Whoops! I Broke Down in this Weird City and Need Money FAST: Jam Edition

Designed for the Anime and Manga Tribute TTRPG Jam, Whoops! I Broke Down in this Weird City and Need Money FAST is a solo journaling (optional) homage to filler episodes. You'll pull a character from a different TTRPG (or make one up), and they'll break down in whatever vehicle they were riding in. Whoops!

Saddled with $500 in debt (not too shabby if you were in a giant mech, but ouch if you were on a skateboard...), you're left to explore a mysterious city that shifts every day and somehow houses everything from mountains and snowy tundras to beaches, skyscrapers, and plenty of strangers. 

The game uses the Carta SRD for travel and the XD6 SRD for rolling dice and getting results. You start each day with 25 energy, represented by 25 6-sided dice, and travel across a 6x6 (options are enclosed for other grid sizes) grid of standard playing cards. Each time you arrive at a location, you can interact with it! Most locations require you to succeed at challenges: you'll roll as many dice as you'd like and add the results (using a tense system of successes and failures) to your current matching stat value to get your number of successes. But be careful: each die you roll may become exhausted, meaning you'll have to recover it at the end of the night or via resting or eating. 

Everything you do takes time, and if you spend too long in the city, you'll eventually fall in love with it and decide to move here forever. To some that may be the bad ending, but for others that might be desirable! It's all in how you roleplay the game and what your character wants. Were they done defeating a big bad villain and ready to relax? The city is perfect for them! Were they racing somewhere to stop the world from ending? You'd better hurry the heck up so you can get out of the city then!

Jam Edition

This game was made in a week and isn't complete yet, even though it's already over a week late to the Anime and Manga Tribute TTRPG Jam 🤣. If you play it, I'd love to hear your feedback! You can reach me at:

• Email --> CataclysmicKnight[at]gmail.com
• Discord --> bethmakesgames

Some things I still want to do with it include:

• Further playtesting: I uhhhhhh haven't done any yet lol, so I'm sure that prompts will need to be balanced for difficulty and such, plus I need to double-check that I didn't allow any stat(s) to be over- or under-used. Playtesting will also allow me to see where the game can be improved layout-wise, which brings me to...
• Layout: I mean, the layout exists, but it's far from as fancy as I'd like. The Character Sheet and Game Board are especially begging for some fanciness! But I sure wasn't going to spend days on making them look great just to have to change them all around 🤣 
• The Prompts: They're done, and I'm proud of em, but they likely still need to be balanced and they definitely need to be edited. I'd be amazed if I remembered to bold and phrase everything exactly right, and I'm considering breaking the prompts that have multiple possible results up so it's easier to determine what will happen with each.

I'm also very seriously considering making a custom deck for the game so people can just look at the cards rather than using a standard deck and looking up prompts. These cards would be printable but also the game would be imported to Screentop.gg so it can be played digitally as well.

When the game is complete, it won't be free (I'll likely charge $3 - $5 for it) but since I haven't even playtested this version it's free :D I WILL upload the updated, finished version of the game here, though, so buying it or getting it in a bundle means you'll get the finished version later! Who knows when that'll happen, though, so please don't buy this in anticipation of getting the full version anytime soon🧡 

Did you know we have a Patreon? 

This is an ongoing project, and I've written a lot about it in this free Patreon post.

The vast majority of our posts are free: we share news, updates, behind-the-scenes design stuff, and more. We do have paid tiers that get access to our stuff as it releases, but even becoming a free member will get you emails when one of our free posts goes out. And psssst: sometimes we even release free stuff!

More TTRPGs

You can check out more of our TTRPGs on this list along with some of our journaling games listed below: