Se7en Sagas

I’m planning to rebuild the Se7en Sagas website in the future. The current site has done its job, but I want the next version to be less of a showcase for blog posts and much better at supporting the games themselves. The goal is to make each line easier to find, easier to understand, and easier to start playing.

In the meantime, Thread & Thimble is already out in the world, and I could not be happier with it. It is a small, warm, cozy roleplaying game about tiny people, handmade places, gentle adventures, and the quiet heroism of taking care of a community. It is soft without being empty, light without being shallow, and designed for stories about kindness, problem solving, friendship, and wonder. You can already find it on DriveThruRPG here.

There is also more Durandal news on the horizon. The print on demand edition of the main Durandal book will become available in the future, and I’ll share more as soon as that is ready. New to Durandal? Start here, which includes the core rules, an adventure, pre generated characters, and tokens. You can also explore the current Durandal line here, as well as my other games.

Finally, I recently sent a couple of hundred questions to my friend Hélder Araújo, whose game Silent Læke funded in 30 minutes on BackerKit and looks ready to explode onto the Portuguese gaming scene. I wanted to ask him about design, crowdfunding, horror, community, ambition, pressure, and what it feels like to watch a game suddenly find its audience. I’m not lying when I say it’s a terrific entry into the twisted creative mind of Hélder, and, since the interview really had more than 100 questions, here are a few of them for your reading pleasure – and more to come:

1. The game as an object of desire

Q. When you describe Silent Læke to someone who has never heard of it, what do you want them to feel before they understand how it works?

A. I want them to feel slightly unsettled — not because something is happening, but because something isn’t quite right. Not fear. Not curiosity in the usual sense.  A quiet misalignment. Like recognizing a place you’ve never been to.

Or remembering something that never actually happened.

Before understanding the game, I want them to sense that Silent Læke is not trying to entertain them in a comfortable way. It’s asking them to stay in a space where things don’t resolve cleanly. If that feeling is there — even for a moment — then everything else can follow.
Because the mechanics don’t explain the game. They reinforce something the player has already begun to feel.

Q. The game seems to sell itself as atmosphere before mechanics: melancholy, decay, beauty, horror, VHS memory, intimacy. Was that always the heart of the project, or did the emotional identity of the game emerge during design?

A. The aesthetic was always intentional.

From the very beginning, I knew the game had to live in that space — melancholy, intimacy, something decaying but still strangely beautiful. That part was never in doubt.

But what came with it — almost in the same breath — was the structure.

There was a moment, early on, where it became very clear to me that this was how the game had to work. Not in abstract terms, but in concrete mechanics. The way Scenes resolve. The way tension builds. The way outcomes shape what comes next.

That wasn’t discovered slowly. It arrived almost fully formed.

Everything that followed was refinement.

What often gets misunderstood is that the atmosphere doesn’t sit on top of the system. It comes from it.

In Silent Læke, things resolve mechanically first.
Then the roleplay grows out of that.

You can play the game purely through its mechanics and it will hold. Completely.

And that’s the part most people don’t expect — that underneath the aesthetic, there’s a very deliberate engine. One that produces that tone, rather than decorating it.

In a way, the mechanics are the real core of the game. They’re just… not immediately visible. But once they see it, they realize they’re not just describing a story. They’re navigating one in a way they probably haven’t before.

Q. What did crowdfunding teach you about what people responded to in Silent Læke? Was it the mystery, the aesthetics, the format, the emotional tone, the mechanics, or something else?

A. Crowdfunding clarified something I had only suspected before.

People don’t respond to Silent Læke because they fully understand it. They respond because they feel that there is something there worth understanding.

At first glance, it looks like it’s the aesthetics — the tone, the visuals, the melancholic atmosphere. And yes, that’s what draws people in.

But that’s not what makes them stay.

What actually resonates is a kind of coherence. Even if they can’t immediately explain it, they sense that everything belongs to the same vision — the tone, the mechanics, the structure, the format.

Nothing feels accidental.

And interestingly, many people only discover the mechanical depth after they’ve already connected with the game emotionally.

That inversion matters.

Because it means the game doesn’t sell itself by explaining what it does. It invites people in, and then reveals how it works.

If I had to name it, I’d say people responded to consistency of intent.

Not just mystery.
Not just aesthetics.

But the feeling that this is something deliberately shaped — and that if they step into it, it will hold.

Q. Now that the campaign has been funded, do you feel the game has changed in your mind? Is it still “your” strange private thing, or has it become something that belongs to the backers as well?

A. It hasn’t stopped being mine — but it has stopped being private.

That’s the shift.

For a long time, Silent Læke existed in a very contained space. It was something I could revisit, reshape, question, without anyone else looking at it from the outside.

Now that’s no longer the case.

People have stepped into it.
They’ve committed to it.
They’ve started to form their own relationship with it.

And that changes the nature of the project — not in terms of control, but in terms of responsibility.

I don’t think the game “belongs” to the backers in the sense of authorship. But it does belong to them as an experience.

They’re no longer waiting for it.
They’re part of the reason it continues to exist.

And interestingly, that hasn’t made the game feel more diluted or more accessible in my mind.

If anything, it made its identity sharper.

Because now it has to hold — not just for me, but for everyone who decided it was worth stepping into something they didn’t fully understand yet.

2. The origin of Silent Læke

Q. What was the first image, sentence, mechanic, or feeling that became Silent Læke?

A. It was a scene from Twin Peaks.

Audrey Horne, in disguise, inside a brothel. Her father walks in — not knowing who she is.

There’s a moment where everything locks into place. She puts on a mask. He tries to remove it. What follows isn’t action — it’s tension. Proximity. Recognition hovering just beneath the surface.

A kind of emotional cat-and-mouse.

That scene didn’t just inspire Silent Læke. It triggered it.

Something about that dynamic — intimacy turning into danger, identity becoming unstable, the risk of being seen at the wrong moment — made it immediately clear to me that there was a game there.

Not just a story. A structure.

From that point on, I knew the game needed mechanics that could hold that kind of tension.

That’s where the idea came from that Sex wouldn’t just be a theme — it would be an attribute. Not as provocation, and not as shock value, but as a system for navigating vulnerability, control, exposure, and risk.

That scene defined the direction of the game almost instantly.

Everything that came after — the town, the mystery, the tone — was built around the kind of tension I felt in that moment.

Q. The premise begins with a dead homecoming queen in 1992. Why that kind of victim, that kind of town, and that specific cultural moment?

A. Because it creates a very precise kind of fracture.

A homecoming queen isn’t just a person — she’s a projection. An image the town agrees to believe in. She represents something polished, stable, almost untouchable.

So when she dies, it’s not just a loss. It’s the collapse of that shared illusion. Everyone knew her. But no one really did.

That contradiction is what interested me.

The small town amplifies it. In a place like that, intimacy and surveillance blur into each other. People are close, but not necessarily honest. They see everything, but understand very little.

And then there’s 1992. Not as nostalgia — but as tension.

It’s that moment where Americana still defines the surface — clean, idealized, almost ceremonial — while grunge is already pushing through underneath, raw, dissonant, and impossible to ignore.

That clash is central to Silent Læke.

The beauty is real. But it doesn’t hide the rot.

It frames it.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Q. Did Deirdre begin as a person, a symbol, a plot device, or a wound in the setting?

A. She began as a wound.

Not as a character with a full biography, and not as a symbol I was trying to construct. She existed first as an absence that affected everything around it.

A disruption.

The important thing was never just who Deirdre was — but what her absence does to the people who remain. How it distorts memory. How it reshapes Relationships. How it exposes things that were already there, but easier to ignore.

Only later did she become a person. And even then, not in a complete or stable way.

In a way, she’s the absent protagonist. She’s nowhere, but she’s everywhere at the same time.

Deirdre is always partially constructed by the people who speak about her. She exists differently depending on who remembers her — or who avoids remembering her at all. So she’s not a symbol in the traditional sense, and she’s not just a plot device either.

She’s a wound that keeps being interpreted.

And that’s why she never fully resolves — because the game isn’t trying to restore her.

It’s trying to show what remains after she’s gone.

Q. A murder mystery often asks “who did it?” Horror often asks “what has this done to us?” Which question is more important in Silent Læke?

A. Silent Læke isn’t really a murder mystery. It’s a false murder mystery.

You can absolutely play it that way — follow the clues, connect the threads, identify the killer. The system supports that honestly. It won’t cheat you out of that outcome.

But discovering the truth doesn’t give you closure. It just makes the pain clearer.

That’s the shift.

Because the game isn’t a simulation of police procedure. It doesn’t ask for realism — it asks for a different kind of logic. Not the logic of evidence and reconstruction, but the human instinct to find order in chaos… or chaos within order.

You’re not asked to abandon reason. You’re asked to use it differently. And when you do, the question changes.

“Who did it?” still matters — structurally, mechanically.
But the question that stays with you is: what has this done to us?

What has it exposed? What was already there? What cannot be repaired, even when understood?

In Silent Læke, the investigation doesn’t resolve the world. It reveals it.

Q. What was the hardest thing to protect during development: the mystery, the mood, the structure, or the emotional honesty?

A. Emotional honesty. Without hesitation.

Not because I’m afraid of difficult material — quite the opposite. I often describe Silent Læke as a sadcore game.

It deals with themes like adolescent sexuality, domestic violence, drug use, gaslighting, infidelity, even incest. These are not decorative elements. They exist because they are part of the emotional landscape the game is exploring.

The challenge was never whether to include them. It was how to include them without reducing them to shock, spectacle, or simplification.

Especially nowadays, where these themes can easily become triggering or, just as easily, diluted into something safe but meaningless.

Silent Læke refuses both.

It doesn’t glorify these elements. But it also refuses to look away from them.

The game is adult — not in the sense of being explicit, but in the sense of being willing to hold uncomfortable truths without resolving them.

At the same time, the structure of the game creates distance.

It can be played entirely through its mechanics, with no roleplay at all. Players engage emotionally only where they choose to — and only as far as they want to go.

That was essential.

Because emotional honesty doesn’t mean forcing intensity. It means creating a space where it can exist — without being imposed.

That balance was the hardest thing to protect.

3. Beautiful Darkness and Melancholic Horror

Q. The game uses the language of “Beautiful Darkness” and “Melancholic Horror.” What do those terms mean to you at the table?

A. They’re not just aesthetic labels. They’re embedded in the system.

Beautiful Darkness is both a concept and a mechanic.

In the game, it’s a tracker that represents growth and corruption at the same time. As it fills, you move forward — you evolve, you become more capable. But every time it completes, it resets at a cost.

You gain something. And you suffer for it.

You improve an Attribute, but you must resolve a Condition — Physical, Mental, or Social. The system doesn’t allow growth without consequence.

That’s what “Beautiful Darkness” means at the table:

The things that make you stronger are the same things that leave a mark. The most meaningful changes don’t come clean.

Beauty and damage are not opposites. They’re part of the same movement.

Melancholic Horror works differently. It’s a tension tracker — a slow escalation.

From 0 to 4, the game sits in a kind of fragile stability. At 0, you even get a moment of release — a chance to clear a Mental Condition. But once it reaches 5, something shifts.

It doesn’t reset. It locks in.

You suffer a Mental Condition, become desperate — and the game moves into a harder state.

There are only two modes in Silent Læke: normal and desperate.
That transition matters.

Because Melancholic Horror isn’t about sudden fear. It’s about accumulation.

You feel it building. And when it crosses the line, it doesn’t go away — it stays.

At the table, these two systems work together.

One tells you that growth comes with a cost.
The other tells you that pressure doesn’t always release.

And between them, the game creates a very specific emotional space:
You move forward. But not cleanly.
And the more you understand, the harder it becomes to carry.

11. How do you keep beauty from softening the horror too much?

By not letting beauty exist as decoration.

In Silent Læke, beauty is never there to comfort you. It’s there to frame what’s wrong.

A quiet scene, a familiar place, a moment of intimacy — these aren’t safe spaces. They’re moments where something fragile becomes visible. And once it’s visible, it can break.

Mechanically, the game reinforces this.

The same systems that allow you to grow are the ones that mark you. The same moments that feel close, human, even tender… are often the ones that carry the highest risk.

So beauty doesn’t soften the horror. It makes it more precise. It gives it contrast.

Without it, everything would collapse into noise.
With it, you start to see exactly where things hurt — and why.

And once you see that clearly, it’s harder to look away.

Q. How do you keep melancholy from becoming passive or purely decorative?

A. By not allowing it to sit still.

I’ve mentioned before that Silent Læke is, in many ways, a sadcore game. But that doesn’t mean it’s passive. It doesn’t mean characters are just observing their own sadness from a distance.

Melancholy in this game has weight — and that weight pushes back. Mechanically, it accumulates. It escalates. It forces decisions.

The Melancholic Horror tracker doesn’t exist to create mood — it exists to create pressure. And once that pressure crosses a threshold, the game changes. It becomes harder. Less forgiving. More exposed.

So melancholy is never just aesthetic.
It’s not something you describe.
It’s something you navigate.

And because the system keeps moving, Players can’t remain static inside it. They have to act, respond, adapt — even if what they’re responding to is something slow, quiet, and difficult to articulate. That’s the key.

Melancholy doesn’t freeze the game. It drives it forward, just in a different rhythm.

Not through urgency, but through inevitability.

Q. When horror games deal with trauma, memory, and buried secrets, there is always a risk of making pain feel like aesthetic material. How did you navigate that line?

A. I think many TTRPGs still struggle to deal with pain without turning it into spectacle or into something to overcome. There’s a tendency to reward suffering — to make it performative, or to use it as dramatic fuel without real emotional consequence.

Silent Læke tries to move in the opposite direction. It doesn’t glorify pain. But it also refuses to neutralize it.

Pain in this game is heavy, ambiguous, and often without narrative reward. It doesn’t exist to be admired, and it doesn’t exist to be conquered.

It exists to be recognized — and sometimes simply endured.

Mechanically and narratively, the game avoids turning trauma into a tool for progression or resolution. It doesn’t give you catharsis on demand.

And that can be uncomfortable. But that discomfort matters.

Because sometimes the most human form of horror isn’t the moment of impact — it’s what remains after, without resolution, without clarity, and without relief.

Q. Does Silent Læke want players to solve the horror, survive the horror, understand the horror, or become part of it?

A. It allows all of those. But it doesn’t prioritize them equally.

You can try to solve it.
You can try to survive it.
You can try to understand it.

The system will support you in doing any of those.
But over time, something shifts.

The more you engage with the game — mechanically and emotionally — the harder it becomes to remain outside of it. The investigation stops being something you’re performing, and starts becoming something that involves you.

Not in a literal sense, but in the way your perspective changes.
You stop looking at the horror as an object.
You start recognizing yourself in the patterns it reveals.

That’s where the game really lives.

So if I had to choose, I’d say:
Silent Læke doesn’t ask you to solve the horror.
It slowly positions you inside it.

And once you’re there, the question isn’t what happened.

It’s what you’re willing to see.

So… that’s first part. Keep up, it’s going to be a fun ride. At the moment of this writing Silent Læke is comfortably sitting at 3642€, more than double it’s initial goal of 1250€, with still 4 days to go. It’s a proud moment for the portuguese gaming community.

Best,

-Rui