The Path
A downloadable game
You’re a young witcher, still fresh after your trials, for the first time leaving the place that trained you in the monster-hunting trade - your witchers’ school.
It’s your very first year on the Path and you have everything you would ever need to fulfill your duty - swords, potions, horse, knowledge, and dedication. Travel the Continent learning more about the world and yourself, and eventually, when you return to your keep for the winter, share your tales with fellow brothers.
Return with trophies of your successful hunts. Or scars after failed ones.
The Path is a solo journaling RPG game about a witcher, monster hunter, traveling the world for the first time.
To play you’ll need a standard deck of cards with no Jokers, a single 6-sided die, and a collection of tokens of some kind - coins for example. You can play without tokens if need be, though the game is better with them.
You will also need a journal. Use whatever you prefer - a physical journal, Twitter, or record your journal entries with a camera.
Every year witchers depart from their keep for the Path, wandering the continent. And now you are one of them.
This work is based on the Carta system (found at https://peachgardengames.itch.io/carta-srd), from Cat McDonald and Peach Garden Games, and licensed for use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).
The Carta logo is © Cat McDonald, and is used with permission.
The Path was inspired by the Witcher saga and games, as well as The Wretched and Alone SRD by Matt Sanders & Chris Bissette.
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Hey! I'm pretty new to finding games on Itch, but I created an account just cause I wanted to comment on your game!
TL;DR: I had a blast being tricked in to writing fanfiction about "The Witcher" while simultaneously barely knowing anything about "The Witcher!" I'd highly recommend the game to anyone willing to try it out, if they either have some prior knowledge or are willing to look up some terms on the wiki.
I finished a session just today, after a LOT of hours. I ended up being way longer-winded than I anticipated and had ended up writing about 20 pages of narrative for the journaling component of this game! Someone more willing to write fewer than four or five paragraphs based on a single flip of a card would probably enjoy this game in a much shorter time, but I still had a blast!
Something I noticed in hindsight was that the game was very flexible in a lot of the details, both when it came to gameplay and when it came to narrative. I think part of this has to do with the flexibility inherent in Cat McDonald's and Peach Garden Games's Carta SRD, which leaves many of the parts of the game —particularly the pacing of the journaling segments— up to the discretion of the player.
That being said, you also carried much of that spirit in The Path's DNA. Something I appreciated is that the game didn't tell me a lot about when exactly in the Witcher Saga's timeline it took place, and it also didn't have a lot of specifics about who the mentors were, what the gods were, what the monsters were, etc. This meant that players like myself have a lot of flexibility not only with regards to how much detail they fill out, but when and where in the Witcher Saga their Path will take place. This flexibility also extended to the journaling segments. leaving the player to write the most about the things which catch their eyes about the world of the Witcher.
Likewise, many of the prompts did a great job of giving just enough information to direct play and give the player something to work with without answering all the questions for them. In fact, the questions the prompts do ask are excellently written. I agree with the other commenter that I found myself looking up some of the terms I wasn't familiar with, but it ended up being the case that these details helped me think about how to tie my character to the world and the information which I had been provided. By the end, I felt like I could believe that my character could exist in the world of the Witcher, which is a very hard feeling to get right in a rules-lite system.
The game is excellent, and I look forward to more! I wish you well on your future endeavors.
Hi! I've just played though a session of your game!
I've thought it was great! I was unfamiliar with Witcher lore so I had to look up a few things, like the law of surprises. I liked the prompts though, it made me think of interesting answers.
And I think I played the game wrong? This is the my first time playing with the Carta system. I thought you had to left to right, unable to move down until the current row is all face up. Turns out you can go down if you want to. Oops my bad lol.
Anyways, thank you for making the game! I had fun with it! I'll play though it correctly next time.