OVERZEALOUS: Playing the game

This post is adapted from an update I wrote for my current Kickstarter campaign.

Overzealous! Your cult has no chill. It's the upcoming solo game of cartoon zealot mayhem. In this post I'm giving an overview of the fervour-filled gameplay.

1. The game's start

To start, you’ll establish who you are as a god, what sort of world you are trying to enter, and what cult has started worshipping you. Most of these details are free-form, so you can create as full an introduction as you like or get right into the game.

For example, you might have fled a collapsing universe, finding that a secret society of malcontents at an observatory have learned your name from the stars. They call themselves The Exalted Circle Of The Infinite Spiral and are, at least initially, dedicated to summoning you.

2. The game's stats

Weeks pass within the world as you play. Each week, your cult may indoctrinate more people (as measured by a stat called Cultists). At the same time, their worship of you amasses more eldritch power for your arrival, which the game calls Imminence.

But this overzealous level of devotion has some downsides.

• Heretical ideas can spread in the cult (increasing Divergence, the amount the cult has drifted away from its purpose).
• The cultists can get more overexcited about bloodshed (increasing Fervour, the measure of zeal the cultists are experiencing).
• Ancient horrors can be drawn to the power being generated (increasing Monstrosity, the number of monsters hanging around being fed table scraps by your cultists).

3. The game's acts

As an outsider god, you are trapped behind the veil of the unreal. Your ability to reach into the world and meddle with things is limited. Each week you can attempt one action.

To win, you need to perform the Immanentising Ritual. This requires enough cultists and psychic potential built up (represented by the Cultists and Imminence stats).

Actions can change your stats, and may have side-effects. For example, you can send an avatar of yourself to admonish your straying cultists, greatly reducing Divergence but raising Fervour. Or you can expend a sliver of amassed power to snuff out some of the monsters hanging around the cult’s camp, substantially lowering Monstrosity at the cost of Imminence. Other actions solve problems, attract more followers, and so on.

The game has nine actions in total, intended to cover any number of situations, and the gameplay focuses on making good choices with them. If you need to, you can come up with your own action with an appropriate cost and consequence.

4. The cult's acts

Each week you’ll roll the dice to see what further trouble the cultists have got into on their own initiative.

If they have high Fervour, they could attack a nearby town, gamble on fights between their pet monsters, or start a holy war.

If they have high Divergence, they might sacrifice an unpopular cultist, merge with a sect of diabolists, or start raising the dead.

Events can affect your stats in various ways, or cause ongoing problems to develop.

You'll likely end up beset by long-term problems. Each week you’ll have a chance that a problem that the cult has unleashed takes its toll. For example, if the cult has a plague of cannibalism, you might get –1 Cultist and +1 Monstrosity when a cultist turns into a ghoul. If they are in the middle of a religious schism, you can get +1 Fervour and +1 Divergence as they passionately declare each other heretics.

It costs precious actions to resolve ongoing problems in your cult.

5. The cult's stats

You only need paper, a pen, and dice to play Overzealous. I’m including two downloadable printable extras to help, a stat tracker and a mini zine.

You can use the stat tracker to record changes from week to week, using a pencil, tokens, dice, chewing gum, or anything you can drop on the sheet. The book also includes a copy you can cut out or trace.

And in the spirit of the upcoming Zine Month, I’ve made a cute little palm-sized zine to accompany it, just for fun.

 

6. The end acts

Overzealous usually takes about half an hour to play, but you might take it more slowly to follow all the game book’s writing prompts. These have you record the events taking place and how you (as a fettered god) feel about your progress, and give room for creative embellishments.

If your negative stats creep up too fast, your cult can fall apart. If you manage to complete the Immanentising Ritual, though, you can enter reality, and win the game. How does the rest of history go? How do mortals react?

I hope you'll check out Overzealous on Kickstarter!

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.