Therapy Dog Goes to the Con (by Me & Anne & Dory)

We released our first print-and-play little RPG/simulator game on itch.io.  With "Therapy Dog Goes to the Con" you can roll up encounters with people at a sci-fi convention, where they can interact with your friendly little service dog -- we're sure the pup will make everyone feel better.  You can find the game here.


Background story:  

We have been working on this one for a few weeks now.  After years of taking a small service dog (Dory) with us everywhere and seeing how often she brightens the day for people, we realized there were patterns.  And as someone who enjoys making up random tables for RPGs that may or may exist, this was a good challenge for me.

We tried dozens of print-and-play mini RPGs on Itch, and it felt like this game would fits a niche on the site.  Sure, there are journaling games and games full of d6 tables, and games about dogs, but this one has all of those things along with some real-world good feel.  Then, while on a trip to WorldCon, we finally found a fun location to set it in.  

In fact, at the Con, I think we had 8-10 encounters of our own, where people asked to pet Dory.  We have had over 100 of these exchanges with people in the last few years, and spent days organizing them into quick and easy tables, all based on real-world interactions ... then thinking of more stuff while trying to sleep, then printing version after version until it felt right to us.  There's definitely a range of patterns behind these encounters.

As for the design of the thing, it's just five pages with some little graphical highlights.  The title illustration is actually a puzzle I built for nonogram.com a while ago.  Remember this post about it?

On the last page, we included a photo from the Con where Dory actually met Baby Yoda.  In between, I added a few quick doggie sketches.  I like to add extra bits of text in my works, clues from nowhere, pointing to the world outside the box.  There is a quick note about a dog named Izzy who we used to watch every once in a while, and one of my dog sketches told me his name was Spike.

I hope you will check it out.  ;-)

Dory met Baby Yoda at WorldCon.

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