Distants
A downloadable game
“You have some queer friends, Dorothy.” “The queerness doesn’t matter, so long as they’re friends.”
- The Road to Oz, by L. Frank Baum
Pathen is a game about people who travel through miraculous Lands, in the tradition of Oz or Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. Every player spends time as the Guide for their own Land, while the other three journey and ask questions along the way.
Submission to the 2025 Dice Exploder “1 Hour or Less” game jam. I’m quite proud of it, since I learned a lot in the process of making it!
I’m a super-new designer. If you played this and told me how your game went, it would make my day.
Footprints, hoofprints, and tire tracks on cover are from public domain clipart at https://openclipart.org/. Main text is in EB Garamond, cover text is Zapfino.
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $10 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Community Copy
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The Pathen Less Travelled
I’m trying to improve as a designer, and one way of doing that is by affirming that my work is valuable. At the same time, this is a hobby for me. And I couldn’t afford half the games I played if they weren’t available for free. So, I’ll try to have unlimited community copies. Just play it and have fun.
Download demo
Comments
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I got a community copy and gave it a look! The premise is very promising, and I think it's well-written. However, I do have some criticisms.
I think some skills/stats would be good to have, so that players have some control over the game's scenarios instead of it always being up to what the d6 says. Maybe some playbooks for different kinds of Journiers, a la Wanderhome, would be good for this?
I also think 10 minutes is way too fast, especially for a game that's supposed to be for 4 people. There's not enough time to really dig into everyone's characters and the story at hand. Maybe a half-hour (30 minutes) would be better? Also, when a Journier becomes the Guide for the table, what happens to their character?
Btw, is it for exactly 4 people, or can more/less people play this game?
Thanks for the attention, it means a lot to me :)
If it helps, this was written for a 1-hour-or-less Jam, so hence the short timeframe. My aim was to get people at my community gaming group comfortable with GMing, and I thought it might be less intimidating if it’s for just ten minutes.
Also, a philosophy I’m developing is to just make a statement without a ton of qualifiers. Of course people could spend longer or shorter than 10 minutes, or have a different number than exactly four players. But, it’s a pretty short game, so I don’t want to spend a bunch of time apologizing for what it is. I trust the readers to have their own opinions.
Re: what happens to Journiers, my expectation is that people’s characters are inactive when they become the Guide. Maybe they‘ve finished their journey, or they’re going their separate ways, or maybe they’re just hibernating because this Land is cold.
Again, thanks a lot for reading my game, it makes me very happy.