The Local Helm

Each month I try to roll up a d6 of random game prompts from a random generator and pick one to make as a small, rough, but fully illustrated product. July's is The Local Helm, a tabletop role playing game designed for playing fantasy stories set in a small community.

The final product is a solo-ready, sprawling village or crew simulation game with few rules, told almost entirely through procedures for play. It is also a funnel, in that characters die often and quickly. It should be playable out of the box, and also usable with any lite/OSR-ish system you prefer, being a collection of layered procedures and meters, along with a bunch of tables.

It's inspired by a post on Dungeons of Signs, an old game (wayback link) called Wuthering Heights Roleplay, and a result from the generator here. You may find the NPC emulators in Scherzo useful, or the PET, in conjunction, though I've included a simple NPC emulation process in this file.

Update: fixing an auto-rasterization issue that ate some fancy layered text and made it hard to read. Rasterize manually, folks.