Les Danses de Cadruce is a TTRPG created for One-Page-RPG Jam 2025. It is set in a dark fantasy version of the medieval south of France, where plagues and demons emerge from the earth. The game sees characters facing those dangers, in addition to their own literal demons, within a system designed to mirror traumas and mental health issues.
Check the project page and download the ruleset right here:
Les Danses de Cadruce is a project born from creative frustration and anger. Still - we tried to take all of those feelings and get a compelling experience out of them. We wanted to convey the sense of characters fighting a dying world and their own demons - something that drives them, but also makes them a liability to the group, and makes everything else more difficult. Hope also had to be a part of it. We wanted players to take risks to help one another, sharing the pain but helping each other slowly get back a sense of control over the feeling of unfairness.
I wanted all this to be expressed directly through the resolution mechanics. This meant designing a system where players could choose how much risks (and potential consequences) they were ready to take to achieve their goals.
So rather than a value to hit with a roll, we went with a system where each single dic roll was a success or failure and players would need a number of success to overcome a situation. They could choose to roll as many dices as they wanted to, but each failure rolled led to an additional negative consequences. The value determining if a roll is a failure or success depended on if they were acting against or toward their natural tendencies (their "demon").
To reflect the ability to help each other, we added a rule letting other players roll additional dices themselves to help another player and taking the negative consequences on themselves.
At first, I thought of having five different stats for the characters, each one "opposed" to two other stats, represented in the form of a pentagram. It made sense thematically and seemed easy enough to grasp on paper; however, it went against another aspect we really wanted to experiment with: the ability for characters to evolve and heal or succumb to their traumas. This implied the need for statistics to grow, and if they had to be compared and "mathed" against one another every time the players wanted to act, this would slow down the pacing and risk turning into a chore at some point.
So rather than relying on several stat values, we kept only one: the demon strength (voice). But this also reduced the potential for characters' evolution. So what I did instead is I designed "traumas" and "hopes", specific rule-breaking abilities characters could unlock or be afflicted by as they evolved away from, or toward their demon.