Outliers: the award-winning solo TTRPG of weird research
A solo TTRPG of absurd comedy about a research assistant recruiting participants, collecting data, and performing weird tasks, before the study runs out of funding.
Outliers is a single-player journaling game in which you play a research assistant trying to do their job in an absurd environment. You may be fresh out of college, but one look at your syrup-leaking laptop shows you that this is no ordinary lab, despite what the disembodied voice of the Principal Investigator (P.I.) tells you.
You'll recruit participants, collect data, and perform miscellaneous tasks around the lab while recording your daily activities in your lab notebook. Hopefully, your lab finds something interesting in the data and gets awarded a new grant before the project's funds run out. That's not to mention the Institutional Review Board (IRB), which will shut the study down if you stray too far from procedure.
It shouldn't be hard to stay within regulations when your participants are clones, time travelers, and cryptids ... right?
Outliers is inspired by the game Absurdia by Quinn Majeski, the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, and the TV series Gravity Falls.
The game was originally published in 2023 as a short digital-only zine. After a small number of test prints were produced for UK conventions last year, Far Horizons CoOp are now crowdfunding for a bigger print run, as well as expanding Outliers with a digital “designer commentary” edition.
