to all the things you would expect of unhinged fantasy cultists. In Overzealous, those are all self-inflicted problems and divergences from what you’d prefer their goal to be: performing a grand summoning ritual. I’ve adapted some of the characters to add a few more kinds of trouble they can get involved in.

Another inspiration was the video game Cult of the Lamb (Massive Monster). The ‘whimsical cultists’ dynamic and cute cut-out 2D style were big draws. The recurring motif I’ve adopted (a red dangling dagger) may have been subconsciously influenced by Cult of the Lamb’s recurring visual symbol of a crowned red eye.

I enjoy the humour that can come from having to rely on characters with poorly-aligned interests. The Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night in Guards! Guards! (Terry Pratchett) are a secret society full of petty self-important personalities.

My battered old copy of Guards! Guards!. Plus a little companion zine I’ve been working on.

I was also influenced by Sinister Hovering Orb (Penguin King Games). In that game, you play as an inscrutable eldritch entity with unclear goals, operating at a cosmic level yet interacting with mortals.

Speaking of humour, I’ve also been influenced by games that lean into bombastic, non-heroic jokery, such as Kobolds Ate My Baby! (9th Level Games) and Wizards (Markerslinger). You’ll see a bit of that kind of thing in Overzealous.

 

Influences

What about motivation for the actual gameplay design? My main design criteria for this one are

• Tactical play with well-defined actions and outcomes
• Easy to learn, quick to play, challenging, and replayable
• A flexible amount of self-directed roleplay journalling
• Actions and events that support the game’s tone

Of the solo pen-and-paper games I’ve played, one with all those traits is Dwarf Mine (Paper Dice Games), whose approach I learned a lot from.

 

Artwork

Overzealous has a bold, hectic, cartoonish look in keeping with its tone. My choice of black, white, and red means that much of the style is based in black-and-white artwork.

The core illustrations are by Gordy Higgins, and I’m also using many pieces by Evlyn Moreau, who has great cartoon linework, and a few illustrations from other artists.

Three gleeful cultists getting into trouble. Art by Evlyn Moreau.

(I’m committed to using no AI for any game project. I support artists by licensing their art, buying from their stores, and/or supporting directly on platforms like Patreon.)

The book uses a lot of eldritch symbols and other decorations, plus a set of glyphs associated with the game stats: Fervour, Divergence, Cultists, Imminence, and Monstrosity. For these I’m using art by Alderdoodle, Lorc, C M Gorynych, and Daniel F. Walthall.

Typography

Decorative text for headings and embellishments requires good typefaces. 

The Overzealous title logo uses the Moonrock and So Run Down fonts, with embellishments in Witch’s Scroll and a dagger by Lorc.

The thin, handwritten, slightly esoteric lines of Moonrock and Witch’s Scroll by Sophie Grunnet (Art SilverGlass) are a good fit for the project. So Run Down font by Raymond Larabie (Typodermic Fonts) blends ‘cartoonish’ and ‘cursed’.

 

OVERZEALOUS: Your cult has no chill!

 

⭕ You are a powerful entity ready to manifest as a benevolent god
⭕ You see a cult has formed to worship you
⭕ You try to guide them towards the summoning ritual
⭕ ...They're all bloodthirsty, bickering zealots

It's a shame your cultists are so

OVERZEALOUS

I've just launched the crowdfunding campaign for my solo TTRPG of cartoon violence and cult mayhem! You can become a backer now to help summon the game into reality, and get a print or digital copy of Overzealous.


Play the game as an exasperated would-be deity, trying to do make do with the cult you've been given. Trying to ignore that they've called themselves something like "The Exalted Children Of The Abyssal Mantle". Trying to shepherd your cultists into performing The Immanentising Ritual, so you'll be summoned into the world and win.

Standing against you are the bloody squabbles and bizarre interests of your cultists, counterproductive stabbings and spiritually-pointless sidetracks from the overall goal. These will increase inevitably increase the cult's Divergence, Fervour, and Monstrosity stats.

A tactical game for solo play, Overzealous has an irreverent tone and a loud cartoonish feel.

You'll get the game as a 42-page book with print-on-demand option, plus a print-and-play companion zine and page of stat trackers.

Caution: Murders. Religious schisms. Profanity. Cannibalism. Cultists summoning nameless tentacled horrors, then making them fight. Heresy. Deliberate plagues. The inspiration of poets. Hordes of the undead. Stolen artefacts. Mystic energies attracting ancient demons. Death spirals. Hobbyist grave-robbing. Blood sacrifice. Lots and lots of candles.

 

Joinnnn usssss

A simple treasure table system

Here's a classic problem: The characters find some treasure – let's say there are diadems, gilt-framed paintings, jade figurines, and various other art objects. The GM describes them so that the players can write them down. The objects may not be sold for many sessions, before which many other treasures will be acquired from various sources, including different modules and the GM's improvisation.

The characters shouldn't generally know how much the art objects are worth when they find them. That should be GM-facing information. On the other hand, the GM shouldn't have to remember where every item came from, or transcribe each one and then try to hunt for it on the big list when the characters eventually try to sell it.

The typical solution is usually to bite the bullet: give out sale values along with treasure, or make it a hassle for the GM. Or perhaps compromise by giving out an indication of a treasure's worth and then rolling randomly based on the indication at the time it is appraised or sold.

 

A better solution:

I'm proposing a system which I've never seen in a TTRPG before, but it's so obvious that I bet I'm reinventing the wheel. It's similar to how item values work in the video game Dwarf Fortress.

We express each treasure as a phrase containing {class, descriptors}, where class is a type of item with a baseline monetary value, and descriptors are adjectives with multiplicative value modifiers. These are on big lists that are privileged GM information.

So the GM has a list of item classes coupled with base values that looks something like

Amulet   2 gold

Beads    1 silver

Cutlery  5 silver

Diadem   20 gold

Ewer     12 gold

Figurine 4 gold 

...

Then there's a list of descriptors, or possibly separate lists of positive and negative descriptors, each with a fractional modifier. Perhaps

Antique     ×5

Cracked     ×3/4

Gold        ×12

Half-rotten ×1/4

Jade        ×2

Large       ×3 

Rusty       ×9/10

Shattered   ×1/20

...

The GM has these lists at their fingertips. They are lookup tables, but of course if you did have a nice number like 20 or 66 or 100 entries, they could pull double duty as dice tables for treasure generation.

Illustration by Zed Nope

 

How do we use the tables?

A zillion sessions ago, the GM let the players know that they found an antique gold diadem and a large cracked jade figurine.

Perhaps they were described more fully (what does the figurine depict?) originally, but the GM made sure to communicate which were the key words, so that's what the players wrote down. The players weren't told the value, just the description.

Now time has come to sell these art objects. The GM doesn't need to remember anything about the treasure – where in the world it was found; what published adventure it came from or whether it was rolled or improvised; what rough-and-ready valuation the characters were given by a passing tinker.

The GM only has to do a couple of table lookups.

Diadem: Base price of 20 gold pieces. Antique: ×5. Gold: ×12. Actual value: 1200 gp. 

Figurine: Base price of 4 gold pieces. Large: ×3. Cracked: ×3/4. Jade: ×2. Actual value: 18 gp.

And that's all you need. The lookups are trivially easy; they're in alphabetical order and should fit on one piece of paper. The maths ain't hard.

 

Joseph Gandy (1771-1843)

 

The benefits:

There are seriously so many.

1. Hidden information stays hidden.

Players don't get information on value which should be secret. If they've found something made of 'ebonshell' and they've heard in passing that ebonshell is valuable, the word is a descriptor on the table and the players won't find out if that means "buy another round" or "buy a castle" until they seek out a valuation in-world.

Prior valuations stay consistent, too. If the GM allows a skill check for valuation, they can look up the true value, give an approximation (or a false answer if the check fails), and then completely forget they've given out that information whether or not the players go on to sell the item.

2. Descriptions correlate nicely with values.

Assuming you have a good set of tables, you're buying extra verisimilitude. The "cloudy garnet ring" you find in one dungeon and the "dull garnet necklace" you find two dungeons later have similar values, both are vastly less valuable than the "hundred-faceted ruby amulet", and that's exactly what players will expect.

Things that would otherwise 'just' be flavour start to matter more to the players. We can only take so much stuff back with us. Is the one-of-a-kind altarpiece cracked or just chipped? What's our best guess about how that compares to this sack of obsolete silver coins? Speaking of which,

3. There are learning opportunities.

We're all big fans of rewarding player skill, right? With this system, attentive players can begin to infer what words matter most for treasure values. This reflects the learning their characters would be doing.

On the other hand, the tables are

4. Easily reset.

If you want to start fresh in a new universe, or with new characters, or change GMs, it's trivially easy to just cross out a bunch of values for base items and modifiers and write in slightly different ones.

Players no longer know what to expect but the whole thing stays internally consistent, because you only tweaked the values. For the same reason, it's

5. Easily customisable.

Let's say you decided in this world, jade has mystic properties which make it worth more than gold. Cool, change ×2 to ×15 in the table and you're done. Any treasure you've already put out there is immediately converted.

If you're using treasure from a publication, when you go to convert an item you'll notice that it's described as "jade", check "jade" in the table, be reminded of your modification, and decide whether this particular thing is massively more valuable or whether you'll keep the value and change the material.

It's easy, because in general, this whole system is

6. Compatible with published treasures.

It's not much effort to start with treasures described by value and work backwards to create the descriptive {class, descriptors} phrase.

Suppose an adventure says "the bag contains three opals worth 300 gp each". What does that convert to? Well, you start by finding the "opal" class base value (or maybe "gemstone" is a class and "opal" is a descriptor), then flick around looking for more descriptors that will get you to 300 gp.

Maybe huge + dazzling + round + opal = 300 gp? Perfect. You've acquired more information about what the treasure is actually like. Or maybe it doesn't fit that they're "huge" so you try a few other descriptors and find that small + flawless + fashionable + opal = 320 gp? Close enough.

7. Simple calculations.

It's easy to price something up. We can put both decimals and fractions in the tables, so that people who are less proficient at mental maths can use a calculator. It wouldn't be hard to make a spreadsheet or online tool that calculates values very quickly.

8. Adaptive.

This single framework should work for most systems and settings. Only the tables will need to change.

Once published, individual GMs could hack further as they pleased. Have as many or few base object classes and modifiers as you want. It's easy to simplify or expand, because

9. You can hang stuff off the system. 

Let's say a character comes from a clothier background, and makes alterations to a "silk sash". Now it's a "tailored silk sash" and its value changes accordingly. A fighter is able to repair the "ragged rusted mail hauberk" enough that she can wear it, and now it's a "patched mail hauberk".

Want to get more out of jewellery and gemstones? Have a subsystem for inset jewels, which might add to or multiply an item's value.

Want to get into meticulous detail regarding some setting-specific fine arts? Add a whole extra table of modifiers referring to specific artists and times and trends and students and suspected forgeries.

Want collectors to be interested in specific things? Express that as custom modifiers. The antiquarian pays ×7 instead of ×5 for the "antique" descriptor. The archivist ignores penalties from the keywords "old" or "repaired" on books. The vizier only wants jewellery in good condition, so will pay double for any items without any negative modifiers, half otherwise.

Have item valuation and haggling skill systems? This framework just establishes the ground truth / base price, so those should sit neatly on top without you having to lift a finger.

10. No tracking.

It really bears repeating that the GM doesn't need to track any extra information, or resort to improvisation when they can't find the item they gave out months ago.

Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1805-1874)

So there's my idea! Do something cool with it. I've added "make a whole little book for this stuff and possible extensions" to the ideas pile.

Complications! Serendipity! Action resolution twists

An envelope gets tugged out of your hand by the wind. You kick your desk and slosh coffee everywhere. You bump into a friend in an unexpected place. A bird lands on your shoulder. The pen runs out of ink when you try to sign.

Because of how our own world works, we expect fictional worlds to be full of lots of little chance things which individually happen rarely. Pieces of serendipity. Unwanted side effects. Unexpected interruptions. Unforeseen complications.

Characters in the fictive world of a tabletop game should expect to encounter little surprises here and there. Not all the time; perhaps not as much as they do in the real world, because of the focus on exciting impactful play — but enough for verisimilitude.

Twisting outcomes ad hoc

TTRPGs often have rules for very consequential rare outcomes (critical hits, spell mishaps, fumbles, etc). But (especially in rules-light games) it is often down to the referee to come up with any smaller "twists": the complications and bits of serendipity we expect to happen not-too-infrequently when someone attempts to do something.

There are two problems with having the referee add twists to action outcomes on the spur of the moment.

1. The imagination is a resource. Thinking requires time and effort, a referee has a lot of mental overhead, and adding twists to action resolution begins with remembering to actually do it. Even an experienced and confident ref likes to have tools at their disposal to reduce mental effort.
2. If it's not a formal procedure, it can feel arbitrary. If the referee just tells a player "your sword hilt catches in the reins of the knight's horse as it gallops past and is ripped away, pinwheeling across the battlefield" it may feel unfair, even punishing. Why them? Why now? Why misfortune instead of fortune? This naturally leads to the ref only adding complications in low-risk environments, which is less interesting.

So here's an approach you can bolt on to any game to add more twists.

 

A procedure for twists

I was reading some older blog posts about (1) spark tables (Bastionland), (2) GM intrusions in Numenera (Alexandrian), and (3) the habit of rolling for complications (Necropraxis), and they got me thinking. We can put together some simple tools for adding twists.

The design goal is to create a procedure that is

• quick, simple, and useful to a referee,
• neither too game-specific nor too vague,
• open-ended and flexible. 

We just need a few dice tables and a basic rule for rolling on them. 

Here's the simple procedure I came up with:

1️⃣ The referee (or designer) should decide on the mechanical trigger for adding a twist to an action outcome. This will be system-dependent, e.g., "when the margin of success or failure is 10 or more", or "when a 01-03 or 98-00 is rolled on percentage dice", or "when rolling with (dis)advantage", or "when anyone spends a luck point".

2️⃣ Ideally it's something that players and referee alike can notice, so that it gets remembered, and eventually comes to be expected.

3️⃣ Now if this trigger applies during action resolution, the referee rolls 1d10 twice and consults the following dice tables, picking whichever of the two outcomes is more plausible for the context. Reroll if absolutely necessary.

(If there's no appropriate trigger for your system, you might roll 1d12 before each action adjudication and give a positive twist on a 12 or a negative twist on a 1. Or if you want lots of serendipity/misfortune and fewer dice rolls, just extend the following dice tables to 1d20 size and roll a pair of d20s for every action adjudication, one for a positive twist and one for a negative twist, ignoring results higher than 10.)

 

Dice table #1: Combat-specific twists

In a fight, one side's boon is the other's bane. The table entries refer to a "combatant" who should either be the character acting, or the opponent they are focusing on, as appropriate for the trigger. (This should work even for games without symmetrical combat mechanics, with a reasonable choice of trigger.)

1. Exposed. Combatant is drawn out of position, surrounded, or put on bad footing.
2. Toppled. Combatant is knocked down.
3. Lost grip. Combatant drops their weapon, gets it stuck in something, or loses their grip.
4. Disoriented. Combatant is blinded, dazed, scared, or demoralised by a combat event.
5. Jostled. Combatant is trampled, grabbed, or knocked aside.
6. Extra injury. Combatant suffers an additional incidental wound.
7. Ally harmed. Combatant accidentally causes harm to (or disrupts) one of their allies.
8. Armour broken. Combatant's shield or a piece of body armour breaks, is removed, or is rendered useless.
9. Weapon breaks. Combatant's weapon is made useless: a blade breaks, string snaps, gun jams, etc.
10. Impeded. Combatant is tangled or otherwise hampered by terrain or their own armour.

 

Next we'll look at random tables for general actions. We can't expect there to be a zero-sum symmetry like there is in combat, so we'll need separate misfortune and benefit tables. Choose the appropriate one for the trigger.

(Depending on the trigger, negative twists might still occur for successful actions and positive twists for failures. I think this is a good thing.)

Dice table #2: General action twists (misfortune)

1. Incidental damage. Whatever the character is working on or with (a rope, lock, computer, tool, weapon, etc) is damaged.
2. Extra time. The action takes longer than expected (the character may choose to abandon the task early when this becomes clear).
3. Costly. The action will take more resources than expected (the character may choose to abandon the task instead when this becomes clear).
4. Loud or unimpressive. A mistake or coincidence causes the action to get everyone's attention. This may be laughable, socially objectionable, distracting, or dangerous.
5. Minor injury. The character suffers some small harm in the course of attempting the action.
6. Crudely done. The action is performed clumsily or its effect is crude and sloppy, in a way likely to have later repercussions.
7. Unwanted side effect. Attempting the action also causes a problem, likely related to the method used and the circumstances.
8. Hidden step. Attempting the action reveals a new challenge which must be overcome before the action can actually be completed. *
9. One shot. Attempting the action reveals circumstances which mean the task can't be tried again following this attempt. *
10. Tougher than it seems. Attempting the action reveals something about the situation which makes the task harder than anticipated. Adjust it for others and for future attempts. *

* Note the last three entries may necessitate changing the details of the world. This approach might not work for everyone.

Dice table #3: General action twists (benefit) 

1. Skill increase. The character performing the action learns something along the way. This may be as diegetic or game-mechanical as you please.
2. Mastery. The character can do this specific action again (in this same context) without any chance of failure.
3. Positive side-effect. Performing the action also causes an unexpected helpful outcome.
4. Good return. The action takes fewer resources than expected to accomplish, and/or yields more of some measurable outcome than it normally would.
5. Quick. The action takes half the time it normally would.
6. Quiet. The action is accomplished stealthily and subtly, or there's a distraction elsewhere that takes attention away from it.
7. Impressive. The character performs the action in a way that's inspirational, smooth, culturally appropriate, or garners public approval.
8. Stacking. The way this action changes the world makes it easier for allies or harder for foes to accomplish some related thing(s). *
9. Discovery. The character performing the action finds something (information or an object) when they attempt it. *
10. Easier than it seems. Attempting the action reveals something that makes the task easier than anticipated. Adjust it for others and for future attempts. *

* Again, the last three entries may require changing the details of the world. You'll need alternatives if you don't like that.

The benefits of table-based twists

There are three main benefits to this approach.

1. SALIENCE. The simple procedure means easy referee decisions. It reminds the ref of various outcomes that should be possible. And it's a quick way of selecting between side effects.
2. PLAUSIBILITY. The tables are fairly general. Rolling twice and picking the more plausible twist is easier than having to think of a particularly suitable possibility, but is quick and flexible.
3. PERMISSIVENESS. When a game system doesn't overtly empower the referee to intervene in small ways, adding a defined procedure feels less arbitrary. The one I've written up is neutral with regard to the player characters; in games where characters are more skilled than their opponents, it may even be a small advantage.

You no longer need as many specific rules for monsters, traps, etc, because it all works inside the established fiction of the world. Now if a monster is described as having a hard shell, whenever "Weapon breaks" is one of the rolled options you'll instinctively pick that one without thinking too hard about it.

Alternatively, you can hang stuff off the procedure to extend it.

• A cursed sword might always favour the "Ally harmed" twist when rolled as an option, and doubles the effect when it happens.
• A sticky jelly monster always permits "Lost grip" as a third option to choose between, so that more and more swords end up stuck inside it.

The procedure can be completely player-facing if you want. In story-telling games you could even make the choice of twist a collaborative decision.

You could also use the twist procedure to simplify rules-heavy games, turning their specialised action outcomes into simple table entries and then discarding their complex action resolution mechanics.

Finally, you could build your own tables to come up with task-specific results. If your game is mainly about tracking, you probably want a tracking-specific table of twists.

A potential drawback: Combat asymmetry

This will give you different ratios of good and bad side-effects depending on the number of combatants involved. If a dozen characters fight one giant, or fifteen minions fight one player character, there's a risk of the solo combatant being buffeted by constant 'bad luck' due to the sheer number of rolls the other side is making.

Ultimately this comes down to choice of trigger. Some possible adjustments: Only accept the first two twists that get rolled each round (for combat systems with initiative). Only take the biggest margin of success from each side (for combat systems where everything happens at once). Identify one-vs-many situations and change the trigger to benefit the one. Give boss monsters the power to ignore the first negative twist they would suffer each round.

And of course you can codify rule zero. The referee should simply reject a twist if none of the possibilities rolled seem suitable for the situation. That way a mob of gnomes can't keep knocking the giant over, making her drop her club, etc.

Finally

I should note that this procedure is untested, but I hope to give it a go at the table in the future. I'd love to hear if you have thoughts or feedback. Leave a comment or let me know on Bluesky or Mastodon!

 

The art in this post is by Gordy Higgins. Used with permission.

The Verdant Chamber: A dungeon room

Deep in the dungeon there's a smooth green cyst in the bedrock. Trapped within, a weird organic sludge waits for a chance to begin its expansion once again.

If you open the door, it may bury the world in slime.

 

 

Merry Christmas! Here's a dungeon room for you, courtesy of the 2025 Onegeon Jam on itch.