Become a Gamer ($5) or higher on our Patreon before May 12th to get this solo TTRPG for free. There's a free trial, too! 🔦

🙋‍♀️ This is a solo TTRPG
🖨️ Printing is optional

You'll need:

• A piece of paper with one blank side
• Something to write with
• A highlighter
• A six-sided (d6) and twenty-sided (d20) die

Content Warnings: Consequence-free death, despair, loneliness, and feeling trapped (in a gigantic city-sized construct).

About the Game

Once a best-selling crime novelist, inspiration has eluded you for years. Desperate, you escape to the remote town of Shining Shore. Free of the burdens of fame and pressure, you soon have a draft of your next novel: Initiation. A draft you can’t remember writing...

After a tumble, you find yourself in the Dark Ocean. Your own personal hell. And the only way out is to write your escape.

But that’s exactly what the Dark Ocean wants, too. Unable to create, only alter, it needs a story to set it free. It needs you to write it, so it can fix it. Twist it. Use it. Use you.

You’ll need to find inspiration, evade the editor and their relentless army of shades (accidental creations of your flawed writing).

Can you transform your manuscript into a story that frees you and traps the editor? Or will you doom the world to save yourself?

Oceans and Spirals is a solo TTRPG where you explore the Dark Ocean for inspiration. Along the way, you’ll fill a blank page with notes and doodles. Meanwhile, you’ll scratch out and highlight your expositional manuscript page, turning it into your escape story.

When you finish, your transformed manuscript alone will determine who wins. Good luck...

Inspiration

• Oceans and Spirals was made for Video Game Hacks Tabletop Jam 2! with the guidelines of "Videogame Hacks." "What tropes, mechanics, or themes common in video games do you think would translate well into a Tabletop game, or a setting or adventure for a TTRPG?" Not only is this a fangame of a video game series, but it also utilizes failure, dying and coming back to try again, discovering narrative through gameplay, and more.
• This game was also made for the Celebrating SRDs jam, which had the guideline to "use an SRD or make one." We used two!
  • The combination of two stats using a single number comes from Lasers & Feelings by John Harper. Our game's stats are "Oceans" and "Spirals". 
  • One Page Left by M. Kirin uses prompts to fill out a single "page" throughout the game. We used this in Oceans and Spirals, and put our own twist by adding a blackout poetry aspect to the prompts as well. This leads you to edit the manuscript page alongside your single "page".

We didn't directly hack Lasers & Feelings or One Page Left; both are one-page RPGs, and Lasers & Feelings is a multiplayer game. 

Oceans and Spirals, on the other hand,  has a Manuscript page, a 20-page booklet, and an optional bookmark (for turn order quick reference). But we did utilize key aspects from those games, and we appreciate the frameworks that we drew from to create this game.

More Games

You can check out all of our journaling and writing prompt games here, as well as a few related games below:

Find Out More

Learn more about Oceans and Spirals on our Patreon. Or come chat about it on our Discord server!

All of our posts are free aside from some exclusive polls. We share news, updates, behind-the-scenes design stuff, and more. Plus, each of our releases is either free for a limited time or has community copies; if you become a free member of our Patreon, you’ll get an email when we release something, and if you’re quick enough you can get everything free! 

Paid members help fund our creations and can get all of them as they come out, answer polls to help shape our future creations, and even get games and zines printed and mailed to you monthly in North America.

"Download demo"

There are two files below that are listed as demos. These are the manuscript pages. They're not actually demos of the game, but are freely available to those who need access to the manuscript pages later.

These files are also part of the .zip file when getting a copy of the game.

The two files are identical, except that the PDF is meant to be printed and the PNG is meant to be used digitally.