The Castle
A downloadable game
In a remote, rural region of the Land, there stands the Castle on Castle Hill. Surrounded by the Village, it is the seat of the Count, ruler of the region, and home to his vast and labyrinthine Authorities. Out of will or necessity, the Investigators’ goal is to enter the Castle, where they will have some task to fulfill. To do this, however, they must first make their way through the Village, its Villagers and the Officials of the Castle.
The Castle is a mostly system-agnostic, conceptual adventure, adapted from the novel of the same name by Franz Kafka, and written for the Liminal Horror Twisted Classics Jam. At 14 pages in A5 format, you will find:
- Descriptions and inspirations for the place and the people of the Village and the Castle,
- 10 random tables to assist you with Investigator, NPC, and location creation,
- the process of (Retroactive) Procedural Generation to help you with further creating the setting,
- and a detailed section on ‘How to Run’ this adventure.
Beware, though, that The Castle may not only be a kafkaesque experience for your players, but for you, the reader, as well. But if you like other works such as Violence, Power Kill, and Spec Ops: The Line, this might be the right thing for you.
Disclaimer: The Castle – Twisted Classics Version is an independent production by Jan Kabasci and is not affiliated with Goblin Archives LLC. It is published under the Liminal Horror Third Party License.
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As a fellow TTRPG designer and fan of Kafka's work, I was glad to see someone else attempting to translate his work into a gameable adventure. A few years ago, I made a little, two-page dungeon adventure based on The Trial. In doing so, I shared the doubt that you expressed here in this "lyric adventure" that the situations in Kafka's work are not immediately playable in the typical TTRPG framework.
However, I do think that it is possible (and effective) to create a more traditional adventure--complete with maps, keyed areas to explore, specific NPCs, etc.--that evokes the same atmosphere of uncertainty, want, and dark comedy that defines Kafka's work.
Anyway, this is all to say good on you for writing up this little adventure! I hope you keep at it and turn this into a more traditional, playable adventure with NPCs, maps, keyed locations, etc. that embodies Kafka's themes while ensuring the players have agency and their characters have goals that are recognizable to exploration/investigative games.
Hey there, thank you for the in-depth comment!
I checked out your adventure and I really appreciate it. I agree with you that you managed to make a kafkaesque experience actually playable. For me, the decision to go a conceptual road came in the second phase of development close to the end of the Twisted Classics Jam after planning to make the adventure more directly playable in the first phase, which started relativly early after the jam opened (and then there was a huge gap in development precisly because it became too much work). However, by this later point I lacked the time and motivation to make it so with the scope I had in mind. So I took the conceptual road because on the one hand, it was more time-efficient, but also because I liked the way it allowed me to question standard TTRPG assumptions. I also see this as quite finished at the moment, so I doubt I will go back to give it a more traditional form.
Also, I think one of the big differences between The Trial and The Castle is actually the question of agency - where in the first, it is pushed upon the protagonist by outside forces, in the latter it comes completly from the will of the protagonist, even if it is never made clear why exactly, which is something I wanted to capture here.
Anyway, I appreciate your comment and work - and I might also steal the term "lyrical adventure", which is a pretty fitting description that somehow completly eluded me.
Thanks for checking out my adventure! And I think you make an excellent point about the differences in character motivation between the two works. The protagonist in The Trial has more concrete motivations and is generally right in his actions. On the other hand, in The Castle, K is confronted with the option to the leave the village multiple times but stubbornly presses on. He is also kind of a petty jerk. Maybe we need a new ruleset, something very dreamlike, to play our adventures like these.
Anyway, it's just nice to see people making Kafka content.
Interesting thought exercise, at the very least.