The game in the chocolate box
How a birthday present turned into a crowdfunding campaign.
Early 2024, my friend Ole Peder’s birthday was coming up. I asked what he wanted. He said he wanted me to make a game for a setting he’d been writing about on a Norwegian Discord server. The setting was called Oguleh.
If you know Norwegian RPGs, you might know Ole Peder. He co-designed Itras By. So I made the game. I color-printed and laminated the cards, found a metal chocolate box to put them in, printed a picture for the front. It looked like something.
We played it with our friend Emil, who mixes some mean drinks. The three of us sat there in this grotesque, magical world, something familiar yet very different, and it worked. That feeling of discovery you get maybe once or twice in a long gaming career, we had it.
So I made more games. The system, which we jokingly called Oguliba (a mashup of character names from different settings), turned out to be flexible. I simplified it over time, made it more structured, easier for a new group to pick up without me sitting at the table.
I also tried to make a Lovecraft game. I succeeded, technically. But Lovecraft stories aren’t about groups of people fighting monsters. They’re about solitary loners going insane and dying. When your character is isolated, slowly losing their mind, session after session, it gets to you after a while. I stopped running it.
I’d talked to the publisher NessunDove years earlier about Draug, a different game in a different system. That didn’t work out. When we reconnected, we went through setting after setting for this new system. They suggested leaving Lovecraft behind, which was honestly a relief. We also needed something that an international audience could engage with without tripping over cultural sensitivities. That ruled out a lot.
I landed on a setting from one of my favorite campaigns. I’d been playing it with my regular group, and after the first session I was sure I’d led them into something boring. Then one of the players told me they’d had a dream about the game. The next session felt completely different. Mellow but personal. Creepy but warm. Not real lives, but literary lives. Like reading a good book together.
It took me a while to realize this was the game I actually wanted to publish. The Roots of Soledad.
Ole Peder is writing a blurb for the campaign page. Tomorrow we’re recording an actual play together. The game that started in a chocolate box is still his, a little bit.
Soledad launches May 7 on BackerKit as part of Pocketopia 2026. Follow the campaign to get notified at launch: BackerKit page