#GM Core

[pocgamer]

Day One Review: Pathfinder's GM Core & Player Core

Pathfinder is changing. Pathfinder has been on my radar since it first released, and the pocket editions of its first edition have a priority spot on my shelf. The second edition showed evolution, and a willingness at Paizo to directly confront a lot of their game’s baggage. Now they’re making necessary changes again to define their game as theirs, not just a D&D clone. This is the review of the…

[gundamfight]

[wolf-2099]

Juno and The Future are 100% oc-ified canon characters but it IS very funny seeing them vs the characters I technically stole them from

[dragonkid11]

GMS Crisis Core Catalogue is a Lancer third-party supplement created by EsbionArshadow that adds in several extra options for the base GMS catalogue for more weapons, systems, and even frame that can fill in niches that were otherwise missing before to further enhance player starting or late-campaign experience. Featured in the supplement is also Last Train to Paradise, a western-inspired adventure where you play as a wanderer that aid those in need, with a big iron.

[canuckianhawkbi]

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin – chapter 99

“Engaging the enemy in Field E!”

[extremelyaverageartist]

Same artist, same drawing, a few months apart

First one I made like 4-5 months ago and the difference is insane

Also the characters are the players in a campaign I'm GMing with some friends. If you wanna hear about them ask and I will gladly infodump

[gunthermunch]

when i started reading munch i thought i was gunther cause i too am an insufferable prententious little nerd but the more i read it the more i realize i'm actually wolfgang. i aspire to be more of an lilith someday tho.

well lilith is 64 years old (and it took her a long while to reach the point of who she is now) you've got time 🤞

[robotsprinkles]

if bungie are really having so much trouble making new ritual armour sets every year they should just either start adding in armour from d1 (yeah they'd have to do retopo and retexturing and the like but y'know. no need to worry about design and concepting)

or go back to the method they used for character asset creation in D1 (modular construction, assets being made of "Bits" and "Bunches of Bits" made in their mashup and gear manager programs (plugins?)) which according to their 2014 "Building Customizable Characters for Bungie's Destiny" GDC talk allowed them to make "a new piece of helmet content in about 20 minutes"

(yes using the mashup/gm bits and bobs asset creation method would result in a lot of reused and very similar assets with potentially less aesthetic variety but they could probably deal with at least some of that by having a team organise assets by similarity and picking the best one from each group or something)

[dawnleaf37]

the parts are not in full

[angelicjuice]

So like… I didn’t wanna jinx it, but ya girls been at work since 9am and broke 500$ tonight. I’m fucking AMAZED like holy fuck

I love my job and I love that I’m really fucking good at it

[pocgamer]

In Depth: Pathfinder's GM Core

When I did my day one review of the new Pathfinder GM Core and Player Core books, I said that the GM Core deserved its own content. So now it’s time for a deeper dive into this book. Let’s go! Continue reading Untitled

[esleep]

hnng wish my irl tabletop-playing friend group was less married to dnd as their system of choice. a friend of mine sent me a rough draft of some homebrew mechanics he wants to add whenever he starts running his own first campaign, and while i really admire the creativity he's getting the chance to exercise and the effort he's clearly put in, i also really want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him and say "please. play a different game. put this energy into a system that is not actively fighting against what you are trying to accomplish. i beg you." but i tried gently mentioning that as an option and he still really just wants this to be very heavily modified dnd 5e so what can you do. sigh.

[staffatemyblog]

Could you make a fun Pathfinder campaign where the party start as brigands left behind after the conclusion of a war?

Like, I'm thinking about daily adventure prompts' post about bandits, and now I'm wondering if I could get a party interested in being enemies from a recently concluded war who kinda got left behind. Locals don't like them, they may not speak the language, etc.

Is the goal to get back home? Start a new life? Idk. This just popped into my head, so now I'm gonna be gnawing on it for a while

[theresattrpgforthat]

Hello!! Do you know any TTRPGs surrounding translation or languages? 😊 (thanks for all your work btw!!!)

THEME: Language / Translation Games

Hello friend! As someone who studied linguistics in university, I absolutely love talking about all of the funky things languages do! I hope these recommendations tickle your fancy!

Dialect, by Thorny Games.

Dialect is a game about an isolated community, their language, and what it means for that language to be lost. In this game, you’ll tell the story of the Isolation by building their language. New words will come from the fundamental aspects of the community: who they are, what they believe in, and how they respond to a changing world.

Dialect uses a deck of cards to help minimize the amount of choices you have to make in character creation, by dealing three cards to each player and having the players choose one from just those three. You track the change of your language over a series of turns, using prompts to help you navigate the conversations that arise in your community as the world around them changes.

Dialect has been very highly regarded as a game that really delivers on the experience that it promises. The grief that accompanies language death really shines through this game, so if you want to combine the wonder of creation with the pain of losing something so integral to your sense of being, this is the game for you.

Tiny Frog Wizards, by @prokopetz

You have mastered the secret arts of sorcery

The very primordial energies of creation and destruction are yours to wield as you will.

You are two inches tall.

Tiny Frog Wizards is a game about tiny frogs, wielding magic using the power of words. When you want to do something magical, you will roll somewhere between 1-3 dice, and use the values of your rolled dice to determine how the range, magnitude, and control of your magic.

What’s important in terms of this game recommendation is the Control aspect, because how well you are able to wield your magic depends on how many words you are able to use to make things happen! It’s a lot easier to use a spell with precision if you have enough words to detail where you want a magical pen to write, or what you want to throw a tiny magic missile at. Not enough words? Then the GM has license to cause some humorous side effects, or, if you roll poorly enough, cause your spells to really go off the rails.

If you like games where you need to choose your words carefully, Tiny Frog Wizards is worth checking out - especially since it’s in free playtest!

Xenolanguage, by Thorny Games.

Xenolanguage is a tabletop role-playing game about first contact with alien life, messy human relationships and what happens when they mix together.  At its core, you explore your pivotal relationships with others on the mission as you uncover meaning in an alien language. The game gives a nod to soulful sci-fi media like Arrival, Story of Your Life and Contact, but tells its own story. It’s a game for 2-4 players in 3-4 hours.

In Xenolangauge, you play as a group of people bound together through a shared past with unsettled questions. Your task is to understand why the aliens have come and what they are trying to tell us. You will soon discover the key to understanding lies in your memories together.

This is definitely an in-person game, as it is meant to come with a modular channeling board that will provide you with alien symbols that you will use to help you interpret messages. This is more than a game about language, it’s about relationship, shared memories, and connection.

Xenolanguage was kickstarted at the beginning of this year, but you can check out the above link to pre-order the game if this sounds interesting to you!

Star-Spawned, by Penguin King Games.

One unearthly night, a ray of colourless light descended from the stars, and under its warping radiance, creatures unlike any the world has ever seen were born. They do not know the world, and they do not know themselves. Unfortunately for the world, they're quick learners!

Star-Spawned is a GMless, oneshot-oriented tabletop RPG in which you don't know what your own traits do when play begins. The names of each group's stats are randomly generated using morpheme chaining, and characters are created while having absolutely no idea what they mean; figuring that out forms the greater part of play.

Star-Spawned is more about self discovery than it is about language, but the use of morpheme-chaining in character creation is intriguing to me. You will randomly roll three pieces of a word, and then chain them together to create a unique Facet, available to the players as stats. These Facets don’t have a meaning when the game begins - you need to play to find out what they mean. If you like playing around with semantics - the meaning of words - this might be a game for you.

Degenerate Semantics, by Mikael Andersson.

Degenerate Semantics is a role-playing game for 1-5 players and one Game Master (GM). The players will each portray a character who live in Emmaloopen's poverty-stricken lower city. They are young, wild, ambitious, and independent. This way of life is threatened by other factions, and the players will need to have their characters work together to survive and thrive.

In the process of playing the game, the players and GM will define and flesh out a language called Bandethal. A collection of street terms and slang, Bandethal is used both as a way to talk openly about illicit activities without alerting authorities and to establish street cred. The terms are liberally mixed in with plain English, or when the language is mature enough, can be used entirely on its own. The characters' success is in large part based on how proficiently the players wield the language.

A friend of mine ran this game for me three or four years ago, and it’s been sitting in the back of my head ever since. Degenerate Semantics was created for a Game Chef competition in 2014, and has remained in the same state since then. I don’t think there’s any more work being done on it, but the game is there for anyone who wants to give it a go - and while there’s a setting that comes with the game, that setting is highly flexible, depending on what your group is interested in. Our group decided to use a lot of gardening metaphors, and undertook a plant-based heist as our act of rebellion! If you want a game about the power that language can give a tightly-knit group, this is the game for you.

I've Also Recommended...

DROWWORD, by Ursidice.

[sprintingowl]

After The Bomb

There's an official Fallout ttrpg. I've read it. It's okay!

There's also, completely fanmade, After The Bomb.

And I want to put After The Bomb on your radar, because it's very, very good.

ATB uses a simple d20 + stat system, with bonuses from gear and perks factored in. You have a HP track, which burns at both ends from radiation and damage, and also a survival track that breaks pieces of your equipment whenever it depletes. Rolls are player-made, and the system spends a lot of time in that osr headspace where it cares more about the choices the players make than how they built their character. The game's currency is Junk, and you spend it repairing your gear and crafting consumables.

Levelling up is surprisingly rich with choice, and fights and obstacles are tense and deadly. Again, the core mechanics are simple, but they use this simplicity to push complex choices towards the players. You see a piece of valuable Junk floating in a bog. Do you go in and take a point of radiation? Risk coming back later? Waste your own Junk fashioning a contraption to try and get it out?

After The Bomb comes with its own sandbox campaign set in Minnesota, plus a *lot* of GM support for stuff like factions, monsters, and basebuilding.

It's a gem in our current pre-apocalypse, and I strongly recommend giving it a look.

[afterlifetango]

Linette’s profile is finally relatively complete. Now i just need icons for her.