The Journal of Agatha Fizzyflask -- My Cozy Campaign Experiment (pt.1)

Stardew Valley is © Chucklefish Games

My wife has been playing Stardew Valley a lot this summer; a game where you play a young person who has just inherited a farm in a fantastical world that sits at something like 1980s technology. It's what the video game industry, and more recently the TTRPG industry refer to as a "Cozy Game." Meaning it is focused on a small area, the stakes for success are failure are small: you might save a community, but the world is in no danger, and the relationships you build with the characters in the community is very much the focus.

Cozy games are not my cup of tea at all, but the game has sort of cast a spell over the rest of my family. My boys are excited to hear what has gone on in the farm and see the strange new fantasy farm animals and the useful item that my wife's avatar brings up from the dungeon. 

Well, if you want to run a good scenario the key is to figure out what your audience likes, and I got the feeling that something like Stardew Valley might make an appealing draw for a few weeks as we ease back into the school year.

So I sat down and asked myself "How can I make this interesting for me, so that I can get myself into the game enough to make it interesting to them?" 

 As I sat and pondered, my mind drifted to a concept that I have been spending a lot of time considering lately: the idea of prep as play.

Prep as Play 

Preparation and world-building are a form of play that the GM engages in during a D&D campaign session. They are playing with the players inasmuch as they are preparing and designing the world the players are visiting, and they are solo gaming insofar as they are throwing themselves into an imaginative exercise that is guided by tools as varied as modules, random tables, mapmaking tools, templates, or actual solo games.

So what if I turned creating this cozy setting's problems into a game itself.

Apothecaria Cover, 
© Blackwell Games

Enter Apothecaria

As I was working on this, I had a wondrous moment of serendipity: a new solo game podcaster, writing eXpressions applied to join the Solo Roleplayers Network; they were running a game of Apothecaria.

I'd heard of Apothecaria before, but I didn't know too many details, but one of the first things he mentioned about it was that it was a Stardew Valley inspired game, so I threw myself into his podcast for a couple of episodes.

In Apothecaria is a solo journaling game in which you play a village witch or alchemist who find themselves dealing with a range of strange magical maladies and racing against time to break curses and cure diseases half the time, and building up their tools, supplies, and gardens to prepare for future trouble.

I really enjoyed writing eXpressions' podcast, and it got the gears churning.

 Solo journaling games are also not my cup of tea, but I have wishlisted Apothecaria and if I ever have enough itch credit to do so, I will grap it and post a review.

While it didn't quite scratch my itch for dungeon delving and monster slaying, it suggested something that did:

Imagine a series of adventures where a group of adventurers are thrown in the deep end of serving a community beset by faerie curses and diseases from other planes: being the only literate people available for miles they are tossed in the atelier of the missing local witch and asked to look over her spellbook and try to lift curses and cure diseases... but more often than not, some of the ingredients are missing, and are found in dangerous monster-infested areas, or require missing spells or magical skills to complete.

Think House meets Stardew Valley meets Dungeons & Dragons. 

I also stole some inspiration from a TSR board-game I had as a kid called Elixir. 

Elixir boargame box top ©TSR

Making this into a Game

This suggested to me that I needed to come up with a handful of magical curses and diseases, then a larger number of strange ingredients important to creating cures and potions. And a handful of locations where those ingredients could be found.

Legend of Mana © Square Enix

So, I sat down and made a list of ingredients, 10 herbs, 7 minerals, 3 weird substances, and 6 monster bits. Many of these were just random words I tossed together like "fire fern" "dragon weed" and "skull-cap mushroom." I took a lot of my inspiration from a favourite video game of my own, Legend of Mana... a game that features some alchemy mini-games, and an invasion of angry faeries that helped inspire my initial concept.

I took some of my favourite locations from Legend of Mana: a castle of a mad king, a glacier, a rushing river, a dwarf mine, flowering mountain meadows, sprawling beaches, a doorway to the faerie world, and magically warped forests, and added in some obvious additions like some rocky foothills and a swamp.

I came up with a few potions and a few poisons, but then drew a hell of a lot of blanks, so I asked ChatGPT to give me a few whimsical fantasy diseases, and as per my usual reaction to ChatGPT, I decided that I hated most of them and gave them massive rewrites,etc.

In the end I had 13 diseases, 12 locations (and a possibility of finding something "everywhere"), 26 ingredients, and I also eventually came up with 13 potions and 13 poisons. I assigned disease/potion/poison to clubs, location to spades, plants and low-level monster bits to spades, and minerals and dangerous monster bits to diamonds.

Then I turned this into a card game: I would start flipping cards until I got clubs. Then after that I would keep flipping until I had at least one spade and two ingredients and then after the next club the recipe would be over.

I would then pair hearts and diamonds to spades to know where those ingredients could be found. After several recipes, I would have a handful of locations associated with certain ingredients.

I also set it that jokers would require me to roll on a d12 table of strange magical complications to the recipe, like it attracting evil spirits, requiring a spell, curse, or blessing, or requiring an ingredient from somewhere else that isn't in the hearts and spades table.

Once I had that I could put it into a spellbook format for my family.

In Practice

 The card game did not work quite as planned, in one case my clubs had clumped up so tight I ended up with a 20-ingredient potion (far too much!) and in another case I had a 2-ingredient potion where the ingredients could be found across the entire valley. It required a lot of GM fiat to make work in the long run.

The jokers also showed up in a mathematically astounding number of spreads, making alchemy in the setting much more complicated than I had reckoned. 

Waiting to draw the first club not associated with a disease/potion/poison that hadn't already be drawn sometimes emptied the whole deck, especially later on. And in retrospect there are a whole lot of refinements I could have added into the game.

For example, instead of doing the diseases, potions, and poisons each in separate rounds, I could have just said that a repeat club drawn would move on to the next list, so the first time I drew the 3 of clubs I would be handling Goblin Pox, the second time a Featherfoot potion, and the third time the Greenblood poison... and the game ends when all diseases are accounted for, making it most likely to have 13 diseases, fewer potions, and only one or two poisons.

But all that said it made creating the setting fun.

The more I figured out where various reagents were harvested, that gave me a sense of what the valley's landscape was like.

If you are interested, I will share my tables and a pared-down summary of the rules (such as they are) here. The same table could easily be used as a one-off adventure generator.

Get them here!