GROVE ROGUES

There is a hamlet somewhere deep within a forest. Hopelessly cut off from the outside world, the people here reside within log cabins hidden behind a tall wooden wall. They huddle together in the night for fear of the darkness and the woods. They are right to do so.

You are the hamlet rangers, a tiny group of unfortunate souls burdened with the task of protecting this place. You will take control of a random ranger each time an expedition must be organized, setting out into the wilderness with just enough to survive. You’ll track, hunt and explore through the terribly dangerous woodland that surrounds the hamlet. If you’re lucky, you might just make it back alive. 

The goal of Rangers is not to make the most money or to kill the most monsters, it is to survive and to protect. Players are given complete freedom to plan and choose their escapades into the wilderness, but that freedom comes with responsibility. Indeed, shirking your duties or chasing your dreams is likely to get the hamlet butchered by the things that lurk in the woods. If that happens, it’s game over.

Gameplay focuses on exploration and planning expeditions over combat and social interaction, featuring a choice-addled ruleset for survival out in the woods as well as streamlined systems that combine all dangerous situations into the same short sequence.

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This is the playtest version for GROVE ROGUES. This document is not finished, but it is serviceable. It will be updated whenever I have a meaningful update for it. The release date will be whenever it is ready, in other words, I have no idea.

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Here's an extremely rough version updated from the one available from the download below. It's quite different, having removed all of the cumbersome hexcrawling aspect of the game, and added in an actual method of trapping/getting up to poorly planned hijinks. It's in an objectively shitty layout right now because I am both lazy and stupid. Eventually it will be in a nicer, more easily understandable layout, but for now, you can see it in the google doc below.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nUoX8XqKeOE1SD8FNgKB9J3QaH4NFNgXSh-SfWp9IrE/...