This is my contibution to this year's Game Chef competition. It's a role-casting game.

I am not a native speaker. What could possibly go wrong?

This might be a strage idea. I guess, I've had stranger ones.

Liber Unobtaniæ

Multiply missing books, philosophical challenges between Sages and stick resolution!

(EDIT: Ok, I admit, that's just my attempt to recreate the original cover. I couldn't find anything on the internet.)

Today I want to tell you all about a gem in early roleplaying history that recently came to my mind again. While this game has been revolutionary at its time, it never took off. And all its influences seem to have been lost in the stream of D&D'esque games after it.

So how early is early? We're talking 1984 here. It was published by Repulsor Labs, a one-man venture that – maybe deservedly so – went bankrupt after just two published games. Maybe their naming wasn't the best idea after all and people actually got repulsed by it.

Somebody grabs you by your squishy end and draws you out of the comfy sticky goo that you were submerged in. You wind yourselves in fear of being crushed. You vaguely see a few worms, winding themselves in the fingers of surprisingly unremarkable humans. You must yourself be such a worm, captive between the fingers of another human, or Norm. The Norm wears goggles and over-sized gloves. Of course, you don't know what that is, now. But you will soon understand. He smiles at you.

While the goo is still dripping off of you, he carries you over to another Norm. Your captor sets you – your little head with its grinding teeth first – onto the neck of this poor fellow.

This year's Game Chef analog game design competition is already halfway through and I thought it could be interesting to share some of my experiences with it and the current status of my design in this episode. A lot of this is quite preliminary, but the basic foundations are likely to stand until the end of the competition.

I have no hopes of winning, but I will certainly submit my game and hopefully find the time to develop it further after the competition. We had a playtest, last night, and everybody had fun with the concept. Also, the rules (as far as we got testing them) seemed to make sense and enrich play. So, I do not need to scrap those entirely.