Rubyquest RPG
You wake up somewhere strange. Your memory gone. The doors are locked, the records incomplete. Why is everyone pretending everything is normal?
TYPE
SYSTEM
LANGUAGE
EXPERIENCE
AGE
$10.00
/ Session
Details
1 player following this game
Weekly / Thursday - 4:00 PM UTC
Session Duration / 3–4 hours
Campaign Length / 3–12 Sessions
0 / 5 Seats Filled
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About the adventure
Imagine Silent Hill mixed together with Animal Crossing. It would be an entertainingly terrifying (not to mention adorable) jaunt into the depths of madness. This game is heavily inspired by H.P. Lovecraft and the MS Paint Adventures popular in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Many years ago, a gent named Weaver concocted a play-by-post thread on an old internet forum. I even participated in a few of the threads. Its based on old point and click adventures with a lovecraftian twist. It became an epic tale of two people who awoke with a gap in their memories, trapped in a strange place that didn't always follow Euclid's guidelines. Are they prisoners? Patients? Victims? Killers? A puzzle slowly unraveled as they ascended through the labyrinth, encountering strange inhabitants and recovering fragments of memories that perhaps would have been better left forgotten. Now, I'm giving that story another life and giving you a chance to see what happens when the decisions are yours. Your goal is, ostensibly, to escape. You have no memories prior to waking up here. You'll explore a strange labyrinth, meet its even stranger denizens, and decide for yourself who, or what, you can trust. You'll solve puzzles in the vein of Silent Hill and Resident Evil. You'll uncover the truth piece by piece. And eventually, you'll have to decide whether escaping is worth it. Because perhaps you aren't merely a prisoner. Maybe you're the patient. Maybe you're the doctor. Maybe you're the victim. Perhaps you're a killer. And perhaps the place you're trying to escape isn't a prison at all. You'll choose a background and an animal (it is Animal Crossing, after all). Together, they'll give you proficiencies and abilities that may prove useful as you attempt to survive and escape. Mechanically, the game is deliberately simple. Most actions are resolved with a coin toss or a d4, giving you roughly a 1-in-2 or 1-in-4 chance of failure. Your backstory is your stats. I should warn you that it is entirely possible that you won't escape the facility alive. Heck, there is no assurance that the good end involves escape at all.
Game style
Puzzle / Mystery Focused
Roleplay Heavy
Theater of the Mind
Hexcrawl / Exploration
Meet the Game Master
5.0
(6)
Less than a year on StartPlaying
3 games hosted
Highly rated for: Creativity, Rule of Cool, Storytelling
About me
Well, hello there. I'm Daz. I've been playing tabletop games for 25 years, and I've been GMing regularly for about 20 of them. At this point, I've come to realize that I didn't really choose to GM. I have to. I _must_ It's much the same with writing: the ideas get into my head, and eventually they simply have to get out. My first games were a few rinky-dink affairs in high school, followed by my first *real* campaign in college with a few dear friends. Before long, I found myself imagining worlds of my own, strange characters with interesting backstories, settings, narrative arcs, and wild ideas that didn't quite fit into any existing box. So I decided to test my mettle and run a game for those same friends. We played a game that was a mix of Animal Crossing and Silent Hill. It was horrifying. But lots of fun! Twenty years later, I'm still at it. For most of those two decades I've been concocting plots behind my screen, running games across a wide variety of systems and settings. Along the way, I've become something of a student of the hobby itself: I love digging into the history of settings, understanding how mechanics have evolved, and figuring out what the intention was behind which dice are rolled. More importantly, I've learned that a good GM isn't simply the person who knows the rules or tells the story. A good GM makes it easy for everyone else to participate in creating the experience. That's something I've worked hard to develop over the years. I enjoy teaching systems by playing them rather than burying new players beneath a rulebook. I like games where the players and GM can actually talk to one another, reach a communal decision about what will make the game more fun, and then get on with absolutely annihilating the plot points I had planned for. I've developed guidelines and approaches that let players engage as deeply as they want to, whether that's bringing a character that is a challenge for the player to the table, or trying a bit of high RP when its a bit outside the players comfort zone. And while I certainly love a good fantasy campaign, I've spent much of my time GMing branching out. Cyberpunk. Low Magic. High Lethality. Grimdark. Heartwarming (Princess: The Hopeful anyone?). Some of the most fun games I've run recently have been one-shot campaigns inspired by movies, television, video games, and books. Both from things I discovered recently to things I loved when I was younger. How I would character myself being is GM is: An experimenter empath who tries to help the players tell the story they want to weave. I like discovering what happens when you take an idea seriously. I like finding the weird corner of a setting that nobody thought to explore. I like watching players take something I prepared, turn it sideways, and come up with something I never expected. (::sound of me dumping my session notes in the trash::) After 25 years, I'm still fascinated by this hobby. I still have worlds I want to build, stories I want to tell, systems I want to try, but also potentially develop. Probably with your help. So if this sounds like your kind of table, I'd love to have you along for the ride.
View Profile →Character creation
Creating your character
Players must select a modern Background and an Animal. Write up a little about who you were before you woke up ... wherever you are now. Your background and animal determines what you are proficient at. Generally between 3 and 5 general things. For example, a Male Tanooki Merchant named Tom Nook might be good at: Diplomacy, Appraisal, and Endurance. So any time those come up, they would roll a d4 and on a 2, 3, and 4, they succeed. If it was swinging a bat at a otherworldly beast with too many mouths, he would roll a d2, and on a 2 would succeed. Feel free to base off any of the characters from Animal Crossing if you like. I think thats a cute idea.
What to expect
Preparing for the session
I typically run voice over Discord, I'll be making a server specifically for this game, its the most stable I've found for VoIP. And I run rolls on Roll20 typically. But dice as you know, are fickle, and if dice rolls are not random-seeming enough on Roll20, I also allow dicebots on discord or any other public facing dice roller. Chargen is really only typing out a few lines in chat, so you dont even need a sheet generator or anything.
What Dazzle brings to the table
You can expect us to have a free session 0 which might come individually with just us speaking over voice chat. We'll probably be typing messages now and then as well. If a group session 0 is possible, it may seemlessly move into a session 1 if there is time left over (still free until the next session). During that time, we'll be chatting about your expectations, what kind of story you might want to have, what kind of story you DON'T want to have, discussing the character or characters you are bringing to the table/the character you are getting from me. Make last minute adjustments to your sheets like freebies and unique attributes you might have from your past. Maybe a storytime if anyone has a cool story to tell about TTRPGs (I have a collection). Otherwise, this is a horror game that tries to get into the characters head, not the players head. So if there is a subject you are uncomfortable with, moreso in this game than any of the others I've run, I am wide open when it comes to whatever you are uncomfortable with.
Homebrew rules
This game is meant to emulate a point and click adventure while also ascribing to the feeling of the source material. There will be a map you move across, generally laws of physics apply, so if you are trying to hand something to someone, they have to be reachable. In the same room generally, hands usable, conscious, with no walls between you. If something would be reasonably impossible. Like bashing apart a steel padlock with your barehands, you would not be allowed to roll on it. Using tools will help. I promise I wont be a jerk about it. Anyway, since they are the homebrew rules, I will paste the chargen blurb below: Players must select a modern Background and an Animal. Write up a little about who you were before you woke up ... wherever you are now. Your background and animal determines what you are proficient at. Generally between 3 and 5 general things. For example, a Male Tanooki Merchant named Tom Nook might be good at: Diplomacy, Appraisal, and Endurance. So any time those come up, they would roll a d4 and on a 2, 3, and 4, they succeed. If it was swinging a bat at a otherworldly beast with too many mouths, he would roll a d2, and on a 2 would succeed. Feel free to base off any of the characters from Animal Crossing if you like. I think thats a cute idea. I'm just going to copy paste the character generation rules
Equipment needed to play
Internet
Computer
Microphone
Platforms used
Safety
How Dazzle creates a safe table
I do not have a physical NO-card to put down in front of everyone, but I can have one on the roll20 board. I have a direct message with all players. And simply stating "Veto" or some version of "I'm not comfortable with this" will illicit me to move on from the scene or merely abstract the events down to the necessary story bits prior to the moving on. Session 0 is typically as far as I've ever needed to go for the tempering and setting of expectations from everyone. I'm very accommodating. And if you are uncomfortable by any subject, let me know your limits whenever you feel comfortable sharing them. I can voice them as if they were my own to everyone else. And we'll probably agree on those limits anyway. I tend to shy away from gratuitous descriptions of the unpleasant or grotesque if they aren't completely necessary. This game more than any of my others gets a big warning about content. It's survival horror. The setting is somewhat claustrophobic. It's an intimate setting. Your characters will likely have to talk about their backgrounds, their problems, etc. But basically, anything down in the content warnings is negotiable.
Content warnings
Safety tools used