# Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple *Created:* 2026-11-10, *Modified:* 2026-11-10 ![[Do - Pilgrims of the Flying Temple (cover).jpg]] **Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple** is a storytelling game about good intentions and troublesome consequences. You are teenage monks with a bag of stones, a stack of complaint letters from strangers, and a mission statement that ought to be impossible to fail at: leave this world with fewer problems than you found it. ## Setting At the centre of the universe sits the Flying Temple, and around it orbit countless tiny worlds. When a worldly person has a problem they cannot solve, they write to the temple and ask for help. The elders hand the letter to a handful of young would-be monks and send them out. One world, one visit, one letter, and a group of pilgrims who are sincere, resourceful, and about to make everything worse. The letters are the setting, and they are written by people who are not being entirely honest. The book says so outright: letter-writers are **unreliable narrators**, telling only their side. So you get a chicken whose parents are arguing over whether to eat the girl who has moved in, a girl typing in capslock about the monster under her bed and the friends it keeps taking, an apprentice who has summoned something too big for the house and taken the roof off with it. The pilgrims' job is to find the middle path between what the letter asks for and what the world actually needs, which is rarely the same thing. Each letter carries a set of **symbols** — Book for tradition and law, Flag for property and borders, Heart for love and jealousy, Knot for family and ancestry, Lotus for gods and faith, Pen for secrets and discovery, Sword for violence and war, Tree for nature and animals. They are a content rating, and the book is refreshingly blunt about that being their job: use them to see at a glance whether a world's troubles are the sort your table wants to spend an evening on. Pilgrims are built to change. They help people, they get into trouble, they fly away unscathed at the end of the story, and over a pilgrimage they grow up — the name on the passport changing as they do, until one day they take on a destiny and stop being pilgrims at all. It is a coming-of-age game wearing a slapstick hat, and it is more honest about the growing up than the hat suggests. ## Mechanics The kit is a bag holding twenty black stones and twenty white ones, a journal the whole table writes in, a passport each, and a trouble token each — any small object will do, a chess piece, a set of keys, a poker chip. ### Making a Pilgrim A pilgrim's name is three parts, and the last two are the character. - **Pilgrim**, written first. It is a job description rather than a title: pilgrims help people, find a middle path, get into trouble, fly away, and grow up. - **A banner** — one adjective or descriptive word, plus six words or fewer on how she gets into trouble. *Clear* gets into trouble by speaking only the truth; *Clumsy* by breaking valuable objects. - **An avatar** — one noun, plus six words or fewer on how she helps people. *Beast* helps by releasing animals; *Quilt* by making magnificent tapestries. The banner is what the table uses against you and the avatar is what you use for everyone else, and both are metaphors rather than powers. The book is firm on this: pilgrims do not solve anything with violence, so a pilgrim called *Tiger* has a strong will or a talent for moving quietly, not retractable claws. It is the sort of rule a table will test in the first ten minutes. ### The Turn Draw three stones, decide who narrates the next part, write it, pass the bag to the left. Steps two and three are the game. You draw three stones blind and keep either the white ones or the black ones — three or zero, or two or one. That number, and whether your pilgrim is currently in trouble, decides who writes what and who gets to spend a goal word. Out of trouble, with: - **Three stones** — you write a sentence about your pilgrim helping someone, and may cross off one goal word. - **Two stones** — you help someone for a goal word, then the troublemakers write you into trouble for another. - **One stone** — the troublemakers trouble you first, and then you get yourself out, without a goal word. - **Zero stones** — they trouble you, and you get no say in it. In trouble, with: - **Three stones or one** — you write yourself out of trouble, with no goal word. - **Two stones** — you get out, and they put you straight back in. - **Zero stones** — they make it worse. The troublemakers are everyone else at the table, and they are the ones who get to spend goal words when it is not your turn. A pilgrim in trouble can only help herself, which is exactly what a pilgrim is not supposed to be doing — so the mechanic and the fiction are pulling in the same direction, and the table gets to enjoy it. The colour is the long game. Black stones kept go to your pilgrim's **World Destiny**, white ones to **Temple Destiny**, and most groups simply keep whichever colour there are more of until the epilogue makes them care. ### Goal Words Each letter lists its **goal words** — the people, places and things the story has to account for, repeated as often as they matter. Using one means writing it into your sentence and crossing it off. You can bend it (*Storm* can be *stormy*, *storms*, *storm's*), and you may put a goal word into a sentence without crossing it off in order to set it up for someone else, which is the closest the game comes to a pass. ### The Ending The story stops when every goal word has been crossed off, or when a round ends with somebody holding eight or more stones. - Every goal word used is a **parades** ending: the pilgrims are thanked and praised, and even the one who ended the story in trouble is forgiven. - A single goal word left over is a **pitchforks** ending: they are chastised and driven off, and even the pilgrim who behaved gets blamed by association. Then the epilogue, in three steps. Each player writes a closing sentence. Everyone counts the stones they kept into World and Temple Destiny. And then either the pilgrim takes a new name or the pilgrimage ends: more black and the **banner** changes, more white and the **avatar** changes, an even split and you choose. If that was the last world, the totals decide the rest — more World Destiny and she leaves the temple for a worldly life, more Temple Destiny and she returns to it, and an exact balance means she transcends and picks her own, which the book treats as the rare and difficult good ending it is. ### Playing for the Long Haul The book is candid that the short-term choice and the long-term one do not always agree. Keeping stones for the colour you want can mean ending your turn in trouble, on purpose, because the banner or avatar you are steering towards is worth it. That admission — that a player might choose to have a worse evening for a better ending — is the most quietly grown-up thing in a game that spends most of its time making you laugh. ## Editions **Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple** came out from Evil Hat Productions in 2011: 96 pages, first printing that July, an ENnie nominee, and a Kickstarter that the designer's own thanks page calls the second-highest fundraising game project on the platform at the time, on 552 backers. One edition, in two builds. *In the library.* - **Electronic Edition** — the illustrated PDF of the 2011 book. - **Electronic Edition, Printer Friendly** — the same PDF, for a home printer. Writing and design are Daniel Solis's; the interior illustration and the handwriting are Amy Houser's, and the cover is Liz Radtke's. It was edited by Lillian Cohen-Moore, Fred Hicks and Solis. ## Supplements - **Do: The Book of Letters** (2011) — the first expansion, 56 pages, and a good deal more useful than the word "expansion" implies. It collects around thirty new letters to the temple, written by backers and contributors, each with its goal words set out. It adds a chapter on writing your own, in which the advice reduces to four things worth knowing: put a citizen out of their depth, give the world's problem a person the pilgrims can actually talk to, offer several solutions that each cost something, and pull a cast at random from the book's back pages and see what trouble they make for each other. It closes with a list of pop-culture-inspired letter openers contributed by fans — guess the source, then work out how a pilgrim would ruin it. *In the library.* ## References - [Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple - Evil Hat Productions](https://evilhat.com/product/do-pilgrims-of-the-flying-temple) — the publisher's page for the game, with the player count, age range and running time up front. - [Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple - DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/92348/do-pilgrims-of-the-flying-temple) — the product listing and the player reviews. - [Do: The Book of Letters - DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/93137/do-the-book-of-letters) — the expansion, with the publisher's blurb and the review that says plainly which gap in the core game it fills. - [DanielSolisGames](https://www.danielsolisgames.com/) — the designer's site, where the pilgrim passports are a free download. - [An actual play of Do - Daniel Solis's blog](https://danielsolisblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/do-and-then-there-was-cat-parade.html) — a table's report of a playtest in which the letter-writer does not turn up until halfway through and a cat parade happens. The most honest advertisement the game has.