From a homeschool dad and his daughter
HomeschoolRPG writes tabletop-style journaling adventures around your kid, set in one deep world that grows up with them. It plans your whole year and keeps the records, while school days stay paper, pencil, dice, and you.
Why this exists
I’m a homeschool dad with a deep love of tabletop roleplaying games.
I watched my daughter struggle with a blank page. She didn’t know how to start a story, let alone how to climb inside one and find out what happens next. Writing had become something she did because it was assigned, not something she made, enjoyed, and felt proud of.
So we changed how we did school. I brought tabletop roleplaying and journaling games into our curriculum: a character to play, a world to explore, dice to decide what happens next, and a journal to keep it all in.
It changed everything. She started drawing her characters. Her stories grew plots and stakes and real substance. Her writing improved, in prose, in grammar, even in handwriting.
That’s where HomeschoolRPG comes from: what happened at our kitchen table, built so other families, and other kids, could have it too.
The AI does the busywork. Your kid gets paper, pencil, dice — and you.
How it works
The Story Oracle
Is the Ledger-Keeper at her toll-gate? Your kid picks how likely it feels — surely, probably, maybe — rolls two dice, and the story answers: yes, yes-but, or not yet. Every “not yet” gives them something else instead: a clue, a path, or a friend.
No screen at the table. The dice, the tables and the pages are all paper.
Where the map stops
The journal pages leave room only your kid can fill: prompts to write against, space to draw what they found, choices that are theirs to make.
Thirty minutes later, there’s a journal page that didn’t exist this morning.
The world they play in
Every story happens in one world, where chemistry, physics and math are how things work, and understanding them is a forbidden kind of power. A hunted few can still read the true line under the smudge. Your kid is about to become one of them.
Into the worldThe world they play in
Chemistry, physics, math and logic aren’t a quiz bolted onto a game. They’re how this world works, and mastering every one of them is how you win.
For the youngest players
Little ones play in the bright days after the healing, when reading is safe and the gods wear kind faces. There’s still danger, conflict and failure that stings. It’s gentler because the heroes earned it.
It’s one world, turning.
The youngest start in the bright one. As they grow up, so does the world: its edges darken, the lines begin to run again, and they cross into the Descent.
Third grade to grown-up
Older kids, teens and adults play the long dark age itself: hunted readers, the Closed Book’s inquisitors, the pilgrimage into the gods’ own worlds. Real stakes, real loss, choices with no clean answer. It’s the same rich game an adult would play.
Once, anyone could read the laws of the world as plainly as lines on a page. Then a few tried to take without paying: a fire that needs no fuel, a sum that doesn’t have to balance. The world couldn’t hold the lie, so it smeared itself to hide its lines. Folk call that day the Running.
Now fires gutter for no reason a farmer can name, stones fall sideways, and the stars have drifted off their marks. The gods are worshipped everywhere. Understanding them is the one thing forbidden. A hunted few can still do it: they read the true line under the smudge.
And what they mend there can become the world a younger brother or sister plays in.
From the story workshop · The Last Reagent
In The Last Reagent you’re a chemist walking a long grey road to a haven called Greenwater, and real science is how you react to the world around you: read what’s wrong, reach for the chemistry that answers it, and get past whatever stands in your way. A sour well. A smiling apothecary selling fake cures. A bunker sealed shut. No roll of the dice can save a bad cup; the science decides, and a wrong guess is a clue, not a verdict.
The first bench of the first session · grades 6–12 · still in the workshop
Session 1 · The poisoned well
Two days of walking, and then a well. The water comes up clear: not green, not cloudy. The first cup goes down easy. Then the tip of your tongue starts to burn, sour behind the teeth. An old woman looks up from under her tarp. “Drink the rain off the tarp, not off the metal.”
Clear isn’t the same as clean. Before you fix anything, find out what’s wrong.
Truth-water is red-cabbage juice. It changes color with acid.
Read the water
Pink. Cabbage juice turns pink in acid. Rain that runs off old metal turns sour and carries some of the metal with it, dissolved, where your eyes can’t see it.
What will you do?
Neutralize it
Chalk is calcium carbonate, the same stuff as limestone. It eats acid and gives off a fizz. Add it a pinch at a time and watch the color.
No chalk yet.
Count it
The clear water pours off the top. The sludge stays behind in the jar.
Nothing vanished. The metal moved, and now you know where it is. In the story you drink first, so the camp can see the water is honest. Then you write the last line of the log yourself.
Bench chemistry inside a story. Chalk lifts water to about neutral: enough to drop out metals like iron and copper, not every metal, and the story comes back to that later. Real well water goes to a lab.
Beyond the road
Out on the alkali flats, where the wind never lets up, stands the Hushfin: a dome that splits light itself.
Step through and the wind is gone.
Moss, still water, trees that never stir. Light falls in white and breaks into seven dancing rays, and the mute monks of the Hush stand in it without a word.
Birds come from all over the wilds to sing to the rays, and not one of them makes a sound.
Who are the monks hiding from? Why can’t a sound get out? Here even the wonders run on real laws, and the answers are out there for a reader brave enough to go looking.
One-shot adventures
A complete adventure in a few sittings, with a fresh character: one place, one trouble, one science at its heart. A first taste of the world, or a whole unit on its own.
A persistent world
One hero who grows with your kid, session after session, year after year. Build up a home base, a hidden lab or an observatory the Closed Book mustn’t find, and fill it with what you’ve learned. The world remembers what you did, and so does the journal.
For you
The Shuffle
At eleven, the dentist’s office calls and takes your afternoon with it. One tap on “Bump the rest of today” moves the unfinished work forward, and the week rebalances around each subject’s own rhythm. Nothing labeled “missed.”
No streaks. No guilt. No red marks.
Records & portfolio
Checking off the day’s work is the record-keeping. Attendance accrues. Hours add up by subject. Photos of journal pages collect into a portfolio. You never type them in.
An actual setting. Checked by default.
Where things stand
HomeschoolRPG has been in development for two years. The planner, the story engine and the print packs are built and working, and the world the stories live in is being written now. We’re welcoming families slowly, on purpose, so we can work alongside each one and get it right for parents and young adventurers alike: something unique, fun and genuinely educational, that helps kids find the joy in learning.
We’re opening to a small group of design-partner families first — full product, free for the first year, and a real say in what gets built. Everyone else holds a place in line, and we’ll write when it’s your turn.
Homeschooling more than one kid, or want to apply as a design partner? Use the full form.
