Desperation License & SRD
Licensing Desperation
One of the most exciting parts about Desperation for us is that we want to make more games like this, and we want you to as well!
To that end, we have released the following System Reference Document (SRD) for Desperation using a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license.
That means that you can create (and even sell) your own game using the Desperation engine, inspired by Dead House and the Isabel. We’re calling these licensed games “Tales of Desperation.”
Tales of Desperation
To create your own Desperation-inspired game, see our requirements below. You might also want to use the Tales of Desperation logo image in your work. To do that legally, include the following rights statement prominently in your text.Desperation™ is a trademark of Bully Pulpit Games LLC. The Tales of Desperation logo is © Bully Pulpit Games and is used with permission.
You can download versions of this image for use in your own work.
How to Use the Tales of Desperation SRD
This license policy covers the general elements of our the Desperation Engine as described in the System Reference Document (SRD) and you are welcome to copy that text entirely or remix it in your own work.
Note that this license does not cover complete translations of Desperation for publication. For that, please reach out to us to discuss translations of the core game.
Requirements
You are welcome to create new works using the Tales of Desperation SRD. Here is what we need from you to do that. Your work must be:
Properly attributed. You must give us credit for our work. That means saying that your work is based on Desperation by Bully Pulpit Games (using the statements provided below), and more specifically noting the authors and titles of any specific products you’re using as inspiration, if any.
Unofficial. Your ideas must be clearly labeled as unofficial and not endorsed or published by Bully Pulpit Games. Do not use the Desperation logo. You may use the Tales of Desperation logo. Otherwise, see below for statements to use.
Your own. Please respect intellectual property. Do not use anyone’s creative work without permission. This includes the text and images from the core Desperation products. This also includes other creators and popular media franchises. If you’re not sure, please ask.
Appropriate. Don’t make content that hurts others, or that hurts the reputation of Desperation or Bully Pulpit Games. We’ll be the judge of what crosses the line, and if we decide for any reason that your work is offensive, disparaging, or otherwise inappropriate, we will ask you to remove it immediately.
Legal. Don’t break any laws. This is your responsibility, and we’re trusting you. If you’re not sure, please contact a lawyer.
Properly attributed. You must give us credit for our work. That means saying that your work is based on Desperation by Bully Pulpit Games (using the statements provided below), and more specifically noting the authors and titles of any specific products you’re using as inspiration, if any.
Unofficial. Your ideas must be clearly labeled as unofficial and not endorsed or published by Bully Pulpit Games. Do not use the Desperation logo. You may use the Tales of Desperation logo. Otherwise, see below for statements to use.
Your own. Please respect intellectual property. Do not use anyone’s creative work without permission. This includes the text and images from the core Desperation products. This also includes other creators and popular media franchises. If you’re not sure, please ask.
Appropriate. Don’t make content that hurts others, or that hurts the reputation of Desperation or Bully Pulpit Games. We’ll be the judge of what crosses the line, and if we decide for any reason that your work is offensive, disparaging, or otherwise inappropriate, we will ask you to remove it immediately.
Legal. Don’t break any laws. This is your responsibility, and we’re trusting you. If you’re not sure, please contact a lawyer.
Attribution
Wherever you put your own copyright information, include the following as well:
This work is based on Desperation (found at https://bullypulpitgames.com/products/desperation), a product of Bully Pulpit Games LLC, and licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Contact Us
While this isn’t required, we’d also love to know about your project! If you’re creating your own content based on Desperation, please feel free to reach out and let us know. We’re happy to answer questions about what is and isn’t covered by this policy and to generally offer advice where we can.
The Desperation SRD
Desperation is a game about trying to survive in a cruel and unforgiving world.
How Does Desperation Work?
Players collaboratively tell a terrible tale of flawed people living through dire circumstances by picking and choosing how they navigate their inevitable fate. Together players will build the map, set the characters, and speak their truths. Games using the Desperation Engine ask you to engage in drawing conclusions and finding patterns among disparate elements to reveal the harsh realities we often face.
The Desperation engine follows a flexible pattern that results in lucid, terrible shared tales. It is especially approachable for people new to roleplaying, because it only asks you to read about sixty words at a time and make some obvious but horrifying choices along the way. While you can overlay lots of fun roleplaying atop this core, if all you do is draw, read, and interpret cards, Desperation still works just fine.
One of the reasons it works so well is that Desperation quietly asks you to let apophenia take over. Apophenia is the innate pattern-matching facility that all humans have. We can’t help but draw connections between disparate elements, and a Desperation experience will present a player with a wonderful variety of things that beg to be put together in ways rich with meaning. When this is working as it should, it often feels like magic.
You can use this scaffolding to create powerful experiences of your own, and we hope you do! Dead House and The Isabel are good, functional models, but there are many ways to diverge, including ways we haven’t even considered.
The Basic Structure
The standard layout is 65 cards:
- Locations (10)
- People (12)
- Act 1 - Foreboding Events (12)
- Transition From Act 1 to Act 2 (1)
- Act 2 - Escalating Events (12)
- Transition From Act 2 to Act 3 (1)
- Act 3 - Hell Events (16)
- End Game (1)
This division is good but not definitive; you may find fewer People and Locations makes sense and that you want more events and that’s fine. The thing to remember is that it is a game of attrition, and you need to scale the amount of attrition to the number of available People. Dead House has 3 possible deaths during Winter and 9 possible deaths during Hell for a total of 12 - meaning it is always possible that everyone will perish if the cards fall a certain way. Both this ratio and volume are just right, so adjust accordingly.
Locations
Locations allow the players to form both a tactile and mental map of the setting you have created. They are the first thing players encounter and should strongly inform what is to come. Make individual Locations evocative as well as easy to tie to the People. You can see in Dead House and The Isabel two different ways to think about Locations, but there are many others. Note that Locations need not all be accessible at all times - they can come and go as they do in The Isabel.
One of the Locations should be the place where People go when they die. In Dead House it is literally a building called the Dead House and in The Isabel it's called the Deep. For the purposes of this SRD, we'll just call this the Grave. You'll likely give this your own colorful label suitable for your setting.
People
People must be memorable, flawed, and inter-relatable. The players will form attachments to them and connections between them more or less automatically if you give them enough color and possibility to latch onto.
When Henry Hetzel says "My granddaughter Velma helps keep the farm running. Of her parents, the less said the better", that is going to set minds racing. That’s what you want from your People.
It is easy to imagine experiences where some People arrive later, in the first group of Events. Adding People later than that is probably a mistake, because the players won’t get a chance to get to know and care about them.
People may be removed through death, but that’s not required. There just needs to be attrition of some sort, and the players need to care about who remains and who does not.
Events
Events come in three acts of escalating trouble and mayhem. Each set of events must be playable in any sequence and still make sense. The three acts represent a dramatic escalation in the security and intensity of the situation.
Dead House handles this by the passage of time, which is a very straightforward way to do it, and The Isabel handles it by breaking the three groups up between pivotal events.
Each event is a roughly 60-word short story, and you must pour as much of yourself and your passion for your setting into each as you can. Make them wild, surprising, or surreal. Make each a promise to bend the story in a new (and probably awful) direction. Players should groan with dread when they read a new Hell event!
Remember that People need to be gradually removed from play, starting in the second act and with great zeal during the final act. While “Ominous Foreboding” transitioning to “Escalating Problems” and ending in "Hell" is a reliable progression, others are possible. Hell as the title (and content) of the third act of events should be standard.
Transitions
Between each act, there must be a card announcing the transition and positioning the players for what comes next. It can be as simple as “time passes”, but can also include more colorful prose or instructions for adding or removing Locations, for example. The game should end with a card that announces the end of Act 3, such as "Spring Comes" or "Salvation". The terrible situation is somehow resolved, and the players get to take stock of who survived among the People.
Adjusting to Taste
While Desperation aims to tell dark tales we likewise aim to provide tools to navigate a safer space to play in. In our games Dead House and The Isabel the cards are numbered so that you can adjust the experience by reviewing or removing specific cards. We list those cards by topic and card number.
Remove the cards you or your friends would prefer not to use. These topics serve as content warnings, too. If you find yourself removing enough of these to end up with fewer than eight cards per act, that’s a sign that you should play a different game.
Remove the cards you or your friends would prefer not to use. These topics serve as content warnings, too. If you find yourself removing enough of these to end up with fewer than eight cards per act, that’s a sign that you should play a different game.
Preparing to Play
Preparing to play a Desperation Engine game requires a bit of organization of the cards.
Start by setting aside the End Game and Transition cards. Divide the remaining cards into piles by type (Locations, People, Act 1, Act 2, and Act 3). Shuffle each pile separately and place them face down. Remove two cards randomly from both Act 1 and Act 2 and discard them.
Remove four cards from the Act 3 pile and discard them. Divide the Act 3 pile into two equal halves. Shuffle the End Game card into one of the halves, then reassemble the Act 3 pile with that half on the bottom, so that the End Game card is somewhere within the last few cards of the pile.
Merge the card piles into a single deck with the Location cards on top, followed by People, followed by Act 1, followed by the first Transition card, then Act 2, then the second Transition card, then Act 3 with the End Game card mixed in. Put the assembled deck somewhere convenient and accessible to all the players.
Playing the Game
To start play, take turns drawing cards in order off the top of the deck. Always read a card to yourself first, and then read it aloud. Follow this pattern throughout the game.The first group of cards consists of Locations. Place them on your play surface to form a map of the setting, obeying the prompts on the cards.
You may have locations that appear out of order, or mentioned locations that don’t appear at all. Be patient—a clear picture will eventually emerge. Be flexible and remember that the locations you have are the focus, and that anything else must fade into the background.
Once your setting is built, continue drawing cards to populate your setting with the People cards. Get to know them, because these are the people the game is all about, and you will be making hard, unhappy choices for them.
When the last People card is played, Act 1 begins. Continue taking turns,
drawing from the deck. On your turn, read the card to yourself and—importantly—decide which character is saying the words. Then tell your friends who you have chosen and read the card aloud from their point of view.
drawing from the deck. On your turn, read the card to yourself and—importantly—decide which character is saying the words. Then tell your friends who you have chosen and read the card aloud from their point of view.
Each card ends with some variation of the prompt “speak your truth.” This is your invitation to continue talking as the chosen person, or to describe events happening, or to embellish what is written on the card, or to invite another player to create a small dialog between two (or more!) characters.
After each of the act cards is read, put it underneath the person who spoke it. Feel free to move those people and their burdens around as the world changes. If someone dies, consign their card—and all the cards beneath them that they have spoken—to the Grave Location. This is a separate pile on the table or some more
dreadful place nearby.
dreadful place nearby.
The game ends when the End Game card is drawn, or when every character has died.
Speaking Your Truth
“Speak your truth” is an invitation, not a mandate—your game will find its own rhythm, and it will be satisfying and fun even if you only read the words provided. Going deeper, scarier, and in dramatic directions is encouraged, though!
Taking Care
This experience can be intense. Talk about your shared experience and the story that emerged if that feels right. Enjoy some quiet reflection together if it doesn’t. Check in with your friends and make sure everyone is feeling good before parting ways after playing.
Good Luck!
If this gets your creative juices flowing, let us know or tag us on social media at @bullypulpit_hq. We're excited to hear what you come up with!