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[summerwoodgames]

My #1 recurring thing as an editor is to guide people away from writing shyly and defensively. If you preempt aggression and try defuse it in your writing itself, you are showing your belly. The audience wants blood.

[summerwoodgames]

Sly Robot Games is looking for playbook writers for Plant Girl Game!

Forgot to share here when we posted on Twitter about a week ago.

Plant Girl Game currently has nine playbooks. Sly Robot Games (me + Dominique Dickey) is hiring folks to create an additional six playbooks between Fall 2024 and Fall 2025 for a mixture of public and Patreon release.

The rate is $125 for a ~250 word playbook. We're committed to working with both new and experienced writers; getting outside of our immediate social and professional circles; and flexible timelines to be able to work with folks with busy freelance schedules, who are multiply-marginalized, and/or looking to build their portfolio.

The application is short and open through May 24!

[summerwoodgames]

any ttrpgs for spooky dark boarding school stories? gotham academy, the boarding school: las cumbres, wednesday, that kinda thing?

THEME: Dark Boarding Schools

Hello there, at first I felt like this overlapped with all of my magic school recommendations, but once I did some digging, I realized that there's a lot of big differences! That also means that there was a good number of games I haven't recommended before, so I hope there's something here that fits what you're looking for.

Tangled Blessings, by Cassi Mothwin.

On the eve of your final exam at Brackroot Academy, what mysteries, secrets, dread, and drama will you recall from your last four years of schooling?

Tangled Blessings is a solo journaling or two-player RPG inspired by dark academia media, ghost stories, and graduate school. Featuring a wizarding college, wandering specters, assigned houses, curses, devils’ bargains and more supernatural flavor, Tangled Blessings blends horror and the fantastical to help players craft a story that spans their time at the academy — culminating in one final showdown against their rival.

If your favorite stories ever involved sneaking around an ancient building, uncovering dangerous secrets, studying in a dusty library, practicing spells on the lawn, or making perilous deals with creatures lurking in the darkness… This game is for you.

Tangled Blessings is a game about discovering the dark secrets hidden behind the allure of a secret magical world. You use a tarot deck to determine your character’s placement at the school, the nature of their rival, and the ghosts and creatures that will emerge throughout your years at the school. Each year is represented by a series of card draws, which will represent events that you have to decide how you respond to. If you play this game using the 2-player variant, each of you will play each-other’s rivals, comparing your results to see how the school year affects the both of you. The game culminates in a Final Exam that will determine whether you or or rival comes out on top.

St. Hornbeck, by belsaas.

Welcome to St. Hornbeck College/

Atop a small hill in the woods just outside the small town of Southfield, WI sits a College. Old, copper-rimmed limestone buildings huddle together against the harsh winters, while herds of students wander between them in search of wisdom, kinship and the occasional party. Soon, those herds of students will include you. There are two main reasons for enrolling at St. Hornbeck. Firstly, they have a leading program in the field you want to major in (yes, whatever you may choose). Secondly, there are only a handful of colleges that accept monster-teens in America…

This game relies on traditional teenage tropes to inform your character background, and leans fully into the allegory of monstrosity being a metaphor for young adulthood. Gameplay occurs over a series of scenes, marking various days in the calendar of the school year. In each scene, you can roll for or choose complications related to your monstrosity as a way to invite tension and obstacles for your characters to overcome. If you want to see something that’s a bit darker, you might want to check out this game’s inspiration, by snagging Midnight Oil from Jay Dragon’s Patreon.

Lost Years, by Summerwood Games.

The boarding school in this game is any boarding school, every boarding school. The walls are old stone or red brick, the dormitories are filled with young people going through the agonizing process of becoming themselves, classrooms retrofitted with ceiling tiles and modern lighting.

There are spaces of this school that belong only to us students, sacred rites performed in them that mean nothing to others and everything to us. We smoke cigarettes in the basement, make out in the tack room, make meaningful eye contact across the cricket pitch. I will tell you two truths and a lie: no one can take these years from us, none of us will be the same when we leave, no class will teach us more than we learn from one another. Can you see now which one is the lie? We couldn’t.

Lost Years is a Belonging Outside Belonging game set in a boarding school menaced by a mysterious force that threatens to empty the students of everything that makes them themselves. Meant for 3-5 players, it can be played as a one-shot but is most suited for multi-session play. 

Lost Years looks to be a game that focuses on the emotional highs and lows of being a teenager trying to survive in a strange environment away from the eyes of their parents - but still under the control of some form of authority. Your characters will fill the roles of various tropes from boarding school media, such as the Sporty One, or the Witchy One.

Because this game is BoB, the school itself will fill the foreground, with various locations such as the Attic and the Greenhouse being fleshed out by different players around the table. If you want a game that focuses on the themes of dark academia and how they affect the relationships of these students, you might want to check out Lost Years.

Never & More, by Small Stories.

NEVER & MORE is a quick-play roleplaying game and Edgar Allan Poe-inspired hack of John Harper's Lasers & Feelings.

You are the newest recruits of The Society of Ushers, an occult secret society. Your mission is to prove yourself to your superiors, master the rituals required to move up a rung, and learn how to talk to ravens. Your direct superior and teacher, the Belfry-Devil, has finally deemed you suitable to circulate by yourselves amongst greater society, trusting you to remain faithful to the Ushers in the face of attempted poaching, targeted seduction, and superior parties.

This isn’t necessarily a game about academia, but I think it carries similar elements of learning, dark secrets, and hierarchy. Lasers and Feelings games balance your characters between two qualities; in this case, you are torn between your desire for safety and your hunger for knowledge. You can play this as a one-shot or draw it out if you like, just keep in mind that these types of games usually don’t have resources for character advancement, so your characters won’t gain any new abilities - although whether or not they learn from their mistakes is up to you.

Precarious Prep, by Seaworks.

Welcome to Precarious Prep.

Something dark is going on at Precarious Preparatory School, and one detective - your GM - needs somebody on the inside. In the daytime you'll take classes, get to know the students and faculty, figure out who you can trust. The better you do in class, the faster you'll level up. At night you'll investigate the campus, search for clues, and unlock puzzles. Report your discoveries to the detective to gain points.

Instead of having 6 universal stats, Precarious Prep uses a curriculum - the stats your character takes on are determined by the course load you pick up each trimester. The better you do in classes, the more firepower you’ll have in your investigations. Classes can be fully relevant, partially relevant, or irrelevant to the checks you need to make throughout the game, so coordinate with your team and round out your education with a variety of skills.

Precarious Prep uses something called Discovery Points to indicate how close your students are to revealing what exactly is going on at this preparatory school. Your characters use the things they are learning in class to investigate the mystery, while trying to avoid generating enough suspicion to get them kicked out. Many of the rules strive to generate a number of different gambles that the players can take while trying to gather information - will you do something that increases your chances of success while also increasing your chances of getting expelled? Can you get enough information before the school year ends - or before one of you gets killed?

This game is still in open beta, which means it’s free, but also that it might still have some kinks that need to be worked out. The designer is very eager for feedback, so if you take a look at this game, you might be able to contribute to the final product!

I’d Also Recommend….

The Gardening Club, by Wizard of Ox.

[summerwoodgames]

behind every great ttrpg dev is either gender dysphoria, a weird attitude towards women, trauma, or temporary insanity

[summerwoodgames]

hey unrelated to artz but 3 hours left to get the palestinian relief bundle on itch. you get to help a little bit and get tons of games & other things too

[summerwoodgames]

there's never enough garlic in anything

[summerwoodgames]

Hey everyone, please consider buying the 2024 itch.io Palestinian Relief Bundle- it's 373 games, game-making assets, tabletop roleplaying games, zines, and comics for a minimum of just 8 USD! They have a goal of 100,000 USD, and as of the time I'm writing this post, they have 8 more days to reach it.

Link will be in the reblog!

[summerwoodgames]

hello!! the Palestine Relief Bundle is live!! for $8 you can get a ton of great games while raising money for the PCRF to bring medical aid to children.

my game BOSSGAME is a part of the bundle, plus killer games like Zero Ranger, Meatpunks, and Lucah! please check it out!

[summerwoodgames]

This is a one-page lyric game to me.

[summerwoodgames]

the gregorian calendar is a roleplaying game

[summerwoodgames]

the point of art is not to be great but to make it transparently obvious that there is something wrong with you

[summerwoodgames]

unstoppable force (desire to write) vs immovable object (tired)

[summerwoodgames]

i feel like i’m cursed forever but other than that i’m doing alright

[summerwoodgames]

no. Yourew not allowed to enjoy d&d. ifg you are out there and enojying a game of 5e my elite squad of pbta warriors will crash in yhtough yourt windows and get a mixed success on their roll, allowing them to flawlessly handcuff and arrest you but at the cost of describing to the GM one dream they will never achieve,

[summerwoodgames]

once you realise it you’ll never unrealise it, but it’s fucking insane how prevalent trans girls are in tabletop rpg culture/spaces in real life when you compare that to the supposedly queer big budget live action actual play podcasts that tout themselves for having “trans representation” which in this case seems to refer almost exclusively cafab trans people playing almost exclusively cafab trans characters

[summerwoodgames]

it's essential as a writer to reread your stuff and go DAMN im actually good at this