3 Shining Motes

The lights are going out.

The darkness drew in fast, cutting many communities off completely. The shadows snuffed light after light, settlement after settlement, until only a vanishing few remained. This game follows 3 of those remaining settlements, holding out against all odds.

3 Shining Motes is a single-player journaling game, played with a deck of playing cards, a 4-sided die, a 6-sided die, 4 tokens and whatever method you choose to record the events that unfold. A game takes approximately an hour to play. Each turn you'll answer a prompt, either a disaster within one of your settlements or a reason for hope, then watch the shadows spread. Hope will prevail, eventually, if even one settlement survives the tide of darkness.

Can the flame of hope burn on, or will it fall to the shadows?

The game is designed to be printed on A4 size paper and folded into a trifold, but there's also a digital version ordered for reading on a screen.

If you're interested in adapting the system used in this game to make one of your own, good news! I'm currently writing up a guide on how you might go about doing that, as I think this game could quite easily be adapted to a lot of other genres and the mechanics could quite easily be expanded upon/developed. Look out for that document soon (included in the game files here)!

Thanks to Deric Bindel for playtesting! This game was created as part of the One-Page RPG Jam 2025.

This game uses the Dicier typeface by Speak the Sky, licensed under CC BY 4.0.