Description
Rosethorn Keep is a solo TTRPG where you acquire companions and complete dungeons in order to upgrade your castle, under the looming threat of the Demon Lord. When your castle is built and your companions are ready, can you defeat him before he thrusts the world into darkness?
Rosethorn Keep is a solo dungeon-crawling and castle-building game. Gather your companions and launch an assault on the foreboding Rosethorn Keep! Restore the keep to its former glory by gathering resources from dungeons below! Finally, challenge the labyrinthine halls of the Demon Lord and SAVE THE WORLD!
Rosethorn keep is a simple but mechanically gritty solo light-strategy game. The player progresses by rolling on dungeon charts with their companions and hauling back resources to improve their castle’s abilities and repeat. Events are completed by a system of quick d6 checks, and improving your castle grants you more abilities to modify and improve your rolls. This is not a journaling game, but rather a game of sending little guys to do little tasks and watching numbers grow. Narrative elements are limited to quick flavor text on charts. The retro mood is enhanced with dark, monochrome pixelart evocative of a bygone era of computer RPGs, akin perhaps to the feeling of booting up Wizardry on an old Apple ii with a green-tinted CRT.
If you’re looking for a light, retro-themed game with a tiny bit of crunch to keep you company in the cold winter (or hot summer, whatevs) months, Rosethorn Keep packs a lot of charm into a short zine!
- 40-page, half letter, saddle stitched zine, color cover and interior
Sidenote: Something that I think is great about this game is that the first page of companions in Rosethorn Keep has these lovely pixelart portraits, and then on the next page there are just scribbly stick figure faces. To me, this is so real. I feel this choice in my bones. Some haters might see this and think “hey, what the heck, i want my dragon books to only exude maximum polish,” to which I reply “how did you get here, what are you doing in my store?” I thank and salute Charlotte and Kaydevs for their honesty and vulnerability here. That’s exactly the art they had in them, and that’s exactly the art we get. Hell yeah.
