Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.
I've ended up reading some shorter things to try to keep up the pace. That hits a zenith today with a one-page ‘microgame’: Olaf hits the Dragon with his Sword, by David J Prokopetz / Penguin King. It develops the premise that “it doesn't make sense to talk about combat and roleplaying as separate activities in tabletop roleplaying games, because a battle can be a story.” It’s licensed under a CC-BY license if you wanted to tinker with its ideas.
Olaf hits the Dragon with his Sword is a game for one to two players using colour-coded dice pools, requiring dice of six colours associated with symbols like ‘ambition’, ‘blood’, and ‘sorrow’. It has an interesting minimalist design, and it is fundamentally about a storybook hero going to slay a storybook dragon.
The game being so short means that I can't go into much detail without just giving away the game's content. But it also means that I did play the game through a couple of times! It felt a little like a choose-your-own-adventure, but with less certainty (or less association from action to outcome?), and different stakes. I kind of saw the ‘twist’, if you want to call it that, coming. The dice associations and the questions for Olaf and The Dragon to answer make it obvious what the flavour of the ultimate action resolution is going to be, after Olaf hits The Dragon with his sword.
What do I think of the game? It's an interesting diversion. It's about as small as it could be and still count as a game, I think. So ‘microgame’ is apt. I suppose you could try using Olaf hits the Dragon with his Sword as a resolution mechanism specifically for ‘dragon slaying’ if that came up unexpectedly in a game that’s really not about combat or individual characters. It makes me wonder if anyone’s tried to run a series of games using a disparate rule set in the form of various completely separate ‘microgames’.
Minor text quibbles:
I don't really have any criticisms! The text doesn’t specify that all the dice should be of the same sidedness (or clarify that they needn’t be), but that’s a common sense assumption.
My favourite bit:
The dragon isn’t colour-coded, but its intrinsic nature is.
Where to get it:
On Itch at: https://penguinking.itch.io/olaf-hits-the-dragon-with-his-sword
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