You Are A Goof

You woke up and your name was on a wall. Not your tag, not your art. Your name, in someone else's hand, followed by four words: YOU ARE A GOOF. In the correctional system — and among anyone who has moved through it — this is not an insult. It is a verdict. Goof marks a person as a sexual predator, an informant, a danger to the vulnerable. In institutions, it is grounds for violence. On the street, in a small Ontario town, on a wall that three hundred people walk past every morning, it is a public conviction with no court, no evidence, no appeal. The question the game does not answer is whether you deserve it. You Are A Goof is a solo journaling RPG for one player. You are either The Known Quantity — a fixture of the community, with thirty years of history working for you and against you — or The Recently Returned, back from somewhere larger, not quite re-established, still finding out who your allies are. You play one week: seven days from the morning you found your name on the wall to whatever Sunday brings. Two resources run simultaneously. STANDING is your position in the community — who still takes your calls, who lets you through the door, whether your employer is still pretending this isn't happening. NERVE is what you have left after each day of this — the ordinary will to function under conditions designed to grind you down. They pull against each other in a specific way. Fighting back publicly may restore STANDING but costs NERVE. Going quiet to recover costs STANDING. Some days you can repair one and not the other. Six 2d6 tables track the week: The Morning (daily), The Town, The Encounter, The Wall (Friday, mandatory), The People, and The Week's End. Two special rules shape the session. The Silence Rule: any day you disappear, the town reads the absence. The Wall Rule: by Friday something has to be decided. The wild card — The Known — fires on double-2 when someone carrying institutional knowledge of what goof actually means enters the story. What they do with that knowledge is not predetermined. The game is set in small-city Ontario because that is the specific social geography this situation requires: a place where the same five hundred people have been in the same room for thirty years, where information moves quickly and incompletely, and where there is no mechanism for correction. This is not a critique. It is an accurate rendering. You need: Two six-sided dice, a journal, a pencil, one to two hours. Format: Print-and-play PDF. Two pages, six panels. Fold, play, keep the journal. Price: PWYW — $1 suggested. A post-playtest gamebook expansion — covering the longer arc of formal process, civil complaint, and the town's memory tested against time — is under consideration. Details at jgesq.itch.io.