Fictive Fun

You awake alone... The last thing you remember is the helicopter spinning out of control.   You, and your entire unit, were thrown from it as you approached the Stepford Estate, deep in the forested mountains. You’d come to investigate a slew of missing persons. Now your team counts among them.   Something ravenous approaches from the dark. You stand, but there is only one place to run…   Inside.    Those are the opening lines of Travis Brightfield's solo, mansion-crawling RPG, The Mansion Incident. In this game, you play as a member of an elite investigative unit now trapped inside a mansion of horrors somewhere in the wilderness. You must navigate the maze-like mansion while overcoming deadly, experimental monsters, trapped rooms and strange puzzles. You must find the rest of your team all while being pursued by a horrible creature called the Nemesis. Can you survive the mansion and escape or will you and your team perish under the pressure of t...

Malachi spent yet another day traveling the scorched sands of Talus. As he reached the top of a high dune, movement in the distance caught his eye. Squinting through his binoculars against the glare, he made out the distinctive silhouettes of several Lek'Tok, the insectoid species adapted to this desert world. They seemed to be approaching him, their six limbs propelling them swiftly across the sand. Malachi aimed his rifle, his nerves on edge. The Lek'Tok were not known for their hospitality towards other species, and he had no desire to engage in an uneeded confrontation. But as they drew nearer, he could see that their posture was not aggressive, and their chittering voices held a tone of... pleading? The group of four Lek'Tok surrounded Malachi, their multifaceted eyes fixed upon him. One of them, the largest of the group, stepped forward and began to speak in a high-pitched series of clicks and trills. Malachi listened, his translator trying to keep up with the strange...

Guardians devote their lives to protecting a Sanctuary of power that can spell ruin for the world if it falls into the wrong hands. This is the setting premise for Sanctuary & Sentinel, a 2-in-1 storytelling game by designer Meghan Cross and published by Siren's Song Games.  Sentinel The original game, Sentinel, is a solo-journaling game in which you tell the story of the last surviving Guardian that stands guard over a place of power, the Sanctuary. This utilizes a deck of standard playing cards and some polyhedral dice to determine prompts such as memories of the last Guardian, how the Guardian manages to defend the source from threats, clues left around the Sanctuary, and the passage of time. It all culminates in a final roll that determines the fate of the Sanctuary and the Guardian. Sanctuary The other part of game is called Sanctuary was created after Sentinel but should actually be played before playing Sentinel. This is also a journaling game if played solo, but optiona...

Still resolute, Malachi continued his search across the endless dunes of Talus. The desert heat had a way of sapping not only the Nomad's strength but also his spirit. Yet he was determined to find Kwame Devine. As he navigated the undulating dunes, a flash of color caught his eye. Approaching cautiously, Malachi knelt down and examined the torn remnants of a backpack, its emblem bearing the unmistakable insignia of the Old Empire. The poor soul who had once carried this pack had likely met a grisly fate at the jaws of some desert predator. Malachi scanned the area, his senses heightened, but there was no sign of the owner's remains. Continuing on, Malachi soon came across another Murian Scrapcrawler, its treads churning up the sand as it moved slowly across the dunes. Malachi approached the vehicle, hoping to glean some information about Devine's whereabouts, but the Murians aboard seemed just as evasive as the others he had encountered. Although no one asked, one Murian h...

As dawn broke, Malachi found himself approaching a towering palace, its ornate spires and domes gleaming in the morning light. This, he knew, was Skab's Palace, the domain of one of the Targ Cartel's most powerful members. Malachi entered the town surrounding the palace, he observed the various locals who milled about, preparing for the day's work. Something seemed off about some of them – their movements were sluggish, their expressions vacant and unfocused. Intrigued, Malachi followed the faint sound of a strange, pulsing rhythm, which seemed to be emanating from a nearby warehouse. Cautiously, he made his way towards the building, his hand resting on the hilt of his rifle. As he peered inside, Malachi's eyes widened in surprise. A Mystic Order acolyte stood in the center of the warehouse, his human hands outstretched as he vibrated a series of metal canisters, creating a mesmerizing, rhythmic tone. Two mercenary guards, one human and one Murian, were nearby, pistols ...

I have a bit of a problem. I love indie RPG's. I love bundles. I love indie RPG's in bundles.  Then I end up with 500+ items in my itch.io library plus stuff on my computer, stuff in my DriveThruRPG library, stuff in my Bundle of Holding account, and a few physical books and zines. I have so much stuff that I have never read let alone played. I love that I live in a time when so many creators have platforms to cook up RPG products and supplements and distribute them. I don't love the fact that so many creators and creations get lost in a ocean of releases and are not shared or further spoken about by others.  Enter Heroic Archivist by Richard Kelly.  Heroic Archivist is a micro-RPG game / Habit Builder / Habit Tracker / Solo LARP / indie RPG promoter. That is a lot of slashes for a something that can fit on tri-fold 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper.  Here is the gist of the game: In 48 BCE, ships in the harbor of Alexandria were set on fire. The fire spread to the city and th...

Back in the desert, Malachi nervously tapped his shock rifle as he surveyed the crashed New Uprising starfighter, half-buried in the desert sands. He looked around the area and up in the sky but saw no other activity in the area. The sleek, angular craft was in bad shape, its hull scorched and battered. As he approached, he could hear the faint crackle of a radio transmission coming from the cockpit. Malachi peered inside, his crystalline features reflecting the dim glow of the displays. The pilot was slumped over the controls, unmoving. Malachi then leaned in to get a better look at the pilot. "Alive, but unconscious," he thought. Malachi's view then shifted to the radio, where a panicked conversation was unfolding. "...repeat, the Empire knew about the ambush! We're being picked off one by one!" a voice crackled. "Requesting immediate reinforcement, they have us hemmed in here! We need to break through or we're all-" The transmission dissolve...

Malachi's garnet-colored eyes scanned the vast desert landscape as he disembarked his small starship. The Pellucid Nomad pulled his hood over his head, shielding his face from the scorching sun. His robes billowed in the hot, dry wind as he surveyed canyon walls. Malachi had arrived on Talus to hunt down a wanted smuggler - Kwame Devine. The contract was lucrative, as is most that come through the Nomad guild, he just wished that it didn't lead him to planet like this. Malachi knew he would need to be careful on this arid world. The extreme heat would be taxing on his body, a lingering reminder of a previous ordeal. Either way, the Targ Cartel wanted Devine captured, dead or alive, and were willing to pay a Nomad handsomely to do it. Footsteps crunching on loose gravel, he calmly made his way through the narrow canyon. He kept his senses sharp, alert for any sign of movement or danger. As he reached the edge of the canyon, Malachi paused. The endless sea of sand dunes stretched...

From page 1 of the rulebook, Notorious is "A game of hardscrabble bounty hunting amid intergalactic war." Notorious is a solo RPG, in which the player takes on the role of a Nomad, or a bounty hunter, under contract to take down a mark in service to another faction. To play, all you will need is the rulebook, some paper, two 6-sided dice, and your imagination. Notorious was written by Jason Price and published by AlwaysCheckers Publishing. Nomads and Character Creation Nomads are a guild of bounty hunter loosely tied together by their commitment to follow the doctrine of the guild called "The Guild Code". The player may choose to follow or not this doctrine during gameplay and doing so will affect the character's stats and eventually the epilogue of the game. Character generation is completed through a series of random rolls of a d6. The first roll will determine your Nomad type (or class/playbook). The subsequent rolls help flesh out the Nomad's origin, sca...

Welcome everyone to the Fictive Fun blog. This is actually a reboot of a blog that I had managed regularly from 2017-2022. Technically 2017-2019 because I pretty much quit playing tabletop roleplaying games back in 2020.  My natural habits with any hobby finds me becoming engrossed in it for a time period before getting bored and not participating at all, then to once again becoming enamored and engaging with it again. It is a vicious cycle and probably the reason I selected the ouroboros as my blogger profile picture. The original blog was on WordPress and I liked the customization options and all the little plugins involved but it all became a distraction and eventually it became bloated as I was consistently tinkering with all the little settings. I became overwhelmed with it when I started to lose interest in tabletop RPG's and just quit paying attention to it for years (although I was still paying monetarily for it).  I remember using Blogger years ago for a separate inte...