The Wayward Guide to Kingshaven RPG: Where Bureaucratic Absurdity Meets Tabletop Gaming
The Guide would like to begin by clarifying that this is not a marketing post. This is merely a collection of words arranged in a sequence that the Guide finds personally compelling, and if you happen to discover it useful for understanding The Wayward Guide to Kingshaven and Everything in It, well. That’s probably your fault.
But let’s be honest: The Wayward Guide to Kingshaven RPG is exactly what happens when Douglas Adams’ sensibilities collide with tabletop gaming, and the result is something that shouldn’t work but absolutely does.
Inspired by Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Every good game begins with inspiration, and The Wayward Guide to Kingshaven RPG began with a very specific one: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
For those unfamiliar with Adams’ masterwork, it is a story about the absurdity of existence wrapped in bureaucratic incompetence, narrated by a book that knows things and is aggressively unhelpful about sharing them. It is cynical. It is hilarious. It is fundamentally convinced that the universe is a practical joke told by something that finds your confusion entertaining.
The Wayward Guide to Kingshaven RPG borrowed this sensibility wholesale and asked a simple question: What if we applied this tone to a tabletop RPG?
Not “What if we created a game about the Hitchhiker’s universe?” but rather “What if we created a game where the rulebook itself is as much a character as the world it describes? Where tone matters as much as mechanics? Where the Guide watching your decisions with silent judgment is part of the experience?”
The answer, it turns out, is: A very entertaining disaster that we’ve been refining for longer than we’d like to admit—and one that’s about to revolutionize how people think about indie tabletop RPGs.
Why The Wayward Guide to Kingshaven RPG Stands Apart
The genius of The Wayward Guide to Kingshaven RPG lies in its commitment to making the rulebook itself entertaining. Most RPGs prioritize mechanical precision. This game prioritizes character, voice, and the philosophy that your GM’s rulebook should make you laugh while explaining how to resolve combat.
Elegantly Simple, Deliberately Absurd
The Wayward Guide to Kingshaven RPG operates on a principle of elegant simplicity wrapped in elaborate chaos. This is what makes it immediately accessible to new players while remaining engaging for veterans.
Here’s the mechanical heart of The Wayward Guide to Kingshaven RPG:
1. You describe what you’re doing specifically. Not “I pick the lock.” Say: “I examine the mechanism carefully, find the pressure points, and apply leverage with surgical precision while listening for the subtle click that means success.”
2. You roll dice based on what you’re attempting. Your Attribute die + your Quirk die (d8 always) + your Skill die. Three dice. Keep your two highest. Add them together.
3. You beat the difficulty number. Usually 8 for moderate tasks. Ties go to you. The Guide occasionally throws in bonuses because it’s feeling generous, though it would never admit this.
4. If you roll a 1, everything gets wonderfully weird. A Clerical Error happens—some narrative complication that sticks around and makes your life interesting in ways you didn’t anticipate.
That’s it. No spell slots. No mana pools. No action economy parsing that requires an accountant. Just: describe, roll, see what happens.
This system accomplishes something surprisingly difficult: it makes failure entertaining. Rolling a 1 doesn’t mean “nothing happens.” It means “something worse happens, but in a way that creates story.”
You’re locked in combat and roll a 1 trying to land a devastating blow? Your weapon doesn’t just miss—it ricochets off a brazier and sets the room on fire. Now you’re not fighting guards. You’re fighting guards while the room is actively burning, and that Clerical Error (d6 opposition from the spreading flames) is going to haunt every action you take until you extinguish it.
This is how The Wayward Guide to Kingshaven RPG turns failure into narrative momentum. Other RPGs see failure as a problem to overcome. This game sees it as a feature.
Absurdity as Architecture
The Wayward Guide to Kingshaven RPG presents a world so thoroughly committed to its own nonsense that coherence becomes irrelevant. This is where the Hitchhiker’s Guide influence becomes most apparent.
The world features:
- Longgully: A town built around making a sentient wall cry through elaborate insults
- Korvain: A desert where the lake sings acidic lullabies and traders harvest mutant grass for recreational use
- Island Kneelnot: An island containing a crater that shouldn’t exist, held together by forces no one understands, featuring a gift shop
- Succession: A swamp town that drifts through poisoned water, operates entirely on gambling, and hosts alligators that have learned professional wrestling
And importantly: none of this is explained. The Wayward Guide to Kingshaven RPG simply presents these places with the confidence of someone describing genuinely normal geography, while occasionally pausing to acknowledge that yes, this is exactly as weird as it sounds, and no, the Guide doesn’t know why either.
Why This Approach Works
This tone—casual acknowledgment of chaos—creates permission for the table. Players understand immediately: this is a world where normal rules don’t apply. Where a wizard can fight with a rope and win. Where your character’s Quirk might be “Volunteer Henchperson” or “Too Honest for My Own Good” or “Retired Sellsword Baker.” Where failure creates opportunities for the ridiculous.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide taught us that the funniest stories happen when people treat impossible things as routine. The Wayward Guide to Kingshaven RPG takes that lesson and builds an entire world around it.
Current Development Status
Here’s the honest part, delivered with the same unflinching clarity the Guide applies to everything else:
The Wayward Guide to Kingshaven RPG is good. But it’s not done.
Currently, the manuscript is in active review with independent creators in the tabletop RPG community—designers, GMs, and players who understand what it takes to make something that works at the table, not just on the page.
What We’re Currently Doing
Independent Creator Review We’ve distributed The Wayward Guide to Kingshaven RPG to experienced tabletop designers and community figures. Their feedback has been invaluable. They’ve caught inconsistencies, identified places where the humor landed, and—most importantly—tested whether the core loop actually creates the narrative momentum we claimed.
Spoiler: it does. But it needs refinement.
Professional Artist on Board We’ve found an artist whose work captures the tone perfectly: someone who understands that illustration in The Wayward Guide to Kingshaven RPG needs to be both beautiful and subtly mocking. The visual aesthetic will reinforce what the text is already doing, creating a cohesive experience that feels intentional from cover to back matter.
Editing and Polish Required The book requires professional editing—the kind of work that separates “enthusiastically written” from “professionally published.” We’re not talking about grammar (though that too). We’re talking about pacing, consistency, ensuring that the voice remains strong throughout, and that every joke lands exactly as intended.
Coming Early 2026
Here’s where you come in.
Our goal is to launch a Kickstarter campaign in early 2026. The funding from that campaign will cover:
- Professional editing and final polish to elevate the manuscript from genuinely good to phenomenal
- Complete artistic illustrations throughout the book—maps, location artwork, character portraits, and that specific visual language The Wayward Guide to Kingshaven RPG deserves
- Quality production standards to ensure the final book is something you’ll want to own, display, and reference repeatedly
This is not a pre-order. This is a collaboration. You’re funding the creation of something that doesn’t quite exist yet. You’re investing in the final push that transforms The Wayward Guide to Kingshaven RPG from a really entertaining game into the complete experience we envision.
Why The Wayward Guide to Kingshaven RPG Matters in 2025
Tabletop RPGs have always been about storytelling. But most games focus on mechanics first, story second. They ask: “How do we simulate a world?”
The Wayward Guide to Kingshaven RPG asks a different question: “How do we make the experience of playing this game feel like reading the Hitchhiker’s Guide? How do we let the rulebook be funny? How do we make failure feel like opportunity?”
The answer involves:
- A book that judges you silently while providing genuinely useful guidance
- A world so thoroughly committed to its own absurdity that coherence becomes irrelevant
- A core mechanic so simple that the focus stays on what matters: your character, their ridiculous decisions, and the consequences that make for better stories
In early 2026, we’re asking you to help us finish this.
The Guide would like to conclude by noting that you’ve reached the end of this post without actually learning whether we recommend reading it. The Guide’s assessment remains withheld, largely out of spite and a genuine belief that your opinion probably matters more than the Guide’s anyway.
But if you’re interested in The Wayward Guide to Kingshaven RPG, keep watching. The Kickstarter is coming early 2026. The Guide’s lawyers insist you understand this is not a guarantee, merely a strong suggestion from people who are surprisingly confident about their own planning.
See you next year, traveler. The Guide will be watching.
