Honey Heist and the Legacy of the One-Page RPG, chat with Grant Howitt

There is a bear at the top of Itch.io’s physical games list. Coarsely written in black ink, he wears a small bowler hat and hides in grass that is too short. Her charcoal eyes are dark with deep hunger and the cunning of an animal, at odds with her chic headgear.

Since arriving on the digital games platform four years ago, Honey Crack hasn’t strayed too far from the top ten, enjoying a steady success that few other titles can boast. The hugely popular and extremely silly one-page tabletop role-playing game is the work of designer Grant Howitt. He created it in 2017 as part of his Patreon promise of one game per month. It’s literally a single page of text on how to be bears, steal honey, in disguise.

But it struck a chord on the internet, becoming one of the best posts of all time in the RPG subreddit and racking up tens of thousands of views on the original Imgur download. Critical Role, the most popular live-action show for tabletop games, featured Honey Crack in three separate videos in late 2017, giving what could have been a lightning-bolt momentum to change the landscape of tabletop RPGs.

This astonishing success, almost overnight, set Howitt on track to become one of the foundational voices of the current generation of tabletop RPG creators.

“I like to think of myself as ‘what if John Harper couldn’t do graphic design and also released a game every month before it’s ready?’” Said Howitt, referring to the designer of Blades in the dark, Agon, and Lasers & Feelings – three other, longer products that cast a long shadow in the TTRPG space. Living in the UK with his wife Mary “Maz” Hamilton, Howitt contemplates each question with long glances out of his office window before responding with silent skepticism or his signature self-deprecating humor.

Howitt has been making games since elementary school, piling up PDF files downloaded via a word processor and hacking the almost impenetrable results with a teenager’s contempt for tact or taste. In college, he fell into the live role-playing game (LARP) crowd and found a hotbed for both his comedic sensibility and his passion for building story structures. It was also there that he met Hamilton and his best friend turned business partner, Christopher Taylor.

After graduating, Howitt moved to Australia with Hamilton and started a Patreon to compensate for his legal inability to work there. It was there that he designed his own life-size table games, such as Goblin Quest, which included dozens of pages and weeks of work. The schedule was exhausting and hampered his ability to support ongoing projects, such as Unbound, her first collaborative release with Taylor. In 2016, Hamilton stepped in with a particular suggestion: focus on a single page.

“[Hamilton] found that people were not buying role-playing games through my Patreon; people supported me. They were like, ‘Cool, we love what you do. We want you to do more. Go ahead, ”Howitt said. Hamilton can’t remember where they got the idea from, but they knew their partner needed a new creative framework.

“I was trying to convince him not to finish something or not to be perfect,” Hamilton said. “I just wanted to give him permission to have a little fun, take on a little idea and do something manageable, playable, but not necessarily complete.” These games thrilled Taylor’s growing audience on Patreon and provided what he termed a pressure relief valve for ideas clearly unsuited to their larger projects. Then the internet found Honey Crack.

These first games – The sea of ​​gold, Fat gay orcs, and Forceblade punks – are charming and rough, pen on paper in Howitt’s hand, often cut and scanned to create a finished PDF. The resulting documents would be dumped on the Imgur image sharing service with delegated monetization as a future issue. He describes this scene as punk but full of seriousness and honesty that people appreciated.

Released in March 2017, the single game with two stats – Bear and Crime – has passed through Imgur, Reddit, Twitter, and every other major internet path on the short path to digital fame. Howitt recalls that someone shared a PDF formatted with a homemade logo the next day, which is the version used on Critical Role. This moment didn’t really make Howitt feel like he had succeeded, but sitting in a Scottish hotel room the night before an uncle’s funeral and watching several famous strangers play his ‘pretty silly game’ was. nonetheless important.

Elsewhere online, Howitt’s daring one-page games had begun to convert a fledgling crowd of enthusiastic artists. Budding designers like Samual Mui in Malaysia, the Philippines, and across Southeast Asia were studying Howitt’s quick and dirty games on Imgur.

“Believe it or not, the very first games I made were ‘released’ on Imgur because I saw that Honey Crack does the same, ”Mui said. “Honestly, we were all molding ourselves after Honey Crack in one way or another. Then Itch.io came along and we all migrated there.

Mui has since published several titles via Itch.io and funded the crowdfunding Our shores anthology project with several other designers from Southeast Asia. Taylor describes one-page TTRPGs as “so easy you’ve probably done it twice already,” but also as an art form that easily realizes the value of the creator’s ideas – a powerful tool for those who don’t. do not have access to more traditional training.

Hamilton agrees: “One of the great things about Honey Crack it’s that it democratized gaming in a way that a lot of other games have tried to do, ”they said. Through a self-proclaimed combination of privilege, talent and a whole lot of luck, Howitt and Honey Crack came at the dawn of Kickstarter’s popularity and the rise of Itch.io as a serious alternative to Steam for selling indie games.

The class of young designers who cut their teeth The witch is dead, Trashkin and Honey Crack took advantage of his punk leanings and skillful balance of comedy and emotional vulnerability to create today’s experimental zines, poetic lyric games, and the cavalier confidence that collaborative play can happen anywhere, in any form.

Howitt is still angry with the concept of having an inheritance, asserting: “I am famous for what amounts to a Lasers & Feelings hack. ”Harper himself said Howitt’s one-page games are set alongside a long game history that flirts with brevity: the work of Fiasco creator Jason Morningstar, his own Lady Merle, and the 200 word RPG challenge. Still, Harper agreed that Howitt’s contemporary influence is hard to ignore. For their part, Hamilton and Taylor lovingly laughed at him over the whole mess.

Howitt is much happier and more excited when discussing his more fully realized TTRPG settings, Spire and Heart, places he created to share and inspire others. The former wrapped up a recent Kickstarter campaign with the backing of 1,964 backers, while the latter is the system fueling the final season of Friends at the Table – a real-life game series led by Austin Walker with over 3,929 Patreon supporters. . The business he started with his friend Christoper Taylor is called Rowan, Rook and Deckard. They recently hired a full-time employee, Mina McJanda, for a living wage – a fact the three of them were proud to share.

Howitt seems focused on the laser to give back. Even his game-by-month promise morphed in early 2021 to become a collaboration with a curated selection of promising indie game designers, who have the opportunity to share his Patreon’s funds.

The creator of Honey Crack, the little game that has become everyone’s second favorite table title behind Dungeons & Dragons, still has a long life ahead of it, but Howitt at least hopes his daring will continue to inspire beginning artists who wonder if they can. also create games.

“Show people that you don’t need to have a lot of money or time to create something that resonates and give people a fun experience,” Howitt said. “And I hope people saw what I did and thought, ‘Well, if he can do it, I can. “If there is a legacy, I hope that was it.

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