This Gravity Falls inspired solo RPG is about lab research and cryptids

An upcoming solo tabletop roleplaying game inspired by Gravity Falls has players attempting to conduct lab research whilst being plagued by strange phenomena.

Outliers is a solo roleplaying game - meaning that players experience it alone and without a games master - that sees players journaling their time as a research assistant conducting experiments in a weird environment. Taking inspiration from the likes of the cult animated television show Gravity Falls, the TRPG Absurdia by Quinn Majeski and the podcast series Welcome to Night Vale, Outliers encourages players to put themselves in the shoes of someone unfortunate enough to be in an absurd, dangerous and, likely, doomed situation.

As the lab research assistant, players will be tasked with gathering participants for the experiments, collecting the data from said experiments and completing a bevy of otherwise miscellaneous tasks - all whilst recording your various activities and observations. Meanwhile, the player character will need to worry about everything from the lab potentially being closed down to the weird beings the experiments are being performed on.

The tabletop RPG is played using the Wretched & Alone gameplay system created by Chris Bissette in their game The Wretched. With the notebook and pen to hand, players in Outliers use a combination of playing cards, a d6 and a tumble tower to tell their story. Taking place over a series of days, Outliers has players drawing cards from the deck - with their assigned tasks for the day being determined by the suit of the drawn cards.

The research tasks will provide you with prompts for players to respond to in their notebook. Sometimes, the prompts for certain cards will also have players drawing blocks from the tumble tower whenever they may encounter anything paranormal - which can lead to unfortunate consequences should the tower ever get too unstable.

Outliers was created by Samantah Leigh, an Ennie award nominated designer who has previously designed other single-player TRPGs such as Anamnesis and Death of the Author. The editing for Outliers was done by J Boone Dryden, with layout and graphic design from James Hanna and illustrations by Carly A-F, who has previously worked on Apocalypse Keys.

The crowdfunding campaign for Outliers is set to launch on Kickstarter Outliers on February 15th as part of the Zine Quest event.