TTRPG Thoughts: Apothecaria
Apothecaria is a solo journaling TTRPG written by Anna Blackwell and released in 2021, and after playing it I'd describe it as a mashup of Kiki's Delivery Service (1989) and ConcernedApe's Stardew Valley. Anna has also created other solo TTRPG games such as Delve, RISE, Dead Air, and Umbra, which I am eager to pick up once the financial stars align—find them on itch.io and/or her website's shop!
I initially balked at purchasing Apothecaria for myself, since this was my first time actually buying a TTRPG on itch.io and I wasn't sure that it would be money well spent, but the promises of herbcraft and foraging sang their siren songs to me... and I'm glad I gave in! Apothecaria manages to pack a lot of information into its 60-page PDF, and is much more than just a simple potion-making game; there's the mystery of the former local witch (who has gone missing, and whose cottage and job your character has inherited), the social events within the village of High Rannoc, and all of the adventures that your character undergoes while foraging for potion ingredients. I had a lot of fun playing!
My only real criticism is that the serif font of the PDF was difficult for me to read, and there isn't an Open Dyslexic version that would make it more accessible for those with dyslexia. I found myself copying big chunks of the rules into a Google document so that I had the information I knew I would need close to hand + formatted so that reading it repeatedly wouldn't give me headaches. This took a few hours, because Apothecaria is a complex game. (To be clear, I don't have dyslexia, but some of my regular D&D players who I want to share this game with do have it, so I'm always on the lookout for accessibility options for them).
I made use of Apothecaria Sugarcube, a Neocities website that organizes the game's reagent lists by various categories and can generate random ailments for the patients that visited my character—I'd recommend AS to anyone who gets annoyed with flipping between different pages of the PDF repeatedly to find various reagents. However, Anna also has physical copies of Apothecaria on her website, as well as a multitude of expansions for the game such as Wild Highlands, Shimmersnow Valley, Maker's Market, Tinker's Troubles, and more, all of which I intend to purchase at a time that is hopefully sooner rather than later.
This game requires no dice, and fateful encounters are determined by draws from a deck of playing cards (jokers included). If you don't have access to a physical deck of cards, you can use this website to simulate card draws.
Something that startled me about the game is the lack of pre-written story, and lack of direction for what story there is. I get the feeling that Anna deliberately designed Apothecaria to be what I'm going to call "open story." It's not "story-lite" because there are so many elements of this game that lend themselves to creating a narrative—and to be frank I could write an entire fantasy novel about my character's activities in and around High Rannoc within the framework that Anna has provided—but those elements are included and arranged purely by the player's will. Players design all of the side characters and all of the details of each side quests and the meat of each encounter; I'm not used to that kind of freedom in someone else's game, so I initially found it off-putting before I realized that I was enjoying the creative exercise of designing all of these extra characters, locations, and encounters.
The only quest where direction is provided is in finding the missing former witch, and even then it's very open-ended. Anna encourages players to take their time here, and gives several options for ways that players can give themselves clues about the witch's location/predicament. She seems to be encouraging a longer playthrough of the game, which I agree with! Apothecaria is a game that's best slowly savored rather than rushed through; my own pace is absolutely glacial, and I'm predicting that I'll be getting several months of enjoyment out of just the core book.
Finally, I also really liked Anna's careful usage of gender-neutral language when describing NPCs, which gives players more freedom to create. Overall, I'm really enjoying my time as the witch of High Rannoc and cannot wait to play more.