Thousand Year Campfire: Impressions and Review
I really enjoyed this solo rpg. I think it works so well because it is so specific and so confined, both narratively and mechanically. You are conducting research on a tiny cave, digging through layers of soil to discover what lays beneath. You draw on a worksheet as you move through the layers, and at certain depths there are flowcharts to go through that give you a prompt. An artefact is found; a fire pit was dug, a creature died, an excavation was made, an amulet buried. Then you move on to the next layer. The first thing that caught me were the discoveries made while navigating the flowcharts. First, they are determined by depth. As you build up layers of soil you roll a d6 for the depth of a specific layer. The depth then determines which flowchart you get. Deeper ones are mostly animals, then as indigenous people move in you get some experiences from them. Finally, white colonizers arrive near the top. The flowcharts read like poetry, and at crossroads you roll a d6 to deter...