dungeons-and-damnit

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A vampire is showing you a video on her iPhone called “5 SCARY GHOST ATTACKS to Watch at NIGHT,” making you go through the whole thing and watching you really closely for a reaction especially when it gets to #4, grinning with her fangs out. The video narrator is explaining that four ghost hunters were enveloped in a black fog and that deep cuts and abrasions started to appear on their skin. Most of the bloody details are obnoxiously blurred.

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Death Bed might end up having weirder women than Eureka

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Halfbody commission for June // Thank you again//

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You know what, I think enough time has passed and the fandom has calmed down enough, I can finally give my genuine thoughts and feelings about Imogen and Laudna as a ship.

I put it below a keep reading because it got kind of long, and also I'm not super confident about writing meta

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Still vaguely catching up with my Mighty Nein rewatch, and thinking about just how HUGE getting a lead box to shield the Beacon was. Like. Who knows how many big names from the Cerberus Assembly and the Dynasty would've been searching for that fucker when they knew it had been located and/or stolen again, only for it to have suddenly disappeared off the face of Exandria

You pop an airtag (Divination/Locate Object/Scrying/etc.) on the Declaration of Independence, because you know it's important as shit, and maybe you can use it to manipulate whichever side of the war you're on, and you've been tracking it, only to see it's been picked up by Agent 47 who is currently smuggling it out of an active aggravated attack combat zone; then suddenly. Your tag goes dead. That shit is FRIED. You lost the Holy Grail and have to assume it's been destroyed, and you now have to figure out how to proceed now that your one piece of leverage is gone. How are you gonna tell your boss about this

And actually, it's just sitting in a lead box in a pink backpack, being used as a really fancy once-a-day bong rip of possibilty 😌

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The Crips for eSims for Gaza Bundle is live!!

Thanks to the generous contributions of over 175 developers and artists, we’ve got over 200 digital games, zines, TTRPGs, and other projects and assets to offer bundle buyers. 

Every $16 purchase covers the cost of an eSim activation to help connect Palestinians in the occupied territories and beyond. On sale April 28-May 20!

🇵🇸✊♥️

PLEASE SHARE WIDELY!

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NEW DND CHARACTER ALERT. (Been a hot minute since I've drawn one of my own characters, huh?) We're doing a game that's vaguely Tomb of Annihilation-y with some Saltmarsh thrown in, so I made a TRITON, BABEY! Her name is Brackish (Kish for short) and she's a Dweller in the Deep Warlock. 😌

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Another worldbuilding application of the "two layer rule": To create a culture while avoiding The Planet Of Hats (the thing where a people only have one thing going for them, like "everyone wears a silly hat"): You only need two hats.

Try picking two random flat culture ideas and combine them, see how they interact. Let's say taking the Proud Warrior Race - people who are all about glory in battle and feats of strength, whose songs and ballads are about heroes in battle and whose education consists of combat and military tactics. Throw in another element: Living in diaspora. Suddenly you've got a whole more interesting dynamic going on - how did a people like this end up cast out of their old native land? How do they feel about it? How do they make a living now - as guards, mercenaries? How do their non-combatants live? Were they always warrior people, or did they become fighters out of necessity to fend for themselves in the lands of strangers? How do the peoples of these lands regard them?

Like I'm not shitting, it's literally that easy. You can avoid writing an one-dimensional culture just by adding another equally flat element, and the third dimension appears on its own just like that. And while one of the features can be location/climate, you can also combine two of those with each other.

Let's take a pretty standard Fantasy Race Biome: The forest people. Their job is the forest. They live there, hunt there, forage there, they have an obnoxious amount of sayings that somehow refer to trees, woods, or forests. Very high chance of being elves. And then a second common stock Fantasy Biome People: The Grim Cold North. Everything is bleak and grim up there. People are hardy and harsh, "frostbite because the climate hates you" and "being stabbed because your neighbour hates you" are the most common causes of death. People are either completely humourless or have a horrifyingly dark, morbid sense of humour. They might find it funny that you genuinely can't tell which one.

Now combine them: Grim Cold Bleak Forest People. The summer lasts about 15 minutes and these people know every single type of berry, mushroom and herb that's edible in any fathomable way. You're not sure if they're joking about occasionally resorting to eating tree bark to survive the long dark winter. Not a warrior people, but very skilled in disappearing into the forest and picking off would-be invaders one by one. Once they fuck off into the woods you won't find them unless they want to be found.

You know, Finland.

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Hey! The Crips for eSims for Gaza bundle is ✨live✨, so if you want a bunch of pc games (including 6 steam keys, most drm-free), some paper-and-pen ttrpgs, some books and some cool zines, check out the bundle yourself while supporting a good cause. And if you don't have the funds, that's okay. You can share it so it reaches more people!

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While I rail against the idea of GM prep being like "preparing a nice story for your players that their characters can be slotted into and also as a GM it's your duty to integrate the characters' backstories into your prep or else you're a bad GM" because it often results in linear narratives with very little room for player agency but also it's an unhealthy dynamic to expect a GM to weave together a coherent narrative out of the ideas provided by multiple people who might have completely different ideas about what the game should even look like. But there's also more to the practical angle than "it's hard to prep:"

If a player whose character is deeply integrated into the narrative of the campaign suddenly needs to leave the campaign you've left yourself with a narrative void and unlike in Hollywood you can't just go recasting that shit. No one's gonna buy into this new Goblin Steve, his new player can't even do his voice properly.

By prepping games like this you're really setting your whole campaign up for failure in most cases. How about: the story isn't something the players write for homework before the campaign, right? The NPCs that matter are not authored connections your players gave you as assigned reading before the game even started. The story is whatever happens during sessions and the connections that matter are those that characters build during play.

There is of course some nuance to this but like: we see so much talk about GMs being expected to integrate player character backstories into their prep (and then their players not being engaged anyway because they felt the GM did it "wrong") and about how GMs are burning out and it's a thankless job and like. Could there perhaps be a solution?

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it is, i think, symptomatic of the way larian has built this brand: bg3 was always marketed as being mature (read: sexual), and that was one of the big draws for players - myself included! especially as media pulls more towards extremes, with mainstream video games starting to get increasingly graphically sexual, graphically violent, and the vogue for 'grey morality' becomes the norm, those boundaries get pushed, and it becomes more and more of a selling point.

larian obviously focused on this, along with the How Do You Do, Fellow Kids brand, the increased accessibility of game devs on twitter, and adopted it heavily into their marketing strategy, and are now pretty reliant on the horny gamer crowd for a lot of their audience, and more importantly, they're doing this on purpose.

which is how you end up in situations like this.

characters (white men) the players want to fuck get centred: they get updates, they get more content, they get favoured. halsin's gone from a side character in EA to a half-fledged romance option, to a full romance option: he shows up in the promotional material, is larian's poster boy for the sex scenes, he gets more content with every update.

now gortash gets more heavily implied situationship lines with the dark urge, because players are horny for him. nevermind that some people aren't playing that way, or that he was originally set up to be a lower-level antagonist; nevermind that if the durge's storyline needed expansion, it should've been with orin and sarevok and bhaal, or that it muddies the writing for the rest of gortash's arc + characterisation: people want to fuck him, so it gets put in the game. it's not even to do with karlach, whose quest so desperately needs expansion! it's specifically catering to the people who want their character to have a Relationship with the slaver, because they're either not interested in or not able to focus on strengthening the weak spots in the narrative: they're just doing things that will net the 'my favourite dating sim' people lmfao.

meanwhile, literal main character wyll gets his quest demoted to a subquest, doesn't get bugfixes, doesn't get a single unique romance greeting after 6 patches and months of requests. he's not a Horny character, so he doesn't get the focus: he's not a player favourite, so he gets nothing. it's just... so unbelievably, indisputably racist, and it's incredibly grim and disappointing to watch it happen in real-time.

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How naive I was in that first campaign...

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we need to talk abt the power scaling problem in playing pretend :/

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We Are An Exclusively Trans TTRPG VTuber Group

Our Mission

In the face of fascism our all trans group feels that it's more important than ever to create trans content for trans people, by trans people. We know we are putting a target on our backs by being so unapologetically our selves, but we want to create space for our community despite that. The only way we can get through what's happening is by not stopping in the face of fear and creating in spite of it.

Our Content

We release weekly episodes of TTRPG games that always have our world perspective that is intrinsically tied to our transness in them. Weather its the characters we are playing that are trans, or just us as trans players influencing the way we construct our worlds from a trans perspective. All of our group is made up of writers so we also have lot's of experience creating interesting and dynamic character arks and vivid worlds.

Our Members

Kat is our resident GM and bright pink catgirl, the mastermind of our stories, and she uses She/Her pronouns.

Mitha is our resident editor and recap writer, the furry that runs the internet, they use She/They pronouns.

Azure is our resident TikTok/Shorts/Reels maker and who's gender is... well, what is a suit of armor piloted by raccoons anyway? He uses He/They Pronouns.

Silver is our resident graphic designer and project manager/creative director, a he/him/hoe vampire him self, and he uses He/Him pronouns.

Our Current Running Game

We are currently running a Vampire the Masquerade game with some inspiration for the history of the world coming from the the Montreal by Night book. Ours is set in 2099, the world in many ways is not so different, and in others, is unrecognizable as you see Montreal from the eyes of creatures of the night.

The story begins on the night of the Pride Parade in Montreal, where Christina, played by our member Mitha, is turned against her will. Meanwhile Feng, played by our member Silver, a member of the Triad and a Vampire him self is sent to clean up the breach in the masquerade made by the attack on Christina. Tony, played by our member Azure, was the first vampire however to come across Christina, and being who he is... only made things worse despite his efforts.

Find free weekly episode recaps, character sheets, and more!: patreon.com/c/TransXPTTRPG

Watch our past episodes you might have missed!: youtube.com/@TransXPTTRPG

Watch our episodes when they come out and talk with the crew!: twitch.tv/transxpttrpg

Find us everywhere els!: transxpttrpg.carrd.co/

Our Hashtags

#transxpttrpg - All of our content

#bloodofthetriad2099 - All about our Vampire the Masquerade series

#transxpfanart - Any fan art made by the lovely community

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I know we indie ttrpg snobs on this website kinda collectively moved on from getting mad at people using "D&D" as a generic term for all ttrpgs like two years ago in favor of having more productive discussions but. Oh boy. Boy oh boy.

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You know how warlocks are always having some sort of issues with their patrons? Like they find themselves having to do things they might not like because Satan told them to, or they slowly go mad from learning too much about Cthulhu. People do this even though there's no mechanical incentive to do so, and I think that's okay! I in fact encourage that, because I think it's fun when you care about your class's fiction.

But what if it was mechanically supported? As much issue as I have with the WItch kit from the Complete Wizard's Handbook, it does have a mechanic for the witch's struggles with their patron. It's not really a story hook, just an occasional penalty, but it still tells a story through the game's mechanics.

This concept was later expanded on Player's Option: Spells & Magic. The optional rules for witches and warlocks gave them mechanics that had previously been introduced in the Ravenloft setting, where the Dark Powers sought to corrupt those who committed evil. But here you instead roll every time you cast a spell, with a minimum 1% chance of attracting the attention of your patron, gradually corrupting the character.

They used to write more story into classes, even back in the 3e days. I miss that.