This Is My Final Recording
A downloadable game
You are part of the Mount Qaf Exploitation Project. Months ago, your corporate backers discovered something marvelous. Something miraculous. A method to tunnel into another realm, into the legendary Mount Qaf, the barrier between the worlds of man and djinn. An opportunity to connect with another species! To leapfrog our understanding of metaphysics! History! Ourselves! A thing with unlimited potential to advance the human condition!
Naturally, you started doing horribly unethical science experiments and bickering over funding. This will probably kill you, and it’ll probably suck, but that isn’t important.
What is important is this: When they pick over the ruins of this horrorshow, you will have named the creatures gnawing at your bones.
This Is My Final Recording is a rules-light game that aims to create the apocalyptic logs so common in video games and found footage media. You play the employees of the Mount Qaf Exploitation Project as your capitalistic over-reach results in terrible and unknown creatures that try to murder you. It is designed to be easily playable through the restrictions of social distancing guidelines, with letters, emails, and text communications all valid modes of play.
My logo was made by DadasDesigns.
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $2 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Community Copies
Support this game at or above a special price point to receive something exclusive.
Community Copies
Hey,
These free copies are for those who don't want to stretch their budget on the base game. Additionally, due to the Coronavirus outbreak at time of release, I've added fifty community copies for those cooped up at home and looking for entertainment.
As the game sells, more Community copies will be added to the pile.
Development log
- 1.01 UpdateMay 15, 2020
Comments
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We ran this game yesterday in Toronto and it went so well! We used tokens for Doom and represented the timeline with half index cards so we could slot in scenes easily, sort of like Apotheosis - eventually we had to curve the timeline to fit it on the table, which inspired players to start time traveling around. (The blue dots on the cards are where characters left and reentered the timeline, and the red dots are marking where characters died so we could find them easily.)
I am very excited to experiment more with this Timeline mechanic! Would it be alright if I used your system as the inspiration for another game?
absolutely! Go for it.
This Is My Final Recording is a game about being the scientist who leaves all those audiologs that Doomguy inevitably finds on a corpse.
It's 6 pages, with a plain but readable layout (although bolding some system mechanics would make it even easier to navigate,) and weirdly it's not a solo journaling game---it's multiplayer and there's crunch.
For game mechanics, Recording uses d6s and a timeline.
The timeline is unexpectedly wild, and your storytelling can slide back and forth in time from the start of the Incident to the very end, establishing different scenes at different points in a way that the game somehow makes easy and natural. This means that even if your character gets killed off, you can keep playing them by setting your scenes prior to their death.
The d6s are also fairly cool, and use a mechanic called Doom---which accumulates slowly and puts you in danger, but the more you have, the more control you can wield over the specifics of the story.
Really, player control is sort of an objective for the design of the game. Despite being horror, and despite PCs being very likely to die, the players themselves have an extraordinary amount of agency, and that makes gameplay feel like watching a really pulpy creature feature, rather than an oppressively bleak gets-under-your-skin film.
Basically, if you liked the Doom movie at all, or if you like Aliens, The Thing, or games like Dead Space or Siren, or the multimedia entity that is SCP, this hits those notes in a really satisfying way.
Overall, I would strongly recommend Recording to anyone who likes pulpy horror rpgs, or who wants a quick pick-up-and-play autumn seasonal game. It's quick to read, the design is stellar and approachable, and the writing is great, making it charming, engaging, and above all else fun.
what's the recommended playercount for this game?
More than two, gets unwieldy over about eight.