Two Weeks One Summer

07 Jul, 2022

I'd been noodling with a few ideas for family friendly TTRPGs for a while because I'd really like to share my hobbies with my kids but they're a little young still.

Two Weeks One Summer started out life as a reskin of Pelle Nilsson's Dark Fort (which is available in the Feretory zine). I was trying to work out how I could port the dungeon crawling experience to a Kiki's Delivery Service style witch in the woods scenario but I couldn't quite get my head around how to make it work. I think that's a project I'll come back to more directly at some point as my children get older so that I can give it to them as a solo game. For the time being though I realised that I needed something of a more guided experience.

One of my personal favourite games is The Quiet Year by Avery Alder and it also involves mostly imagination and rudimentary drawing so it seemed like a good fit. Again though I wasn't sure how well the themes would go over with the under fives so I was looking at what I could do to simplify it, that's where the idea of Two Weeks One Summer came from. It's a compression of that timeframe and a simplification of the prompts to a straightforward "What shall we do this morning?".

Combining Dark Fort and The Quiet Year with the vacation theme lead me to the idea of exploring a big house and grounds. The idea then was simply that you'd draw a floor plan of the house on one big sheet of paper and the gardens on another¹. I played it with my kids the morning after I had the idea and honestly it went pretty much as I expected straight away. That is to say that I felt like the basics of the game were solid but I needed more procedure to keep things on track, some prompts and more time².

I went away and wrote up my ideas into the first draft of the game and we play tested it again a few times over the next few months. I refined things in the guidance and changed the focus of the document to be more about how a regular RPG group of adults could play it as a GMless game, when you add kids into the mix procedure goes out of the window somewhat anyway. The main thing I added at that point was the weather system. I wanted some way of prompting the flavour of the sorts of things people were doing and adding some restriction to colour a particular session. If the dice say it's raining all the time you're likely to end up with a more detailed house and vice versa.

In my head cannon for the game there are definitely faeries in the garden, there are magical portals in the woods and entire secret wings of the house. I wanted the text as written to have the smallest hints at that but not to say it or force play in that direction. In an earlier draft there was a roll every time you explored to see if you found something magical. I found that explicit fantasy element detracted from the cozy kitchen sink feeling I was trying to evoke and also raised questions it was beyond the scope of the game to explore. If players do find portals or doors to unexpected places they might like to consider what’s on the other side though and there are lots of other great games for that. The best one would be the one you have on the shelf and have been dying to play.

The last thing to change was the look, it originally looked like an old manuscript with public domain art and a serif font but I wanted to capture a more pre-school cartoon vibe in the finished product which I'm really happy with. If I ever come back to it though it will be because I have what I need to do an actual art pass on it, it does bother me that the house isn't represented at all currently.

I can't thank the people of the NSR Discord enough for their help with my design work³ as well as everyone who helped with proof reading and encouraging me to put it out into the world. It's been a really fun project to work on and I'm so happy that it's there and is a thing that people can read. I hope people do read it, play it and enjoy it!

#game-design #launch #rpgs #writing