Heroic Archivist

I'm not really a spreadsheet person, so I have been maintaining this page for my reading journey instead (skinned it with a favourite character and setting from Dimension 20) and I'll share it here now since it's not like I can only do that when it's 'done' https://liyyusof.com/archivist/ 

It only tracks the reading so far, but soon I will link in images of notes and game playthroughs so I can gather them in one place. Thank you for making this framework!

I'm doing the same thing as Fictive_Fun, this game is entry 417 in the spreadsheet I'm working on. I may have a problem lol. But I'm looking forward to playing this along with the other games as I review and hopefully add to promoting so many wonderful games I've found on this site.

I'll come back with an actual review once I'm done with my spreadsheet and can start playing, reviewing, and promoting the games.

I am glad I came across this as I was trying to organize my now overflowing itch.io archive into a spreadsheet. I look forward to becoming a high-level archivist-mage. Here is my review - https://fictivefun.blogspot.com/2024/06/heroic-archivist-lets-talk-about-it.html

When going through my (oh-my-gosh-how-large-has-it-gotten) itch library, coming across this is the recruitment letter that I needed. I entirely planned to pair the trifold with a travellers journal and start making a dent in my backlog, but having a fun gamified reason to do so will give my strange brain something to latch on to. 

Thank you for this.

Just starting this and I am so exited for my reading journey this year. One of my wishes for 2024 is to play more solo games and overall to read more games even if I know before that I might not necessarily play them.

Glad that there is already so much fan made material and it definetly come in handy for my play through. Will advertise this in my gaming group as well just to see if anyone wants to join as well.

I love this game as a framework for collecting and engaging with all the wonderful things people have created in the world! It’s a great way to encourage not only consuming other people’s creative work but entering a dialogue and recognising the enjoyment their work brings.

I have a huge hoard of TTRGPs and board games in collections which I’ve yet to actually play, so I’m using this as a framework for exploring those, but I think it may also be really great for collating and engaging with others things. I’ve seen some fabulous reviews where people have used it for all sorts of things like albums and indie comics.

The game has actually prompted my first upload. I made myself a stylised notebook to keep track of my progress which I’ve uploaded to my page. It’s a PDF so could be used with a PDF editor, printed or uploaded so something like GoodNotes. The link is here - https://justlikeicecream.itch.io/heroic-archivist-notebook.

I did make a small rules tweak to make it better suited to my life - 500 points allows me to purchase my own pizza to ‘increase morale’. 

Here’s an example record or a review I did whilst playing this game:

Thank you kumada1 for such a lovely little game!

I absolutely adore the idea behind this game! it's amazing to have not just a tracking system for all my ttrpgs on here  that i really need to get to reading but for it to be fun and dignified in a way that encourages community and uplifting more and more indie ttrpgs! this is the first time ive ever left a comment on a game like this but i am soooo excited to leave many more ! thank you so much!

Best game ever. Every ttrpg enthusiast should play it. I have a nasty anxiety writing comments (whyyy, creators love comments, even short ones, I know it myself, so whyyy) and this game helps me to overcome it. Priceless. Impeccable. I love it with every fiber of my soul. 

I'm only in the beginning of a long, long path, but hey, everyone starts somewhere.

Also I suggest adding points for adding games to public collections, I for example like to see how people categorize my games. Also it's the most popular way to get at least some way of feedback for me, soooo...

Got this on the bundle, and it is an amazing way to gamify a behaviour that I already have, while also making it fantastic and placing goals to achieve. The system is easy, rewarding, and also very generous with the points, so you can confortably defend your archive. But it's important to seek the final goal of 500 points; since the levels are increasingly harder to get and at some point, the steady increase in the enemy hordes will be too much for you to keep up.

What I like most about the game is that it encourages people not only to hoard pdfs or materials, but to actually read them in a way that they can rate and have opinions about it (and now play them with the alternative rules). The fact that there is no mechanical penalty if the Legion wins one week makes it casual enough for people that have other things to do; but I will be substracting from my points if that happens. I already have an archivist level and I will seeking more.

The only real suggestion that i could give would be making the fillabe spaces in the PDF wider, specially for the Points. As it is currently, you can only see two digits, even when one of the goals is to collect 500 points

Did a video review of Heroic Archivist here!

Hi, I found this idea very useful and encouraging. I instead, decided to focus on the more practical side of tracking the games to play/rate/comment… rather than on the playing side. I created a very streamlined spreadsheet to track the fields of my interest and organize the games I am interested in playing online on my Twitch channel and create stories with it later. Therefore, even though there is a wonderful spreadsheet already made to play this game, I made something for myself much simpler and adapted to my own needs. If anyone considers they can use it to use it to their own needs, feel free to get it here: Library Archivist / Bibliotecaria Archivista

Oh wow. I have apparently been playing this game for months, except for the legionnaire attack phase.

I've not been able to pay for most of the games I've played, I make use of community copies whenever possible and only if I feel like there is a huge chance of me enjoying the game, same as if I were going to buy it outright. So I review and play and write and rate to try to make up for it.

I've started to also post sample playthroughs under my reviews (excerpted to show enough of the mechanics, play loop, and general feeling without being too long or too spoilery). I think writing up a sample playthrough is +5 archivist points.

My only fault I think is that as a result of being sick constantly I am really, really slow. ^_^; But it is just how I do things.

I don't think I want to incorporate the legionnaire attack phase. I just like seeing number go up.

Not here for the points, just letting everyone know that you should get this game and become a Heroic Archivist yourself!

And if you really need an incentive beyond being an integral part of the community, there's also Pizza!

5 Stars!

Heroic Archivist is a love letter to the indie game community. It creates fictional reasons and a gameplay experience to reward reading, rating and reviewing games, creating engagement and bonds between designers and their peers.

The game presents us with the task of caring for each other's creations and stories, to reach out and tell each other about the experiences we had with the words and worlds created by our fellow humans. And most importantly, it does this with the explicit intent of keeping knowledge and curiosity alive.

_______________________________________________

As an additional bonus (not counting towards the review here), I'd like to suggest two alternative rules for getting Archivist Points, inspired by the energetic feelings that this game gave me:

Alternative Rule - Archive Explorer: if you play an indie game you reviewed, and write to the auther to tell them about your experiences with it, you gain +5 Archivist Points per paragraph of measured and thoughtful feedback. If you do it during its playtest stage, you gain an aditional +3 Archivist Points per paragraph written this way.

Alternative Rule - Archive Contributor: if you design new material for an indie game you reviewed, and share this new material with its author, you gain +5 Archivist Points.

(As Richard Kelly must've figured out by now, these new rules are just a trick for me to gain more points! Haha! Soon, the legionnares shall bow before my newfound powers!)

Copy-pasting this here because itch.io treats reviews and comments as different, apparently!

As someone who loves to browse (and collect and horde) all the fascinating stuff in this community, more than I'll ever have time to actually play, I love this idea. It's a great concept and great execution.

I don't know how to view reviews so posting this here so other people can find my tweaks for the google doc! I had something similar going for a while but it's sometimes overwhelming without an outline, and it's super fun to have a little cute rpg/story to go along with your reading!

A cool little framework for working through my pile of games, and the suggested google doc is nice for tracking everything. 

I made a few tweaks to the google doc to automate point management:

1. Made Spent Points automated with the following formula: =((F5+H5)*5)+((B11/2)*(B11+1)*5)
2. changed the formula for Archivist Points so that it updates based on spent points, making the field "available points": =sum('Review Log'!G2:G)-F14

I'm trying to figure out how to add +-1 buttons to the Archivist Level and Medals boxes, I'll update this once I have those worked out. (This appears to involve using scripts, so I probably won't add this.)

Just enough nudge to make remembering the importance of reviews fun, with a mechanic that means the longer you play, the more you'll want to leave reviews! 

If you're here, I assume that you and I share a very similar hobby: Reading RPGs! Probably more than we could ever play in our lifetimes! Which is great; there's a lot of fantastic games out there and it's really energizing to see what creators are doing for the hobby. 

This little meta-rpg is a way to gamify something you're probably going to do already. Read RPGs. Leave ratings. Write reviews. Level up. Repeat. I think it's fun, and I think everyone should be doing what they can to leave ratings and reviews for others. Now, you can do that and protect your own magical library.

I think it's such a cool idea I made a google spreadsheet you can use as a character sheet / logbook. Grab it here by making a copy into your own google drive. It even automates stuff for you, to get things out of the way so you can get back to reading RPGs and reviewing them!

oh my gosh I can't wait to level up

be back soon with a review in hand! c:

be right back - I’m updating all of my socials to include my archivist level

Heroic Archivist is a framework for gamifying the noble work of reading and reviewing things that could be easily forgotten. Receiving a review from kumada1 is one of the highest possible honors in my friend group, and I think the idea to package up and share that power and that privilege with such warmth and such a fun frame (and the promise of personal pan pizza) is just really really cool.

When I was in middle school, I spent a few months checking out every single Beatles album from my local library system so I could have a complete set. It was really important to me that I had all of the albums on my silver iPod Nano (which had gotten really gunky because of a melted screen protector). At some point during that mission, I found out about some of their uncollected singles, fan records, live recordings, and bootleg tapes, and realized that because of these forgotten and abandoned bits, it would probably be impossible to build that full set. I looked around the library and thought about all of the loose ends and forgotten artists, and felt sad. This game feels like a tool and an encouragement to fight that sadness.