Camp Cryptid, my most recent game, was a pretty in-depth project that involved a lot of experimenting with the design. So, in this TTRPG Behind the Scenes, I’ll take you through the game’s production and explain how I created this game!
The Initial Idea
This game was made for Pocket Quest 2022, a game jam run by DriveThruRPG. The jam had two basic rules: the games must be a maximum of 20 pages of rules, and they had to fit with the theme of “Summer Camp.”
Now, while I’m used to working with small page counts, the theme was tricker for me. I grew up in the UK, so I never encountered a summer camp. At least, not a summer camp in the American sense.
I talked with my American friends who kindly shared their summer camp stories with me. My main takeaway from these conversations is that I totally don’t understand American summer camps.
So, I went to my other source of summer camp knowledge: 80s slasher movies. I’m a big fan of old horror films, and stuff like Friday The 13th, Sleepaway Camp, and Cheerleader Camp are where my mind goes when I think about “summer camp”. It seemed like a natural fit.
But, one thing that I’ve always wondered about those movies is, what happens when the story ends? Do the cleaners shrug all the blood off and presume it was just some bizarre prank? Does the camp’s accountant buy a better insurance package and start making plans for next year? People criticize the Jurrasic Park franchise for having the park reopen after horrible incidents, but slasher-movie summer camps make John Hammond look sensible.
And the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of focusing on the aftermath of a slasher film. Just what happens once the campers are all slain?
Another influence on this game was The Goes Wrong Show. The Goes Wrong Show is a UK TV show that follows a fictitious theater company as they perform a new short play every episode. Except, as the title suggests, this ensemble is terrible and things constantly go wrong, from characters forgetting their lines to the set collapsing.
What makes this even funnier is that each member of the fictitious theater company has a defined personality. This leads to loads of running jokes that go from play to play, no matter who that character is meant to be playing in that specific episode, as casts’ different personalities clash.
It also means you have real-life actors pretending to be other actors who are pretending to be characters, which is an amusing amount of abstraction.
This made me imagine those 80s slasher monsters trying to pose as camp staff, trying to pass the chaos off as mundane despite not really understanding how humans function or interact. And thus was born the game’s main story: A group of cryptids impersonating the camp staff they’ve killed in a bid to keep the camp open for another season.
Building The Mechanics
With the core idea sorted, it was time to think about mechanics. I experimented with loads of approaches during the game’s creation as there were quite a few ways this could go.
In the end, I decided to base the game around a Jenga tower for several reasons. Both horror and comedy are about build and release, slowly building the tension up until you hit that punchline or big scare. And, when you think about it, Jenga towers are the same. While the first pulls are pretty non-eventful, the tower slowly gets less stable. This causes the tension to build and build until, finally, it collapses!
On top of this, having all the players share a Jenga tower means that their actions will indirectly affect the other players, forcing you to pay attention to what the other players are doing. The game situation is constantly changing. You won’t know what state the tower will be in until it’s time to make your turn, forcing you to adapt and improvise rather than plan an optimal tactic and stick to it.
This approach perfectly suits the mood I was going for. The cryptids are powerful, but they have no idea how to deal with humans they’re not trying to murder. They’re constantly improvising, throwing things at the wall, and seeing what works.
This decision shaped the rest of the mechanics because it sets up a perfect risk/reward system for players. You pull blocks to use abilities but take too many and the tower will fall. Falling blocks lead to bad things. So, do you risk those extra few blocks? Or do you try to find a safer solution?
The other key mechanic I focused on was the Aspects. Aspects are secrets your character keeps, anything from being afraid of sunlight to being obsessed with a specific candy. At the start of the game, these are kept secret from everyone else. However, some abilities will force you to reveal one of your secrets to another player or the GM. And, those players can invoke those secrets during play to get your cryptid to do stuff for them.
This mechanic appealed to me on several levels. Firstly, it really helps cement the cryptids’ rag-tag status. This isn’t some powerful monster team. It is a group of randoms who only know each other because they torment the same summer camp. So, as they try to save the place, they’ll learn more about each other and can work together better. Because, if used correctly, Aspects allow players to pull off impressive teamwork without risking the tower falling.
The failure mechanic also plays into the risk/reward aspect. Whenever you cause the tower to fall, you get a Crisis Mark. When you hit specific numbers of marks, your character has a Crisis Moment and, from then on, you have a new rule to follow on your turn.
Some Crisis Moments may make you pull from the tower if you don’t do certain things, while others force you to act in specific ways in certain situations. Players have to decide if they want to risk performing the Crisis Moment or if they want to take steps to avoid it going off, forcing them to change plans on the fly!
Making The Cryptids
Making the Cryptids’ character options was the part where the page limit really started to bite. There are so many I wanted to include, but there just wasn’t the space!
So, I tried to find a nice balance between famous and unique. Obviously, if I didn’t include a Jason-Esque masked murderer, the game wouldn’t feel totally complete. And, a classic Vampire is a must for any monster-focused game.
But I also wanted to include some more out-of-the-box choices. As a massive fan of The Ring, a Sadako-like ghost was totally needed, and I always love the chance to play as Mothman, so he had to be included.
However, my favorite is the Night Clown. Of course, clowns are beloved modern horrors, but it also acts as a fun double reference. Firstly to a line of dialogue found in Animal Crossing: New Horizons and to one of my favorite songs by Chris Garneau.
The Look
Obviously, visuals are necessary for any game. I decided to go for a retro Summer Camp brochure look as I adore the look of old National Park guides from the 70s and 80s.
However, I wanted to push the game’s horror aspects. To do this, I included a load of fake newspaper clippings and spooky photographs that feature shadowy figures hiding in the background.
(Fun Fact: The creepy figures are all pictures of me turned into silhouettes! I spent far too long photographing myself in the bathroom mirror to make those.)
I adore TTRPG books that look like in-universe props, so by having these fake pictures and clippings, I aimed to give the feeling that someone had been using this old guide to catalog their own supernatural experiences and cryptid sightings!
So there you have it! Camp Crytpid, 20 pages of summer camp fun!
If you want to buy the game, you can find it here.
Jonathon Greenall is a freelance writer, artist, and tabletop roleplaying game designer who has written for CBR, Polygon, Nintendo Life, Gayley Dreadful, Enbylife, and many other publications. They have also published several popular and highly-praised tabletop roleplaying games including “You Have One Ability….The Ability To Fuck This Up,” “Macarons, Milkshakes, And Magic,” and “Wander Wizards.”
Jonathon has always been fascinated by media, from the big hitters to the small, obscure, and often overlooked titles that linger on the sidelines, capturing both the on and off-camera stories that make these shows so fascinating.
Jonathon is also a major anime fan, having been exposed to the medium through shows like Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena. Since then, Jonathon has maintained a passion for anime, watching most new shows each season and hunting down overlooked gems from previous ones.