TTRPG Experiment 1 - ADS
10/5/26
ADS: Apocalypse Delivery Service is a Death Stranding-inspired solo journaling TTRPG about delivering packages.
The idea behind this game is that you are making deliveries across a devastated world, connecting the last pieces of humanity. As you complete deliveries, you write a journal of the things you see and the deliveries you make, as well as reflecting emotionally on what they mean to you and to the people you're connecting. You make a certain number of deliveries, ending with a final "special" delivery, to meet the quota for your shift. There aren't very many actual mechanics involved, with the focus being on creative journaling. It's also currently a relatively short game - probably 30 minutes to an hour, depending on how in-depth you write.
For this project, I tried to limit myself to making a one-pager (mostly because I wasn't sure how much I'd be able to write). I had a few ideas for mechanics that I didn't get to put in as well, which are in the brainstorming doc. I'd potentially be interested in expanding this one in the future, both in terms of amount of mechanics and amount of writing.
When playtesting in class, I added an addition mechanic that I'd been tossing around in my head: "Before you begin, create a playlist for your deliveries. Add (your quota + 1) songs to it. For each delivery, play the next song in the playlist. Your delivery is completed when the song ends."
This ended up being super fun, although didn't leave as much time for journalling as I would have liked, being limited to roughly 3-5 minutes per delivery. My pie in the sky idea to fix this is to write a companion album of 10-12 minute songs for people to use. However, I think that removes the personal expression part of it, so maybe not.
Here is the brainstorming doc:
And here is the official one-pager, plus a few pages of prompts:
I also did a page-long demo of the game, which you can see below.
