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Know what I'll be doing next week.

Game Zine Reactions: RPG Design Zines

Link: https://ndpdesign.itch.io/rpg-design-zine

The RPG Design Zine, and the follow up RPG Design Zine 2, are by Nathan Paoletta (World Wide Wrestling). I backed the second zine on kickstarter this Feb, and the PDF was just delivered yesterday.

They’re cut-and-paste zines about designing TTRPGs. Literally, they’re built with excerpts cut from various books and stuck to the pages haphazardly, with handwritten notes and edges visibly blurred from photocopying. It’s a delightfully DIY aesthetic, and nicely mirrors the way the zines collect guidance and wisdom together about design.

Both zines are worth reading. The first runs through a lot of fundamentals like game ideas, characters, roles, core loops, and mechanics. It’s all in service of helping the reader think through their own games in a practical way. The second zine delves further into some aspects like authority and responsibility, adversity and conflict, scenes and storytelling structure. Each gives you a lot of food for thought, and plenty of examples.

They’re PWYW, so really there’s no excuse not to give them a look if you have even a passing interest in RPG design.

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The range of possibilities for a horror ttrpg campaign in that little phrase...just let your imaginations run wild. Vampire, fairy, some eldritch monstrosity functioning by its own array of rules safe that it is bound by ancient laws of hospitality -- yum!

i really do think that "let me in" is the most potently horrifying phrase ever conceived of. just let me in. that's all you have to do. just invite me inside. show me kindness. trust me. all you have to do is say yes. all you have to do is open the door. the rest is up to me. but you can trust me. have faith. you wouldn't leave me out here. you wouldn't turn away. not you. you aren't cruel. you're a good person. i can see that. i need your help. that's why i'm asking this of you. just let me in. let me in. let me in let me in letmeinletmeinletmein LET ME IN

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Have yet to get to Mothership on the long list of sci-fi horror RPGs I want to run, but I have this clawing suspicion that this'll be a helpful resource and a half.

Mothership Playkit

I've got another Google Sheets Playkit for folks, this time for Mothership!

Mothership is an OSR space-horror game by Tuesday Knight Games, and is inspired by movies like Alien. It has oodles and oodles of interesting modules for you to run for you crew, the most recent of which were submitted to the TripTech Game Jam back in May!

I tried to replicate the way the character sheet guides you through character creation, although I had to upload a second tab just to illustrate how the different skills are connected to each-other. I also included my typical Safety Tools Sheet, which has a link to the game and my bog-standard section of Lines, Veils & Lures!

You can check out the playbook here...

...and you can take a look at my entire playkit library at the link below!

Clicky.

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What a lovely way to put it. As someone who's recently gotten really into ttRPG scholarship, this analogy is going to be such a huge help in explaining to confused non-ttRPG scholars what I'm on about.

Hope your thesis defense went brilliantly!

im preparing to defend my thesis on therapeutically applied ttrpgs tomorrow and im sitting here and pondering ttrpgs and how unique they are as a genre and how you might describe them as texts and objects to someone who's not too familiar

because like ttrpgs (the texts) are very creative and theyre very artistic and inspiring and beautiful and moving and they're also ... instructional manuals. lmao. yknow? theyre Technical Writing by and large unless youre looking at like a lyric game or something. the main purpose of a ttrpg text is to instruct you how to carry out a series of tasks and rituals in order to produce a desired outcome. theyre instructions on how to facilitate a specific experience

and theyre pretty unique in that as a genre (in the writing studies sense of the term - a specific type of creation with shared features, uses, and intentions)

like kind of the only way i can think to compare them to something else is if you had a play script, right

and in the play script you have a description of all the characters. and you had a description of the setting. you know how many acts there are, maybe those acts have titles. the play might give you suggestions on how to design the stage and what props to include. and then as you're flipping through it all the stage directions are there and you know which order things are supposed to happen in

but all the character dialogue is blank

you cant really look at that and say "wow ive been moved by this story" because like. well. the story isn't there yet. it's potentially easy to tell what the intent of the play is - what kind of story it's likely to tell. you can look at the set of characters and reason out what might happen if you put them all together. you might even know some of the actions that are meant to take place in this play because of the stage directions (does someone shoot a gun? do the characters cry? does everyone fall over dead or do they dance?)

but at that point, even though it's creative and maybe even beautiful, this is really mostly an instructional manual. the story hasn't been told yet. there's a lot of room to imagine and generate and create - within the confines of the instructions they've given you. surely this is art, right? but what kind of art is it?

ttrpg texts largely aren't telling a story, they are instructional manuals on how to generate a specific story in the confines of that specific game. beautiful, lovely, creative instructional manuals that are really hard to explain to anyone who hasn't been involved in the experience of generating from one before

but ... yea :) thats the best metaphor i could come up with. thesis defense tomorrow !!

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Obviously the amount of realism you put in a D&D game is entirely up to you (and everyone else at your table), but I will say that if a particular monster is attacking the party because it wants to eat them, it would almost certainly try to run away and look for a less dangerous food source once the players do enough damage to it. I'd say that reducing it to half its max HP should be enough to get it to change its goals from "eating the party" to "running away"

(If I'm a big monster and I take a fireball to the face, the weedy little twink that threw it is not gonna be a good enough meal to justify the risk of that happening again)

Two exceptions to this would be if 1. it can't run away, for whatever reason, or 2. it's already starving... and if it's the latter, consider how that would affect its appearance and abilities. And whether any of the PCs might be able to notice those effects

And if the monster has a motivation other than "want food" then it might operate differently - and might have different conditions for ending the fight. For instance, a monster that's trying to chase the party away from its den will back off once they're far away enough; gods know what might happen if it keeps chasing you and leaves the den unguarded

A monster that's sapient and has Sapient Being Reasons for wanting to kill the party... is a person and thus can potentially be reasoned with. The DC may be high, but it's possible

The only time there wouldn't be a realistic way to get the monster to back off until either it or the party dropped dead is when that monster was specifically created to kill. Maybe kill anything it came across, maybe kill the party specifically, point is that if its main objective is anything else you can get it to back off by fulfilling that objective

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But imagine a player asking you that question in a ttRPG. I'd have a field day with it.

Nancy Willard, from “Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him”

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Filip's Fantastic Locations #001:

(Hi, I'm Filip. If you like it, use it! Just drop it in any game. I tend to go for narrative-first stuff, but I'll drop a few lines at the end as to how this location might play out in mechanical terms.)

The Lucky Well

Aspects:

An old man, Life-Drawer Karrugin, tends to a ring of willow trees overlooking an ancient well, its stonework covered with soft moss. He spends long hours drawing water for anyone who asks.

Rumour is, visitors to Maldara who offer a tribute of coin to the old man see their luck change for the better.

The well's water is the most delicious, coolest, freshest water you've ever recalled tasting.

Secret: Karrugin's home, just next to the Lucky Well, has a secret passage leading deep within the earth. Below it, Karrugin brings the gold to the water sprite that makes the cavernous space beneath the well its home.

NPCs: Life-Drawer Karrugin, human sage.

Motivation: To care for the community and shield the well.

Appearance: A wizened man, short of stature, with a bushy beard, his eyes forever weighed by weariness.

Personality: Gruff, but not unkind. Humble about his place in life, disdainful of those who do not possess humility.

Rumour: No one knows quite how old Karrugin is, not even the oldest visitors of town.

Secret: Life-Drawer Karrugin is a member of the local society of hedge witches, wizards, and various other wisefolk*.

Sprinkle, water-spirit.

Appearance: A teal drop, its form rippling from one outline to another. It often recall

Personality: Playful, forgetful, distracted.

Motivation: Sprinkle likes to help. It cares for people. Wants to make people happy. In fact, the sprite likes helping almost as much as it likes shiny things...and it likes Karrugin most of all because he helps it help people without frightening anyone and he brings it shiny things.

Secret: The existence of the sprite is the big one! No one knows about Sprinkle, and that's how Karrugin and the water-spirit like it, due to some wretched experiences from long ago.

How does drinking water from the Lucky Well work?

A few examples:

D&D 5e (and any other modern d20 game such as Shadowdark):

The simplest way to go about a place like this is, you can give your players a Heroic Inspiration. Everyone loves an advantage, right?

If you'd like to underline the "good luck" nature of drinking from the well, you might instead choose to riff on the Portent roll, and decide to give your players a high dice roll to use in lieu of a bad dice roll later in the session. How about a 15?

Resistance games (Heart, Spire) or Powered by the Apocalypse:

After you invite your players to give you a roll, let them choose to instead take a mixed success one time after having sampled the Lucky Well.

The One Ring (though you'd need to tweak the lore a bit, perhaps):

The next time the characters roll on the Journey tables, let each of them roll with advantage.

* Inspired by M.T. Black's Wand & Robe Society from one of the appendices of his Iskander Adventures Vol. 01.

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The "Aspect" structure is inspired by Sly Flourish's excellent Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, one of the quintessential books any and every referee should read to make their lives easier.

Art attribution: Hanging over the Dark Pool by Alphonse de Neuville, 1862 from OldBookIllustrations.

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My players know that no matter how cheery the beginning of a campaign, no matter how light and fun and--dare I say it--comedic the first half dozen sessions or so look like, I will eventually lead them down despair and oblivion.

It's not because I don't love all those things. It's because the darkness pours out from my black little heart no matter what I do to stave it off.

And I love it to bits. I love the call of the dark, the way that it tests the characters in the game-world, what it can teach us about human nature. About handling anxiety and fear and loss and so many other negative facets of the human condition.

Solo TTRPG Realization: it's grimdark because I am.

In my Micro RPG-R session today, I realized that I'm not actually playing a high-fantasy game of discovery and wonder infused with the joy of pure creativity. Rather, I suddenly understood that I'm playing a game of grim and gritty survival horror that actually functions as a symbolic theater for the vast ocean of anxiety constantly seeping into my consciousness.

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About This Blog...

Hi, hello, I love ttRPGs, don't you?

I've been running them for about ten years now, for several groups since COVID. Online, in person, a mix of the two. It brings me such a joy to bring people to the hobby.

But it's not quite enough. None of the people I play with are as enthusiastic as I am. They don't have the interest to engage with RPGs the way I want to - and that's perfectly alright! It goes without saying that the Game Master-type figure is often the

That said, I figure that maybe it's time to take the plunge and try to connect with others who feel about ttRPGs as I do. Who want to engage with so much more than the big names, who are willing to dig into weird mechanics or engage with some fun worldbuilding idea that crosses their path at two in the morning; or even just someone who'll see me drop a fun location and think to themselves, "Hey, that's neat, I'll put this in my own game."

I'll be writing about large indie RPGs like Heart: The City Beneath (my sheila), Spire: The City Must Fall (embrace anarchism, tear down the town) and DIE: The RPG by Kieron Gillen (don't mean to toot my own horn, but I wrote a blog post elsewhere once and Mr. Gillen himself reposted it, and ain't that nice?!). Many Free League ones, too, I love those, and the titles coming out of Darrington Press (though, idiotically, I didn't pre-order a copy of Daggerheart, which I will eternally be tormented about).

There's no escaping D&D, either, and I do sometimes have opinions about it: those will appear occasionally.

What I hope to do here is engage with the smaller titles, too, alongside all the bigger ones I've played and loved like The One Ring, Alien, Dragonbane (and half a dozen RPGs by Free League, who very rarely miss, don't they?). I want to find bizarre, unhinged rules that will have me laugh out loud in disbelief at the nerve or sheer ingenuity at display.

And I hope to make new friends. That would be a treat.

There you have it. If this sounds good and fun and what-have-you, stick around. Say hi. I hope you have a grand ol' time here.

This, by-the-by, is Doughie the dough golem. His bark is worse than his bite, and he is so, so sour about it.