A Familiar Problem

A Familiar Problem is a one-page tabletop role-playing game designed by Grant Howitt and Marisha Ray. It was published by Darrington Press in the United States on Free RPG Day, June 25, 2022, and will be available internationally on July 23, 2022. The title is a play on words for familiars. A Familiar Problem is the system played in.

Premise
Players are the familiars to a group of adventurers. Feeling forgotten, the familiars have decided to complete a missions that will prove to the adventurers that they should be paid more attention. Possible missions, undertaken beneath the awareness of the adventurers, include sabotaging the villain's plans, recovering a lost item, rescuing a dying adventurer, or slaying an overlooked enemy.

Mechanics
Players choose or randomly decide one of twelve species of familiar. Each species has predetermined stats out of four attributes that govern aptitude for various actions: Clever, for talking to and understanding people; Fierce, for biting, scaring, and similar actions; Sly, for hiding, deceiving, and similar; and Quick, for climbing, dodging, and spotting things of interest.

Each familiar knows three "Pocket Magic" spells randomly chosen from a list of twelve; familiars are said to have learned these spells by reading their master's spellbook and may cast each spell once. Spells have simple effects like filling the area with fog, causing someone to drop something, or summoning a horse.

To complete their mission, players describe their actions. The gamemaster may ask the player to roll a d10 and add their bonus in an appropriate attribute to complete an action. If this number is equal to or higher than the difficulty number determined by the gamemaster, the action succeeds. If the number is lower, the action fails; failing a particularly dangerous task causes a familiar to acquire a point of Stress.

If a player rolls equal to or lower than their number of Stress points, their familiar suffers a Break. The familiar disregards the mission and behaves in a manner the rules assign to their species, i.e. hawks suffer delusions of grandeur and weasels develop paranoia. A Break ends and Stress resets to zero if the other familiars take time to calm the familiar and remove them from what caused the Break, otherwise the familiar vanishes off the Plane and is removed from the game.