SQUEEEEE!!! How to Play pt. 1

Ever wished your game night could be more than just slaying dragons? Welcome to Squee, where therapeutic concepts meet high fantasy in a vibrant world where emotions literally manifest as magical forces.

Squee takes place in Prismatichrome, a shining realm of whimsical fantasy and soft hope, deeply steeped in connection and community. Here, the bonds between people and the emotions they feel form the basis for most stories—and most magic. When emotions grow strong enough, they manifest as "Affects," sometimes creating environmental wonders and sometimes dangerous monsters that must be confronted not just physically, but emotionally.

What sets Squee apart is its innovative approach to gameplay. Rather than focusing on combat stats, players build Harmony (internal peace), Rapport (team bonds), and Unity (community strength). Your character grows not by gaining levels but by forming meaningful connections and achieving personal aspirations. It's a rules-light system that prioritizes roleplay and emotional exploration while still providing just enough structure to guide your adventure.

The four-act structure (Prelude, Overture, Expedition, Coda) guides players from setting intentions through relationship building to adventure resolution, all while supporting meaningful character development. Best of all, you need minimal materials to play—just some six-sided dice, tokens, paperclips, and your imagination.

Ready to punch anxiety in the face, kick depression to the curb, and galivant through a magical world where friendship truly saves the day? Join us in Squee, because while life is hard, we can absolutely have fun in the meantime.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Squee TTRPG
• 10:21 Safety Tools & Game Mechanics
• 16:48 World of Prismaticrome & Emotions
• 21:09 Game Structure & Player Aspirations
• 31:04 Credits & Acknowledgements

Transcript

Kitsch: 0:01

Hi, this is a quick note from Kitch, the creator of Squee. This first episode is part one of how to play Squee. If that doesn't interest you, please skip to episode two to jump right into the action. Outro Music Hi Hi Wanna punch anxiety in the face, kick depression to the curb, galavant through a magical, sparkle, rainbow world where friendship saves the day. Quick, take my hand, swish, swish. Well, hello darlings, welcome to Squee. Hi, squee is a tabletop role-playing game, or TTRPG, about the emotional world of being in community and we are playtesting for you live. So grab a snack and maybe some tissues and come be our neighbor as we find joy in the journey and celebrate our authentic selves, because life is hard but we can have fun in the meantime. Jeez, life is hard, but we can have fun in the meantime. Jeez, all right, yeah, welcome. Hi everybody, we're launching Squee like right now. Are y'all excited?

Greg (Repot): 2:18

Yes, yes, it's been a long time coming, I'm so ready. Yeah, all right.

Kitsch: 2:22

So hello audience, Welcome on. In is squeeze. So we are a new game. This is a new game. Squee is a therapeutic tabletop role-playing game set in a vibrant and enchanting high fantasy world of prismaticrome. Through whimsical storytelling and zoomorphic representations of emotions, the game offers a safe and supportive environment for players to explore their identity and values while processing complex emotional topics. Emphasizing the power of friendship and intentional magic, players learn the value of building community resilience as they navigate challenging obstacles. With healing and growth as our guiding principles, collaboration and emotional awareness are key to triumphing over the forces of destruction. The power of friendship really does save the day. Now, to start us off, it's just really important. This is all about having fun. Yay, and it's only fun if you say it's fun, right?

Ray (Dazzle Brite): 3:36

Right. We all believe that Sure.

Kitsch: 3:42

But no, really, squee is a role play, focused rules light game. So here are a couple important terms to keep in mind. So I am the chronicler, so this is the role of the dm or facilitator that just runs the game make sure that everything, uh, goes and happens. Um, so I do all of the planning and then I just kind of coax the story along. Those are the players that you can see on my right, which is my left, in person, but on the video it's my right. They play a game Wow, really really complicated. They play a game, wow, really, really complicated.

Kitsch: 4:25

Now, role playing is when you act and voice a character that is other than yourself. So they are going to be playing various characters that they have created and they're going to be making decisions as those characters, voicing those characters and acting out how those characters are going to interact with the world that we have created and all of the stimuli and challenges that I put in front of them. An important note here is that, because Squee is intended to support some difficult conversations Emotions are hard y'all we do want to be mindful of various safety tools when you play a game like this. So what we have done is we have done a survey of all of the players to determine various topics that are in and out of conversation, just hard lines of. We don't want to bring this into the game. We also have a stoplight card system, so all of the players have a red, yellow, green and a black card, which is now a new color in our stoplight system. A new color in our stoplight system, red, means stop, do not proceed, do not pass, go, do not collect $200. It is everybody's responsibility at the table to pivot really quickly out of that topic into something else entirely. Yellow is oh, things are a little uncomfy, let's be a little sensitive, let's be a little careful, let's slow down. Green is I'm good to go.

Kitsch: 6:15

This is great if a red card or a yellow card was thrown up previously and you want to indicate that everyone did a successful pivot. It also can be a great indicator of an intense roleplay scene where maybe the character is in a heightened state of emotion. They're angry, they're yelling, they're combative, but you as a player you're actually just still having fun. Throw up the green card, let everyone know. Black is really just an extra card to say, hey, this topic is fine, but I don't want to roleplay it. I just don't have the spoons or it's just not interesting to me right now. Let's just fade to black and move on. This is also great if there's a romantic scene and you don't really want to roleplay the flirting, but you just want to insinuate that it's happening. So we'll fade to black, I'll give a short little description of what happens and we will move on with our days. So that is all of the safety tools.

Kitsch: 7:24

So let's get into the world we are playing in, the world of Prismaticrome. For those of you watching and not listening, there is a map available. Prismaticrome is a world of shining colors, whimsical fantasy and soft hope. It's deeply steeped in connection, community and emotions. The bonds of the people, the communities they form and the emotions they feel form the basis for most of the stories told in the realm. The land and the people in it are a beautiful mosaic of self-expression and strength of feeling. When all is working in harmony, there is great diversity of people, lands and cultures not only coexisting but thriving together. Now I also mentioned that this is a game about emotions, so we have something called affects. Affects are the emotions manifested, so we have a term called miasma, that is, the collective emotional energy of all the folk within Prismatic Room, and the affects are those collections of emotions. Sometimes they form environmental things and sometimes they turn into big, bad, evil things, monsters that we're gonna have to fight and deal with on not just a physical level, but a social and emotional level too.

Kitsch: 9:09

Now you might be asking what do I need to play this game? This is a new game, we don't know it, so it's really quite simple. You need some paper, some writing utensils and six-sided die. It is a D6 system. We recommend five for each player, but you can get around with less. If you have at least one d6, you'll be able to make it through. It's just more fun if you have more. And then you also need two different sets of three tokens to represent something called Harmony and Rapport. You can really use anything for these three tokens. You can use pennies, dimes, random lint that you found in your pocket. The world is your oyster, just make sure that you have three of each. The last two things are paperclips I know sometimes kind of hard to find and your imagination, woo. So yeah, that's Squee. So in a nutshell, it's just a silly little game where we play fun things and do fun things and then talk about our emotions and laugh about it Sound fun.

Ray (Dazzle Brite): 10:27

Yeah, peace.

Kitsch: 10:29

Again, I just have to keep saying this is a fun thing.

Kitsch: 10:33

It is a fun thing, very fun, all right. So we're going to get started with the acts. So this game is played in acts and that is really just a guideline to determine what the objectives of certain time periods within the game are. Things will evolve and change over time but, being a roleplay-heavy system, this just helps keep everybody on the same page. So we have four acts. We have the Prelude, the Overture, the Expedition and the Coda, and this will just take us through an adventure from start to finish and make sure the Chronicler is establishing all of the key points. So we're going to start with the Prelude Now.

Kitsch: 11:21

The Prelude is kind of a game management system. Um, it is where we establish the setting, we establish the context and we also establish something called aspirations. So while I keep talking and rambling on, I want the four players here to start thinking about what their aspiration for this adventure is going to be. This is a goal that you as a player have, that you would like to enact through your character. It can be quite simple or as complex as you want. This is your intention for the adventure. At the end, if you accomplish this goal, you will receive a reward, which we will get to later. So other things that may happen as I'm giving my players time to think about their aspirations are community developments, which are things in Tyne that can be built or established in order to help the community. Right now we don't have any prosperity points, so we cannot do any community developments. Tyne is just a simple small town at the beginning of this game a simple small town at the beginning of this game.

Kitsch: 12:47

Another thing that may happen during the prelude is actualization, which we will get to much, much, much later, probably in a year or two. But this is something that levels up the world. So we as characters don't necessarily get more powerful, but the world and our influence on it will change and grow over time, and so actualization is our opportunity to reimagine ourselves and our role within the world as our influence grows, and our role within the world as our influence grows, and that is what we are going to be doing for the prelude. So I'm going to put everyone a little bit on the spot and we're going to go around and we are going to talk about our aspirations for this adventure cycle. So, again, this is a goal that you, as a player, would like to achieve through your character. Greg, would you like to start us off? Sure.

Greg (Repot): 13:56

Leapot is a construction robot. It has recently had to leave its old construction kind of site and they've ended up in time and they have previously relied on that construction company for getting all the materials they needed in order to make stuff. And as a construction robot that's kind of its primary purpose. But now that it has been separated from its old construction company it needs to figure out a way to acquire materials ideally locally, just so that it's easy to get them. And it wants to construct its own sort of base of operations, its own workshop, so that it can start building things again. But before it can really start building anything, it needs to figure out what it's going to build with, because previously it didn't really have to worry about that. That was kind of taken care of by supply chains, and now it has to figure out its own supply chains.

Kitsch: 15:01

Nice, all right, doug, what is your goal for your character?

Greg (Repot): 15:06

yeah, so trinket's goal is a little less ambitious than that all that trinket really wants to do is to be able to help someone in time in a meaningful way that kind of creates a memory for that person that involves trinket, so that he is in that memory of that person beautiful. All right, dan yeah so zipper like every other day of her life, she just wants to make a friend. Cool and Ray Dazzle.

Ray (Dazzle Brite): 15:45

Dazzle Bright is very new to town, and they stay inside a lot, not because they're like a homebody or don't like getting out. They just simply don't like other people, and so their goal today is to at least try and meet a few other people let's say five, because I assume I'll be meeting these three and they just want a lay of the land. They want to know who they can use in the future and who they might want to steer away from.

Kitsch: 16:21

Gorgeous, alright. So remember those goals that you have set for yourselves, um, because at the end of the adventure, I will ask you whether or not you achieved your goal and you will be rewarded if the answer is yes. So it is up to you to make that happen. I will not be pushing in any direction for this. All right, and that's the prelude. It's really straightforward. It's really just to make sure that we're all getting ready for the game. We're all set and we have taken care of all those kind of meta components of the game that aren't really a part of role play but help keep the game running smoothly.

Kitsch: 17:08

So now we are entering the next act, called the Overture. This is a player and chronicler driven set of scenes that focus on relationship building. So this is a bit open-ended in terms of what can happen. I don't even know what's going to happen, because the players are going to make a lot of the decisions who they want to talk to, what they want to do in time with all of their downtime and establish their relationships here in this community. So, as they are doing this, they are also trying to build two things. They are trying to build rapport and harmony.

Kitsch: 17:54

Rapport is the interconnectivity of the team. So, for this adventure, we have four players and four player characters Repot, trinket, dazzlebrite and Zipper. So the rapport is going to be a measurement of those four player characters and their interconnectivity. Do they trust each other? Do they feel confident in their abilities to support each other? All of that is rapport. Harmony, on the other hand, is inward. It is your internal peace with yourself, with your decisions and with how the outside world is affecting you. And so, based on these scenes that are about to take place after I kick us off, they are going to be rewarding, or getting rewarded, those two things. Rapport is rewarded by other players when they have felt supported and connected to their fellow player characters, and there are a set of guiding questions in order to determine whether or not you should give a point of rapport. You can gain up to three by helping someone understand an emotion or challenge that they are dealing with, demonstrating appreciation for somebody's identity, or establishing or solidifying trustworthiness in a relationship. So those are the guiding principles.

Kitsch: 19:34

Players, you should see a bowl with little tokens in it with an R, so it should be the green hexagon. Dan was holding up the blue diamonds, which will be harmony, and I will tell you all when you've gained a harmony point. Normally I would hand them out, but there's actually a significant distance between myself and the other players because I have a lot of gear that I need to run this show, so I will let you know if you are getting Harmony. Otherwise, you can hand each other Rapport, and that is up to three. The last thing that could potentially happen in terms of getting cute little tokens during this overture period is unity, and these are story-driven points that you get for really building that inner connectivity between the characters in the town of Tyne. So all of those NPCs, if you are bringing them together, getting them more engaged with the community, getting them more excited and trusting the leadership, trusting each other, that is Unity. I will also let you know, as those are rewarded. Any questions before I kick us off by setting the scene.

Greg (Repot): 21:08

Is unity something I have to keep track of, or is that just some kind of new number?

Kitsch: 21:13

So unity will be tokens that I can hand you. They're cute little purple teardrops and behind you, specifically Greg and Doug, there are two little banks. We have our Unity Bank and our Prosperity Bank. We'll get to Prosperity at the end of this adventure and that's where we will put them until later when they will come into play. No-transcript, no-transcript as we are drifting off today. We will see you next week, Unless it's a holiday, which it's not. So thank you for being our neighbor today. We will see you next week, unless it's a holiday, which it's not. So thank you for being our neighbor today. I also want to thank our writers, who have kept me going and have made this possible. Jacqueline Lewis, writer and parent. You can follow them on Instagram at wranglerofchaos all one word. And they also are the writer of a book, a wonderful book called Rolling with the Youth, which you can buy on itchio. I highly recommend it.

Greg (Repot): 31:42

Sounds like something.

Kitsch: 31:42

Zipper would write. We also have John or Pax Crum, who is a writer, crisis intervention trained and medically retired police veteran, game designer and historical fencer. Just to give him a quick little shout out, he'll be GMing Swords and Runes at Key City Steampunk in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on August 8th through 10th. I would also like to thank our composers, who we will be presenting some really fun music next session, as well as the theme song you heard at the beginning. They are here to help me realize my vision and immerse us in this story. So Ray, who is also a player, is a pianist, game composer and professional GM. You can find them on all streaming platforms at RayD and that is spelled out D-E-E-99.

Kitsch: 32:43

Also, my brother, Steven, who is a musician, vocalist and sound engineer. He is the producer of Lusk L-U-S-K-U, which is a chill electronic vapor soul art. And then our Patreon subscribers who literally keep the lights on. Y'all are helping me pay my bills. We have JCH, Chris B, Maggie Z, Russell B, Missy G and Dan S. And lastly, I want to thank our players, who get to have fun and invite us into their worlds. Ray, anything else you want to plug while we're at it?

Ray (Dazzle Brite): 33:28

Nope.

Kitsch: 33:28

Cool, doug Hi. Thank you guys for coming and hanging out with us. Dan hi, nothing to plug.

Greg (Repot): 33:38

and greg hello, uh, if I had to plug anything, it would be the dance interactive vr album rave gazebo you flail your arms around the music is remixed in real time.

Kitsch: 33:48

It's fun yay um, like what you heard or saw today. You can follow us on twitch. Hit that button. Um also instagram at goblin underscore forge. Underscore ttrpg. You can subscribe to our patreon at patreoncom slash goblin underscore forge and get early access to playtest material and exclusive bonus content. Keep an eye out for our Kickstarter and help us fund this game. And thank all of you out there. Your support and excitement fuels us. Give us more, so hungry Bye. All of you out there. Your support and excitement fuels us. Give us more, so hungry Bye, bye. So long ©. Transcript Emily Beynon.