Kill Your Darlings
Mechanics as Meaning in A Jornada
Context
In 2015, I was shutting down the project of my life.
Voo da Fênix was a blog and quasi-publisher dedicated to tabletop RPG in Brazil. I had poured years into it — writing, designing, building a community. I was passionate. I was dedicated. I was, for a long time, the only one who was. So I followed the advice every creative person eventually receives: kill your darlings. I killed it.
The two weeks that followed were the strangest grief I had ever felt. I had grieved people before and since.. But grieving a project felt like grieving a person — the loss of something that had been, for years, part of how I understood myself.
Overlapping the last week of that grief, I made A Jornada for a Brazilian game jam called Faça Você Mesmo (can be translated as Do It Yourself). The theme was letting go.
I won.
Design
A Jornada is a tabletop narrative game for exactly four players — not three, not five — about a group of people who have lost everything and must journey toward something new, leaving more behind with every step.
Each player holds a character sheet and a role. The roles rotate every scene. In your scene, you are the Walker — the protagonist, narrating your own journey. In the next scene, you become the Road — the force that presents the Walker with impossible choices, drawing from your own suit of cards to determine how heavy each one is. In another scene, you are the Neighbor — the community surrounding the Walker, spending shared integrity tokens to intervene in their story, at cost to everyone. In the last, you are the Passion — the thing the Walker loves most, intervening through specific ritual phrases that push them toward selfishness or sacrifice.
Every player is, in rotation, protagonist, antagonist, support, and temptation. The same person who frames a brutal choice for you will, two scenes later, be the one walking through the choices you frame for them. The system doesn't have a game master. It has four agents with overlapping and sometimes conflicting mechanical authority over the same shared narrative.
The cards determine the weight of each choice. Low cards can be deflected by spending a character trait. High cards cannot be escaped — only absorbed. Face cards force a dice roll, and the consequences are determined by the result. When a trait is spent to survive a choice, it is marked. A marked trait, spent again, is gone permanently.
Meaning
Here is what happens when a trait is lost.
The player tears that section of the character sheet off. Physically tears it. And places the torn piece on the map — a large sheet of paper in the center of the table where the journey has been drawn, forked, and annotated by everyone throughout the session. The piece lands where it lands. It marks the exact moment in the journey where that part of the person was left behind.
The map accumulates these. Torn pieces of character. Cards placed where the Passion intervened. Lines drawn by different hands at different moments. By the end, the map is a record — not of what the characters chose, but of what the choices cost.
At the end of the game, after the epilogue, every player places their character sheet on the map. All the cards. All the torn pieces. Then the map is crumpled — everything inside it — and thrown away.
The journey must live only inside you.
This was not a metaphor dressed as a mechanic. It was the mechanic. State change — the trait is gone. Spatialization — it happened there, at that point in the journey. Persistent marking — the map holds the record of every cost. Session closure — the destruction is mandatory, not optional. And the destruction is the point: you cannot keep the record. You can only keep what it did to you.
I was designing this while in the process of not keeping Voo da Fênix. Of accepting that the record of what it had been was going to stop existing in any public form. Of understanding that the only place it would survive was inside me.
The mechanic was autobiographical before it was a design decision.
Pattern
The same instinct runs through everything I have made.
In The Suicide of Mr. Tanaka, the title screen was the opening scene because I had no time to build a separate one. In Moving Away, the tutorial was wordless because I couldn't render text in the engine. In A Jornada, the destruction of the game record was the only form of persistence available to a physical game with no digital component — and it became the most meaningful moment in the session.
Constraints, in my experience, do not limit the design. They locate it. They force the question of what the thing actually needs to be, stripped of everything that was going to be nice to have.
A Jornada needed no code, no screen, no save file. It needed four people, a deck of cards, a large sheet of paper, and the willingness to throw it all away at the end.
That willingness is the game.
Gone
A Jornada won the Faça Você Mesmo 2015 game jam. It is still available in Portuguese at gkorn.itch.io, where it has been downloaded and played by people I have never met, in sessions I will never know about.
One of the judges wrote that I had managed to put, in a few pages, a map of what life is.
I wrote it during the two weeks I spent grieving a project I had loved. I threw it out into the world the same week I stopped paying the domain registration for Voo da Fênix and announced publicly that it was over.
I don't know if that's relevant to a video game hiring process. Or a videogame design portfolio.
All I know is that it is relevant to me.
And it's the truest thing I have ever designed.
A Jornada — Solo Designer — Faça Você Mesmo Game Jam · 2015
Available, in Brazilian Portuguese, at gkorn.itch.io/a-jornada