LitRPG Writing Through A Rubik’s Cube

A couple months ago I discovered a terrific new game accessory called the Evermorph Dungeon. It’s a detailed and brilliantly designed dungeon map printed on a Rubik’s Cube. It offers near-infinite possibilities for role-playing game (RPG) use. Unfortunately, I don’t have a group to play RPGs with anymore, but Evermorph is too cool not to own and I bought it anyway.

Of course, someone on YouTube had already made their own solo rules for it, and, when I finally got my hands on my Evermorph cube, I discovered that it came with an official solo rules set as well. I’ve played a couple different journaling solo RPGs, where the fun is in writing out your character’s adventure. While neither set of rules for Evermorph was as fleshed out as those games, I decided to take that approach. 

I also have an interest in LitRPG (aka Progression Fantasy) and so I had that in mind as I wrote and played. All the LitRPG books I’m aware of are video game based and I wonder why official Dungeons & Dragons LitRPG books don’t exist. So, this is a meager first attempt at writing LitRPG for tabletop rules, although in practice it is more of an actual play with LitRPG pretensions.

I’m posting this as an explainer and companion piece and this is probably a good point to jump to reading the first of my two adventures if you haven’t done so already. Then, come back here if you want to know more about how I played the game.

First Game: Official Solo Rules

First, I really like these rules! They are evocative without being directive. They feel well-crafted and play-tested (a game does not have to be ‘crunchy’ to be well made). However, without the journaling, I don’t think there would be enough interaction to maintain my interest. Sure, some players will create the story in their heads, perhaps in great detail, and not writing it down. I would find that unsatisfying. Maybe I’ve been too removed from the RPG community in recent years and it’s just assumed that this is how these games are played, but I think a bit of an explanation in the rules would be helpful.

I’ll dive into more details about interacting with the rules below. First I’ll describe my ‘approach’ to playing and writing for this game. For this first adventure, I wrote in present-tense, which is not my usual style. With a one-character story and almost no dialogue it felt necessary to write in present tense to preserve the sense of immediacy of gameplay. I’m an early riser and the day after I opened my Evermorph Dungeon package I started playing. Eventually, I took a break to eat breakfast. When I came back to finish the game, I forgot all about the writing tense and switched back to my natural past tense style. That led to a lot of editing later, but not as much as my poor handwriting combined with OCR!

Other than fixing spelling, tense, and grammar, I made few changes from what I hand wrote. I want this first adventure to be as concise and genuine as possible to convey the excitement of playing Evermorph for the first time! The biggest change I made is that I used Gnolls instead of werewolves in the original. That’s not a very substantive change, but I want the story to read a bit broader for those who don’t know all the Dungeons & Dragons monster races. You can read these werewolves as Gnolls if you like. They don’t transform or spread their lycanthrope, so there is little difference.

I used random generators for my character’s name and personality traits so that I would have something to work with and I would get a quick start to the writing. I also rolled randomly for the goal as well. ‘Slay a Beast’ informed Thiovar’s character as much or more than the randomly generated persona. It was also a serendipitous roll as it dovetails nicely with the setup for the second adventure and its ruleset.

Having stats to work with (Vitality, Grit, and Gear) felt satisfying and the stats chosen were well suited for the style of play and the Evermorph Dungeon. If you aren’t familiar with solo and journaling RPGs, it might seem strange that the stats for Evermorph are always the same at the start rather than being specific to your character’s attributes. I find these more abstract stats can be applied to a variety of archetypes and skill sets and this approach works quite well if you give it a chance.

The Encounters and Narrative sections of the rules go hand-in-hand and were the heart of this experience for me. The connections between threat types and the stats were interesting and created a good narrative flow. The rules were clear and simple, yet had enough depth and variety for a good experience. I didn’t encounter the cube rotation mechanic as often with the official solo rules (compared to the “Twist of Fate” fan rules), but that could have played out differently had I made different choices and had worse luck. 

I ‘gamed’ the system throughout this adventure, taking paths that led to optimal outcomes and avoided the worst damage to my characters stats. I think the rules intentionally push you in that direction and, due to clever design, it leads to greater variety in gameplay and narrative. 

One challenging aspect of Evermorph is that there is a map, you, the player, can see it, but it can change. How much of this information does your character have? He needs to go from Point A to Point B, but how? I felt this needed a few explanations in my narrative. The first gave my character a magical direction-sense towards the prey he is hunting. For the return from the successful kill to the starting point, after the dungeon had shifted, I imagined a system of runes that my observant hero could learn to read and use to effect his escape. I’m curious to see other answers to this challenge.

Finally, you may notice that later in the story my word choices are more ‘purple’ and tend to rhyme. This was somewhat intentional and heavily influenced by the epic poem audiobook that I was reading at the time [Galahad and the Grail, highly recommend!]. Purple and rhyme fit my mood while playing and I let the style flow naturally rather than try to write an epic poem or a truly Conan-esque tale. I hope that doesn’t come off as a half-hearted attempt at either or both.

Luckily, my character survived Evermorph and I decided to send him back in—but you’ll have to wait for part two for that tale!

Attribution: 

Maps © Evermorph Studios (https://evermorphstudios.com)  

Maps created with Dungeon Scrawl (https://dungeonscrawl.com) — used under CC BY 4.0 license.