I've done some dabbling in various sizes of RPGs: first I made Fruit Friends, which is a postcard-sized game, and then itsy bitsy spider, a business-card sized game (and my first entry to the Tiny series). I liked these because of the design limitations that naturally came with the size that I had to work with. After these projects, I came across the One-page RPG Jam and decided to join. It seemed like the logical next step, to try my hand at a single page RPG, a similar and yet different form of size limitation. What happened was I ended up experiencing something I really didnt expect: working with one whole page was suddenly overwhelming. One entire page to fill? All my ideas felt either too small to use the room effectively, or too big and were threatening to spill over into a longer game.

After taking some time to brainstorm and check out other one page RPGs, I was inspired by other snappy games like Grant Howitt’s Honey Heist and Crash Pandas. I’ve run a couple games of Honey Heist but haven’t had a change to formally play Crash Pandas yet, although it’s been on my list. My husband pancelor has a love of raccoons that has rubbed off on me, so this was naturally another influence. The cute little guys have a certain energy to them, perfect for shenanigans. The game idea itself was sparked by this tweet, which I love to this day:

From here I decided the game would be split into three phases: creating you raccoon, planning the heist, and then jumping to the middle of the heist. One of my favourite parts of Honey Heist is that in character creation you can choose a hat for your bear, so I had to include that in character creation. I decided that using d6 tables would be the best way to keep things simple and streamlined while also allowing for a solid amount of chaos (d6 is also probably the most accessible die).

The game is a combination of fonts from Speak the Sky and of my own handwriting. Dicier (dice shapes in font form) was great to help keep the game looking clean (lots of white space) while easily fitting on to a single page. The font for the body text of the game is my own creation. I wanted something handwritten and whimsical to go along with the silly energy of the game. I used Calligriphr to create what I called a “small caps” font. I liked how quirky it looked, but it was perhaps a bit too quirky – the original version has some readability issues since some of the letters were different sizes. I ended up updating the font to remedy this, paying more attention to size and spacing, and I think the new version is a big improvement.

All that was left was the title. The game was called ‘Raccoon Heist’ for a while because it’s descriptive and gets the point across… but incredibly boring. But, well, titles are hard and you can’t let that hold you back from working on a game. I knew the title had to be catchy and to the point. The games original I-need-to-save-this-file name was “a good title including raccoon” which I suppose fits the criteria. I ultimately settled on Trash Bandits after a brainstorming session with pancelor, and it’s perfect. After all, you might just be on a heist to steal a piece of trash.