SIFT: A Free One-Page Role-Playing Game

So, I’ve been pounding my face against the keyboard for the last little bit trying to put together a role-playing game based on Avatar the Last Airbender. There’s a 4E hack for the series, but I don’t think that the D&D treatment really hits on what Avatar was about, so I’ve been trying to mash together a version that hails to some of the better narrative-centric role-playing games of the past little bit.

But, I’ve got writers block, mostly in the sense of “I don’t want to work on this project right now.” And partially because my work doesn’t exist until I show it to you.That’s part of why I started a blog in the first place, was to get writing for an audience instead of just putzing around on a project, not finishing it, and not caring because fuck it, no one was ever going to read it anyway.

So rather than languish in my feelings of “Writing conflict resolution chapters suuuuuuuuuuuuucks,” I decided to write a new game in the meantime. It’s just one of my little one-page role-playing games, and it’s here for your enjoyment. It’s a military-mystery game based on an alternate reality game.

The ARG itself was sort of poorly put together and didn’t make a ton of logical sense, but the people who were invested in it were invested to the hilt. I have some pretty hefty criticisms of it, and those criticisms were eventually responsible for my leaving the game, but this isn’t really the place to air those. In the role-playing game, a United States military operation has recruited civilian help to crack codes and gather intelligence on an important mission. This more-or-less mirrors the ARG (where the role the civilians played was much less clear). There is something crazy going on somewhere in the world, and it’s up to one agent, one strike team and a group of asshats from the internet to stop it.

If you’d like to take a look at the game, you can find it here.

If you’d like to take a look at the source material, you can find most of it here.

If you’d like to take a look at the source material for the source material, you can find it here.