A pencil & paper roguelike
His fate is left to be written.
In testingIt's 1981. You're at the kitchen table with a sheet of graph paper, a pencil, a character you rolled ten minutes ago, and an older brother behind a folded-up book who knows what's in the next room.
Staff of Shamgar is that afternoon, on your phone. A turn-based dungeon crawl with permadeath, where the dungeon is drawn in pencil as you walk into it.
"Shamgar. Killed six hundred with one staff. Went down. Never came up."
"Find him."
He gets two verses in the whole Bible and no ending.
And after him was Shamgar the son of Anath, which slew of the Philistines six hundred men with an ox goad: and he also delivered Israel.
JUDGES 3:31
No tribe, no years, no death. In this game he went down into the dungeon first, drew a map of what he found, and didn't come back. His torn pages are on the floors below. So is he, and so is his staff.
Reach him and you get a choice. Take the staff and climb out alive. Or carry it deeper, toward whatever he found at the bottom.
Every room is sketched in grey pencil on 10-foot squares the moment you see it. Corridors follow the grid. The secret door gets drawn in after you search, not before.
Your sword says 1d8. The monster's armor class is written next to it. You roll a d20 to hit, and the little pencil dice stay on the page beside the number so you can check them. Six abilities, hit points, saving throws, levels. Nothing is hidden behind a bar.
"It hit. It always hits. It didn't kill it."
He says what happens, in his own handwriting, short and dry. He's on your side. Mostly.
"Poison. 3 hit points. (winces) You'll live. Find a bucket."
Your character sheet is a real sheet: boxes, erasures, crossed-out numbers. When the hero dies, the GM writes how, and the sheet goes in the folder with the others. The next one starts at the top of the stairs.
The monsters, the magic items, the spells and the traps were invented for this game. Nothing you meet is out of a book you've already read.
Staff of Shamgar is playable and in private testing on iPhone and Android. There's no release date yet, and there won't be one until it's worth the download.