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Today, we’re shining a spotlight on two indie projects that are either just releasing or about to release in the near future, trying to do something interesting in the indie TTRPG space. One explores passion through monster-hunting, while the other is a magical realism-influenced take on time.

Glatisant Puts You Face-to-Face With Your ‘Beast’ and Their Passion

The questing beast, for those familiar with Arthurian legend, is a creature that is best known as the ‘target’ of a series of quests that King Arthur and his fellow knights often pursue as part of the legends. The chimera-esque creature is iconic and has taken on multiple appearances in legends. But what would it be like for you to become the Beast instead of the knight?

That’s the opportunity that Glatisant, the premier game published by Graftbound, hopes to empower players to explore. Glatisant is a GM-less, asymmetrical TTRPG for two players using the playing card-based “Carta” system to create a point-crawl system, or a system where players journey from location to location in a fairly linear manner that may be randomly generated in some manner. The story is simple; one player is the knight assigned to hunt the questing beast, and the other is the beast themselves. It becomes a cooperative experience for the pair to reach a common goal.

The game’s origin begins in a way that should be very familiar to other creators, according to Glatisant author Lucas Zellers. He had spent two years writing the Book of Extinction for Mage Hand Press when he got on a plane going to PAX Unplugged in 2023. It was one of the most exhausting and emotional experiences for Zellers since it required grappling with mass extinctions, climate change and how that was affecting our world. The project didn’t go as well as he had hoped, and he didn’t have a book in his hands until two years after the campaign. But it sparked a simple question in his head: “What does our passion owe us?”

Or to put it another way, “Our passion should ask more of us than just our money and they should give us more than just pleasure,” fellow Graftbound Press owner Emily Entner added, quoting Phil Edwards.

That question led to Zellers creating a game about “following a dream that knows more than you, but can't tell you and doesn't seem like it cares for you,” the author told TTRPG Insider. “I wanted to imagine a dream or a goal that was active and actively caring for you in a way that maybe you couldn't understand. The best metaphor for that from a literary perspective was that of the Questing Beast from Arthurian legend. It’s a creature you must hunt as part of your knightly duty to the realm, even though you don't necessarily understand what it is, how it looks, how it works, or why it does what it does.”

What the game adds is the notion that the questing beast guides the knight toward a larger passion through the Carta system. Carta was initially designed as a solo journaling framework by Peach Garden Games and was built as a basic framework for exploration and storytelling, where players place cards down and flip them over to determine what sorts of events or tasks could appear before them as they move through the cards. What Glatisant adds is a two-person mechanic where the questing beast and knight are traversing a “map of cards”, where each individual card is connected to a variety of events and conditions. One card might cause the knight to run into a new threat, while another might offer them the resources they need to succeed later down the road. The knight and beast want to get to the same card by the end of the map, else the knight has failed in his quest. So it’s up to the beast to “guide” the knight to where they need to be.

“I imagined a Questing Beast that is as committed to building up the Knight Errant as the Knight is to catching the Beast,” Zellers admitted excitedly.

TTRPGs are great for helping people to talk about things that might be hard to understand, Zellers notes, and they offer metaphors and literary language to do so. One of those core themes in Glatisant is learning what it means to talk to people who are different from yourself. “Glatisant gives these two figures to work from and gives you two characters who are fundamentally different as creatures. You might believe that you’re working at cross purposes, but you have to actively work to figure out what your goals have in common.”

The game is launching September 16th on Kickstarter.

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Explore What it Means to Have Memories in The Home We Remember

What is it like to live within a community and to process tragedy in the days and weeks after the events? How does it change a person? How does it change a world? These are the deep and introspective questions that The Home We Remember, a new project released by Frivolous Bear Studios and tendervicious studios strives to explore in its latest project.

The Home We Remember is “an introspective lyric tabletop roleplaying game of magical realism” that claims to be about “imperfect memory, identity, and community.” At first glance, it presents a multitude of abstract concepts and ideas that will require mental and emotional efforts to explore with your table. But the game’s origin started in a place most might not think a literary-oriented game would originate: a physics class.

The concept of The Home We Remember was initially inspired during lead game designer Hamnah Shahid's attendance at a physics class, where she was exposed to the space-time continuum as a concept. Most physicists accept the notion of multiple dimensions of space, Shahid noted, so what if the same were said of time? “We think of time as this two-dimensional thing in Western culture, where time is conceived as linear,” Shadid told TTRPG Insider. “Some non-Western cultures perceive time in non-linear terms but still adopt a two-dimensional approach. What if there were multiple dimensions of time beyond the two? What does that mean when it’s lived in, or affects our memories?”

These concepts can be challenging to grapple with on a personal and metaphysical level. But Shahid eventually brought them together in collaboration with other TTRPG creators in the indie space in the form of a 12-episode AP. Laurie’s House is an award-winning actual play podcast that was GMed by Cai Kagawa and involved Shahid and other performers in telling the story about a community dealing with the recent burning down of a house that mattered to them and how it affected their lives. That podcast eventually became The Home We Remember, which released this week.

The game is built on a tarot card system, where players will separate their deck of cards into separate suits. The cards are each connected to certain questions that a player might ask about their character and how they releate to them, and the major arcana cards mark a “major change” in the character, according to Kelly (who helped design the game.) These questions are intended to explore both the character’s relationship with the incident as well as with how that incident may have changed them.

These questions are then guided by the “Architect” (The GM for the game), who must “embody, orchestrate and iterate the tragedy,” according to Kagawa. They use the questions to guide and reinforce what exactly happened with the tragedy and perhaps even reform what that tragedy might be (especially since the core of the game is an exploration of memories and not necessarily the events as they happen.)

The game is intended to be based in the genre of “magical realism,” a subgenre of storytelling that bases the events in reality (such as modern life) but intertwines elements of magic or the supernatural. While the stories cold can feel quite real, the magical elements can be there for more metaphorical purposes. Players are asked to pick a ‘magical metaphor’ that relates to their character through simple aesthetic concepts like animals, flowers, or sounds.

A lot of these explorations are meant to be done solely for storytelling purposes or literary explorations, Shahid emphasized. The Home We Remember isn’t intended to be a game that one could explore what it is like to go through real-life tragedies like a fire or a shooting (something that immediately came to mind, since our interview occurred within a week of the Minnesota shooting.)

The end goal of the game, and the reason you might want to give it a try, is to explore identity and what makes a person unique.“I think you should play The Home We Remember if you really want to explore what it means to be a person and how they form and grow,” Shahid argued.

The ashcan edition of The Home We Remember is currently available on Frivolous Bear Studio’s website.

Correction: We made slight amendments to quotes from Hamnah Shahid to better reflect the context of their discussion. We also amended the number of episodes featured in Laurie’s Home (which is currently still in production a

What are your thoughts? Send any scoops, tips or press releases to [email protected].