The Salt Traders
A downloadable game
A game of tall tales, the desert, and Salt.
Initially engineered for Dreamjam 2019, The Salt Traders is a ritualised, GMless storygame that allows you and your friends to play out the strange adventures of a trade caravan providing one of the lifelines of the ancient world. Utilising a map drawing mini-game for inspirational prompts and an easily understood collaborative structure, the game guides you through the surreal edges of travel, dreaming and memory.
Nominally a sworddream, and I promise that there are at least some swords in there... perhaps more a sanddream. The mind moves in odd new directions, out on the sand...
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Are the players describing the events as they happen, or are they viewing in retrospect? The Bearer says “I could’ve sworn I saw something…” seemingly in the present-tense, but the prompts of the Speakers (“No, that’s not how I remember it!”… “Don’t forget about ____, that’s the best part!” - I’m paraphrasing a bit, here) seem to be in past-tense. Are we experiencing these encounters in “real time” as a group, or is only the Bearer experiencing them, or are they tall tales about the past?
It was left deliberately ambiguous in the initial write up and I've had players do both.
In fact some groups living the events in present tense but editing them as if they were a story, some telling the whole journey as if it were a story, and one in particular who were telling tall stories at camp on an otherwise uneventful crossing.
You can kinda have it either way, I tend to find players will follow whoever leads in but they tend to surprise me too
A game of Salt Traders with the girls. We tell about the desert, its changing landscapes, the fatal ardor of its implacable master, the bluish glow of its sovereign lady.
We also speak the legends, the old men’s tales, the ominous stories used to scare children into mariage and tradition. We also exaggerate, once in the city of never-ending gardens, spicing up our adventures in retrospect with a parade of spirits or a spectre with a hooked and accusing finger.
After 1h30 of landscapes, at the first campfire, we realized that the “short game” announced was going to last 8 hours at such a pace. I believe that we had just been wrapping ourselves in a big coat of images, stars and sand.
There are weak points (the map could be exploited more, human landscape too, the themes are a bit too loose, there is no help to create a narrative arc) but beautiful memories, offered landscapes, moments of complicit serenity, and a vast feeling of gratuity.
Thank you so much for sharing! I'm glad it helped you cultivate such an intriguing world.
The Salt Traders is a worldbuilding, storytelling rpg about a society where traders trek into the desert to gather salt for their cities. You play by scattering some dice to draw a map, and by interpreting the prompts the game gives you.
The PDF is 12 pages, and it's well organized and easy to read. The game's tone is a little poetic, and some of the rules explanations lean into this, but there weren't any points where I felt lost, and if you're comfortable with games like The Quiet Year, you should be perfectly at home here.
Mechanics-wise, once you've built your map, you take on the roles of traders traveling through it. The GMing role is shared, and you all describe your environment and make choices about how the world around you looks. And honestly, this is kind of the core of the game. It's about taking turns to narrate interesting sites, or events that help you connect to the characters.
There are Rites, which are sort of like Moves that trigger under certain circumstances, and that ask you to GM the story in certain ways. It doesn't feel intrusive, and the Rites flow naturally into each other.
The game ends once you've crossed the map, and it does so in an open-ended fashion. You can easily pick up the same characters and play more The Salt Traders with them later if you wish.
Overall, I think if you like atmospheric narrative games, or if you've ever played the board game Tokaido and wondered what it would be like without points, this is for you. Salt Traders is not a game about action and crunch, but it's immersive and chill and great if you've got a casual gathering of friends, some snacks, and tea.