Sidhe Shed

Purple background with a garden shed icon. Above in script are the words "Sidhe Shed" and below the shed are the words "A solo journaling game by Stephanie Bryant (mortaine.com/blog)"

You are visiting friends or family and must stay in a tiny guest house on their property. The guest house is haunted. What do you do? Sidhe Shed is a short solo journaling game about encountering one of the Fair Folk while staying in a guest house. It’s available as an in-browser experience or in […]

Exit, Pursued by a Bear

with 6 game hacks to play out the story of Pablo Escobear, the legendary black bear who ate up to 40 pounds of cocaine in the Appalachian mountains in 1985. We have some of your favorite “bear and pretzels” games, an original solo RPG, and a Fate one-shot.

One Convo Cards: Like X Cards, but for Noise

A large icon of an ear with the text "One Conversation at a Time, Please! Thank You"

This page holds the One Convo Cards for tabletop gamers with auditory processing issues, hearing loss, or who want to make their tables accessible to everyone. How do you use them? Print these out, cut them, and place them on the gaming table, or give them out, one per player. Scroll down for PDFs with […]

Girl Bryte

Work in Progress. Started in October, 2022. If you’re interested in playtesting, sign up here. This is a magical girl RPG using a Tarot deck and the Burn Bryte dice mechanic for action resolution.

Pride Flag Token Overlays

In June, 2022, I made a set of token overlays with some pride flag color combinations. You can download them on itch.io for free.

Heroic Dark Deluxe – Settings

I wrote the Fathom and the Knights of Callisto settings for Heroic Dark Deluxe. In The Knights of Callisto, you’re a mecha pilot facing down against giant monsters living on one of Jupiter’s moons. Excellent anime-esque heroic struggle! In Fathom, you play an aquatic person (mermaids!) whose minor conflicts with land-dwellers pale in comparison to […]

Waters Rising

A D&D 5th edition combat encounter for Tier 3 characters, available in the Collective Encounters Vol. 3 on DMsGuild. At the final confrontation with the Arch-sorcerer Esunell the Blue(Ess OO nel), the party must disrupt his ritual to create the Chaos Knife! Credits Stephanie Bryant is a writer, game designer, bassist, knitter, and scrum master […]

All My Circuits

This is a short game for several players about non-verbal communication and literal electrical resistance. Written with Toby Strauss and available in the Love & Resistance anthology of games.

Buzz and Fly: A Bee Game

Buzz and Fly is a Lasers & Feelings hack where you play a bee in a beehive. You can download it right here, for free. It’s CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US. I started writing it at the end of June, 2020, set it aside while taking care of some travel and family stuff, and finished writing […]

Passport

Passport is a game I wrote with Toby Strauss. It’s a play-by-postal story game. Posting it now because Nick Golding posted his Love Letters and I remembered hey, we made a thing! Passport You will need: 2 or more players 1 small notebook (a moleskin cahier is perfect) Stamps and envelopes We are going on […]

Can’t Sleep, Clowns Will Eat Me

As we all know, the collective for “clown” is “a horror of clowns.” Last month, I wrote “Can’t Sleep, Clowns Will Eat Me” for Trilemma Games’ Patreon-sponsored blog. You can find it here for free to use and enjoy in your games. It’s a deviously clownish adventure about a town that suffers from dangerous insomnia […]

Baby Bestiary vol 2

I contributed the Pseudodragon entry in the Baby Bestiary, vol. 2! (Print | PDF) This was such a fun project to work on! Metal Weave Games posted asking for last-minute contributors after a couple of theirs backed out, and I jumped at the chance. I love pseudodragons, and had a lot of fun researching old […]

TimeWatch: Book of Changing Years

I contributed the zombie events to the Book of Changing Years by Pelgrane Press. My entries are in the agent log for “Engineer Pritesh.” I had a ton of fun writing both this timeline, as well as the adventure that formed its inspiration. Now that Timewatch is officially out, I may use the SRD to […]

Threadbare RPG

Threadbare is a role-playing game about being a broken toy in a post-apocalyptic broken world. It funded on Kickstarter in under 24 hours and ultimately raised over $11,000, with 7 stretch goals. It’s available on DriveThruRPG and Indie Press Revolution. I participate in Bits & Mortar, so if you buy a  hard copy at a […]

Mx. Universe

Earlier this year, a couple of editors put out a call for submissions to their small anthology of LGBT-written/themed games. A friend of mine did some brainstorming and wrote Mx. Universe, a live action role-playing game about being non-binary and getting fashion policed. There was a small prize pool for certain categories, and I’m pleased […]

Mythics in Spaaace!

I contributed the 3-part campaign Mythics in Spaaace! for David Schirduan’s Mythic Mortals RPG about big fights and overpowered mythical beings. It was a lot of fun to write and playtest, and I made up a pretty solid structure for the adventure.

Golem’s Complex – Santicore 2014

In 2014, I participated in the Secret Santicore swap. My dungeon the Golem Spa (or Golem Complex as it was printed) was an interesting take on an ancient underground assembly lab for a gigantic metal golem… and its female companion. I wrote about it a bit here when it was released in early 2015. You […]

Ruins of Byron’s World

A while back, I backed Elegy for a Dead World on Kickstarter, and it’s already a very rich world of writing prompts! Here is my first story, The Ruins of Byron’s World. I stuck pretty close to the writing prompt and didn’t skip ahead to see what was coming next, so my story is a […]

Exploring the Kingdom

Inspired by the GameChef 2015 theme and ingredients. This is a competitive physical game for one or more players. You will need: A note-taking device (notebook or cell phone with notepad app) A path or trail in a natural space (woods, wetlands, park, lake, field) Optional, but useful: A field guide Take a walk or […]

Night’s Black Agents Adventure: Day of the Wehrwolf

Pelgrane Press ran the Dracula Dossier kickstarter. As one of the stretch goals, I was hired to write a scenario for Night’s Black Agents, called Day of the Wehrwolf. Interestingly, the scenario is a standalone module– something you can play independent of the Dracula conspiracy. October, 2015: Day of the Wehrwolf is now available for […]

Restless: Holiday Palette

Restless: A Very Special Holiday Horror This is a palette for J. Walton‘s game Restless (PDF). This palette is, in essence, a pre-defined apocalypse to use to tell your stories. Non-Survivors: The non-survivors are Santa’s Elves, driven mad with obsessive toy-making. They have broken free of the Workshop, overthrown their tyrannical master, and are now […]

200-word Game: Escape Pod One Launching

Download as PDF. (Download in Japanese). Translation by Django. Â Español (in nanoludoteca: el titulo es Cápsula de Escape Uno). Translation by Juan Manuel Avila. Winner of the 200 Word Challenge. Developer Statement: I woke up after a bad dream and decided it would make an interesting game. I wrote during my lunch break, and […]

Tiny Dragons/Epyllion Hack

This is a hack to use the solo Tiny Dragons RPG and Epyllion together. Your entire Epyllion group must agree to the Tiny Dragon off-table game. Note: Tiny Dragons is a solo game. Epyllion is a group game. This hack attempts to reconcile the two games so you can play them with the same character. Character Sheet Conversion: Epyllion […]

200-word RPG Supplement: Moon Mage Compendium Class

download as PDF. Developer Statement: I ran an Epyllion campaign in 2014 for some friends of mine and their daughter. When the campaign ended, we picked up Dungeon World and decided to play it in Dragonia, but thousands of years later. Most magic is the human kind, but when our heroes encountered a dragon, we […]

Are You Sheriff Dullard? A Mafia Hack

Last year, for my 39th birthday party, I threw a “Red and Wild” birthday party, inspired by To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. In the movie, Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes, and John Leguizamo are drag queens who get stranded in middle America, where they teach others to let their freak flags fly. The […]

TimeWatch Adventures!

Hannibal Crossing the Alps (2/4/14) TimeWatch has detected an anomaly in the continuum! It doesn’t sound too serious, but we’re pretty sure Hannibal wasn’t riding a triceratops over the mountains. Can your team fix it, rookie? Recruitment Drive (3/15/14) “Beware the Ides of March! No, I’m serious, guys– March 15th is, like, seriously a bad-luck […]

30 Day Worldbuilder

MagicalWorldBuilder for printing out at home or reading on a computer ePub for use with many fine ereader devices MOBI for use with Kindles and MobiPocket software. In October, 2004, I posted 30 days of world-building exercises to theNaNoWriMo discussion forums. These are short, 15-minute exercises that can help you make crucial decisions about your world, […]