ROCKPOOL: A Tiny RPG About Tiny Rockpool Creatures

[Jubal]

ROCKPOOL is a tiny RPG about tiny Rockpool creatures. With separate aims and a world that is both teeming with life and in constant flux, will you and your friends be able to use your Tidefast, Spinethrown, and Shelltwirled scores, your ability to craft items out of bits of rockpool junk, and most importantly your ability to work together to achieve your mist-shrouded, salt-encrusted dreams?

Will you build yourselves a tower to watch the sea, hunt periwinkle shells, face off against the monstrous power of a shore crab, or learn magic from the grief-tossed Driftwood Hag and the mysterious Watcher in Seaglass? The choice is yours!

In the 12 page PDF you will get:

• Basic rules for playing the game.
• A Table of Occurrences for unexpected things.
• A bestiary of creatures you might find around a rockpool.
• Some pretty public domain illustrations from 19th century natural history books.
• A couple of small story-vignettes to give some more illustration to how I imagine the setting.
• The general feeling of melancholic hope that comes from feeling small in the face of sea-spray and the ocean winds.

In ROCKPOOL, the core of the rules are that it's intended as a GMed RPG, though it might well work if played GM-less, and that it's a 2d6 based system with stat trade-offs. Your three stats are all useful for different things, and can be rolled over or under - so for example, rolling under shelltwirled, a stat about finesse and dreaming, is important for creating items, but rolling over it might be important for perception, and the more you keep your head stuck in the clouds the harder it might be to work out what's going on around you. As a result, there's a real tension between the value of minmaxing and the value of being an all-rounder. Combat is simple and potentially brutal, with it being expected that the player characters may die at times: life in the rockpools is short, and the tide in particular gives a severe and regular threat to the player characters. You can improve your chances and get bonuses by crafting items from flotsam, to help progress towards your aims: there's not necessarily meant to be a core quest structure, more just the players trying to collaborate to achieve their goals.



I wrote ROCKPOOL in a weekend specifically for the Katelynn's Closet Charity Bundle which is currently available on itch.io. It's currently exclusively available via that route: buying it will raise funds for a small charity providing clothes and supplies to disadvantaged children in the Cape Cod area. If you do decide to give it ago or have a read, I'd be really interested in your thoughts!

[Tusky]

This is a really neat idea and a good cause. Contributed!

Will need to get some people together to try some 

[Jubal]

The bundle is now at 875 dollars raised - though it's actually double that as the bundle creator's employer has a scheme to match charity donations up to a thousand dollars, so $1750 which is pretty neat

EDIT: Hit the 1000 mark! So that's 2000 raised, any more wont't get doubled but will still contribute to the cause

[Anke]

aww. Any plans to make it available again some time?

[Jubal]

Yeah, I definitely planned to contribute it to more bundles etc but haven't got round to it yet. I'll happily send you a copy in exchange for some feedback & thoughts on it, anyhow, if you're interested

[Jubal]

I finally ran a little game of Rockpool today! It was fun, which I am very pleased about.

We had four players: a mercantile being that wanted to decorate its shell, a little creature that wanted to have an anemone riding around atop it to terrify its enemies, a being that, whilst in some ways the enforcer of local rules, had a romantic streak and wanted to talk to the sea-whispers, and a small turtle-like thing that wanted to kill an anemone just because it didn't like them.

There were shenanigans! The major occurrences included a blenny fish which turned out to have a treasure in the crevice it lived in, which resulted in a pretty long drawn out combat, which may have dragged a bit but did feel like a fairly good epic centrepiece. Nanereia, Lady of the Rockpools, also got involved and the two fish-fighters increasingly ended up in an almost Arthuriana-like questing narrative while the others tried to work out how to deal with a pebbling-fey who ended up, for want of a better name, being referred to as The Customer (another one turned up later and got referred to as The Resident).

The tide also unexpectedly rolled in early, though the small turtle-like thing then killed the blenny and sacrificed it to Nanereia, who as a resulting boon returned the two players who got swept out to sea into play. The fish's bones were then used to decorate the mercantile creature's shell, and its hoard was to become a gift to the sea-whispers for the player who wanted that, so it all worked out quite nicely narratively. Definitely some tweaks to be made in the rules - I think it perhaps needs to be easier to work on items, and there was some feeling that combats should be faster and more deadly - but in general I think it went nicely.