Lupis – What’s all this, then?

Lupis is a tabletop roleplaying game that I devised a couple years back. I wanted a game where you played as the monster and hid from humans. Originally, it was played much more D&D style with a Game Master, more involved character sheets, and D20 rolls, but overtime, I’ve began to appreciate the GM-less TTRPG more from playing games of Microscope.

(Also probably because of my adversion to planning)

I set the original concept of Lupis on the backburner a couple years back, but after reading and playing a couple of solo RPGs, I decided to give it another shot.

Concepts

In which I give you a couple of concepts I jotted down at the start

“Deteriorating” Games

I want players to feel that they have plenty of agency in the early game. I want them to overextend. Late-game, however, I want them to feel constrained and feel that they have barely any resources to be able to cross the finish line.

Impactful Events

As the players play the game, I want particular events to separate their game into a “Before” and an “After.” Like everything was good, but bam! Life’s in the gutter.

Togetherness

Players should desperately want to help each other. It should be backbreaking when someone loses control and goes on a rampage

Loss of Control

Players should be able to receive permanent or near permanent negative modifiers that keeps them in a “Death Spiral,” meaning their rolls begin to fail more often. It should feel like a “mean” game that’s working against them. Similarly to the “Deteriorating Games” I mentioned earlier.

In addition to these, the mechanic of gaining or losing a physical-real-world resource was compelling enough to work on Lupis again.

To elaborate, I mean something like Avery Alder’s The Quiet Year’s Contempt (Which I’ve covered here before) or Ben Robbins’ Kingdom’s Overthrow mechanic. In both of these games, players can seize control of the narrative by spending a resource and force their idea into existence. In Kingdom, you swap roles with another person. In The Quiet Year, you spend Contempt which in turn causes other players to gain Contempt.

(Also I’m a tactile person, so the thought of manipulating pieces and placing them on cards was irresistable)

Finally, before starting Lupis, I had played a couple rounds of Takuma Okada’s Alone Among the Stars which really served as the lynchpin to starting Lupis. The idea of using a deck of cards to serve as random events and form a narrative was… obvious, but its execution I hadn’t come across yet. This game really showed me a good example of what could be done with that.

Initial Design

In which I walk you through how I came up with the initial mechanics

I’m writing this after the release of the first preview of Lupis, so my memory is a bit fuzzy, but I believe I started with the initial scenario. I needed a reason the players were in this city (the game was initially set in a town, but I changed it to a city, so players could roam more freely) and didn’t just leave, so I came up with a fog surrounding Cromsworth (which was a name I thought was fancy-pants enough) preventing players from leaving.

Next, I started messing with the cards. I wanted to test that resource management mechanic I thought about, so I took out the Jack of Spades, the Queen of Spades, and the King of Spades (Spades was arbitrary) and placed two poker chips on the Jack. I took an index card and placed three poker chips on it and spent a couple of minutes just moving them back and forth. This felt good. I had a card left over, but I just set that aside for now.

I then used the index card that the poker chips were on (poker chips are now hereby referred to generally as ‘Tokens’) and made it the player’s character sheet. I took the general form of the sheet from Kingdom and added a dash of the Quest TTRPG as well. This, meaning, the player writes down the name of their character, a phrase about what people notice when they first see the character, how the character moves, what people knows the character for, and an irreconcilable Issue that holds the character back and is the reason why they stay in Cromsworth in the first place.

I orignally had more options for personality traits that I mooched from Kingdom, but I removed them because I didn’t fully know why they were in Kingdom in the first place, so I couldn’t use them fully.

Later, I took out the Aces from the deck of cards because they’re a unique type of card like the Face cards and set them aside. I came up with dealing out stacks of four because I knew I wanted the max players to be four. (again, arbitrary)

Now, I had stacks, and I had the Aces separated, so my next instinct was… to, well put the stacks together with the Aces separating them. To justify this decision, I thought that the Ace could represent a Disaster and the cards under the ace would represent days in the city. Going back to the four player hunch I had, I dealt out cards in groups of four. I decided that each card in this bunch represented a time of day (Morning, Early Afternoon, Late Afternoon, and Evening) and the suit and value of the card represents the event (like in Along Among the Stars). Then, I went to work making tables!

MMM… tables are… a bit tedious, but I got there eventually. I wanted to justify using both the Suit and the card Value, so the Suit represented the type of experience and the Value represented where that experience takes place.

Next, I had to make the poker chip token manipulation mechanic thingie work, so I named tokens on the Player “Restraint” and tokens on the Face cards “Suspicion.”

I needed a risk for losing Restraint and gaining Suspicion, but to begin I focused solely on punishing a lower Restraint. This punishment being every time you flip over a Disaster card, you would roll 1D6 and add Restraint and if the result didn’t go over a number, you would be responsible for that Disaster.

Flipping a couple of cards over from the deck, I would hit a face card not too often, but usually one every set of cards (a set being the cards under an Ace before the next Ace), so I decided to use this to incorporate proper roleplaying in the game. Not wanting to come up with a proper system at the time, I basically cut and paste the Scene/Dictated Scene rules from Microscope into the Encounter system (that is, coming up with a question, what’s happening in the scene, and revealing the thoughts of characters). Given Face cards aren’t inherently numbered, I just had the player add up all the number cards revealed so far plus 1D6 and if the result were over ten, then just subtract six until you get a number within two to ten.

Then depending on how you did in that roleplay, you would gain or lose Suspicion and lose Restraint if you used any werewolf abilities in that rp.

Now, the Jack, Queen, and King of Spades are currently face up on the table, and players can reveal face cards at one point or another, so I wanted the Face cards that players can reveal to associate with the Face cards on the table. To do this, I renamed the face up face cards as “Citizen” cards and each card represented a certain status in the city. King being politically powerful figures, Queen being middle class people and clerical positions, and Jack being the rest of the proletariat, kinda on the poorer/struggling middleclass side.

Then after revealing the face card, you would make up a character who is part of the associated Citizen card social status (So if you revealed a King, you would maybe make a city leader or something). Making up a character involved coming up with a name and two adjectives and writing it down because it was simple.

As you added and removed Suspicion from the Citizen cards, you would change which Citizen card you placed the Suspicion on. For example, if you’re currently placing Suspicion on the Jack and after placing another Suspicion, there’s two Suspicion on the Jack, you would move the Suspicion tokens to the Queen. This represented how far the Suspicion in the city went to. If the Suspicion is on the Jack, then it’s only a concern to a small citizens and no real action is being taken. Queen, then citizens have begun to organize and instate rules, and King being that this is a very high concern for powerful figures and laws and curfews have been set into place to prevent any further Disasters from occuring.

Now with the deck setup, the character sheet created, and the Citizen cards ready. I began playtesting.

Issues

The main issue I ran into was what I think is an inherit issue with the solo genre. That being, solo RPGs are at best contemplative experiences. You have a couple of seeds and from that you craft a world or retell an experience your character had. It’s nothing like the tense game of cat and mouse I had in mind.

Another issue is repetitiveness. Mathematically there’s plenty of situations that can happen, but in the game it feels that you get the same situations over and over again. Also, there’s no moment of contemplation. No moment in between days or events where players can take actions to hedge their bets.

Roleplay is also difficult. There’s no restrictions on what character you can make other than the social class of the character, so paradoxically I, at least, got a lot of cookie cutter characters and got tired easily.

Finally, the ending. This is still a problem even in the first preview of the game, but the game just… ends and unlike in The Quiet Year where the game just ending is an integral part of the game, creating tension where the desire to be heard is at the forefront before its too late, this game doesn’t have the systems to support that sort of experience.

Over time, I would begin to solve these problems, but that’s for another blog post. Thanks for reading!

(If you made it this far, I would like to thank you for reading all the way through! I understand this is very much a stream of consciousness form of writing, but I wanted to get this out.)