#+ maybe some horror rpg stuff

[r-aindr0p]

Oufgdhdsh done with a few stuff for a con this june, Dungeon meshi lil guys and gals hehee

I still have a few other merch designs to speedrun though :")

[pestercide]

Bought RPG Maker 2003 for just three bucks fuck yeah!!!!!!

I can finally fulfill my dream of making an RPG Maker style horror game,,

[ohnoitstbskyen]

Okay, here’s an interesting one.

Before seeing your content, I’d basically only ever heard the term “power fantasy” used as a derogatory term to describe over-the-top protagonists who are strong and cool, but also boringly devoid of personality so the audience can project onto them. But then some of your League videos talked about skins letting characters like Gragas “inhabit more interesting power fantasies.”

So… when are power fantasies a good thing? The best I’ve got is that it only works in interactive media like video games so that the audience can more directly engage with the fantasy (essentially: Dante from DMC works, Kirito from SAO does not)

I mean, power fantasies are just endemic to storytelling as a whole. There isn't really a hard "this is when they're good, this is when they're bad," they are core to several genres of media and can't be extracted from them. Most video games are power fantasies, just by nature of their mechanics.

Power fantasy isn't a genre (usually), it is just a tool, same as any other trope or convention. It is a means to engage the audience with a story.

An RPG where you level up and become stronger to defeat more difficult enemies? That's a power fantasy. Undertale where you get the best ending by finding some way to spare absolutely every monster and end every fight mercifully? Power fantasy. The Tomb Raider reboot games that take an almost sadistic glee in putting Lara Croft through absolute hell both physically and emotionally? Those are power fantasies about overcoming and surviving those impossible challenges.

They're not just power fantasies, they have lots of other stuff going on, but power fantasy is an inherent part of them. Romance stories also often include power fantasies, specifically about the power of love. "He's broody, dark and broken, but my love can fix him" is a power fantasy, for example, as is "an unjust society keeps us apart, but we will defy everything to be together!"

Even being The Final Girl who beats the horror monster and walks away at the end of the movie can be a power fantasy, if a rather grim one.

If there is a general case where power fantasies become "bad," I think it is when the power fantasy is all there is, and it subsumes all other parts of the story. Shonen manga often runs into this as they get longer, and the power system and escalating battles against ever more powerful foes become the overriding driving force of the story, to the exclusion of everything else. Shaman King comes to mind for me as a particularly egregious example, or Bleach.

Isekai is also riven with this. You can't walk two steps these days without tripping on a "TRANSPORTED TO ANOTHER WORLD WITH MY SUPER OP CHEAT SKILL" premise, where the entire purpose of the story is simply to act out unchallenged wish fulfilment with no friction or tension or character development. Those stories get boring very very fast... unless of course the power fantasy being played out is your specific power fantasy. Yes, OP protagonists winning everything with no challenge is boring, but this OP protagonist is building a sapphic cottagecore witch polycule with an ever-expanding harem of emotionally damaged lesbians, so... y'know. Maybe I'll give it a pass.

It's generally less interesting and useful to observe THAT something is a power fantasy, than it is to observe WHAT KIND of power is being fantasized about. Zombie apocalypse stories are often power fantasies, for example, but there's a pretty noticeable difference between stories where the power fantasy is banding together and building a life with a found family in horrible circumstances, stealing joy from the end of the world in spite of everything... and stories where the zombie apocalypse is an excuse to enact paranoid right-wing prepper fantasies where the hero protects their property (home, land and women) against the verminous hordes of the monstrous Other, and is reified and uplifted by the employment of brutal violence.

[bogleech]

Also going to finally make a pinned post for all my stuff:

BOGLEECH - my tumblr blog is named after this website I created around 2002 and still update. Thousands of pages worth of content focusing on creature design as well as real biology. My review of the original Legend of Zelda monsters might be the most straightforward example of my articles.

Links to some of the most popular content:

POKEMON REVIEW ARCHIVE: - I rate and review each and every single Pokemon, in Pokedex order, on its merits as a creature design. I also do so as someone whose favorite animals are all parasites.

DIGIMON REVIEW ARCHIVE - same, but more chaotic.

CREEPYPASTA COOKOFF ARCHIVE - for several years I hosted a yearly writing contest before it grew too big for me to keep up with. There are over a thousand user submitted horror, fantasy, sci fi and surrealist stories here emphasizing unconventional, original ideas you seldom see from the "creepypasta" community!

The original "MORTASHEEN" Monster Archive - since the early 2000's I've created and illustrated more than 800 creatures and counting for my own monster-catching world, now set for release as a tabletop RPG setting.

AWFUL HOSPITAL: SERIOUSLY THE WORST EVER (page one): an interactive comedy-horror-sci-fi webcomic I started in 2014 about a medical facility that could maybe be better.

Some of my other internet stuff:

PATREON - constant work makes my patreon updates inconsistent, but the content backlog goes back years with a huge amount of exclusive art and writing. I try to put up new exclusive stuff whenever I can.

ETSY - I design all sorts of original enamel pins like these, plus I sell zero-maintenance terrarium plants (just leave them in a jar!), original books and other things!

COLOR THE ABYSS (available on the above etsy!) - a 30 page educational deep sea coloring book! Includes a few famous favorites like giant isopods and hagfish, but mostly focuses on less popular, often much weirder animals.

UNBELIEVABLE BUGS - also regularly restocked in the etsy store, 30 of the strangest and most surprising arthropods most people have likely never heard of, illustrated by myself and @revretch, written for even the youngest kids to understand (but will likely teach you something new at any age)

My Itch.io and Ko-fi - both sell digital versions of my books, including some creepypasta collections and my first novel, "Return of the Living," about a world of entirely ghosts suddenly dealing with the appearance of ghost-hunting monsters.

TWITCH CHANNEL - I now try to stream something at least monthly, sometimes weekly when possible, from horror games to books and art.

YOUTUBE CHANNEL - archives my twitch streams and other little things.

INSTAGRAM - look at pictures of my huge weird collection of toys and Halloween collectibles

BLUESKY - I'm going to put mainly just updates to my stuff on here.

SEE ALSO:

HUMANS-B-GONE - a science fiction animated series by my partner @revretch, about a world of kaiju-size, technologically advanced insects and arachnids to whom vertebrates like us are just pesky little "gubs." Also has a tumblr account @humansbgone

FINALLY, HERE'S MY GUIDE AND RESOURCE TO MAKING YOUR OWN INTERNET WEBSITE IN A FEW MINUTES WITH NO KNOWLEDGE OF CODING

[that-house]

The Tarrasque Can Blow Me or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Make 5e Bosses That Don't Suck

HI, I'm Catherine that-house, and I play Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition almost as much as I hate it. I do this because I am a sicko pervert who likes to tinker with abysmal dogshit, not because it's a good game. This screed is dedicated to everyone trapped in the same mine as me.

D&D 5e combat sucks! Here's the flow chart for your melee champion fighter's turn:

IF BAD GUY: smack bad guy

IF BAD GUY WITHIN 30 FT: move to bad guy, smack bad guy

IF LOW ON HP: second wind

IF NO BAD GUY WITHIN 30 FT: dash towards nearest bad guy

action surge, take it from the top

IF YOU'RE FEELING DARING TODAY: maybe a grapple or an item interaction

And pretty much any non-caster monster has a pretty similar flowchart: there's no real back and forth, just the same set of actions over and over and the only time you have to pay attention on someone else's turn is for an attack of opportunity maybe. Finally one side reduces the other side's number to 0, and you can get back to roleplaying in your roleplaying game.

In general, I strive to make my boss fights hard and interesting, with interesting being the more important of the two. For some reason the wicked clowns working at WOTC got it into their heads that the only ways to make a fight hard are Bigger Number and Less Counterplay. I don't have any data on how they sought to make fights interesting because as far as I can tell they were too busy siccing the Pinkertons on people like it's the fucking 1800s.

Probably not all 5e combat is like this. But, like, look at the statblock for the Tarrasque, the CR 30 "strongest monster in the game" and try to tell me that that thing looks INTERESTING to fight. Difficult? Maybe, if your stats are bad. But INTERESTING? It walks at someone and murders the shit out of them, then rinses and repeats. The fetid dog turd that is the Tarraque is the perfect example of the Bigger Number, and even its meme status as the DM's "fuck you" monster is eclipsed by later additions to the game.

The other end of the "strongest 5e statblock" spectrum is shit like Sul Khatesh from Eberron, who earns the title of "most bullshit" by being immune to nonmagic attacks and creating antimagic fields. This is progress, because you might force someone to grapple it out of the field or something so everyone can deal damage! But this is still ultimately a pretty linear fight, not unlike fighting any other caster in the game, but with Less Counterplay.

My DMing style is pretty character goal-oriented, with the occasional bullshit superboss. We sit around for a few sessions while people pursue side projects and gather information, and then I subject them to the Horrors of a 5e fight that requires things like "positioning" and "planning" from turn to turn.

When playing a high level D&D campaign with insanely bullshit homebrew magic items and character-specific custom mechanics, it becomes necessary to pull out the big guns. The biggest guns. I'm talking a gun like my boy Hierarch Ozyas, undead demigod, father of monsters and heart of a living city, who had a meaty 2000 hit points and took somewhere in the vicinity of thirteen rounds of combat to bring down. Building bosses is an arms race and it's my job to lose in style. Here's Ozyas' statblock:

The bitch himself

Anyways I've been talking for a bit without actually saying anything of substance besides making fun of the Tarrasque. Which I will do one more time:

...deep breath...

D&D 5e is a pretty widely-disdained game by pretty much anyone who's ever played more than one RPG system. I myself only play it because I enjoy game design, and the thoroughly-beaten dead horse that WOTC calls a game serves as a decent foundation to do a lot of heavy tinkering. The Tarrasque is perfectly emblematic of all of the trash I have to wade through in order to get to the stuff worth keeping: it is an uninspired, anticlimactic relic of the past that didn't even manage to cling to a shred of its old glory and is instead content to wallow in the filth of what it once was, never once providing a challenge to any character with a flying speed. I would probably attempt to beat it to death with my hands (and fail, because it checks your character's stats rather than challenging you as a player in any way), but Jim the 1st level aaracokra with a save-forcing damage cantrip already solo'd it for me, so I'll settle for chewing through the throat of whichever game designer forgot they were making a "game" and submitted a three step flowchart for D&D's ultimate boss monster.

But anyways, I promised you a guide to how I design boss fights these days, so let's get to that.

Actually, first here's a quick aside about action economy that I didn't bother finding a place to fit in elsewhere: legendary actions are basically a necessity for any boss past level five or so. One big action is going to be a lot more polarizing than several small ones (i.e. one big crit on a large attack could completely flip the course of the fight, whereas multiple smaller attacks offer the same amount of damage output in a more consistent fashion). If you don't want to give your boss a bunch of HP to make it live long enough to take a few turns, you could consider giving it two turns in the initiative order (reducing the damage per turn to keep the damage per round constant). Low health minions are also a good way to pad out action economy, and even if they're easy to kill they tend to buy the boss another turn or two just from the actions it costs to take them down.

ANYWAYS, here's the core ideas I like to focus on in my boss design:

Keep them moving

Keep them working

Keep things changing

Reward good play

Punish mistakes

Make it a game

Along the way I'll be using snippets of the boss I mentioned above to illustrate examples of these principles and how they affected play. Let's begin.

KEEP THEM MOVING Positioning doesn't really matter in 5e. AoEs and movement values are both so large that you can easily get away with not having a battle map and sorta just tracking "in melee" or "not in melee." I run most fights without a battle map and just kinda track that, but for a good boss you need a map.

But how do we keep the game from just falling back into "move into range and hurt people," you ask? Simple: the Zone of Nasty. The Zone of Nasty is something on the map that is going to hurt the PCs if they're in it, and the Zone of Nasty moves. Depending on the boss, it could grow, shrink, follow a player, follow the boss, alternate between areas of the map, whatever. Some bosses might have multiple different Zones of Nasty that move in different ways and do different things.

There are other ways to force movement besides a moving AoE, such as punishing players for being too close or too far from each other or the boss.

The general principle here is that a boss should at times force suboptimal play: optimal play involves simply standing around, spending all your actions on damaging the boss, and it's incredibly boring from a strategic standpoint. There should be turns in which your players have to spend their action economy on protecting themselves or helping their allies. If they find themselves in a Zone of Nasty, it should force a decision between suffering the consequences to continue optimal play, or spending resources to get out of it.

Our boy Ozyas had a Cancer Field that he could move slowly around the arena that damaged and debuffed PCs inside it, and Pretender-God-Piercing Strike, a telegraphed line attack that oneshot anything that stayed in its area too long (more on this one later).

KEEP THEM WORKING Everyone needs a job to do! This job is probably just going to be based on what their class and abilities encourage them to do, but it sucks for someone to not be able to meaningfully participate in a boss fight.

Let the DPS players kick the boss's teeth in, obviously, but make sure the person who focused on AoE effects has some extra enemies that they can deal with. Bonus points if the extra enemies have something that forces them to be dealt with instead of just rushing the boss' HP bar.

Worst case scenario, throw in a secondary objective like completing a ritual, controlling a point on the map, or fighting the boss' soul on a higher plane to give someone who isn't immediately needed for DPS to still have something to do.

Ozyas spawned a bunch of extra monsters from these gross Birthing Pillars around the map, and killing the monsters and destroying the pillars provided a nice secondary course of action for people either not equipped to slug it out with the boss or not currently positioned right to fight him.

KEEP THINGS CHANGING The tarrasque sucks because it does one thing over and over until it works or it dies. The Theros splatbook improved on this marginally: Mythic Traits are fucking baller! Combats should change over the course of the fight, or this could have been a fucking autobattler. But we can go further.

In addition to occasionally shaking things up based on health thresholds, here's a few ways I like to do it:

Rotating list of effects that change every round

Huge list of options the boss can choose from for one of their effects with no repeats

Some sort of meter that increases and decreases based on what's happening in the fight and modifies the boss' abilities

Ozyas summoned new monsters every round and could customize the statblocks with a bunch of quick templates I whipped together, and in his second phase he started alternating between scaling the to hit/damage of his tentacle attack, the reach of his spear attack, and applying extra buffs to his summons.

REWARD GOOD PLAY These next two kind of tie together but the core idea here is that it's okay if a boss is a bit easy, as long as it makes your players work for it.

This can include things like ways to trivialize certain parts of the encounter as long as the players utilize them, typically at the cost of advancing other parts of the fight.

I knew that Ozyas was going to be a long fight, so I gave my players the ability to heal to full health, as an action, whenever they wanted. They were fighting inside Ozyas' body, and he was a generous host. However, any time they healed, he would be healed for the same amount. They got around this restriction by hitting him with Chill Touch to disable his own healing whenever people needed to heal, but that obviously had the cost of losing two actions' worth of damage output.

Towards the end of the fight, everyone was still standing thanks to that healing, but as he began to infinitely scale his stats once he reached his second phase and started taking them seriously, they couldn't afford to waste turns healing anymore and the safety net they built up by healing earlier in the fight kept anyone in the party from dying.

PUNISH MISTAKES The range on D&D characters' HP pools and general survivability can be pretty broad. I like to give my bosses a reasonably-heavy hitting melee and some sort of light ranged attack to remind the backliners that they too can die. But there's a third kind of attack.

The great equalizer.

The One Hit Knock Out move.

These need to be telegraphed. There needs to be copious time to get out of the area, or to stop the boss from using it, or whatever the case may be. But any superboss should have a way to threaten any player on equal standing: a move that will always hit if its conditions are met, and puts them clean to 0.

Ozyas' OHKO was Pretender-God-Piercing Strike, where at the end of each turn he would wind up a spear thrust with enough range to hit across the entire map, targeting a 15-foot line through the nearest player. Neither he nor the line could move after that, and if you were still in that line at the start of his next turn, you were done.

It wasn't hard to avoid: just walk like 10 feet and don't get pushed back in by another enemy. They even lined it up to target some of his own allies sometimes. But it forced them to think about positioning and stay moving, and there were a few times where it aaaaalmost caught someone in the line. The prospect of Instant Death really does wonders to ratchet up the tension.

And now, finally, we come to the most important part:

MAKE IT A GAME D&D 5e likes to jerk off while fantasizing about being real. "Catherine what the fuck are you talking about?" What I mean to say is that D&D makes a fumbling attempt towards a more simulationist style of game, trying to distance itself from the fact that it is, in fact, a game. It tries to comport itself like reality, such that every part of its combat makes sense in-universe, and then immediately falls short because it can't be assed to indulge in actual simulationism.

It is my belief that if you're going to spend 4 hours fighting a boss, and one of the boss mechanics doesn't really make much sense as an in-universe concept but does make the boss more interesting and fun to fight, then that's a perfectly fine mechanic. Obviously finding some way to justify it is preferable, but my bosses prioritize good gameplay over verisimilitude.

The upcoming boss in my campaign has a feature which puts the fight on a ten-round time limit before he begins kicking substantially more ass than he was before (and the prior ass-kickery was indeed already substantial). If this is a desperate fight with his life and his dreams on the line, why doesn't he open with that? If this were a WOTC statblock, barring a mythic trait, that's exactly how it would work. But fuck that, because it would make the fight way less interesting! Now there's time pressure! And sure, the post-round-ten version of the boss is meant to be fled from, not fought, but if he's at a low enough HP it could instead make for an insane climactic finish!

I let my players see the whole statblock before the fight. We talk through all of its abilities, and I'll even point out some of the potential points of complexity and the big risks to watch out for. There's no in-universe justification for why the characters would know this (beyond, perhaps "you're exceptional adventurers and are good at evaluating your foes"): in fact, one of the quintessential examples of classical 5e metagaming is the Guy Who's Read the Monster Manual. I think that's fucking stupid, though. With open statblocks:

Features can be game-warpingly deadly without instantly incurring a TPK born of ignorance. OHKO moves don't feel fair unless the counterplay is known

The players can strategize around the ways in which the boss is going to change throughout the fight

It's fundamentally fair. Some GMs just wait X turns and then let the boss go down when it takes a big, impressive hit (and I fully respect people who do that! That's still more compelling boss design than 5e's normal schlock), but I personally like when numbers have meanings.

You can still hide some information (I like to black out the boss' Mythic Trait, and then only use it if the players stomp the fight too easily), and you can still tweak it to adjust the difficulty, with the difference being that your players know it's being adjusted and how so (which again comes back to my feelings of fairness).

A few other fun mechanics to toss in include stacking debuffs that trigger something horrible at some certain threshold, additional win conditions or lose conditions, and silly little minigames. One trick I particularly enjoy is having my players secretly vote between two or more bad outcomes, and punishing them even more if the vote is tied.

CONCLUSION Your mileage may vary, but I'm hoping at least some of the insights here were useful to you! I have a particular strain of undiagnosed mental illnesses that make me especially predisposed towards piloting huge convoluted intricate bosses with 1k+ word statblocks, and I'm lucky enough to have players who know their shit well enough to play around this bullshit. Find something that works for you and your players.

If you hate 5e combat and think this sounds like way too much work to be worth doing, go play something else, like Pathfinder or Lancer or (heaven forbid) a game that actually struggles to trace its lineage of inspiration back to D&D. Go to itch.io and find some game no one's ever played before, and toss the creator a bit of money. The only way we're making it out of these goddamn Mines of Phandelver is if people try something new from time to time.

On the subject of cool games with cool combat, bear with me as I shill for a friend real quick. If you want a game that cares less about combat as an abstract dick measuring contest and more about combat as a facet of violence and all that that entails, check out [BXLLET> by @rathayibacter.

And, finally, from the bottom of my heart, fuck WOTC. Your books aren't even worth pirating, and the Tarrasque can blow me.

[vintagerpg]

Back in the ’90s, a big part of the local punk scene in North Jersey that I bounced around in was centered around street punk and oi bands like Headwound, Niblick Henbane and The Wretched Ones. Their music was stripped down, catchy and their lyrics reflected a mix of working-class life, light hooliganism and, in the case of Those Unknown, grassroots leftist politics. One thing that none of them struck me as? Nerdy.

Fast-forward to 2023 when I stumbled across Harvest, by Philly’s Poison Ruin. Self-described peace punks, the album is a leftist working-class manifesto filtered through the aesthetics of medieval peasantry. It gets weirder! The tunes are gruff head-kickers with a strong sense of ’90s-era production, but there are all these clearly dungeonsynth-influenced interludes and, well, come on, look at that cover. Spooky chainmail guy with a sickle, black on yellow — it’s basically a MÖRK BORG zine. Can’t help but notice that flail is real similar to the one in the Gnoll logo, too…

Poison Ruin reminded me how much I liked aggro-infused music, so I went hunting for more. Most of the stuff I dug up hewed to the ’90s standard of slice-of-life working class lyrics and aesthetics, though many have a strong mix of post-punk and new wave influences, a la later-era Blitz, which is also surprising and intriguing. But some bands have decided to explore even stranger trails.

Enemic Interior, out of Barcelona, mixes oi and post-punk, and their album art, by David Soto, clearly evokes the look of old school RPGs — that ghost on II (2022) is very reminiscent of the ghost from the original Monster Manual — and could easily front dungeonsynth albums. Same for Castillo but more so — the sleeve of their self-titled EP (2020) boasts Sutherland’s green dragon and frost giant from the MM, and the Paladin in Hell from the Players Handbook (I can’t place the wizard). And for Pete’s sake, just look at that cover for Lost Legion’s Beyond the Concrete Veil (2024). It’s not explicitly tied to RPGs, but it could totally be an illustration in Realm of Chaos. And in a million years, I’d never have expected to hear oi this catchy and stompy to also be so entangled with science fiction, psychedelia and Aleister Crowley, but here we are. And, mind-blowingly, when I ordered the Mutant Genes 7-inch, Derek Atkinson at the label was already following my Instagram and popped the vinyl in a custom hand-stenciled sleeve featuring the text of the gelatinous cube entry from the Monster Manual. Fuckin’ wild.

Does this mean anything? I dunno! Medieval fantasy, and the notion of the fantasy dungeon in particular, can be a pretty handy visual shorthand for brutality, whether physical or metaphorical. Just look at all those poor adventurers getting eaten by monsters in the original Monster Manual! Does the frost giant and his huge ax on the Castillo sleeve represent the oppressive, exploitative forces of capitalism? Are frost giants with huge axes just cool now? Two things can be true simultaneously. And, regardless of intent, it’s interesting how the aesthetics have shifted in 30 years. Maybe fantasy is having a moment of broad appeal reminiscent of the last golden era in the ’70s.

P.S.: And, yes, true, the Misfits were into nerd shit way before any of this stuff, but I think horror nerd shit has always had more cachet than fantasy nerd shit? Perhaps because it maps more readily to established masculine norms; there was a big gulf in 198X between Danzig watching Plan 9 from Outer Space and Danzig copping to running a weekly D&D game).

[beesmygod]

you posted a clip of SGFs RE4 VR playthrough on twitter years ago and he's since become the only person i watch on youtube, do you have any other recommendations for people that play video games for the internet that i won't want to kill with my bare hands?

hmmm! maybe! i follow like 5 streamers total lol. well. 5 streamers and some general video game guys.

STREAMERS:

tomato (VOD channel): high energy lunatic who plays total ass games lol. his friends are equally deranged and scheme to kill each other. entertaining.

john wolfe (original channel): low energy, grounded guy who plays horror games and generally no-sells the scares. funny and nice friends who plan to help each other. extremely large backlog.

coney: affable guy who is evidently big in fighting games. mostly hes just very funny with some very funny/stupid stream gimmicks. check out "shitty genie" for quick solid laughs.

dougdoug: guy who is utilizing AI for its true purpose: creating chat bots who deliberately give terrible advice and have horrible ideas. the ones where they try to utilize AI for any kind of strategy games are hysterical. it cant do anything.

VIDEO GAME DISCUSSIONS:

face full of eyes: rarely updates but drops extremely thoughtful vids on game design. my brain doesnt conceptualize this stuff without someone holding my hand so i really get a lot out of these

warlockracy: russian youtuber who discusses 90s RPGs and fallout mods, primarily. plays them so i dont have to. sharp guy and dryly funny. gives a fresh perspective to games from the eurojank subgenre.

mandalore gaming: late 90s/early 2000s gaming discussion. plays a lot of shit ive never heard of in my life.

shetani's lair: has a series on sekiro that should be considered a near definitive breakdown of the game.

worm girl: this one is a pro-click. in-depth plot analysis of various games, mostly obscure or difficult ones. seriously excellent work from her. very entertaining and thought provoking.

any austin: guy who has a fascination with the supremely boring aspects of video games. extremely interesting perspective that celebrates the mundane and awkward parts of game design

have fun! let me know if any of these work for you

[xoxo-chrmy]

guys these are all concepts okay..... I'm just sharing ideas so don't throw rocks at me or anything!!! 😸😸😸

Tw; some slight blood mentioned and shown, also possible grammar mistakes, and very sloppy drawings bcuz I finished this all last night 😓😓😓

I did wanted this to be a Gritty VHS-glitch horror with some thriller and mystery mixed with late 2000s dating sim aesthetics aaand the fonts being a distressed typewriter font for narration! the cursor could be a literal knife.. and the sound sfx being a static distortion, a faint heartbeats, and some whispers!! I want this slashfic rpg to be the type of Rpg horror game that will probably have two modes to save some ppl's sanity; Normal Mode or Lovesick Mode! Where basically, Normal mode will be quite forgiving and you will be able to rack up bloodlust points of your favorite slashers which means you will rarely get any death screens! And you get to save! Hooray!

And then Lovesick mode will be the harder mode, as it will be completely unforgiving and harder to raise your bloodlust points with your slashers which means it will also equal into more death screens, and maybeee.. you won't be able to save.. (I'm still debating on this) so you practically have to really think carefully about your choices and making the right call while playing Lovesick mode!

i haven't thought much about the mechanics and other stuff bcuz that costs too much brain power but this is my current idea for the inventory system...! That Darkness Meter in the top right is indeed, based off the time in the early Slashfic eps where we had our darkness rising, and I kind of liked that idea and decided to incorporate it here! The Darkness Meter practically acts like a sanity or mental darkness meter, where it rises with terrifying events that happens or other stuff that can cause your sanity to drain, and if you were to have a very high darkness meter, you'd start to get hallucinations (perhaps of shadow people or the slashers attacking you or whatever) and you will begin to get poor choices with your slashers (or other characters) that won't gain you any affection points whatsoever, and maybe it could equal to a death screen if you were to pick the wrong choice of words (to be fair they'd all be bad choices) but anyways!

Those little paper dividers you see on the side of the inventory are supposed to lead you to different options, i have no idea what the First peach colored divider with the paper icon would lead to but the Second blush colored divider with the heart icon would lead to the Slasher Relationship Tracker! The Third glaucous colored divider with the open book icon would lead to the Collectibles you can collect and lastly the Fourth basil colored divider with the question mark icon would obviously lead to a tutorial for all of the gameplay and stuff!! But now it's time to yap about the Slasher Affection Tracker and Collectibles.. sweats

the current concept of mine for the Slasher Affection Tracker.. is to make it look like a document for now! And these documents will all be personalized by their specific Slashers on the page, like Jay as an example would probably have a bunch of stickers on his! But anywho, basically you'd still have the bloodlust or affection meter on the relationship tracker obviously and I incorporated the meter from Slashfic since I had no clue on how to do mine.. and I wanted to add in the Status, a kill or spare status where you can tell how they feel about you, and so you can know if they plan to kill you any time soon! And lastly the Notes part, which is basically notes abt the slashers that will be written down or added with a sticky note whenever your bloodlust with them gets higher! And it's basically a way to get a quick insight on the slasher's personalities and likes or dislikes, or whatever!! It's supposed to help you understand them better so you know what choices to pick if you were to talk to them!

Now unto the Collectibles!! These would be Fun Items you can collect, or Endings you got after each run.. or Entries on the Slashers, aka, their lore! I keep thinking about how I had to write down their lore and replay some episodes just to get a small tidbit of lore, so I had the idea to actually be able to document and save their lore, via a collection of Entries! Each entry would also be personalized by the characters they're about just like the Slasher Affection Tracker, but this time you can track down and collect entries of their lore, backstory or whatever via polaroid pictures or pages or other stuff! (mostly had this idea just to save some slashfic writers) The endings part of the Collectibles could either be; replaying the ending scenes or it's mostly there for collectible purposes.. but yeah this is still a concept

now on to some gameplay mechanics concepts, since I said I wanted some mystery in this rpg version of slashfic..! yeah you can collect these little clues for ideas on your next objective Incase you didn't have any nor have no clue (maybe the tutorial would point out you'd have to collect clues for your next objective) or even collect some lore tid bits for the bloody entries and other such things! you basically be a little detective when you search around cabins or labs or wtv place you may be in to find some lore or clues..

i initially had the first thought to make it where you'd be able to go into first person mode and your knife cursor turns into a magnifying glass or bloody hand cursor and basically you're playing a point and click game when you're investigating whatever you're investigating.. but I don't know if that'd fit so I scrapped it and kept the 3d rpg feel

now! unto the dialogue mechanics that I had in mind! i think it'd be quite fun where during the dialogue, instead of getting some generic choices you have to click on, you'd have a timer suddenly appearing and you'll actually have to hover your knife cursor over to one of them to pick which of the choices seem like they'd get you any blood points or stuff like that!! there's honestly not much going on but i don't have any ideas yet but this is of course just a concept and a messy doodle of my idea but mb chat!

i also think it'd be quite silly where if you were to run into your slashers in the early start or whenever they're mad or whatever.. you could get attacked or chased! Where a Triangular pair of choices would appear and you'll have to Choose with the same knife cursor between: Fight, Flee, or Talk, all while the same timer would begin to count down but suddenly become all glitchy and then have a shorter time limit, which is intended to make you stressed and dreadful!!

Fight = risk of a death screen, but could gain bloodlust points from specific Slashers

Flee = stamina cost, but could could gain bloodlust points from specific Slashers

Talk = high risk but also a high reward (you have to use your knowledge abt them or their emotion to stop them, even gain bloodlust points!)

And if you were to- let's say, get caught while fleeing, get interrupted and attacked while talking or simply losing when fighting: then a Struggle Bar would appear! The struggle bar is a type of mechanic where you need to tap rapidly on the screen/button mash a keyboard button to be able to run away successfully! so this little game mechanic only appears if you're being attacked by one of the slashers and you'd have to rapidly click a button or rapidly tap the screen until the meter turns full so you will be able to momentarily 'overpower' your foe and be able to live!

yeah this is all I have in mind, I guess I could also show my scrapped ideas for the Saves and Endings Collection but yeah that's it!! i might edit this post when I feel like it but anyhow thanks for reading this concept of Slashfic as an Rpg 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏😸😸😸😸😸😸

i also ran out of images whoops

[hazardace2]

sorry making my own little discussion/theorizing on susie's life after this post.

Susie talks about blood the most, it seems to be something she enjoys (from what she thinks to herself on the ferris wheel) but with the revelation of her bleeding at the end of chapter 4, we are back at the bottom of the "do monsters bleed argument" which, by god, am i tired of.

it's not confirmed that monsters can bleed but we do know 100% that they do still dust and die like in undertale.

humans 100% can bleed

darkners 100% can bleed

evidence that monsters can't bleed: there's a child in hometown who asks kris about having blood and a skeleton - things that monsters don't have (skeleton monsters are seperate from human skeletons too)

evidence that monsters do bleed: susie saying "everyone bleeds"

my thoughts on this: susie likes violent movies and games, she tells kris she likes giant monster movies more than giant human movies; she's going to pick up some phrases that will include blood regardless of whether or not monsters bleed + "the warrior" who works at ice-e's and is always talking about rpg stuff like wizards??? they talk about blood too. there's a horror movie series called "bloodcrushers" like, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that blood themed stuff can still exist even though monsters don't do that themselves

do you know what's really damning about susie possibly being the only monster to bleed? she doesn't recognize gerson's dust as being... well essentially like a corpse! it takes her a minute to recognize that that's what she's looking at. why wouldn't recognize what a monster's dust looks like? sure, maybe she's never been to a monster funeral or learned about it in class (since she's moved so much) but it's still really odd

susie's also the only character to realize there's a bloodstain on kris' carpet? at least, she says it looks like a bloodstain. what's crazier is that she offers to clean it up??????? how would she know how to clean blood out of a carpet? better question: even if the stain is as new as kris' weird behavior, you'd still think that maybe toriel would ask about it? or maybe offer to clean it? i guess she respects kris' privacy, since we see her wake them up, but their room stays untouched. again though, toriel doesn't bleed, of course she wouldnt be worried about the stain or want to clean it.

Imagine what it must be like for susie then. you get a paper cut or some other silly injury during school, but then everyone starts freaking out or calling you a freak. and then before you know it your parent is packing up and the two of you are in another town. wash, rinse, repeat. say you get some blood on the carpet of the apartment or hotel you're in, you're going to have to clean it up. no wonder she says doctors don't get her, most monsters don't bleed during their appointments.

while the chances of susie being abused are still there, whoever is taking care of her isn't comically evil. we know that when she was in 1st grade she used to wear ribbons in her hair, somebody used to take the time to do her hair and get her ready for school. apparently she's been to sleepovers before, but after a while of moving I'm sure she probably had less chances to do that kind of thing. she's had eggnog before (she says noelle tea tastes like this iirc) but she's never seen gingerbread cookie cutters. susie likes monster movies, so she's had to have grown up with a tv for most of her life.

i almost wonder if she's moved around so much out of fear.

[reinafish]

Guys this AU I literally just created has already infested my brain. I must yap my extremely vague ideas of it.

It’s a horror AU so uh… warning for that kind of stuff? Also another warning for this being the goofiest AU ever (and its still a WIP so a bunch of things could change and I still actually do need to add more- so don’t take any of this as if it’s gonna stay in the AU forever)

Ok so when I normally think about this AU, I think of RPG/Visual Novel-styled games? Or like Undertale? Yk what I mean. I’m taking some inspo off of Mad Father, Mario The Music Box, etc too. So if you see me describing anything like it’s a video game (saying “you as [character]”, etc.) that’s why😭 this most likely won’t be made into an actual game sadly </3

I barely have a plot for it rn, I just know they get teleported to some other dimension thing? and there’s a mansion (obvi) they have to escape ?? But I do know what happens to some characters (Like Amy :D)! I’m thinking of maybe some unexpected ones could team up (because, if you didn’t know, I have a this weird obsession with rare character dynamics and relationships) like Tails and Blaze? Because you barely see them together.

I don’t know all the characters that are gonna be in the AU yet, but I’m thinking of Sonic (WHICH ISN’T DEAD OR EVIL FOR ONCE IN A HORROR AU! LET’S GOOOO!!! He suffers with his friends instead of making them suffer himself), Tails Doll, Amy, Knuckles, Blaze, Silver, Shadow, Rouge, maybe even Cream?

I only have some characters sort of planned, so I’ll be talking abt those.

Sonic:

Señor Trauma

He cries has a panic attack and a breakdown (all in separate moments) for the first time in a while lmao

Amy:

Here’s Amy!! We all know and prolly love her!<3 They all have different designs in this btw, so-

Anyways, I know at some point she’s left alone, possibly abandoned (that’s what she assumes anyway) in the garden after choices you make as another character(probably Sonic) (jk cs this isn’t a video game but i did explain this at the start), and since I hc her with AMAZING abandonment issues…❤️

Of course there’s monsters and entities in this, so one of them possibly takes control of Amy? Or tries to, until YOU, AS SILVER, GO TO THE GARDEN AND FIND HER!! There, you’re left with a choice (a bunch of stuff happen prior to this btw, this isn’t at the start of the story):

(Also yes that’s a timer, every second the more red and shaky the screen gets lol. Why?? BC ITS COOL AND STRESSFUL) AND YES. THIS MONSTER/ENTITY/THING IS FLOWER THEMED. AMY ROSE-

Ok uh, if Silver does save her (he has to fight obvi, it isnt that easy), he takes her and they escape to another part of the area? Map? Wtv I call it. And when they can finally take a little break for once, they talk (kind of- Amy’s been quiet (traumatized gal)):

So, uh, yeah. Heavy traumatized now so (also a lot more clingy). ANYWAYS, SILVER AND AMY ARE A DUO IN THIS NOW!!<3

I don’t have much else for her now, so let’s go to Silver ??

Silver:

My proudest drawing of this so far💖

I guess he got transported with the others to this dimension. Yeah- he hurts his foot somehow, not sure how yet. Definitely from an entity tho.

First thing he does it try to find if anyone else is here. So… he does just that. He enters the weird giant ahh mansion infront of him and calls out for anyone. He explores a ton, finding important objects, a weird doll that looks oddly familiar which he decides to just ignore and leave there, and also hurts his foot as yk- He does reunite with Blaze for a moment, though they’re immediately separated by obvi another monster.

He gets thrown back outside the mansion, into the garden. In that garden? Well yk what he finds😭

Blaze:

Fun fact: it was this doodle that started this whole thing !!

Also dont have much for Blaze, but she’s the first I doodled so I’ll be trying to make stuff up abt her in this (maybe on the spot even)

She’s confused why she can’t teleport back to Sol or anywhere else. Or why she can’t escape this mansion-place-thing. Actually they’re all confused abt that but wtv- Using her pyrokinesis, she can light torches and other things so she can see in darker areas. She can also just light her hand up too, but this takes energy from her ^_^

At some point, she reunites with Silver!! Then they’re separated by another monster. He was thrown into the garden, while she was thrown into a dark room.

In that room, she finds a doll. It looks a lot like Tails for some reason…?

She’s weirded out and judging it (I would too)

If she grabs it, she notices how real it feels? Like it actually feels like Tails… which is creepy. SUDDENLY IT TRIES ATTACKING HER (LOL?) BUT—

—before she has time to process anything, Tails pushes her out of the way (she notices his ear is missing) and points his arm cannon to…

….whatever that is.

Am I being cringy? Yes. Do i care? …honestly kinda, yeah- but I’m not gonna let myself do anything abt it

I don’t have much else with her. They fight it and become a silly duo and uhhh yeah-

Cream:

No art yet, but she’s definitely appearing now. Uhh I know she find the doll (btw I’m refusing to call it “Tails Doll” bc THEY’RE NOT THE SAME! I PROLLY SHOULDN’T HAVE CHOSEN TAILS THEN BUT IDC..) at some point and it tricks her into thinking it’s good. So like she drags it around while she explores, trying to find Amy or anyone.

Uh

This is a horror AU someone has to die right—

Idk if I’m killing her off or not but I might??

If she doesn’t die then atleast she’ll be dead inside /silly

Tails:

Also no art yet (other than the one with Blaze I already showed), but basically he was with Sonic when they entered. Bunch of stuff in between happen, they get stuck in a room, Sonic watches the monster-thing literally rip Tails’s ear off and make a fking doll out of it bc it was feeling a lil quirky (well they do get quirky at night /ref), Sonic then believes Tails is dead, meanwhile Tails literally tried escaping and ended up all the way on the other end of this giant goofy mansion—

Uh I don’t have anything else oop.

I HIT THE IMAGE LIMIT FUKKCCKCKKK uhhh there wasn’t much else to add tho sooo? Yeah?? Hope u like it bye. Reminder this is still a WIP and stuff will most likely change— ^_^ (I AM EXTREMELY EMBARASSED ABT THIS IF YOU COULDNT TELL.)

I’ll just add the rest of the images in an rb

[xamiipholia]

okay y'all seemed to like the last one so here's a few more Horizon 3 thoughts:

Aloy won’t die. It would completely upend the series’ themes and just be really nihilistic.

Since Nemesis is a gestalt entity I think it’s a safe bet that we’ll see Sam Witwer, Carrie-Anne Moss, etc again. I’m curious how they’re going to do it because at least structurally, it’s basically a reaper. Maybe it’ll use different Avatars when communicating like the Leviathan in ME3. 

It's gonna take some work to make a flashback/dream/vision not contrived but I would love to see Varl and Rost again. I think we deserve that.

Minerva is gonna have its work cut out for it blocking access to both the dormant Faro Swarm and the ZD terraforming system. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if Nemesis has some sort of corruption function that becomes the equivalent of the corruption in HZD. It would be a really fun tech showcase if GG uses Zenith nanotech for machine corruption and leans into mechanical body horror.

If we’re going to Ban-Ur I really really hope they do the work to make the Banuk less problematic and more fleshed out as a culture. A quasi-Spartan society absolutely would not survive in an extreme environment, *especially* without megafauna to hunt. The Banuk characters are lovely and well-written; they deserve a society as well thought out as the Utaru or Carja. I’m honestly fine if there’s retcons or revamps to the cultural lore because the whole “outsider barges in and becomes chief” is rooted in racist, colonial tropes and we just don’t really need that imo.

The most recent footage of Death Stranding 2 (also running on Decima) has me SO excited for the visuals. GG’s gonna knock it out. The facial rendering and animation that Kojima Productions are doing looks industry-peak and I’m sure GG’s gonna match that. Aloy’s Gay Panic™️ scene on the beach in HBS is already top-tier nonverbal storytelling through animation. Digital Foundry actually just posted a really cool tech breakdown of the current Decima engine. I’m especially excited about the environmental stuff. The ocean simulations in HFW are already incredible and I hope they increase verticality in the world. I can’t wait to see the Sacred Lands in current gen graphics. 

I really love Kotallo’s DIY arm and it’s so so important to his development but Beta and Gaia now have access to Zenith nanotech, maybe give your buddy a sick upgrade hmm?

Speaking of, I can’t wait to see Beta come into her own. She’s one of the best parts of HFW and Aloy’s character absolutely shines in a sibling dynamic. 

I wouldn’t get your hopes up for a romance mechanic. Everyone’s feelings on that aside, it would be really odd from a game development perspective to just overhaul part of how the narrative develops Aloy’s character in the last act of the story. Yeah, there are flashpoints but I would argue that the presence of choice in Horizon is smoke and mirrors- cosmetic at best. Kentucky Route Zero (which you should play) does something similar where the player is given a certain amount of control over the substance of individual conversations and scenarios and it does absolutely nothing to alter the plot, by design. I think it’s the same here - this isn’t really a choice-based RPG, the flashpoints don’t really affect anything plot-wise or for Aloy’s character development. Olin is still out of the story, Nil lives, Regalla still dies one way or another. Aloy’s character development is pretty firmly on rails (think Jin Sakai, not Shepard - you get to guide some momentary character reactions but that’s it). I don’t think HBS is a testing ground either - If they were gonna introduce a romance mechanic I think they’d just do it, and not spend two years making a direct continuation of HFW’s main quest and establishing a specific romance hard-baked into the plot, complete with multiple leitmotifs for the character relationship (which is something they haven’t done before afaik) just to introduce a side quest mechanic coming in 5 years. I genuinely can’t think of any game or dev that has beta tested a major alteration to upcoming game mechanics that way - it doesn’t really make any sense in terms of developer resources, and these games are extremely time-consuming to make. I know this is a thing a bunch of people want and I can totally empathize with that! I just think it’s probably not on the table. 

I would bet money the series will bookend itself and the epilogue will involve a) the naming of Zo and Varl’s kid and b) Lis’ pendant. 

Mostly I'm just looking forward to being surprised. One of my favorite things that Horizon does is use carefully established elements in the world to pull the plot in unexpected directions and keeping the world grounded while they lean into speculative science fiction. I can't wait to see what Guerrilla is cooking up

[thydungeongal]

Going to run Quietus today, so far it's the best horror RPG I've found for my purposes (one-shots where a bunch of regular people go into a Spooky Place and see some Spooky Stuff and maybe Die). Previously I'd been using Call of Cthulhu but the madness mechanics in that are a little goofy if you aren't running a Lovecraftian narrative.

Any recommendations for other games that meet the above criteria? I haven't run it yet but so far my two biggest concerns are that Quietus isn't well suited to groups with more than 2 other players, and the emphasis on accommodating prep-free play also means that using it to run a session with a premise you decide beforehand is a bit tricky.

If you want something a bit crunchier but that works well for horror, I'd recommend checking out Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy by @anim-ttrpgs. As the title suggests it is meant for investigative gameplay, but urban fantasy has a lot of overlap with horror as a genre. Eureka's Composure mechanic emulates the loss of one's nerve and the stress of encountering horrific things (both mundane and supernatural), and the way it works is that once a character's Composure goes down it effectively acts as a cap on their skill ratings. Characters don't just go Lovecraft mad because they've seen something they don't understand, they become emotionally and mentally strained and become unable to operate at peak capacity.

[plaidos]

I feel like every transfem I’ve met loves video games and animes but as a transfem myself I’ve never really gotten into those :/ where are the tgirls who are into history and political documentaries????

On a serious note tho, do you have any video game recommendations for someone who’s never played before but wants to get into them so she can meet some other transfems that way?

there are definitely lots of transfems into history & political documentaries! i’d say those are nearly as stereotypically transfeminine as anime and videogames — but as somebody not into Magic the Gathering i feel you!!

the way i answer this depends on a lot of stuff — when you say you’ve never played, i need more details. this is like coming to me and asking “i’ve never seen a TV show before, what’s a good starter?” like. have you literally never touched a videogame before ever? like never held a controller? i’m gonna assume you’re exaggerating a little (although no shade if you’re not — i can still give recs for that too!) but even then, it’s hard to know what to recommend for an entire medium. do you have access to any gaming consoles? a computer? what genres do you like outside of gaming like horror, scifi, etc.

videogames are an interesting medium to recommend for, because you’re selling a type of gameplay AND the aesthetic package that surrounds it. for example, i like first-person shooter games because i love the adrenaline rush of reacting to a scenario i have the power to change in real time — but i skip a lot of shooters because i don’t like the everything-else part surrounding it. the difference between Call of Duty and Half-Life and Halo and DOOM means nothing to my mom but everything to the gamer girls

do you play any games of other genres — tabletop RPGs, card games, board games? there are often good analogies of those games in the videogame world. also, if you’re into politics and history you might like something like Hearts of Iron or some other grand strategy game like that (and i promise there are BUTTLOADS of transfems into basically all the big grandstrat games).

but yeah it sort of depends like, what about videogames is theoretically appealing to you? because you’re only gonna have fun with something that, well, you think is fun.

Portal & Portal 2 are both on the Switch and probably pretty runable on even a shitty computer and they definitely shouldn’t be too difficult if you have like basic videogame movement/camera literacy (which like! you might not! i’m really shooting blind here haha) — they’re well known for their incredible dialogue & outstanding voice acting performances

if you have access to a Switch (i know, assuming a lot here) then maybe one of the new Zelda games. Breath of the Wild has a high skill cap but is still fundamentally designed to be approachable to children. it’s about exploring a fun and imaginative world, and it has a pretty competent tutorial to set you on your way. again! it’s hard to give recs without knowing what we’re working with here.

[bogleech]

I completely missed that a Mortasheen book was getting kickstarted! What's the best way to get updates on that? Is there some way to sign up for a bogleech.com news letter? I don't want to miss when it comes out

Oh it was kickstarted three years ago, but with the intention of coming out in only one year. A lot of stuff happened :( It's a tabletop RPG that's actually been in development by other folks for now a grand total of I think 15 years, with me just being the art and concept side. I was never really let in on 90% of that development or what caused it to go on that long but now I have enough stuff together that I should be able to get the book out for real in 2024, with the help of the remaining gameplay dev Morgan Mullins, a huge boost of additional development help from @gutsygills, and a dozen different artists I've paid to contribute.

Having sunk so much of my life into it, I won't make it at all possible for people to miss when it comes out. It's basically the thing I have to bank on as my main career for the foreseeable future, the first book is only intended as the start of a series of expansions, it'll have its own official website and get pitched to actual gaming stores. I've been really sweating to make it look as professional-ish as possible.

Like the core D&D books it will have to be fairly pricey, we're looking at 200-300 pages, but I'd also put out much cheaper digital versions, and maybe little skinny "monsters only" books for people who just want to look at those :)

The stats/abilities on these pages are already a little out of date, the gameplay system had some last minute updates following a lot of backer playtesting!

I dunno how many people reading this have maybe never heard of Mortasheen yet but it's a horror-comedy flavored homage to Pokemon and Digimon set in a world sort of like ours, thousands of years from now where there's goofy monsters and mutants and biotech while humans are very rare and endangered. Actually the setting most similar to it now is Adventure Time of all things, if it had a whole lot more body horror and no magic (but lots of biotechnology indistinguishable from it). But when development of this game began, Adventure Time was just that weird short pilot Nickelodeon passed up on. Now it will be coming out after Adventure Time had a finale, sequel movies and the first season of a followup series. It has literally taken more than an entire Adventure Time to get this done :( I did not mean for an answer to an ask to go on this long but it occurs to me as important information for my followers in general!!!

[dovenskin]

Your writing is spectacular, genuinely, I love it so much. You always write the characters so accurately it’s almost painful. I keep re-reading the same posts over and over again almost obsessively, like I’m trying to study your words, memorize the phrases and spaces, trying to improve my own writing. I want to eat your writing, consume it in hopes that it will become a part of me, that maybe in hopes that maybe my own writing will improve.

That is to say, can you perhaps give some writing tips before I lose my mind and send myself to an insane asylum? No pressure, if not.

omgee??? you’re making me blushh, thank you so, so much !! the idea of someone rereading my stuff, studying it, wanting to eat it is making me giggle n kick my feet <33

and absolutely!! I can totally give you some writing tips. I’m still learning all the time, but here are a few that really helped me: (this is for smut btw, below is general)

Let the characters be awful. Eltingville is all about ugliness — insecurity, ego, obsession. If it’s messy and uncomfortable and grossly specific, you’re probably nailing it. Don’t over-sanitize. The more cringe, the better.

Layer the humor into the smut. Staying in-character doesn’t mean you can’t get filthy or funny—it just means their flavor of filth needs to match. Bill calling someone a slut while pathetically rutting into a thigh? In character. Pete talking shit mid-thrust? Also in character.

Make it about ego and insecurity. These guys are all virgins canonically (except jerry via epilogue i assume, mmm maybe pete too (epilogue)). Even when they’re in smut, they’re trying too hard, overcompensating, or pathetically needy. That push-pull of bravado and meltdown makes them feel real.

I use the Eltingville wiki constantly. The more specific and grossly accurate I can be about their behavior, quotes, or obsessions (like Josh and Star Trek continuity or Bill and his gatekeeping), the better the fic feels. Even in porn.

—

general

let them be bad. these boys are meant to be cringe. don’t be afraid to lean into their toxic traits, ego, weird fixations, or embarrassing meltdowns. if your reader’s secondhand embarrassed?

focus on obsession and insecurity. everything they do—whether it’s yelling about fan canon or fighting over soda—is rooted in insecurity. they desperately want to be seen as smart, valid, superior… but they’re losers. that emotional contradiction is gold.

humor comes from specificity. don’t just say “he nerded out.” say “he launched into a 12-minute rant about why captain pike’s wheelchair design was a canonical betrayal.” the more specific and unnecessarily detailed, the funnier and more in-character it feels.

their relationships should be volatile. even if you’re writing fluff or friendship, remember: these guys insult and undercut each other constantly. that doesn’t mean there’s no love, but it’s always filtered through sarcasm, competition, or bitterness. lean into the dysfunction.

again, the eltingville wiki is your best friend!! seriously, use it. knowing each guy’s fandom interests (e.g. josh = star trek, pete = horror elitist, bill = gatekeeping goblin, jerry = anime/rpg guy) will help you write them accurately. name-drop references. make fun of their hyperfixations. that’s the fun part.

anywayy, thank you for the love, i hope this helps and i promise you’re already writing better just from being so engaged — keep studying and keep writing!!

xo ,

faye

[anim-ttrpgs]

Wait does Eureka have its own established lore for how different supernatural creatures work?

Yes, it does!

(I’m going to preface this post by saying that just about everything I’m talking about here, and more, is available FOR FREE for you to read in the free pre-release version of the Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy rulebook that you can download from our website. Go to Chapter 8 to start reading about the supernatural lore. The rulebook itself will do a lot better job of explaining all this than I will, because it has the exact details of how each one works, and I’m just hitting the highlights and going over what those details mean.)

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is a game about very human and believable investigators digging into dangerous (often supernatural) mysteries way over their heads, and sometimes those very human and believable investigators will be supernatural creatures themselves.

These supernatural creatures are every bit as human and “normal” as their mundane investigators counterparts, they have jobs, friends, families, hobbies, etc. They live among mundane society, not outside of it.

Most modern fantasy settings have some kind of separation between normal society and magical society, like you see in Harry Potter where there is normal society, and then a separate, secret magical society hidden away from it, or Vampire: The Masquerade, where vampires all have an agreement to keep themselves a secret from normal society despite acting within it.

In Eureka’s world, there is no “masquerade,” but that doesn’t mean that magic and monsters are well-known and well-documented phenomenons. Supernatural creatures such as vampires, wolfmen, etc. are exceptionally rare. Don’t take this as an exact number, but you can probably assume there’s about one of these per every 3.3 million normal people.

This rarity, as well as the fact that each individual has little to gain and everything to lose by revealing themselves (try “coming out” as a person who regularly assaults people and drains their blood), has led to them going largely undocumented in the modern day. Sure, this is the digital age, there are videos, but viral videos are not exactly scientific evidence. For every real vampire caught on camera, there are a thousand hoaxes and horror short films.

There is no secret vampire government controlling things from the shadows—most vampires don’t even know any other vampires, let alone enough to form a secret society with any effect on national politics.

As for how they work, well, that’s one of my favorite parts to talk about.

There are five playable monster types in Eureka (The Vampire, The Wolfman, The Fairy, The Witch, and The Thing From Beyond) plus two extras that are Kickstarter stretch goals (The Dullahan and The Gorgon), but in the interest of time, I’m only going to really go into detail with one of them.

Most playable monster types in Eureka are very, very old-school, with an emphasis on actual historical folklore over just making up all our own lore. That doesn’t mean Eureka doesn’t have a unique approach to the supernatural, though. Little of it is “new,” but it is certainly unique, because to my knowledge no other RPG has ever taken the old stuff this far before. A PC being a monster in Eureka isn’t just a few +1s here and there and maybe a little extra damage from silver weapons, it means playing by an entirely different set of rules from fellow investigators.

The vampires and vampire lore you see in movies are not folkloric vampires, they are mostly a 20th and 21st century pop-culture creation. Eureka’s vampire abilities, weaknesses, and other traits are based on pre-1900 vampire legends, with older traits usually taking precedent over newer ones. Thus, a lot of assumptions you might have about vampires going in could end up being very wrong. For instance, in movies, vampires instantly die when exposed to sunlight, but the first ever instance of a vampire in a story being killed by sunlight was in the 1922 film Nosferatu. In Eureka, sunlight is still awful for vampires, it strips them of their vampiric powers, but it doesn’t do any real damage to them. Sunlight is an issue vampires have to deal with, but it is far from instant death. That doesn’t mean being a vampire is inherently easy though, because in addition to having all the powers that folkloric vampires have (which is a TON), they also have all the weaknesses, and it is the emphasis on weaknesses that really makes the moment-to-moment playing of a monster PC in Eureka the most interesting. A few of my favorites for vampires are the refusal to enter homes without a direct invitation, and the compulsion to count large numbers of small objects. I think most vampire media these days considers these to be “silly” weaknesses and don’t want to acknowledge them in the lore of their “serious” scary horror vampires, but honestly I think that the “sillier” vampire stuff can still be used to great effect in horror. Imagine knowing that the only reason a vicious killer at your door hasn’t stormed in to rip your throat out is because they’re being polite.

A vampiric investigator will need to work around these weaknesses, and more, in their daily life, all while being sure not to reveal their true nature to their more mortal friends. It’s something that really changes how a character behaves and goes about problem-solving.

For instance, the rest of the party may be able to break into a house no-problem, but the vampire cannot. They need a invitation. That’s a problem. That’s a puzzle. It makes me excited just thinking about it.

This was originally going to be a much longer post where I went into more of the themes of monsters in Eureka, but I have decided that that would be most cohesive as its own post, an upcoming essay titled "How Eureka Handles Disability." So stay tuned for that.

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is kickstarting from right now until May 10th! Back it while you still can!

If you want to try before you buy, you can download a free demo of the prerelease version from our website or our itch.io page!

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Join our TTRPG Book Club At the time of writng this, Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is the current game being played in the book club, and anyone who wants to participate in discussion, but can’t afford to make a contribution, will be given the most updated prerelease version for free! Plus it’s just a great place to discuss and play new TTRPGs you might not be able to otherwise!

We hope to see you there, and that you will help our dreams come true and launch our careers as indie TTRPG developers with a bang by getting us to our base goal and blowing those stretch goals out of the water, and fight back against WotC's monopoly on the entire hobby. Wish us luck.