It Is Said: A One-Page RPG
A game about true and false stories.
This game was my entry into Lituanicon’s 2024 one page RPG contest. I am proud to say that it won first prize! That’s right, get ready for me to introduce myself as an Award-Winning Game Designer™ at every opportunity I get. You may see the other entries here.
The theme for the contest was folklore, so I made my game about villagers lost in the woods whose only real weapon is a bunch of rumors and tall tales they know about said woods. The twist? Not all of these stories are true, and they have to roll dice at the crucial moment to find out!
The game is largely based on Lithuanian folklore and thus contains Lithuanian names that I did not change in the English version because I couldn’t be bothered because I think that makes the game more unique. If these names are unfamiliar to you, don’t worry — the game is about filling in the blanks with your own ideas, not adhering to “authentic” or “canonical” folklore. That said, if you insist on using more familiar terminology, I suggest some substitutions in the trivia section below.
Features:
a folk tale generator
a forest pointcrawl generator and travel procedure
an explicit win/loss condition (escape the woods before sunset, or else!)
After much delay, I translated it from Lithuanian into English and am posting both versions here:
Enjoy!
Trivia
Note: reading the rest of this post is very optional. I considered deleting it altogether because of how self-indulgent it looks. These are fun facts, not necessary background knowledge.
I am not a folklore expert and mainly based the game on information I absorbed in school + some very superficial reading; if you ever see a source contradict anything I’ve written here, it’s probably correct.
As promised, below are some suggestions on how you can replace some of the Lithuanian creature/item names with ones you might be more familiar with. Needless to say, all suggested analogies between folklore concepts are general similarities and not 1:1 correspondences.
A kaukas is a helpful house spirit who looks like a small, very hairy man. You may instead call him a gnome or maybe a troll.
An aitvaras is a rooster with a flaming tail. Consider calling him a phoenix. Today, aitvaras is the Lithuanian word for kite (cf. the Russian word for kite which literally means “air serpent” (i.e. dragon)).
Originally the Baltic god of the dead, the word velnias now means devil (cf. Perkele in Finnish). But in folklore, a velnias is a selfish trickster rather than an embodiment of evil, e.g. the folklore-based novella Baltaragis’ Mill, later adapted into a musical film, is about a pact with a velnias whereby he stood to gain an industrious wife to do all of his housework for him. Analogues: satyr, goblin.
A laumė is a female water spirit that inhabits a lake or pond. She might drown you if you disrespect her or if she lures you in. You may instead call her a naiad, siren or mermaid.
Kanklės is a real traditional Lithuanian instrument. It sounds like a bit like a harp but its role as a folk instrument is more similar to that of the banjo, fiddle or bagpipes.
And here’s some other trivia:
The stork is Lithuania’s national bird. Notably, Taiwanese artists sometimes use it to represent Lithuania in Lithuania-Taiwan cooperation art.
The iron wolf appears in the founding legend of Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital and my hometown. According to said legend, the Grand Duke Gediminas dreamt of an iron wolf howling on top of a hill, and a pagan priest interpreted the dream as meaning that he is to found a great city.
The “brown one” comes from the claim that Germanic, Slavic and Baltic languages have abandoned the original Proto-Indo-European word for bear and instead replaced it with a euphemism so as to avoid summoning the creature.
The grass snake is based on a character from the folk tale Eglė the Queen of Serpents, in which the titular Eglė makes a throwaway promise to marry a grass snake, who later turns out to be a handsome shapeshifting prince that expects her to marry him for real. The tale serves as an origin myth purporting to explain how the trees got their names (spoiler: the tale ends very unhappily as Eglė turns her entire family into trees that inherit their human names, such as the spruce (eglė)).
The amber crown is referencing the legend of Jūratė and Kastytis, a love story about a sea goddess and a fisherman. Disapproving of her mésalliance, the thunder god Perkūnas destroyed Jūratė’s amber castle, which explains why there’s so much amber on the Baltic coast (enough to cheaply make tacky souvenir art like this). I like this one because it shows how even really old stories can be post-apocalyptic, in a way.
The giant may be a necessary monster more than any other. As a child, I remember reading somewhere that the Vilnius neighborhood of Verkiai was named after a sad giant that sat down to cry and turned into a hill (verkti means “to cry”). That said, I can’t find this story anywhere now, so maybe I misremembered it.1
The fern only blooms on St. John’s Eve (the night of June 23rd). If you find its flower you will get magic powers like immortality and the ability to talk to trees.
The axe soup comes from a variant of the stone soup tale.
The specific Lithuanian kind of clogs is called klumpės; AFAICT they are based on the Dutch klomps.
Verkiai is definitely named after crying, though.