The Saturday Morning Cartoon Trilogy

I've released the last part in my thematically linked trilogy of games inspired by the style & feel of Saturday morning cartoons, a trilogy I had no idea I would be making until I started writing the second part.

The first part is Home from Home, a fairly typical isekai premise about kids from our world finding themselves trapped in a fantasy castle with no obvious way of getting back, This was mostly inspired by some very wholesome, improvisational play I'd been doing with my online group and I wanted to create something that formalised the process of exploring a blank page-type setting and filling in the details as the story grew.

Part two is Wardens of the Wanderbots, a sci-fi game whose setting practically came to me in a dream: it began with the image of kids and teens on hoverbikes exploring the interior of a vast arcology in space, mixing some Rendezvous with Rama into a kids-on-bikes story.  The tricky part of this was coming up with a system that wasn't just "roll for success" and I like the unusual combination of coin flipping with tic-tac-toe that I brewed up.

Finally, we come to the most recent game, Kicks, which began life as a very different game with the same name; having committed to two Saturday morning cartoon storygames, I wanted to make it a trilogy and the notes for this game became the obvious candidate to cover another major genre, e.g. superheroes.  This was also the most satisfying for me to work on, as the mechanics and theme came together so easily after the initial hurdle of deciding how to create the dilemmas that the story relied on.

The other thing that all three games have in common is that they are GMless: there's no player who is responsible for providing story and applying the rules. Instead, tools are provided for every player to create content and everyone is responsible for following the rules collectively. This is a much harder game mode for most people and I learned the importance of mechanics that support the creation of content in the process; it's not easy to look at a blank page and know what should fill it. 

Only Home from Home has been thoroughly play-tested so far, but my goal for this year is to spend more time playing and less time designing, so fingers crossed I'll be able to update these documents as I get some more experience of them under my belt. In the mean time, I'm always open to constructive feedback and questions about the content, so please get in touch in the comments for these games.