HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD?

Two days ago, Billy Zaggert went missing. Billy was is a nice kid. He gets along with every clique at school, is the friendliest waiter at the Elwood Diner, and isn’t the type to snitch on anyone for any reason. Nobody had any trouble with him … which has only fueled the rumors about his disappearance.

You live in Goodview, West Virginia. Nestled in the Appalachian Mountains, Goodview is a town where the townsfolk trade gossip and monster sightings as easily as the songbirds exchange tunes. You’ve heard tales of the mothman and bigfoot, of the raven mocker and even a cult for a nameless god. And you believe every one of them.

Your goal is to figure out the truth behind Billy’s disappearance: find clues, read between the lines, and save Billy … if he can even still be saved.

Did You Hear About Billy? is a narrative generation, tabletop RPG mystery that I recently made for Unknown Dungeon's One-Page RPG Jam 2023. The theme was rumors and secrets, so I wanted to play around with the idea of small town gossip and cryptids. Since I have a thing for Appalachian folk tales, I set the game in a fictional West Virginian town and played around with some well-known legends in order to build the mystery.

Overall, I think it's a bit messy. I had a hard time managing the scope of a single-page game (seriously, it's tough fitting world-building and mechanics on just a single sheet of paper), but I'm still happy with the narrative generation mechanic I came up with as well as the project as a whole. I had a ton of fun putting this together and learned a lot about tabletop design in the process while also challenging myself to create a clean and engaging document from scratch. That's not even touching on how much of a blast I had writing the game's copy! This was an exciting project that I'm proud to have completed.

If you're interested in checking out the game and diving into the mystery on your own, Did You Hear About Billy? is available for download on itch.io.

Stick around and read some more stuff!

Get in touch!

Contact me directly :)

joelatroutman@gmail.com

Or use this form thing!