Working on a melancholic extraction TTRPG
After moving to Finland last year and playing a bunch of ARC Raiders with my new colleagues, I got inspired to start working on a tabletop roleplaying game during the holiday season. And since one of my 2026 resolutions is to write more about my design process, I figured it'd be an ideal fit to get started.
Playing ARC Raiders was satisfyingly inspirational, both in terms of setting and gameplay. The tight gameplay loop and the "just enough" amount of world building got my creativity flowing. It also sharpened my thinking about what makes extraction games tick. The genre is high risk, high reward, and the incentives usually breed aggression. You drop in, grab loot, get out. Other players are competition at best, threats at worst. But the game introduces the eponymous ARC robots, threats so dangerous that they create a natural “us vs them” dynamic. Despite a post-apocalyptic setting and a winner-takes-all gameplay, cooperation emerges from overwhelming pressure. The design generates prosocial dynamics, and survival becomes collaborative. For players trying to extract with their loot, help is the smart play.
It got me thinking about how much extraction shooters and dungeon crawling TTRPGs have in common. Resource scarcity, attrition, loot, random encounters. Timely sessions of Mausritter with my son made me wonder how the chit-based inventory would work with an extraction loop wrapped around it.
So here is where I started work on Aiguilles. Needles in French. Like the game's characters: hollow, sharp, searching. Aiguilles is a melancholic extraction TTRPG. In a post-apocalyptic world where the surface has been unlivable for decades, an underground society survives by sending memory-wiped conscripts to scavenge the surface.
In Aiguilles your character's identity is a contested ground. The autocratic system that conscripts you also erases your biography. You forget who loved you, but you remember how to love. Now that your “before” is gone, the crew is all you have. But things surface anyway. A smell. A reflex. A face you can’t place. The game lives in what the system cannot erase.
The core question it asks is:
What will you salvage from the ruins of the lost past?
As your crew threads through the Pale, a toxic surface that doesn't want you here, you may find an answer.
However, you have limited resources. Every step costs oxygen. Risky actions might cost even more. The math the crew faces is always: can we afford this?
Despite the dire situation, I want the game to feel melancholic, not grimdark. A tabletop spleen. The surface is dangerous and beautiful. It is not malicious, nor relentless. Sometimes you stop and take a breath, despite knowing how much it costs. And then you see it, the green on the horizon, visible yet out of reach.
The core mechanic is a stepped dice system, from d10 to d4. Your stats dice step down as you exert yourself. When they drop below d4, you’re in crisis. Your gear works the same way: items deplete with use until they become scraps. It makes the mechanical attrition at the core of the extraction loop extremely salient. The other key mechanic is the Heat die. As you make noise, draw attention, disturb the zone, Heat rises from Cold (d4) to Warm (d6) to Hot (d8) to Burning (d10). You always roll the Heat die alongside your action die. If Heat beats your result, the surface escalates its response, even on a success. Something notices, responds, engages. This means that even rolling d10s is still tense when Heat is high. The pressure is always there, building slowly.
During our first playtests, the game seems to hit the right feel I am going for. Now the hard part begins: iterating and testing again and again and again as I expand and prune in turns both the systems and the world of the game.
I’ll be writing about what’s working, what isn’t, what I’m currently stuck on. If you’re interested in following along: this is the place.
Stay sharp.