#rpg

[grendel-menz]

warrior women only want one thing these days (homoerotic bathing) and it’s sick

[tampire]

To Zanarkand

[dungeonmastersdiary]

[videogameoutofcontext]

[einarbaldvin]

Black Knights. Ink on paper.

[chiaerieblossom]

There's a really wonderful middle ground between "GM runs the game from a module" and "GM makes the entire game from scratch and prepares every story event and character and encounter all by themselves" and it's collaborative storytelling and world building.

There are even games that have this as a core premise! It might be "more work" but it's also more payoff; sure, you could say the " video game has no content" but you could also say "my friends and I put this video game together and everything was tailor made to us and we all loved it." Encounters get to be customized to what your party can do, rather than making your party to match whatever the module says is the best kit. The story gets to follow the characters' journeys instead of inevitably leading to the same ending.

And the GM doesn't have to have a higher workload for it! Toss questions at your players, get them involved in the "GM process" *at the table* and they'll be more invested in the game because they're helping to make it. It's a win-win and I'll never go back to doing it any other way.

The more I think on it, and I know this greatly differs from what people have come to expect in recent years, but to me a TTRPG with no adventure modules is like booting up a video game and finding out the devs didn’t make any levels. Like I wanted to play this but I guess we’ll have to wait until someone in the group, who may have never played the game before, spends a not-insignificant amount of their free time in the level-editor throwing something together for us to play.

[vintagerpg]

In the back of Barlowe’s Guide to Fantasy (1996), I believe, there are sketches for a book called Pilgrimage to Hell, which appeared two years later under the title Barlowe’s Inferno. Three years later, a follow-up emerged called Brushfire. All three of these things have had a strange hold on me. The sketches are nightmarish, a big shift from the fairly safe and reasonable creatures in the Fantasy and Extraterrestrial books and an even vaster gulf between them and The Pop-up Book of Star Wars, Barlowe’s first published work. I’ve never come across the actual Hell books, though, only seen their covers and a piece here or there, once in person at the Enchanted show. Until I learned about Psychopomp (2021), that is.

A massive book, it collects just about every piece of Barlowe’s Hell that existed at the time — the contents of Inferno, Brushfire, the art from Barlowe’s two novels about Hell and a gigantic section of character design work (though not the sketches for Pilgrimages, oddly). This vision is both strange and unsettling. I don’t find it horrible, but rather more melancholy than anything. So many of Hell’s inhabitants are petrified to varying degrees, a state I find sadder than upsetting. I also find it so outside my preconceptions of Hell as a medieval torture chamber that it winds up verging on science fiction.

Barlowe is a real master of details, too. The cover alone, a self-portrait, gives you enough amulets and talismans to stare at for an afternoon before you even start trying to parse the background. The city behind is vast, the statues massive, the souls tiny, but is Barlowe a giant or is it a matter of perspective? Psychopomp is rife with these conundrums of scale.

The design section is particularly interesting coming from RPGs — it’s practically a monster manual and sourcebook all in one, and with very few words, at that. Barlowe’s portraits tell stories, but also his subjects’ clothes and ornaments and armor and weapons. No surprise he went on to do production work for del Toro’s Hellboy films.

[celestial-fang]

Hey everyone! This is a grimdark RPG that I worked on with my friends from college :) I did some of the art and miniatures for it, so please check it out and support the project if you are interested!

[videogamesskies]

Fire Emblem Heroes (Mobile) (2017)

[hametsux]

That's how I imagine fantasy dwarves test their equipment

Home Skillet made one heck of a knife there

[videogameoutofcontext]

[mostlyghostie]

A custom D&D print I made for a customer who is the DM of a long running game and wanted a print for each of the players. They sent me a link to a bunch of stuff specific to their game (maps, encounters, in-jokes, characters etc) and I drew this!

It was really enjoyable to do. I’ve put up a listing on my shop as I’ve done a couple of these and enjoyed making them. (Warning: it takes absolutely ages so it’s not cheap unfortunately!)

Links

[anim-ttrpgs]

How to Game Master Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy in Under 15 Minutes

In the past 40 years or so, an increasingly heavy number of responsibilities have been stacked on top of game masters, to the point of often making it more like an entertainment job than playing a game. Eureka does not want you to comply with those expectations, both for your own sanity and because Eureka as a game just does not work with a GM trying to be a “storyteller” or entertainer. (Yes the rules matter.)

This quick start video will walk you through the 3 dos and 97 don’ts of game mastering Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy - and it’s recommended viewing for players too, since it’ll tell them what to expect and what not to expect from a GM.

[writingpluscharismamod]

Midwestern mom barbarian

Barbarians but instead of Entering Rage, they just Get Kinda Miffed

[bybvdlands]

jonathan bailey