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TTRPG recs

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Last posted in 2016 about Breakfast Cult, returned after 8 years to post about Hard Wired Island. This must be what boomers call a "glowed up"

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Hey folks! I'm crowdfunding a reprint of Hard Wired Island, my cyberpunk TTRPG. Backers can get a discounted physical copy or just a PDF!

Hard Wired Island is a retrofuture cyberpunk game, inspired by 90s anime. It's set on a space station orbiting Earth in an alternate 2020 where a meteorite strike supercharged public interest in space exploration. The player characters are regular Grand Cross citizens doing their best to live their everyday lives while fighting for the station's future.

This 400-page game includes:

An easy-to-learn system where social actions and problem-solving skills are at least as important as hacking and getting into fights.

An alternate 2020 setting in an O'Neill cylinder near Earth.

Descriptions of the many locations of Grand Cross, from the busy downtown Voyager Ward to the high-tech parkland of Mariposa to the Agriculture Ring that feeds the station.

Seven Occupations, including the Fixer, the Hacker, and the Influencer, along with a plethora of character options.

Over 100 detailed NPC descriptions, from corporate heavyweights to android crime lords to just regular citizens of an Earth-orbit city.

A flexible mission prep system that allows characters to adapt their plans on the fly without wasting their earlier efforts.

A wealth system that tracks the financial burdens placed on you by the capitalist system you live in.

A cybernetics system that doesn't dehumanize you for installing augments.

A lot of great art from a lot of great artists.

No genAI because we're not gormless hacks.

The game released in 2021 to great reviews. We sold out of print copies long ago and people keep asking us for more, so now's your chance!

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overwatch is fucked up…. imagine if australians were real

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lmao

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Kaiju Crisis: A Fiasco Playset

Back in 2012 I made a Fiasco playset for kaiju movies. Not for being the kaiju, mind you—you’re those people nobody likes because the scene keeps cutting to them instead of the kaiju and explosions.

I decided to tweak it a little and give it a proper PDF treatment, like I did with my Eclipse Phase/Fiasco mashup. So, here it is!

Kaiju Crisis, a Fiasco playset (1.36MB)

Let me know if you try it, I’d love to hear how it went!

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A fun thing to do in Overwatch is just scream dril tweet edits at people all game by @Ettin64

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Breakfast Cult, my Fate Accelerated RPG about cosmic horror and high school drama, is now available on DriveThruRPG! Check it out!

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Somewhere In Noctis-Qianjiao: An Eclipse Phase/Fiasco Playset

So back in 2012, I came up with an Eclipse Phase-themed playset for Fiasco and posted it to RPGnet. This week, I decided to give it a proper PDF treatment while warming up for work.

So, here it is: Somewhere In Noctis-Qianjiao, a Fiasco playset (1.77 MB)

The layout is me jamming Fiasco fonts into an EP fanbook template I was using for something else. I hope it turned out okay!

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with the high quality inspirations that BCult owes to, will we see an annoying mascot character come up

No lie, this almost made it into the core book. It will probably come up in one of the stretch goals!

It’s PROBABLY a dinosaur

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For us time poor, how do you recommend we enjoy danganronpa, anime or game?

Good question! The anime felt kind of rushed to me because they had to compress the entire game into a single season, so you will miss a few Cool Things if you watch it, but if you’re short on time it’ll do.

The game is btter than the anime, but it’s a LOT longer. If time is an issue and you’re fine with Let’s Plays, you might be better off hitting up one like orenronen’s and just reading it when you can: http://lparchive.org/Dangan-Ronpa/

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Hey, so I apologize if this has been posted elsewhere already, but is there an expected release date for Breakfast Cult? I looked around for someplace to buy it but could only find the old Kickstarter. Eager to play it whenever it comes out!

Nothing concrete, yet. The book’s done, but we still need art. I’m going to take a wild, generous, mostly unfounded guess and say that we’ll be able to plug the finished art into the laid-out book and post it around July/August. When it’s up, you should be able to find it on DTRPG (and every major RPG forum because I plan on not shutting the fuck up about it).

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Hi! How well do you think BC would work for running a Persona game?

Good question!

I think it would work well, but first you'd have to think about whether you want to keep the regular setting's magic level: Is occult science public knowledge, is Occultar Academy an occult science school, how well-understood is it, are there occult sciences that don't involve Personas, etc.

If you do run with the basic setting, Personas are one branch of science among many. It can still be a non-public power you use in secret, but your character might still be able to use cybermancy or occultech or the Five Rings or whatever occult science they know.

If you want something more like a typical Persona adventure, you'd have to nix the occult science. That's fine—Occultar becomes a school for exceptional students. Or you could have occult science be something that exists but isn't well known yet, and have Occultar be run by something like the Kirijo Group (in Game Over I'm adding one faction, the Arc Zaibatsu, that could pretty much fill in for them). BCult is set in the late 21st century so you could even set it in modern times and make it like a prequel!

Other than that, you should be good. Ancient Ones could be replaced by/a stand-in for end bosses like Nyarlathotep, Nyx and Izanami, though AOs don't have stats so you might need to whip something up if you want them to be fought directly. Muvians and all the other monsters could also be Personas, probably.

Anyway, that's all story stuff. For mechanics, you'll need to work out how to do Personas in Fate. Personally what I'd do is have each Persona be represented by an aspect or two and a stunt that has something to do with their main power, then have the character use their own approaches to take actions through it. The Persona would also use the character's stress track.

I'd also recommend giving characters a Tarot aspect, maybe even replacing the Talent. Talents are designed to define something important about the character that can provide clues (for example, the sample character Isaac Carver is an Occultech Inventor, so if he's involved you'll see a lot of occultech in the plot). In a Persona game your Arcana is what's important, so I'd swap Talent: Occultech Inventor for something like Arcana: Magician, for example. You could even make more detailed Arcana aspects that zoom in on the character a little, like Magician: The Ladies Will Love My Machines!. 

Talents have a special power—1/scene, you can spend a fate point and invoke your Talent to flip a dice roll (so [+] becomes [-], and vice versa), provided you can explain how you use your Talent to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. If Arcana replaces Talent, your Arcana power would be used when you're doing something that fits your Arcana (so Magician would be using Fire magic, hitting on people and killing your love interest). Or you could drop that power and say your Persona is the power you get instead. Or you could replace a different aspect with your Arcana, whatever. This is all just a suggestion, mind.

Basically, yeah, it's doable. It's something I've been thinking about - a lot of the Summer Survivor stretch goal is Persona-inspired, even, so there's a good chance there'll be alternate rules for a Persona game somewhere in the stretch goal packs. In the meantime, once I put the core book out there you should be able to use that and this post to smash together a Persona game!

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You wore uniforms in school? You're not one of those heathen englishmen, are you?

I'm from Australia! My uniform was pretty much grey pants and a white button-up though, nothing fancy.

I don't know if they do this anywhere else, but here we usually give kids in their last year of primary/high school a special jumper with their name and graduation year and other details on it. Our high school let us customize ours, which was pretty cool and incidentally stopped a lot of complaints about having to wear uniforms to school. It was Pretty Great.

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What was a cool part of the process for designing Breakfast Cult that surprised you?

One of the things I've really enjoyed (despite struggling with it sometimes) is the themes. Breakfast Cult has a few of them going on, but one of the big ones is freedom and choice.

For example: Occultar Academy is a great place to be, but it is also, essentially, a prison. School itself can feel like one if you're in a bad mood - a place where you're forced to put on a uniform and sit around in a room doing what you're doing - but Occultar is more literal. It's out on an island off the coast of fuck-knows-where not for the scenic location, but to keep the students isolated. Out here, a sorcerer-in-training can't hurt anyone.

For some students, it's worse. Newtypes (students with psionic powers, basically) sometimes have to wear badges that mark them as a danger to society. The Foundation conducts routine medical examinations of everyone, and for some people they can get invasive. There's a town on the Island, but it's mostly Foundation families - yours can't move there for "security reasons". And unless you're expelled, you probably won't be allowed to leave.

It sucks, and the Foundation knows it. But they have to do this, they have to make the conscious decision to fuck with the lives of the students, because they're volatile high schoolers and they're learning occult science that has already scarred the world irreparably. Nobody wants to have to build another Neo-Tokyo.

So they do their best. They make the Academy a fun place to be, to keep the students content. They give the Student Council great power (a little too much, actually) to give students who need that sense of power and accomplishment something to do. They encourage clubs and social interaction to keep people distracted. They run psych checks on everyone to try and head off problems before they begin.

Sometimes it's not enough, and the Foundation has to decide if it's worth keeping the student trapped here.

Students who start to think like this have to decide how to cope with it. Do they accept it as a necessary evil? Do they rebel, breaking the little rules that won't get them expelled for some sweet release? Do they not give a shit? Do they give in and start hurting themselves? Or do they hurt the Academy instead, so nobody else will suffer like they did?

(Breakfast Cult: Fun games about high school adventures!)

I pretty much just picked this theme because it's something that resonates with me, but it's made some things surprisingly easy. If I'm writing an NPC and get stuck coming up with ways to make them interesting, for example, I can just think about what's limiting their freedom and how they deal with that. Azumi Kamiyama isn't just a delinquent—she's being blackmailed into working for the Headmaster and chafes constantly against it even as she works against the players. Fong Ho is my go-to villain for Breakfast Cult games right now, and he's compelling because he wants to take that control himself and fuck everybody else.

A lot of things just seemed to click for me when I wrote them in that context, and that was really cool.

Sorry about the :words:!

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Reason #582 why you should be watching Sonic Boom.

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Can you talk some about the changes you had to make to Retrocausality to simplify it over the PAX weekend?

Haha whoops, this one was in the middle of some stupid messages and I never got around to it. ANYWAY:

Most of the rules are the same, but I decided to trim some stuff so I could fit them all on an index card. The first thing to go was Complications - they were personal problems that could force you to draw two cards and choose the worst if the GM decides they'd come up, but they rarely did and they felt unnecessary.

The other thing was changing your time travel specialty so it makes you draw two cards and pick the best one instead of changing what results are successes/crit successes. It's easier to explain, way easier to remember and doesn't need another table.

Everything else is more or less the same. I'll probably put out a draft of the revised rules for the Retrocausality KS later this year.