You all have been living together for at least several weeks. Recently, people started picketing outside your house. More keep coming. They’re all angry. A Mob is forming. Words on the wind. “Kill them.” “Burn the whole thing down.” Survive against The Mob.

Trapped is a one-page tabletop RPG where your primary goal is to survive the ever growing mob. Trapped is an incredibly flexible system that fits into any level of fantasy or time period that uses a unique mechanic to decide the outcome of uncertain events. Instead of rolling dice, you draw cards from a standard deck of playing cards.

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This one-page tabletop RPG was designed for a tabletop RPG class, where we had to design an RPG based on a Grimm’s fairy tale. I selected The Owl, which tells a tale of an owl who rested in a barn, but was mistaken for a monster by the farmers. Many try to rid the barn of the foul beast, but none are brave enough to do so. Ultimately the angry mob decides to burn the barn down with the animal inside.

Trapped! plays out from the owl’s perspective, where the angry mob gets ever closer and closer to killing everyone inside. In order to capture the feeling of an uncontrollable angry mob, I created the deck system instead of rolling dice, in order to phisically represent how much time the players have left. The additional element of randomness also adds to the feeling of the angry mob, as they become further enraged for no apparent reason.

I’m particularly proud of the relationship mechanic I created for character creation, where each player determines their relationship with the player on the right. This leads to emergent gameplay, and informs the player how they should be interacting with other person, which is useful when a game shouldn’t last more than an hour or two.