About
Goblinville is a tabletop roleplaying game about broke goblins who travel into dangerous places to steal enough gold to make rent. Gameplay is focused on putting the goblins into dangerous, risky situations and providing compelling choices for how they get out of them.
Goblinville's fast, collaborative character creation produces goblins with lots of personality. Players can roll for random jobs, bosses, and garb, or make those choices themselves. Important elements of the character, like traits and titles, are decided by the other players. The result is a party that has a sense of relationships and interpersonal dynamic right from the start.
An unusual resolution system (inspired by amazing story games like Psi*Run and Ghost/Echo) gives players tons of narrative control, without ever diffusing the pressure of tense situations. Players roll their dice and then decide (based on the outcome) whether they care more about succeeding at their action or minimizing the consequences. This creates dynamic drama, where the GM and players share control of the pacing and danger.
Goblinville includes procedures for GM (Goblin Master) prep that outlines steps to quickly convert any fantasy adventure site into a Goblinville delve, and to make your own. The adventures we've developed focus on presenting interesting dilemmas to players and providing perilous and fantastic locations that are easily referenced by the GM. The rules for creating Goblinville monsters provide evocative and clear GM prompts that make monsters feel interesting and varied without complex stats or subsystems.
We've gotten great response from initial playtests and we're eager to get Goblinville to more tables. We encourage you to download and print the Quickstart Guide and try it out for yourself.
We're excited about the rules for Goblinville, but we've got much more than the core rules to share. We have an adventure series, optional rules and expansions, and complete setting hacks. That's why we're publishing Goblinville as a four issue zine.
Issue one will contain the core rules for running and playing the game, expanding on the quickstart guide. It will contain all the rules and procedures you need to get Goblinville to your table; you just need the pencils, dice, paper, and people. We're calling this our "Core Issue".
Issues two and three will contain optional rules and setting materials. This will include rules and tables to enrich the time goblins spend in town and an adventure series full of dungeon delves and overland journeys. These issues will help you build out Goblinville into a sandbox campaign over many sessions.
Issue four contains two complete setting conversions of Goblinville with attendant changes to rules and procedures: a human community in a hostile fantasy landscape, and a mutant community in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. We're excited about both and we look forward to sharing playtest reports and updates with backers of the zine.
The Goblinville Gazette will be mailed out in monthly installments from March to June. The zines will be saddle-stitched booklets full of original art by Eric Swanson. The serial format will allow us to adjust and expand future issues as we go. We're looking forward to releasing Goblinville and we hope you get the chance to try it out.
Or maybe DIO: doing it ourselves. Goblinville Gazette will look and feel like something we made ourselves, because it is. We're doing all the writing, art, and layout. Though we're working digitally, we'll be printing on photocopiers and screenprinting the covers ourselves, to give the project a tangibly DIY feel. We're even sewing and screen-printing the "burlap sack" dice bags to emulate a key in-game item. We think the attention to detail that comes from hand-made artifacts will be worth it.
The Indie RPG community is a place of incredible collaboration, dialogue, and innovation. We could not have developed Goblinville without the games that inspired it, the people who playtested, and the forums where we got feedback on early drafts. We're indebted to Tom Moldvay's 1981 Basic D&D Rulebook, for giving clear procedures for dungeon crawling. Goblinville's central resolution system was derived from OtherKind by Vincent Baker (and the related systems Psi*Run by Meguey Baker and Ghost/Echo by John Harper). Torchbearer by Thor Olasvrud and Luke Crane showed us that time and inventory can be a core source of drama and tension. Thanks to all our playtesters for their willingness to try new iterations and for sharing your insight into how the game feels at the table. Finally, thanks to the Story Games Community and the RPG Design subreddit for giving crucial feedback to early drafts. We could not have made this without you.
Risks and challenges
This is our first Kickstarter and unforeseen challenges could emerge. That said, the project is staying small in scope: no external partners, no stretch goals. We are doing all writing, art, layout, and printing ourselves. We are also limiting shipping to the U.S. and Canada so that we don't have to worry about unexpected shipping costs or delays.
We're committed to delivering this project on time and keeping you all updated. Thanks for making this possible.
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