Ket Set Go! Designer Diary 1 - Just Ket-ting Started!

To avoid my bad habit of burying the lead, I’ll start out by declaring that I am designing a tabletop roleplaying game! 

I actually have been since February 2025, and now six months in and a few informal playtests later, I have something that I can tell my friends and the public about without shrivelling up inside from imposter syndrome. 

Ket Set Go! (KSG) is a tabletop roleplaying and racing game where players race on giant cats (known as Kets) across a fictional Ancient Egypt inspired world known as Lux. It was born from the question “Are there any good roleplaying games surrounding racing?”. While of course there are (I’ll explore a list of racing and sports themed games in another post), none of which fully embodied the game and world that I desired to one day run and play in. 

Here are some considerations and challenges I faced thus far while designing KSG:

Why Fight when You can Run?

Perhaps owing to its roots in wargaming and the trappings of the fantasy genre, many popular TTRPGs spend considerable effort on developing combat subsystems. With that design intention, these games tend towards combat as  the climax point of most gaming sessions. With KSG, I intend to replace the focus on combat with a subsystem that simulates racing, to capture the excitement and drama of fantastical sports media such as A Knight’s Tale, Speed Racer and Real Steel. It might be an additional bonus that the racing mechanics of KSG might eventually be light and modular enough to hack into other existing RPGs that people already prefer to play. 

(Photo Credit: Warner Brothers, and taken from brightwalldarkroom.com)

Speed Racer (2008) is probably not a good movie by any regard and I hesitate rewatching it today as an adult. I was completely enamoured as a 15 year-old that I shelled out money to watch it a second time. Did the Wachowskis know the sheer power that Christina Ricci wielded with her classic bob haircut?!

Roleplaying and not just Playing

To capture the spirit of these sports movies, I didn't want the focus of KSG to just be on satisfying racing mechanics. There are many great boardgames out there that do a fantastic job. I want Ket to be a game that facilitates meaningful roleplaying and storytelling opportunities, to better fulfil the RP portion of the TTRPG.

To push that aspect, I’m currently designing mechanics which have players build their character based on archetypes (Much like playbooks in many Powered by the Apocalypse RPGs), and incentivise them mechanically to participate in situations and stories that flesh out and develop their characters’ journey. That portion of my design is still very much a work in progress, and for now I’m keeping it pretty loose as I test it.

Fostering Healthy Competition

One obstacle I encountered while designing a TTRPG about competitive racing, is that the narrative environment and framing fosters competition, while most TTRPGs rely on a collaborative and cooperative mindset to thrive. I’m also still juggling that in relation to the mechanical design, but for now I tend to remind my playtesters that the intent of the game is to tell a good story, and that winning the race might not always be the only main objective or most satisfying part of playing KSG.

I've read that the Paranoia (1984), originally published by West End Games is a great example of an RPG thats both collaborative and adversarial in nature. Also has great retro futuristic dystopian vibes that I'm all for.  Will have to check it our sometime (Photo Credit: Meeple Mountain) 

Starting with Small Steps 

Earlier in the year, I was inspired by a friend who shared her experience boothing and selling her D&D inspired illustrations and merch at a local convention. I decided to challenge myself and asked if I could share a booth with her for this years Tablecon Quest, a local tabletop convention happening in late August. My goal was to produce a quick rules zine of KSG, that I could sell at the convention. 

I soon learnt that game designing while holding a full time job is a lot more arduous and slower than anticipated. I was less than two months away from the con with only a few paltry pages of written material, and I was about apologise to my booth partner and throw in the towel.

Thankfully my resourceful and ever resolute fiancée advised me to pivot rather than cancel, and suggested for me to run short demonstrations of what I had developed so far. While I wouldn’t be selling anything, I could still gain a lot of experience and have a great time sharing with interested people the fruit of what has been mostly an isolated and  cerebral mental exercise. I gratefully kissed my partner thankful for that paradigm shift, and got to work on covering the essentials. 

My current ruleset for KSG is not finished for a satisfying full session, and so I’ve decided to run a mini version of the game instead, by paring down the rules to its most essential parts, allowing me to be able to run a 15 mins taster! I was also drawn to the idea of keeping things compact, and was inspired by many indie creators on itch.io who design small games that could fit in a wallet. and so I designed two different character sheets that fit on a little folded business card, that visitors could keep after trying out the demo! It was abit of a rush to layout and do some illustrations for the character cards but it turned out well and I’m so proud to be able to pull them out anytime to show them to people who are interested in hearing and trying out the game! 

Presenting Mini Ket Set Go! Featuring two premade character sheets condensed into little foldable cards. Thank you Sushiro for partially inspiring me with your loyalty card (and your pretty decent sushi). 

Im hoping attendees would be interested enough to follow along with my design journey as I continue to build a full and robust ruleset. But for now I’d be so grateful for the privilege of anyone taking 15 mins of their day to consider the most barest bones of the game I've been thinking up. 

Stoked to bring Mini Ket Set Go to players at Tablecon Quest 2025, and regardless of the outcome, I could say I set my inadequacies aside and just got to creating and gaming!

TableCon Quest 2025 is happening 23-24 August 2025 at Suntec Convention Centre Hall 403 (Singapore) . You can find me at Creator Zone booth CA-9.

Icarus: A Storytelling Game - My First Impressions

Over the weekend I had the chance to table a session of Icarus (2019), a storytelling game written by Spenser Starke (of Alice is Missing and Candela Obscura fame) and released by Hunters Entertainment and Renegade Games Studios.

I was blessed to find an unopened copy at a thrift store going for 25 SGD (19.5 USD) in mid-2024, and I proceeded to bury it like a squirrel with an acorn, until such a serendipitous social gathering, bringing along an urge to play something new, prep lite and roleplaying-ey. I’m glad I played Icarus with my friends because it was a pretty good time! 

Quick overview of the game
The players at the table collectively tell the story of a fictional civilisation of people known as Icarus, describing how the city rises to power and inevitably falls to ruin. Each player creates a character who governs or heavily influences a particular pillar of society (religion, energy, agriculture etc), and each with their own specific motivation. 

Players then take turns to respond to issues that pop up in the city by describing a scene. Other players may support that same cause or respond to other issues. Eventually dice will be rolled to see if the characters succeed in enacting their changes to Icarus. For failed rolls, dice are added to a stacked tower of dice, and when the tower finally topples, it symbolises the collapse of the once great Icarus and the game concludes. 

Here’s my first impressions:

The Components
The game comes in a medium sized box that would fit nicely on a bookshelf. Inside are a pack of custom cards, a memo pad, a slim 40- page rules booklet, and a set of 20 chunky white dice. Juxtaposed against the creamy premium dice is a sad cardboard insert just trying its utmost best. 

Check out civilisation and these contents!

The Rules 
Considering that I had chosen to run this game on a whim (“I brought a new game, would you guys like to try it?” / ”Sure!” / ”Awesome! give me 15 mins to read the rules”) the game isn’t too hard to run. It does what it says on the box, promising a GM-less storytelling game that lasts about 2 hours.
That said, I did meet some friction while trying to understand the rules and set up the game. The set-up of the cards was initially frustrating as the Story Deck cards are split into three long and descriptive sub-headers. These sub- headers  are on the front of the card instead of the back, which makes them hard to initially differentiate. I eventually figured out the iconography on the card back, but I wish that this was better explained in the rules booklet. 

The game rules could also be better written. I found the concept of Aspects to be especially vague and hard to wrap my head around. Aspects eventually become something to understand more intuitively as you play the game (and to me probably the most brilliant mechanic in this game), but I did wish the rules had more explication.

There were a few edge rules that I wish were addressed in the FAQ:

1. For dice that you have succeeded in rolling. Do they stay on the Aspect or return to the box? (we eventually just returned them) 
2. There’s a table on the last page of the booklet for the game that I assume you would have to use if playing the game without wanting to stack dice? From what I know it’s not really explained anywhere in the rulebook. 
3. Where can we find additional scenarios for Icarus if we run out of scenarios to play in the rules booklet? (I googled a bit and found an additional supplement on DriveThruRPG for 1USD. Would be awesome to see more player contributed content too!)  

All in all the rules booklet is slim and adequate but the rules do feel like they could just be a tad more organised and cleaned up. It would also be nice to have had some additional player tips and guidance, especially to help players new to games like these. One plus is that the rulebook quite elegantly explains how to play the game without the proprietary dice, or even with a deck of cards (the game’s indie roots really shines through here). 

Stacking dice has been the bad habit of every bored player waiting for their turn at the table.
Glad to see it incorporated into a game for thematic effect. 

Influences 

Even as I was learning how to play Icarus, it was hard for me not to make comparisons between this game and a few others. Most notably Dialect (Thorny Games, 2016), which I feel Icarus shares so much DNA with, that I’ve taken to market this game to my friends as “Dialect but with the language component filed off”. There are also murmurings of Fiasco (Bully Pulpit Games, 2009) in the dice play/ scene framing mechanics of the game, and ofc the toppling tower of dice draws some parallels to the Jenga tower in the horror RPG Dread (The Impossible Dream, 2005). 

I don’t mean to bring up these influences to disparage Icarus. Quite the opposite. I think it’s a good remixing of great parts of great games, and in some ways Icarus succeeds in solving the challenges posed by the design of those games that came before it. 

I love the ambition of Dialect, allowing players to collectively invent their own glossary of fictional wordswords as they play out the rise and fall of an isolated community of people. It’s very clever, but can be too alienating or overwrought in the same cleverness and ambition. I find that my games of Dialect tend to drag out due players trying to handle its procedures. Also with the invention of words, there is quite a huge demand on players to have to roleplay scenes to use these new coinages. 
Fiasco is similarly very smart in the way it uses playbooks and mechanics to juggle creating a Coen brothers style story. But even more so than Dialect, the game places a huge emphasis on roleplaying for the game to really shine.

Icarus blithely does away with the absolute need for roleplay, by stating that it’s more of a storytelling game, and that characters and scenarios can be acted out or described in third person. We can liken Icarus to be an almost top- down city simulator equivalent of an RPG (minus all the crunch that is often associated with those videogames). I find that this 3rd person psychic distance is quite a good spot for newer players or for players who might have difficulties really immersing into roleplay. The 3rd person pov also fits the theme of playing leaders literally building high towers and being detached from the ground. My friends and I took quickly to the game’s affinity towards simulating paper pushing bureaucrats. Is it pertinent at this point to mention that all the players at the table including myself are Singaporeans? 

Of course you can still go for roleplay in Icarus, and it can enhance the experience by significant degrees. But the omniscient perspective definitely frees things up for players and makes the game more accessible. This is probably Icarus’ greatest strength.

Art
I find Icarus’ art to be its weakest point . The box art of men in suits plummeting doesn’t accurately portray the city building/ toppling aspects of the game that to me is the core of the game. My guess is that the art is meant to harken to the eponymous Icarus of Greek myth, and also soften the impression that potential players would otherwise have of the game, compared to say—  a visual of a toppled statue a la Ozymandias—, even if it’s probably more relevant. 

The other illustrations inside the game (booklet and cards) just suffice. I acknowledge it’s difficult because this game allows you to play across any genre, and it can be hard to unify vastly different works of art and make it look unified. Also the illustrations have to be descriptive yet generic enough for players to project their ideas upon the game. The game has these challenges to juggle in terms of its art design, and it just does an alright job. 

Conclusion 
All in all, I enjoyed Icarus, and I’m glad I picked it up. I foresee myself tabling it quite a few more times with most of my friends, even those not too huge on roleplaying games. I think it would not have been worth the cost at full price back in the day (USD 35) , but as of this post, the game appears to be on sale on the Renegade Studios Webstore. Also the PDF is at a pretty good price though the dice and cards might be worth picking up the physical game for.  

A game worth picking up at a bargain, and I would welcome a 2nd edition with a tighter redesign, some rewrites and additional content. 

*Thanks for reading my post. I am not affiliated with any of the links or games that are mentioned in this post.*

Hollow, World!

"Once you've got a task to do, it's better to do it than live with the fear of it." 

I wondered if it would be an overly derivative and sentimental move to start my first ever post here with a line from a fantasy trilogy I had just finished reading. Would this be too cringe? Would I live to regret making a dated reference for posterity? Am I  conceited to even having considered a future readership?  I quickly realised this was the sort of diffidence and navel-gazing that had kept me from starting my Youtube Channel and this blog sooner rather than later. So to take on a new tact...

Hello there reader, thanks for reading The Spectral Hollow. I am Russ, a full- grown adult in Singapore,  donning the mask of Owl Ghoul Games, and belabouring the ghost/bird metaphor by calling this blog a refuge and perch to discuss my thoughts on tabletop roleplaying games, boardgames, and everything in between!

Side Note: Owls don't live in eyries, no matter how much I love the homophonic implications of the word. Google tells me they don't even live in nests. School was a lie...

I hope that one day when I look back on this site, it would be cached to the brim with long-form reviews, TTRPG book read-alongs, post-game reports, essays on game design and ludology, and other half-formed, poorly cobbled musings on a hobby that has sustained my soul for a good part of my life. I must confess an embarrassing level of love for boardgames and TTRPGs, and all the friends and memories I've forged while playing them, and I hope eventually some of the writing here will inspire at least one person to pick up that game they've been meaning to play, or to dare to dream about designing that next great game they have in their heads. 

Where others saw a broken maw, the owl ghoul made the tree hollow its home.