New Release: A Grotto Called!
Defeat the monster through through inference and phone calls.
A Grotto Called! is a a dual-GM, asymmetric horror, one-page TTRPG where players hunt a monster by reconstructing its rules through inference and phone calls.
The method to your survival is to commit to three actions at a time that you believe will help you defeat the monster, while another player presents three arguments for why those actions won’t work. You won’t know exactly what went wrong in the plan, but the GM will give narration and point-based feedback showing how close you were. If you can put together a plan that targets all of its weaknesses, you might just make it out of the grotto.
You’re not the only group trying to survive either. This game, originally designed on my bachelor party road trip to be played between two cars with walkie talkies, will now provide an occasional phone call. You’ll have another group in a separate space, and with enough skill and luck, you may be able to contact them for a short time to exchange findings. The GMs adapt to new information from each other’s side, and players must use deduction across both groups to piece together the monster’s true nature and find the right combination of actions before the timer runs out.
Try it out for free here: https://kaimedina.itch.io/a-grotto-called
Drafting on the Road
We were at a cafe between DC and Virginia, and there was still a bit of road a ways ahead of us before we hit our hiking trails. So, that’s when I thought up this game:
This particular TTRPG needed to be playable with minimal pieces, mostly verbal, inside a car, and ideally using our walkie talkies. We had just finished making a mess of things with “verbal Wordle” and “verbal Pokémon combat” (we had a Pokémon stat expert present in both vehicles), so I wasn’t opposed to making things a bit challenging and a touch annoying.
War Models and Landmarks
Two years ago I was obsessed with Matrix Games, and kept the idea in my back pocket until now. I felt this was a pretty fitting approach, since the genre requires zero physical resources.
A Matrix Game is a unique type of role-playing game that emphasizes structured argumentation and decision-making within a controlled scenario. Typically, the game involves two players and a Game Master (GM). One player makes a decision or proposes an action, while the other player counters with reasons why that decision may not work. The GM, who is usually an expert in the field, listens to both arguments and then makes a final call on the outcome, which leads to a plus (+) or a minus (-) on a dice roll to add an element of chance. On a grander scale, the results of these decisions and dice rolls are recorded, forming a complex matrix or data table that helps organizations, such as military or government agencies, simulate and analyze potential outcomes of real-world scenarios (assuming the knowledge base behind the players and expert accurately regard the modern real-world).
So, the experts (GMs) would have to understand the monster in full, and mechanically we can produce landmarks, powers, and weaknesses in order to keep those things steady and consistent. Credit to my friend Connor for the idea that landmarks should be required to include hints, to help guide the players towards their goal.
I’m including a lot of older blog posts here, but truly these are where my ideas are coming from for this project. The above Landmarks through Windows article outlines how in games like D&D, focusing on set landmarks can help connect players into the world.
Pig Timer
Skeleton Code Machine, the provider of the woodcut tracing art in the included example monster, introduced me to the dice mechanic Pig.
The idea of the game is to keep rolling and adding dice together until you hit your target before your competitors. However, if you push your luck and roll badly, your score can reset.
That made for a great timer mechanic in A Grotto Called!. When a group’s total point value reaches 60, they enter a final round to attempt survival. If they hit the timer and lose, all players become ghosts. I like imagining one group calling them in, and only getting silence on the other line, with a mutual understanding of what had occurred to lead there.
While I didn’t want anything to reset the timer like in Pig, combining a dice roll with the total score from the Matrix-style system created some interesting strategic decisions.
Strategy
The balance beam of this game is gathering as much useful information as possible without advancing the timer too quickly.
Each round, one player proposes three actions and another provides three objections. The GM then evaluates them: each successful action is worth +1 point, and each valid objection is worth –1 point. These are combined into a single net score for the round.
After that, the timer advances by 1d6 + the net score. If the result of that math is 6 or higher, the group also gains the ability to attempt a short phone call with the other group.
Because of this, outcomes might look like:
1 success and 1 valid objection canceling out to +0
2 successes and 1 valid objection for a +1
3 successes with no valid objections for a +3, and so on
Higher scores help you reach communication faster, but they also accelerate the timer, drawing the monster’s attention closer. Negative values are turned positive when added to the timer.
Importantly, you are never told exactly which actions succeeded or which objections were valid. This means both success and failure are only partially revealed, and players must spend multiple rounds creatively probing the “negative space” of what might be true about the monster.
If you want to keep the timer low, but also get useful information, I suppose maxing out objections while minimizing actions (without going negative) would be a strategy. However, explaining why something doesn’t work can be harder than explaining why it does sometimes. Alternatively, you can just focus really hard in the narration, and hope the numbers work out.
To win, a player must be confident they understand all three weaknesses of the monster, won’t have their plan impacted by it’s powers, and declare a final all-or-nothing attempt to defeat it based on their deductions.
Feedback
I haven’t had much of a chance to playtest this deeply, so all feedback is appreciated! While preventing the overly-semantic GM doesn’t seem too possible for this game, there are some areas of balance and strategy that I’m curious about, especially regarding the timer mechanic.
Try it out for free here: https://kaimedina.itch.io/a-grotto-called
you can shoot me comments either on the store page or below this post for feedback.
Other odds and ends
The new podcast, “This Should Be A Game!” combines the essence of movies like Gravity and The Martian into a tabletop game format. It has been extremely invigorating to how I play around with mechanics - they’re really clever!
My Pokémon Shale TTRPG is still under works! I’m hoping to get some playtest copies out by mid-may, so I can focus on other projects when the Unpub mentorship starts. It will be free on its official release!
Follow this blog to get an email when it’s time.
