Here is a use for your next gallery visit: bring your tabletop RPG character along and let the paintings interview them. That is the whole premise of Diptych, a pay-what-you-want character study game that designer Meghan Cross published on itch.io this week.
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Start organising for freeThe method is charmingly analogue. Pick a piece of art and a character, then count the letters in the artist's name and in the title of the work, reducing each total to a single digit. Claude Monet gives you 6 plus 5, which is 11, which becomes 2. Those digits point you at numbered prompts, and you answer them in whatever way suits you: journalling, playing the scene out in your head, typing notes on your phone.
The prompts are the good bit. "If your character was transported inside this piece of art, how would they react?" "What memory would this piece of art bring to mind for your character?" "If your character was the artist, what would they change about this artwork?" Once you have finished one piece, you move to the next and play again.
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Set up your group for freeIt is a small, quiet thing rather than a game you would run at a table, and that is rather the point. Most character depth arrives through play or a session zero questionnaire, and neither of those tends to happen in the Sainsbury Wing. Diptych fills the gap between "I have a character sheet" and "I know who this person is", and it works just as well for a Daggerheart guardian or a Call of Cthulhu investigator as it does for a D&D rogue.
The itch page notes no generative AI was used in making it, and the download is a single 4.5MB PDF. Name your own price, including nothing at all. If your group has been meaning to dig deeper into its characters, this is a free excuse to do it somewhere more interesting than the pub, and you can round up your players first.
Sources: Diptych on itch.io | Wargamer
