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[snakebonesgames]

if people are interested in getting more into ttrpg scholarship and actual academic conversations that are happening around ttrpgs some journals to check out (pared down from a list written by dr evan torner in the generation analog discord) are:

international journal of roleplaying

japanese journal of analog rpg studies

analog game studies

games: research and practice *

journal of roleplaying studies and steam

all journals are open access, meaning you can read them for free, except for the starred one, which is half open access. the two italicized journals are bilingual, the first in japanese and the second in spanish

theres a lot of interesting discussions happening out there that i think would be very enriching to some of the convos happening here, especially in indie ttrpg spaces. so, go forth. read. enjoy

[snakebonesgames]

HUMANS

brief nonsense for flesh home

They're not...normal.

From high in their sky-scraping towers, Elves knew that Humans were NOT normal.

Bipedal, with sentience and culture and communities- everything an Elf was.

But Humans were so disgustingly fragile.

The Miasma, which had left Elves unharmed as long as they remembered, tore Humans cell by cell into a thick, bloody paste resembling nothing. Even without it, no Human had ever broken the hundred year mark.

Weird.

What's weirder is how they adapted without the Elves help.

Grafters, a kind of back-alley doctor, tied tissue from other lifeforms onto Human patients to fill the gaps.

Dragon skin. Griffon feathers. Kobold eyes.

Tied, nerve to nerve, in bunched knots that couldn't relay signal.

Yet...they did.

Weird, in the way their bodies adapted and absorbed, with a gentle gradient forming between foreign and known meat, veins pumping and thrashing into tissue like crazed vultures invading a corpse.

Weird in the way their minds knew what to do; consuming calcite to fuel the dragon fire stomachs, providing tears to the extra eyes stuffed in every new orifice.

Weird, that they survived.

[snakebonesgames]

ive been thinking a lot about MEAT FANTASY, which is what i like to call my little pocket of high fantasy that involves a lot of freaky bio-hacking, limb attaching and tendon snapping. i was thinking recently about an idea for a game, called for now FLESH/HOME.

A long, long time ago, Humans were.

Then the Miasma came, and melted the Humans' cell walls, reducing them to goop. Elves soon followed, led by the trail of miasma, and offered life-saving care to the human race: Globin, the medicine that would resist the Miasma.

Over hundreds of years, Humans evolved around the Globin, dependent on it to survive, and served the Elves who produced it.

Then one day, the Elves said no. Humans didn't deserve it anymore.

Now? Humans are falling apart at a cellular level, and you're a bleeding sack of flesh, fighting your way to the High Tower to find out how to make Globin for yourself, and free yourself.

Anywho. meat fantasy.

[snakebonesgames]

realized while writing that promo post that BXLLET was out of community copies, so just added some more! id highly encourage anyone thinking about buying BXLLET to take a community copy and spend that money on a cool supplement instead. if you want a recommendation, try BXLLET CLIP! its got a bunch of really sick design work from a bunch of friends of mine, and even a lil interview with moi

[snakebonesgames]

HELLPIERCERS Playtest Edition Is Live

HELL IS A PRISON - BREAK ITS BARS

After eons in the inky black, we've peeled back the veil, torn asunder the guards of the scorched gates, and rent open the bars of DIS. HELLPIERCERS first public edition is now live; this edition is near text complete, lacking only a few minor systems, a handful of factions, some late game content and art.

I have no idea how to begin to express how absurdly proud of this titanic work I am. The team I've been working with is magical, the game we've made here is magnificent. And this is the realest it's ever felt.

Lots of work to do, but please check it out and get hyped for the full release and physical edition; coming when it's ready.

[snakebonesgames]

currently seeking aid for me and my brothers, displaced after years of abuse from our parents!

any help financially or through a signal boost is appreciated!!! help a gaggle of queer autistics!!

(ignore the deadname. thats my next big step)

[snakebonesgames]

We're proud 🌈 to present the 4th Queer Games Bundle, with 500 games, TTRPGs, comics, and more from LGBTQ+ creators around the world.

For the price of one AAA game, you can directly support queer artists today. Buy it here for $60 (or $10+):

https://itch.io/b/2506/

[snakebonesgames]

its so scary to put yourself out there but a SINGLE message saying "hi i loved what you made it touched me in some way" makes it all worth it 10000%

[snakebonesgames]

more freaks for KATABASIS

[snakebonesgames]

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.

[snakebonesgames]

fuck tolkein and fuck dnd for being the originator and modern popularizer respectively of the race science tropes that have glued themselves parasitically to the fantasy genre and refuse to come off

[snakebonesgames]

Wrote out a thread on twtr about this and thought maybe I'd share it here too.

I was thinking about how I like the modularity of pf2e runes, but also the specificity of magic weapons & armor Being A Specific Thing, and resolving that into something that's kinda-sorta like an anonymized version of Destiny 2 catalysts.

1. Magic items have a specific feature

2. Increases in power/maybe adds new effects as you bond greater & greater (or just more & more?) Magical Orb Things to it.

3. Remove Magical Orb Things & put them in something else when you want or need to, to suit a tactical need.

I think that, on instinct, i'd go with "greater & greater" Magical Orb Things rather than just shoving an increasingly large number of Item Coupons into them. So you'd have like Grade 1, 2, 3 "glyphs" you could craft from specific pieces of monsters or something.

One key, I think, would be to award something like 50+% more items than glyphs, and stop awarding glyphs entirely at some point.

Kinda generalizing for the thought experiment, but it would be something like:

* People (thinking/spoken) drop magic items. So you get magic items by fighting against villains & lieutenants.

* Monsters (otherworldly/animalistic) enemies drop stuff you can make into Magic Orbz.

To create more sense of ownership over the Orb Thingies, you could make it so that they tier up by being used, rather than being crafted at a given tier. This has the (possible) downside of narrowing the number of high grade Orb Thingies you could get later in the campaign.

That's only a possible downside because it may be an explicitly desirable feature. The Orb Thingies the party has had for ages are the Most Beefed Up, and so late game they have to make potentially engaging choices about which item gets the coveted Grade 5 Orbs & which can make do with less.

🤔idk still thinking this one through

[snakebonesgames]

I made custom card decks for my Monster of the Week game! I ended up laminating them so players can use permanent and dry-erase marker to note advancements, stats, etc. (You can erase Sharpie by writing over it with Expo marker.)

I also have a larger, large-print set for a player with low vision (not pictured).

I'm working on making the Publisher file and PDF available as a template.

[snakebonesgames]

Draconic Reproduction

The first dragons were born from man's fear of the unknown: a dragon would be born slumbering in the heart of a terrible storm whenever it tore apart a village, or would come crashing from the mountaintop when a volcano erupted. As science and magic have progressed, the unknown has been beaten back, and these forms of spontaneous generation have become rarer. As a result, dragons have found new ways to reproduce.

Some dragons practice Budding, where they grow multiple heads from the same shoulders. These heads are new consciousnesses just as brilliant as the original's, and upon being severed will become great winding serpents. Oftentimes, a dragon with more than five or so heads will begin actively seeking out foes to decapitate them, as the bickering and politicking between heads becomes too much to bear.

Dragonblood, when it falls to earth, mixes with the dirt and stone to form kobolds. A single splatter of blood might just make one or two, but a ferocious battle can sometimes give rise to a whole community of kobolds, who very quickly set about getting themselves into trouble. Kobolds don't tend to live longer than a few years, but in the rare case when one manages to molt a hundred or so times they'll become a whole new dragon.

Some dragons collect great glittering hoards of gold, which they use to transmit the Glimmering Curse. Dragonslayers and thieves alike find themselves tempted by such impossible riches, and will attempt to flee with whatever they can carry. The obsession grows roots in their soul, leading them to greater and greater acts of avarice, until eventually they cut the last ties holding them to humanity and instantly erupt with wing and claw and fang.

A rare few dragons still maintain the ancient art of Dreamsong, most closely related to the births of the primordial dragons. With Dreamsong, the dragon appears in a mortal's dreams in a strange and wonderful form, and spends many tender hours with them there. The mortal wakes up remembering little but a warm feeling, but weeks later will stumble upon an egg, half-buried in the earth, from which will hatch a beautiful child with golden slitted eyes.

[snakebonesgames]

YIPPEEEE I LOVE PLAYING TTRPGS WITH MY FRIENDS

[snakebonesgames]

quick thought on ttrpg design

i feel like the ttrpg designer’s mission should be to make something better than the players’ first instinct. you’re never, ever gonna be better than what they come up with after consideration, cuz that’s gonna be tailored to the particular situation and the tastes of the people around the table, but you can make something that helps raise the baseline. give players tools and toys that let them make interesting decisions in the moment. if you’re designing a class, make it so even the most basic character of that class has something interesting going on. if you’re making a monster, have it say something fun about the world. sure, you can give someone +2 to a stat during character creation to match their background, but they already know they can have slightly better stats thanks to their background. give them something they wouldn’t immediately think of.

this is also why i think youve gotta be real careful telling players they can’t do something, or that something they can do doesn’t matter. every time you do that, you’re cutting off space where the players might find something fun. does that mean you shouldn’t ever say no? absolutely fucking not. a lot of my favorite game mechanics are denials, lines in the sand that can’t be crossed, because not crossing them is interesting and meaningful. telling a player they can never return home is cool and impactful. telling a player they can reflavor their spellcasting but those changes aren’t allowed to matter just sucks.

[snakebonesgames]

I decided to make my life harder by making the naming convention of "spells" in Stampede Wasteland some nonsense.

Spells are only accessible to Technoccultists, the "priests" of the setting, so I wanted them to feel liturgical, and kind of opaque.

Anyway, here's the current form of the spell Change Flesh;