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My first essay of the year is on @no-road-home's "Stewpot!" I think the game is pretty directly in conversation with D&D, and I talk about how it turns the tables on adventuring tropes, inverting the power dynamic between heroes and NPCs.

Transcript here.

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Dressed to the Neins - Molly pt 3

Here’s a tutorial for my Molly-inspired Eyes of Nein cowl! The pattern’s free and easily adaptable to whatever length suits you best.

Leave the world better (dressed) than you found it 😉

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THEY HAVE NO RIGHT TO BE THIS GOOD

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I might've added the BG3 Art Book to my dnd assets stash

It's got stuff like the 5e players' handbook + 5e’s character sheet, the dm's guide, critical role's explorer's guide to wildmount, baldur's gate and waterdeep city encounters, 101 potions and their effects, volo's guide to monsters, both of Xanathar's guides, a bunch of other encounters, one shots, class builds, and other fun stuff!!

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Ten inessential worldbuilding features for local communities in your fantasy RPG:

A grievance or conflict of interest with a neighbouring community which the community's members feel much more strongly about than the issue's magnitude really warrants

A substance or commodity important to everyday life with no local source, and the complicated and inconvenient arrangement the community has made to obtain it from outside sources

A local practice or custom whose original motivation has been rendered obsolete by changing circumstances, and which is now carried forward out of tradition

Something that's technically illegal, but everyone does it on the sly anyway, with enforcement of its illegality being reserved for people the community's leaders want to mess with for unrelated reasons

An obscure piece of trivia or local history which the community's members regard as obvious and widely known, to the extent of treating outsiders with contempt for revealing their ignorance of it

Some undertaking or realm of achievement in which the community isn't particularly exceptional, but which the community's members believe they're the best around at as a point of civic pride

A mostly harmless thing that nobody talks about because its existence or some facet of its historical context is regarded as an embarrassment to the community

A particular prank that's become traditional to play on visitors to the community, and which occasionally gets taken further than is strictly appropriate

A specific area of the setting's history where what the community's members insist really happened is wildly at odds with the accepted version of events

A genuinely dangerous circumstance that everyone treats with casual disregard because it's always been there, and only a damn fool would actually get hurt by it anyway

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Rolls to Alarm Your Players

Want to spice the game up? Why not try alarming your players for no real reason? Make sure to make a show out of counting the dice before you roll.

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I make DnD character sheet sets and this is one of my Halloween releases <3

This is my affiliate link if you're interested in jazzing up your Halloween campaigns this year!

You can also find me on Etsy inkandclaw.etsy.com

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I scribed all the spells my wizard learned in our last D&D campaign!

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D&D alignment is famously dumb, to the point where in literal decades I've only ever heard it discussed to dump on it or joke about it, but designing esoteric cosmic alignment systems for RPGs is very fun in that it appeals to the nerd's natural delight in taxonomy and mysticism. anyway my favourite one that I ever came up with, which I have yet to deploy in a finished work but still want to, is an alignment trinity that goes like this:

ROCK: associated with moralistic heroes and heroism, personal virtue, romanticism, himbos, babyface wrestlers, beach bodies, unarmed combat or purely cosmetic weapons, doing the simplest or most ethical thing without regard for the consequences, hot-blooded shonen protagonists who are 14, even numbers, the colours red and green

SCISSORS: associated with "bad guys", cunning, pragmatic and ruthless self-interest, heel wrestlers, "edginess"/antiheroics, lethal weapons (especially blades and guns), surprise attacks, lies and betrayal, decisive lateral solutions, the ends justifying the means, odd numbers, the colours black and blue

PAPER: associated with bureaucrats and institutions, "The Man", proceduralism for its own sake, dense codes of law, deciding what to do on the basis of abstract theory, Ayn Rand villains, inconvenient traditions, intellectualism and pseudointellectualism, co-optation by the establishment, art that only makes sense if you know art history, nonsense as distinct from lies, domestication of conflict, non-integers, the colours white and yellow

These form a kind of daoist element phase pattern where one is considered to "beat" the other and things transition according to that pattern, in the expected way.

This hits what I think is a sweet spot for design, where it feels plausibly transcendental in the sense that you can kind of let your eyes unfocus and genuinely imagine that these categories embody deep wisdom about the nature of the world, and it's elegant in that the aesthetics line up with the names of the categories in both metaphorical and literal ways, but it's also just visibly incredibly stupid and a joke, so you can enter into a superposition of taking it seriously within the narrative while considering it stupid and deflating.

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An INFINITE COOK is offering average pay to deliver A LOVE LETTER to A PIRATE STRONGHOLD -or-

A quick combo of two of the random tables in my RPG for making an NPC and a quick, preconstructed contract for the players to complete.

Outside us Nothing is an upcoming, rules-light, statless science fantasy ttrpg about survival and vulnerability in a strange and hostile universe, borrowing from the stylings of Cowboy Bebop, Space Sweepers, Firefly, and The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet currently being written by yours truly. You can find out more about it and talk with other people interested in playing or currently play testing it here: https://discord.gg/Q569jt8htP

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Not to be THAT bitch but

It makes me so sad that Robin Williams died almost a year before the ttrpg renaissance because I can imagine him getting into D&D and being an absolute powerhouse of a player with amazing improv skills

And I’m not just talking about being an absolute agent of chaotic good he would have brought amazing drama too

So many stories of laughter and bitter sweet pain he could have helped weave

He would be a legendary guest player anywhere and I make myself cry every time I think about it

RIP to a legend and a pure soul

He achieved so much and could only have gone higher if only

What could have been

The untold stories

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For anyone wanting to start watching Critical Role but need a softer entry than just “start with campaign 1”:

I recommend 1 of 3 ways

Watch some of the One-Shots (or smaller multi-parters (I have favorites))

Watch Campaign 2

Read the Crit Recaps by Dani Carr before watching each episode of Campaign 3

Obviously starting with Campaign 1 makes ALL the SENSE but it can be a difficult. For a softer entry try the methods above or possibly watch The Legend of Vox Machina on Prime and then start watching campaign 1 around episode 23

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If as a novice game designer you understand nothing else, please understand that writing for a rules-light system doesn't mean you don't need to know basic statistics. I've seen multiple Apocalypse Engine titles whose authors are clearly under the impression that every possible sum of 2d6 is equally probable. I've encountered at least one that included sum-of-2d6 based lookup tables with twelve entries.

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meowth team rocket will go episodes forgetting he himself is a pokemon and his main hobby will be breaking the law, attempting to ruin a childs life, and generally being an asshole and thats cool but then hell curl up on a table to go to sleep and im like OHHH... HES A KITTY.. hes just a little cat. a little kitty cat meow meow meow. mrow

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Everyone loves the Big Damn Heroes moment.

For full context, you can check out all the recordings of The Rise of Balxiros over at KaleiWorks.net!

@kaleidraws

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Ok, so, for once in my life I'll keep this brief. This video is basically the idea that it's easier to make something if you understand what your materials are. Going through the sections to explain what words mean and the mechanics associated with them. Then when you make your character, you'll hopefully understand what's being said in a functional way and have an easier time. This is specifically going through the lens of someone with at least some familiarity with 5e, as I'll be glossing over things that are the same between the two systems. I usually deal in sharing ideas and explaining concepts, but I typically try to make sure even someone brand new who stumbled in will keep up. I'll make videos for new people soon, but this isn't it.

And I'll get back to character sheets in time, but probably with pathfinder? maybe 5e too but we'll see.