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 be able to take risks to help each other, sharing their pain and mitigating the feeling of despair and unfairness of the situation.
I wanted all this to be expressed directly through the resolution mechanism. This meant designing a system where players could choose how much risks (and potential consequences) they were ready to take to progress toward their objectives.
So rather than a test system where players need to hit a certain value, we went with a track system where a number of rolled success is required to resolve a situation. Player can choose to roll as many dices as they want, but each failed rolled leads to an additional negative consequences. The difficulty of the roll depends depends if the character is acting against or toward their natural tendencies (their "demon").
To reflect the ability to help each other, a rule allows all players to roll additional dices during another character's turn to help them succeed, but risking potential negative consequences themselves.
At first, I imagined a system with five different statistics 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 meant the stats had to evolve as the characters did, and if they had to be compared and "mathed" against one another every time, this would have considerably slowed down the pace of the game and risked turning into a chore at some point.
So rather than relying on several stat values, we kept only one: the "voice" - representing the demon influence over the character. But this also reduced the potential for characters' evolution. So what I did instead is I designed different "traumas" and "hopes", specific rule-breaking abilities characters could unlock or be afflicted by as they evolved away from, or toward their demon.