Well will you look at that, my first published full game went public today! It’s called A Scoundrel in the Deep and it’s a tiny game for two players about a Scoundrel (well, duh!) trying to escape the ominous, mysterious and most importantly dark “Tomb of the Deep”.

Imagine an archetypal rogue, an adventurer from the pulp era sword and sorcery stories: he stole the fabled Ruby and must find a way out… except the Tomb is pitch dark and they only have a few matches left… and the Deep does not want them to come out alive with their loot!

And you actually play with matches, lighting them on fire and passing them back and forth with your play mate, the Deep. You can buy the game right now, included in Issue 6, Vol. 1 of the e-zine Worlds Without Master, at the top is the gorgeous cover for this issue of the zine (art by Jeff Brown): it’s really cheap, and the zine is always full of delightful sword and sorcery goodness: fiction, games, a comic, inspiring illustrations and more. And if you like what you got, I suggest you join the Patron Horde by heading to Epidiah’s Patreon and pledging to pay a small amount of cash every time he puts out an issue (never more than one a month, and so far less than half of that): not only you pay less than buying the single issues afterwards, but you help make the zine better for the future.

The game was born from a joke on Google Plus, of all places: a friend noted that a portable version of Epidiah’s Dread rpg could be played with a lit match. The character of the player that burns their fingers dies!

A joke, yes… but it kept bouncing in my head so I spit it out on the page in a very early, crude form. Then Eppy encouraged me to complete it, and most importantly my friend Flavio Mortarino came along and basically adopted the game as developer, bringing it around to actual people to playtest, brainstorming with me and helping me put down words on the page, completing and refining it.

So now here it is. I hope some of you will play it and have fun. Try to play it in pitch dark for maximum effect!