The Historian of Dour Creek

You've lived in Dour Creek for your entire life, and you made it your life’s work to record the history of this town, even as the industry that once drew people here has left and most of the animal-folk who made up the community have left or died. But you’ll soon discover that there just might be a future for this town yet, after a peculiar new creature moves in next door…

This is a solo RPG that I wrote for Story Synth, an online platform for games like For The Queen or The Quiet Year. It's my take on a particular genre I call the "empathy contagion;" stories of a wide-eyed innocent coming to a moribund community and through their inherent kindness, curiosity and decency managing to inspire those qualities in all the people they encounter. Think Pollyanna, Wall-e, Babe, Paddington. There's a ton of examples.

I found I couldn't quite write the game from the innocent's perspective, which was my original intention. I banged my head against it for a while before eventually coming up with this. It's not exactly what I want it to be, but it's playable, and the Story Synth platform was great fun to work with. If you play it, let me know how it went!