Odd Hours: Horror and Absurdity (v1)

Something is wrong at the Gas N' Go.

And it's time to clock in.

Odd Hours is a tabletop roleplaying game about ordinary people working the worst shift of their lives. Repeatedly.

You play gas station employees at a station that is, by any reasonable measure, wrong. You are not investigators. You are not occultists. You are not chosen ones. You stock shelves, run the register, and try to make it to the end of the shift with your mind, your body, and most of your coworkers intact. You won't always succeed. (That's not always a bad thing.)

The station sits between nowhere and somewhere worse. The lights never quite go off, even when they should. Graffiti shows up in the bathroom that nobody remembers writing. Customers come in who are almost people.

It starts small. It does not stay small.

What's in the book

• Two six-sided dice, three attributes, nine skills. Wit, Grit, Strangeness. Investigation through Rituals. Easy to learn. Easy to break (in the fun way).
• Sanity and Absurdity. One number tracks your grip on reality. The other tracks your willingness to let go of it. Both numbers move. (Mostly one direction.)
• Character creation in six steps. Should take fifteen minutes. (Unless you really get into making that backstory.)
• Combat that's fast, ugly, and usually a last resort. You don't have training. You have what's behind the counter, what's in the snack aisle, and however much grit you brought to the shift.
• Rituals for when fighting isn't enough. Salt circles. Banishment. Talking to things you probably shouldn't talk to.
• Nine creatures of the gas station — Hand Plant, Self-Populating Lawn Gnomes, the Bathroom Cowboy, the Night Shifter, Shadow Lurkers, the Mirror Fiend, Whisperers, the Collector, and the Dark God.
• Three d20 random tables — customers walking in, owners calling, and the shift getting strange.
• A starter adventure (Night Shift of the Living Weird) you can run tonight if you want.
• Standard and fillable character sheets included.

What this is

Odd Hours v1 is the free primer. It's a complete, playable game — not a preview, not a teaser. Run it as a one-shot. Run it as a short campaign. Hand it to your weirdest friend and see what they do with it.

A fully expanded v2 — with the town of Corrow developed in full, an expanded bestiary, more backgrounds, and the complete OM toolkit — will crowdfund later this year (hopefully).

v1 is the door. v2 is whatever comes through it.

The details

• 3–5 players (one is the Overnight Manager, the rest are employees)
• 3 hours per session (one shift)
• Recommended ages 16+ (Sanity loss, body horror, cosmic indifference, missing coworkers)
• Free. Pay what you want. Including nothing.

Designed and written by Wells Marston. Published by Route 9 Games.

Good luck. Don't forget to lock the back door.