Guillotine Earrings
A downloadable game
Created for One-Page RPG Jam 2021.
You are a magical jeweller in a city on the brink of revolution. A solo RPG.
Guillotine Earrings is a magical journalling game on two pages. Your character is a jeweller living in a city on the brink of revolution, held in the grip of a cruel and despotic tyrant. Over the course of the game, you describe and draw the jewellery they make as they attempt to fan the flames of protest in the city with their art. You also describe the parties they attend, the allies they find, and the communities they enlist as they start a revolution behind the unlikely barricade of their storefront.
Guillotine Earrings has players roll dice to make jewellery and network with people. They must record and describe both their successes and their failures. It's a flexible game which has two alternative timelines: one which is simple, structured and short; the other which is more experimental, and allows for a longer, more unpredictable game. It's up to you to decide which you prefer - or to play the game more than once, creating different people in different cities as they try to rise up against their oppressors.
You will need:
- 2 D12s
- A Jenga Tower OR a Pool of Jewellery (Optional)
Layout and formatting by Max Briar.
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Comments
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Guillotine Earrings is a mini journaling ttrpg about being a jeweler in a city on the brink of revolution.
The PDF is two pages, with clean, readable layout and a really pleasant visual aesthetic.
Mechanically, Guillotine Earrings is a little loose, and it requires you to GM yourself, but the game also has a definite structure to it, and each game of it comes with a gauntlet of skill checks for you to roll.
Those checks are rolled with a d12 on one of two stats, and succeeding a check boosts the stat you used while failing penalizes the stat you didn't.
With the increasing difficulties and penalties for failed rolls, it does feel very possible to enter a losing spiral---but the game has alternate rules for using a jenga tower or a bunch of pieces of jewelry to track your success, and these feel more forgiving.
I think one interesting use for Guillotine Earrings might be as a worldbuilding tool.
It has you flesh out a few important features at the start (such as your tyrant and your city,) but it ends with a random number of years passing before the tyrant is overthrown, and *that* stood out to me. Creating a setting, fiddling with it a bit, and then ageing it a bunch is a great way to set up a sandbox.
I do think Guillotine Earrings is an interesting experience on its own---and I don't believe I've seen many other games about making jewelry---but especially if you want to do a bit of urban worldbuilding, I'd check this out.
Thank you so much for such a thoughtful and considered review, I really really appreciate it!
Thank you for writing the game!