Thank you! It was very much inspired by the Below a Bad Moon Jam a while back that required a messed up moon and a labyrinth. It just took me a while - and the catalyst of the Lean Green Zine Jam - to make it happen.
Almost Bedtime Theater
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Thank you so much for being a librarian, for letting me know about your experience with the game, and for sharing it with others!
I unfortunately had to delay ordering reprints of the original version of the game because of all the tariff-related chaos, so it was out of stock for about a month. The good news is that I received the new print run the other day and have sent it on to Indie Press Revolution, so with a little luck it will start showing up at retailers again in the coming weeks. My apologies for it being difficult to find!
I was introduced to this game as part of a solo RPG game club in which five of us played together. My disgraced heir to the throne (in hiding) had a relatively low-key journey, but I definitely had fun discovering a fog-enshrouded swamp tower that the locals would trebuchet pumpkins at as part of a festival, running afoul of an adventuring supply store selling "authentic royal hair" good luck charms, and discovering what was decidedly a cult that I based off someone else's rumor about an evil red star.
I had a wonderful time and will definitely be taking this game to another group in turn. Thank you for creating it!
That you do! When you open the itch download page for this game, at the bottom of the page should be a red button labeled “Get download key.” Clicking it will reveal the key you can use on the Role code redemption page. (There’s a link to that page in the Virtual Tabletop section above.)
If that doesn’t work, please let me know. Thanks!
I played this as part of a solo journaling game book club and it was so close there at the end: 1 ritual point left vs. 1 damage point. Sadly, it wasn't meant to be and the guards succeeded in their mission, but the tension of that last round was awesome! I'll definitely be trying again.
And thank you for including the play example. It was very helpful.
Hi! I'm sorry you're having trouble with the files. The printer friendly version is indeed the one you are looking for, with black text/illustrations on a white background. It's named "Printer Friendly Dreams Detective v1.1.pdf" and I just double-checked it was working correctly - at least for me - by downloading it from the game page. If that file is still not working for you, please reach out to me at AlmostBedtimeTheater @ gmail.com and I'll see if I can create a different kind of PDF file for you.
That there is! The duplicate page numbers occur when you are turning over an item that's in the book rather than a page of the book itself. For example, the page 18 & 19 spread has the library bingo card in it. In the first version of that spread, you can see the contents of page 18 but the card is covering the contents of page 19. When you turn the page, you are flipping the bingo card over, so now it's covering the contents of page 18 and you can see the card's back plus the contents of page 19. Page 44 appears duplicated but it's because the corner of page 45/46 has been torn away, so you see "44" again. Does that help?
Hi - I hadn't planned on it because there are some elements of the book that may be a little confusing if not viewed as spreads, but I'll get it added. Things to watch out for are places where turning the page is flipping over a piece of ephemera stuffed in the book rather than "turning a page of the book" (like PDF pages 3-7 and 28-31), tables that cross the spread (PDF pages 22-25), and tables where instructions and examples are split across a spread (PDF pages 46-47 and 40-41). I hope that helps!
Thank you so much for sharing your story; it's wonderful! It is always a delight to see what folks come up with and the delightful ways they make the Library their own. I particularly loved how to deal with riddle rain, the gambling scene, that there was a lizard problem, the kindness shown to the gnosiphage, and the idea of letting the various documents know they are being checked out today. It's all so good!
Thank you for the work you do with your library and thank you so much for your wonderful comment! It's always a delight to hear from someone enjoying something I made. And if at any point you'd like to share your art from your exploration of the Great Library, I'd love to see it.
Thank you again for absolutely making my day, and I wish you and Orion the most amazing of travels!
That sounds amazing! Thank you so much for letting me know, and I'm looking forward to hearing how it went. If you or your student have any questions, please feel free to contact me at AlmostBedtimeTheater (at) gmail.com.
As a side note, I've discovered the Helping mechanism (pg 8) can be cumbersome in play and recommend this instead: "Helping: If you want to help someone who is going to be rolling for an action, describe how you are providing assistance. They roll an extra d6, but if things go wrong, or there are costs or complications, those affect you as well. The number of players who can help is only limited by what makes sense narratively."
If you are interested, there is also an actual play available from a session I ran for the American Library Association's Games and Gaming Round Table: Twitch video link



















