dark-dungeons

[dark-dungeons]

Part of the sleight of hand that makes people think D&D can do everything is surely the fact that a lot of people see the genre of D&D as "generic fantasy" (a patently ridiculous notion once you realize how nongeneric and idiosyncratic D&D's flavor of fantasy is). People sort of understand that while Guardians of the Galaxy and The Expanse and Star Trek and Starship Troopers are all, broadly, science fiction, they occupy such different spaces within the broader genre of science fiction that they should not be treated as interchangeable and equivalent to each other. Yet when it comes to fantasy RPGs many people consider D&D a generic template, onto whose very specific type of fantasy you can just project any other fantasy property.

It's a bit like. Imagine an actual play podcast wanted to do a science fiction season in their own universe and what they ended up using was a fan hack of D&D 5e for Star Wars, right? It wouldn't just be ridiculous because of the dissonance between D&D's systems with the type of narrative being produced, but also because Star Wars is a very specific type of science fiction. People would obviously see the absurdity and remark on it and no one would actually do this, right?

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If I see another youtube video reviewing a ttrpg for its ability to "make your DnD game better" I swear to god I am going to start setting things on fire.

[dark-dungeons]

A far right Xtian extremist group in Aotearoa New Zealand has harassed and attacked multiple queer events as our country goes into its pride seasons.

A few of us have banded together to make an itch bundle to help fundraise for much needed money for security for pride events, so our communities don't have to rely on cops to protect us.

Get cool games here and help keep queer community events safe at the same time:

[dark-dungeons]

Reblog to Save a Life

I have talked about it before, but independant artists, and by extension independant TTRPG designers like myself and my team, live and die by their social media presence. We can't afford a lot of advertising, if any, and so we rely not only on word-of-mouth advertisement, but also just the good will of our audience. Like another designer @cavegirlpoems put it, we're basically busking, putting our art out for everyone and hoping for voluntary donations, donations which I writing this am reliant on as a disabled designer who can't work a normal job.

If you can't pay, you can still have it for free, and something that can be just as helpful is reblogging the posts of artists like myself. I'll demonstrate with a screenshot from our itch.io page for the open beta for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.

(and on these days, it was only about 6 or 7 people who did the reblogging.)

As you can see, reblogs mean more people see our game, which means more downloads (and sometimes even payments), downloads mean more people play our game and more people see our game in the itch.io algorithm, which means more views, which means more downloads, which means more and so on and so on. But, it all starts with you reblogging our posts, and without that, we're stagnate. It doesn't matter if you have 1,000 followers or 10, your reblog means that our posts reach corners of tumblr that wouldn't have seen it otherwise.

Myself and others are reliant on a 2-second reblog to be able to support ourselves as artists, you and your 10 followers are where it starts.

[dark-dungeons]

Imagine a person who only consumes Batman-related media. That is, they only watch movies and TV shows that have Batman in them, only read books that are novelisations of Batman media, only play licensed Batman video games, and so forth. This is not so absurd an idea; Batman-related media is sufficiently popular, varied and widespread that restricting one's media consumption in this way is completely feasible. However, I trust we can agree that if you actually do this, you will be left with very strange ideas about what popular media looks like.

The next step in this analogy is undestanding that if the only tabletop RPG you're acquainted with is Dungeons & Dragons, you have the same grasp of the tabletop roleplaying hobby as our hypothetical Batman Guy has of popular media.

[dark-dungeons]

the fact that any athlete can be subjected to "gender testing" on a whim because osmeone thinks she is too strong, too fast, just simply Too Good to be a woman is so fucking antifeminist, how can these people not see it?

[dark-dungeons]

You.

Yes you, the one thinking about running a tabletop game but you're tired of running DND and/or you're fed up with Hasbro's bullshit.

You should run Lancer.

Why?

1. MECHS. It's a hard sci-fi far future setting with space magic powered MECHS.

2. Combat is crunchy but there's also a specific rules-light system for narrative roleplay.

3. ONLY THE DM HAS TO BUY ANYTHING. All the player side materials are 100% FREE.

4. Massif press publishes their own incredible character building site called CompCon. You can even import homebrew!

5. Explicitly inclusive setting. Published adventures have gay and trans characters, PoC characters, etc.

6. Incredible community.

[dark-dungeons]

Kiwi RPG Bundle Final Days

There's little time left to grab the Kiwi RPG Week Itch and Drive Thru bundles. Both contain a collection of awesome titles from kiwi creatives, for an 80% saving!

We've got everything from standalone games, to expansions for Mausritter and Monster of the Week. We've got adventures aplenty, and some wonderful maps of Duskvol for Blades in the Dark!

My own work is in both bundles as well. Voidwalkers and The Tower in the Meadow are in the DriveThru bundle while Explorers of the Forever City and Super Unnatural are in the Itch bundle. If there's something here you've been eyeing up, now's a great time to grab it!

[dark-dungeons]

At the link above is a 45 page condensed PDF sample of the upcoming 300+ page Mortasheen TTRPG Core Rulebook. This condensed sample contains just the following:

-The Biotypes (player races)

-The College of Genetics location and its Dean

-The Runoff, a sample adventure locale in Mortasheen City

-An explanation of the "Green Goo" that Mortasheen runs on

-24 monster pages, some of them still never before seen by anyone but the original Kickstarter backers, from a planned final count of 152 monsters.

No gameplay instructions, but monster pages retain their statblocks for you to look at.

All full color artwork in this sample is by myself or by @revretch, while pixel sprites are by hashtag_underscore, beachboogyman, myself, and Pokemon: Quarantine Crystal's @latenightagain !

Any money from this zine-sized digital preview will go partially into everyday survival and partially into improving the print quality of the final book. Its kickstarter print budget is still with me, but only covers a just-average quality for the book's first run! There are still better paper weights and color options to consider! After that print run finishes and ships out to all 2020 backers, that final book will go up for public purchase, maybe by the end of this year (2024) if everything works out.

Boost and spread this if you can; I've worked on Mortasheen as a personal world building project for over twenty years, and the coming RPG release is a project that took multiple people at least fifteen years.

FIND OUT WHAT KIND OF MONSTER IS CALLED "SHARKITECT"

[dark-dungeons]

Hey y'all, sorry for the silence; for anyone worried, I'm alive and doing just fine! I injured my back, and updating you all slipped out of my brain entirely.

There will be a full progress report by the end of the month, with a list of the estimated release date for, and major changes in, v0.3! I also own the KH games for PC now (it's justified I can use it for research. Probably), so I may do some sort of stream to get more in depth about what's to come.

Thank you all so much for your endless patience!! I am so incredibly excited for you to see what I've been working on 🙏

[dark-dungeons]

A few tabletop RPG creators you might recognise from previous posts on this blog – myself included – are participating in this charity bundle benefiting Medical Aid for Palestinians. The beneficiary has been on-boarded with itch.io, and all proceeds go directly to them without passing through the organisers' hands.

[dark-dungeons]

[dark-dungeons]

"You can run any setting or game in 5e, the DM just has to do a rules overhaul!" This is why your friend goes on social media and complains about being a forever DM.

[dark-dungeons]

Anyway instead of constantly making the world's silliest people mad with my mild criticisms of D&D I'm going to say some positive things... about games besides D&D.

I love the tables in Rolemaster, like you've probably heard this before but the random tables in Rolemaster are basically little story generators.

The system of strings in Monsterhearts is probably one of the best if not the best social mechanic ever.

I love how Errant empowers players with the ability to make actual tactical choices about how their characters move around in places.

I love how weird Troika!'s character options are. I'm playing a weird muck wizard right now. He can cast a spell that literally ties some tongue in knots.

I love the presentation of everything in Break!, it's an absolutely beautiful game and I can't wait for the physical book to arrive so I can show it off to my friends.

I love the investigation point/Eureka! mechanic in Eureka, it ensures that characters will at least have some clues available to them provided they're willing to do the work, also there's so many fun traits that alter the flow of investigation points in fun ways.

[dark-dungeons]

i'll never not be mad that there's technically 'punishments' for not worshipping hard enough in Forgotten Realms because that's not even how polytheistic religions worked, they have psychopomps, you don't have to worship the psychopomps for them to do their job of taking you to your culturally significant afterlife because THAT WAS LITERALLY THEIR JOB. ahhhhHHHHH why diD YOU MAKE THIS SYSTEM

[dark-dungeons]

Also speaking of "5e is universal", like four years ago someone made a 5e supplement for Fire Emblem Three Houses, which is similar enough even if the magic classes don't line up, but. They decided to adapt the "there are objectively real races which have measurably different capabilities" aspect of 5e's rule system. To a setting where (with the exception of a half dozen plot-relevant dragon people) everyone is just human. Which resulted in the team statting up black people with a strength bonus.