Submitted my tabletop RPG for the #RPGenesis game jam: The Jekyll Hypothesis

I finished the first draft of my tabletop roleplaying game The Jekyll Hypothesis and submitted it to the #RPGenesis game jam on itch.io.

For a while I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to finish by the deadline. I really struggled with the "science" subsystem. What I'm trying to achieve with it is something that feels like scientific exploration, something where you won't know for sure how things work without doing some experiments, and even then you can only theorize and hypothesize. Conceptually, any kind of exploration is like traversing an as-yet-unrevealed map and seeing what you cross. But having something that feels more like the "concept space" of a field of science is what I was going for. I wanted it to have enough mechanical meat to seem interesting since exploring this science is what the characters are passionate about, but I didn't want it to be overly clunky. Hopefully I achieved that.

Even though I want exploration and empiricism a major theme, of course I also want there to be incentives for the experiments to be a little bit mad-science-y: a little less systematic testing and a little more "I'm pretty sure this formula gives people super-strength, and if my butler had super-strength would really solve a lot of problems for me right now...", a little less "by analyzing her personality I'll be able to find out what she really likes", a little more "If I extract a poet's passionate essence and inject it into myself I'll surely be able to win the heart of my unrequited love." I think there are mechanics in the game that can make that happen, but I'm not sure how much of that comes through right now. This week I was really focused on just getting something done that was valid to submit, so I wouldn't be surprised if it still needed some work for readers to see the full possibilities. The mechanical core of the game is a little bit more procedural than most (there's a "scene type selection" element to the mechanics that has some similarities to Burning Empires), which might make some people skeptical, but I think it has a lot of potential.