I wrote another RPG. I set myself the challenge of creating it for a single sheet of paper and came up with Board of Mammon, a GM-less PVP one-shot RPG about greed:

You are demonic executives competing for Mammon’s favour in corporate board meetings. At the end of the coming financial year, Mammon will judge you. Who will stab backs and grift hard enough to be its champion?

Download it here, or on Itch.io, for free.

Here are the bullet points:

• Lead Finance, Production, Marketing or Personnel in your own awful Business Style
• Beg, lie and steal for Bonus to raise your chances in the final contest against the demonic majesty of Mammon
• Push to achieve the quarter’s Target while grappling with the prevailing Business Climate
• Strive to become CEO and wield power over the other players, but take care not to end up ousted in a Vote of Confidence
• Uses an adapted version of the Paragon system, as seen in Agon and Deathmatch Island
• Full rules print to just a single double-sided sheet of A4 paper, including cut-out sections for each player profile

As I said, Board of Mammon is a GM-less PVP one-shot RPG, and it’s for three or four players and based on the Paragon system. Let’s break down what all that means.

It’s GM-less in the sense that every player manages their own actions, but each quarterly Board Meeting is run by the player who is currently CEO. If the Company fails the quarterly target, though, they’ll likely be ousted… The sheet is designed so that every player cuts out their own section of the sheet so they have a copy of the simple rules for play.

It’s PVP in the sense that the players are competing with each other to collect Bonus, which will help them in the final contest against Mammon. How do they collect Bonus? By making the best roll in a quarter, or by stealing precious Budget that the CEO has granted them. Backstab, lie, take; do anything necessary to succeed. It’s what Mammon demands.

It’s for one-shot games in the sense that it’s quick to set up and start and features just five contests, covering four quarterly Board Meetings and then a final one against Mammon, taking two to three hours in total.

Three or four players in the sense that this four was what fit on the sheet and is cleanly balanced across the roll tables for the Target and Biz Climate. You could probably make up other divisions (Sales? Logistics?) and tweak for more players, but I wouldn’t recommend playing with fewer than three.

And Paragon? Board of Mammon features a stripped down version of John Harper and Sean Nittner’s Paragon, a simple and fast-paced system used by the excellent Agon and Deathmatch Island. It’s about characters competing in challenging contests by collecting dice pools based on their characters and rolling against the situation. The result then informs the ensuing roleplayed narrative.

The lead image is an adaptation of William Thomas Horton’s illustration of Mammon for A book of images.

Board of Mammon is a work in progress — follow this blog (RSS) or me on Itch for updates, and feedback welcome!