Orichalcum
A downloadable game
To find our way home, we must sift through the ruins and our memories of the Empire. But in our remembering, we must not forget what we have created for ourselves.
Orichalcum is a tabletop roleplaying map game for 1-5 players. Players will lay out a map of the Empire that oppressed their ancestors and drowned in a deluge of its own making. By remembering what was left behind, they will draw a connection from the past to the present. Their people, the Exiles, have evolved past the Empire's ways, and these differences will become features on each player's map of their island home. Orichalcum is a game about drowning empires and imagining utopias.
This game was created for the Mapemounde game jam (#mapemounde2019) on itch.io, hosted by Mammut RPG. It has also been submitted to Hilagyo Jam, hosted by Pammu, Nosfecatu, Maharhar, Diwata ng Manila, Jamila R. Nedjadi, and John Erwin. The typefaces used in this text are Righteous by Astigmatic and Raleway by the League of Moveable Type. The cover photo is by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash.
Thank you to Opal (@obliqueObloquy) and Ash (@smokeandash95) for helping me playtest this game. <3
License: Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0
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Orichalcum is a 9 page, 1-5 player mapmaking rpg about finding your way through the ruins of the empire that long ago exiled your people and broke the world.
It's got lovely art and a lot of small, cool interior illustrations. It's also layed out in a way that makes it extremely easy to read.
You will probably want the downloadable tiles, and it may be a little tricky to play remotely, but the game does a good job of handing you prompts that you can expand on. It's *really* focused on building your island / the empire's cultures and comparing them, but there's a lot of room for creative freedom within that concept, and the gameplay doesn't feel confining.
Overall, I would recommend this to groups that like short storytelling games. It's an excellent one-shot, and also potentially a way to build an interesting island setting for an adventure in another system.
Justin Quirit's ORICHALCUM is a thoughtful examination on legacy in the aftermath of colonization. The literal unearthing of pillars of empire—revealing the context of oppression, followed by the ways in which the Exiles have subverted that oppression on both a communal and an individual level—is a powerful means of reclaiming and recentering the narratives of an erased community. The mechanics for exploring of the land (a mixture of tile placement, narration, and drawn detail) all fit together in a satisfying confluence.
caro, this is so kind. thank you. :)