This is the repository for the rulebooks and code of Nests & Insects, a Roguelike Tabletop Roleplaying Game.
Nests & Insects is lovingly crafted by hand in a text-based format with custom layout code and glorious ASCII.
Figure 1: The Nests & Insects rulebooks in vim with syntax highlighting.
Nests & Insects is still a work in progress, in the early stages of design and
playtesting. To see how much is done and how much remains to be done, check out
the TODO file and changelog.md.
Nests & Insects is a tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) for 2 to 7 players. One player assumes the role of the Game Queen and describes the game world to the other players. The other players control characters who explore, and interact with, the game world.
Players' characters are arthropods that belong to one of six classes: Spider, Wasp, Scorpion, Ladybug, Beetle and Ants (plural). The characters are mercenaries, assassins, and thugs, hired to invade a Nest and carry out a Job on behalf of some arthropod client. Nests are the homes of eusocial insects: the nests of Bees, Ants and Termites. Common Jobs are to assasinate the Queen, or the King; steal nectar, honey, honeydew, aphids or mealybugs (farmed by ants) or fungi (cultivated by termites); steal, or kill, larvae; deliver, or pick up a message; or sabotage the Nest.
At the beginning of a new game the players' characters enter a Nest to carry out their Job armed with their natural weapons and armour: mandibles, pincers, stingers, carapaces, wings, venom, webs. During a Job characters must survive combat with the soldier castes guarding the Nests. They must also hunt or forage for food to avoid weakening and starving to death. While foraging, characters may find food items, such as nectar and fungi, that can be consumed to provide not only sustenance but also healing, enhanced physical and mental abilities and other benefits.
Nests & Insects is a tabletop roleplaying game: the players say what their characters want to do and roll the dice to see what happens. Then the Game Queen describes the results of the characters' actions. Nests & Insects' roleplaying system is a percentile system where a composite, "percentile" die (d100) is rolled to determine the outcome of actions and composite "decile dice" (d20, d40, d60, d80, d120 and the d100 itself) are rolled to quantify the results of actions. The system is designed to remove all mental arithmetic from "action resolution" and to encourage the players to use their imagination to help their characters achieve their goals. Everything characters encounter in Nests & Insects is procedurally generated: the Nest, its guardians, items, all challenges and rewards.
Nests & Insects is a "Roguelike" TTRPG: it is inspired by Roguelike Computer RPGs (CRPGs) such as Nethack, Angband, Moria, ADoM and newer games like Diablo and Darkest Dungeon. From Roguelike CRPGs it borrows: procedural generation; hack-and-slash, dungeon-crawling gameplay; lethal combat; hunger mechanics; and a focus on exploration and experimentation with the game world. From TTRPGs it borrows: weird dice; tortuous terminology with Pompous Capitalisation; over-engineered rules; unclear motivation to learn yet another roleplaying system; and crunch Crunch CRrRUNCH!
The text-based rulebook is in the following path:
<project root>/game/rulebook/txt/nests_and_insects.txt
The text-based version is the only version of the rulebook.
To read the text-based rulebook, you can open the rulebook file in your favourite text editor. On Windows, Notepad and Notepad++ work fine. On Windows and everywhere else, vim, emacs and friends should work as well as usual.
Once you open the file, you should be greeted by the glorious ASCII of the rulebook cover.
Alternatively, in your system's terminal navigate to the rulebook's directory and open it with a pager like less or more etc. For instance, using less:
cd .../game/rulebook/txt/
less -z 50 nests_and_insects.txt
Calling less with the argument "-z 50" sets the number of lines per page to 50, as in the rulebook's page height. This lets you page up and down by pressing z or w, even if your terminal's screen height is not exactly 50 rows.
The rulebook, and, in particular, its cover page, are best rendered in the free font DejaVu Sans Mono. You can download it from here:
https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/
The ironically named /codez directory contains Prolog code used to manage game data and generate characters, character sheets etc. Also, to lay-out the text-based rulebooks. It is not necessary to peruse the codez directory to play the game- it is only included for the game developer's convenience.
The text-based rulebook is formatted with the code in the Prolog module
codez/src/layout.pl. This, too, is a work in progress. If you find major formatting
errors, or any errors, in the rulebook, please report it by emailing the game's author
at ep2216@ic.ac.uk. You're welcome to send a pull request instead.
The contents of this repository come with the text of a LICENSE - the GNU General Public License version 3 (GNU GPL v.3 for short-er). The GNU GPL v.3 is a "copyleft license for software and other kinds of works" therefore I assume and hereby declare my conviction that it also covers the contents of the game/ directory, which are not, strictly speaking, "software" in the commonly understood sense of "source code writte in a programming language".
In particular, where the word "software" appears in the GNU GPL v.3 ", and for the puproses of licensing Nests & Insects, that word should be interpreted as saying software and other kinds of works, including game rules text, instead.
Should there be any doubts about the licensing of parts of the text in this repository, assume that all text is the source code of a programming language, except that some text may not have a compiler, or may not be designed to be executed by a computer, but a human brain.