#IMMORTAL Pop!bat 2: funK.O. (Definitive Edition)

[rathayibacter]

OOPS

ok meme aside this was (almost certainly) not my doing. but hey im an opportunist! buy my stupid funko pop game when itch comes back

[rathayibacter]

sadly not, i think she's a bit too recent. here's her normal statblock though

@rathayibacter is this one in IP!b2:fK.O.(DE)?

[rathayibacter]

Rath's TTRPG Post!

Hey yall, been long enough that I should really write another of these. I'm Rath and I make weird tabletop games! I've got a lot of games already out there, and even more in the oven, so this post exists to help organize them all and give you a jumping-off point if you want to check out my work. Without further ado,

[BXLLET>

BXLLET is a post-apocalyptic cowboy game about the nature of violence. It hands players incredibly lethal characters, then asks those characters to try and find their way in the world. If all you have is a hammer, how do you stop seeking nails?

Every BXLLET character begins with a single bullet on their person, and can always spend a bullet to kill someone. Collecting more bullets unlocks your archetype's unique powers, making you an increasingly imposing threat—and juicy target. However, even as you become bloated with potential violence, you'll find plenty of problems escape easy solutions. Sure, you can always kill, but can you cut out the rot that runs deeper than any individual bandit, warlord, or capitalist? In a world fighting to rebuild itself from disaster, are you a wandering hero, or just a murderous tool of the old age? Can you help build a better future, or are you doomed to haunt its outskirts?

Thanks to two game jams and a whole lot of love, BXLLET also has a ton of additional modules, spilling over with scenarios, archetypes, factions, mechanics, and alternate settings. Here's a big list of them! Check them out, they're fucking incredible.

KATABASIS

KATABASIS is a tactical combat afterlife-crawl, where spirits fight using weapons and armor made of their emotional baggage to try and escape a surreal concrete afterlife. It's all about putting together strange builds to face off against bizarre monsters, all while meeting other stranded spirits and exploring the tangled world you're trapped in. If you delve deep enough, fight hard enough, maybe one day you can find a way to return to life.

KATABASIS is a work in progress, with the full game still a ways off. I'm currently working on the next update, The Highway Down, where players will fight their way across perilous highways tangled through a hanging city. Even so, the game's already packed with characters, equipment, monsters, and maps.

So go! Gather your painful memories, bare your petrified heart, kill the psychopomps and shatter the gates of hell. There might be no escape, but we'd rather die a thousand times more than give up looking.

Disparateum

Disparateum welcomes you to the Named City, a place at the edge of our world and the center of all others. Residents of the Named City wander across the full spectrum of possible worlds, visiting them as one might visit another neighborhood. Like KATABASIS, it's also a work in progress, but already contains pound-for-pound more raw ideas than anything I've ever written. It's a dense, strange, silly, and colorful game, and a gushing love letter to roleplaying in general.

Disparateum is a game for a Knight, a Thief, and a Seer, who explore the Named City in search of adventure and change. Here, shared dreams settle over the city at night; here, our reflections plot revenge from the opposite side of every mirror; here, dragons hold court to debate ownership of stories; here, museum corridors tangle their way through the past and into other histories; here, spiders weave a network of WiFi connections and host dense egg sacs of websites; here, sprawling statue gardens grow beneath our souls. Welcome to the Disparateum. Enjoy your stay.

Unskilled Labor

Unskilled Labor is a game about struggling to get by in the rotting corpse of capitalism. But this time, you have superpowers!

Unfortunately, the superpowers will not let you steal back the time you wasted in dead-end jobs, nor will they let you topple the system and fix everything singlehandedly. But, hey, did you really expect them to? The work to make a better world remains to be done, and maybe now it'll be slightly easier. Manifest a customer service persona to fight your friends' landlord, use perfect timing to escape the cops, coordinate supernaturally disruptive protests of an oil pipeline. Play using resumes as character sheets and calendars as battlemaps. Manage your well-being (as much as you're able), struggle against the tides of Western society, and spit in the face of authority. It's not a glamorous power fantasy, but hopefully it reminds you not to give up the fight.

Charcuterie

Charcuterie is a series of zines, each about 40 pages long, collecting various little experimental games, writings, and doodles. The first two have five ttrpgs each, four being updated versions of games I'd previously released and the fifth being exclusive to the zine. The third is instead a collection of poetry and short stories, though I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a streak of game design through it all anyway.

IMMORTAL Pop!bat 2: funK.O. (Definitive Edition)

Have you ever wanted a miniatures wargame with thirteen thousand seven hundred and ninety-nine unique statblocks? Have you ever wanted to microwave your friend's limited edition metallic blue Batman Funko Pop, but lacked the game mechanical justification to do so? Have you ever wanted to waste an entire paycheck on a terrible idea? IMMORTAL Pop!bat 2: funK.O. (Definitive Edition) has you covered. With two pages of rules and sixteen hundred pages of Pop!batants, with IP!b2:fK.O.(DE) you'll be making terrible life choices in no time.

Stationkeeping

In Stationkeeping, you've inherited a run-down satellite from your late aunt. Slowly you'll patch it up, add new rooms, and fill it with memories. The game's contained entirely on a small stack of handwritten index cards which you can carry around with you, slowly progressing the game by going out of your way to enjoy the little things in your day-to-day life.

And More!

I've got even more stuff over on itch, and I sneak occasional glimpses at my current projects into the #ttrpgs tag here on tumblr. Keep your eyes peeled!

And of course, I'm always happy to chat. If you're ever curious about something I've made or am making, if you enjoyed something or had thoughts on it, if you just wanna say hi, please reach out! Games are my passion, and I love nothing more than to talk with other passionate people. Until then, I'm signing off!

[rathayibacter]

hey yall! im eternally grateful for your patience with me as i quietly tinker with a dozen projects at once, releasing them out of nowhere and seemingly at random. i usually eschew talking too much about my work before it's done, but... oh man, we've just got too much good stuff lined up this year, i can't hold back. without further ado,

Rath's 2025 Release Schedule!

BXLLET is getting a long-awaited kickstarter release! it'll feature plastic minis for the new tactical combat rules, poorly-made custom dice, and the removal of any mention of politics, including the controversial "Conservatives Fuck Off" opening.

Disparateum Act II releases! You'll now be able to venture into exciting new worlds, including the Forgotten Realms, Dominaria, the Kalos region, and Earth-616.

KATABASIS has been scrapped, since it no longer aligns with my beliefs after being saved by our Lord, Jesus Christ. goodbye!

IMMORTAL Pop!bat 2: funK.O. (Definitive Edition) is getting a new edition, //FUNKO: Dream of an Immørtal Age: プラスチックゴミ Eternal Showdown -- 𝕡𝕠𝕡 𝕥𝕠 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕥𝕠𝕡 [ Premium Golden Edition ]. it will launch with an accompanying web app slash NSFW gacha game.

Unskilled Labor is getting an Amazon adaptation!

Charcuterie is no longer a zine collection. It's now a small-press indie publisher, which will spend two years giving small creators a life-changing spotlight before collapsing suddenly and without warning when scandals around unpaid royalties and workplace sexual harassment come to light.

thank you all for accompanying me on this journey, can't wait to see where we go next!

[rathayibacter]

IMMORTAL POP!BAT 2: funK.O. (DEFINITIVE EDITION)

THIRTEEN THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED AND NINETY NINE UNIQUE FUNKO POP STATBLOCKS

ONE THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED AND TWENTY PAGES

COWER BEFORE ME

[rathayibacter]

I was just looking through the list. the people deserve to see 105 "Buy the World a Coke" Can

...

[rathayibacter]

Hi there! Maybe a weird question, but nonetheless: I am (in probably the far far future) planning on making a ttrpg based on source material and posting it on itch.

As the creator of (breathes in) IMMORTAL Pop!bat 2: funK.O. (Definitive Edition), although maybe not in exactly the same boat, did you do anything in order not to step on Funko's toes? Do you know of any other similar projects and what they did? Essentially, do you have any advice for a newcomer to the scene who doesn't want their shit taken down?

Thanks!

this is a really interesting question, thanks for asking!

so with IP!b2:fK.O.(DE), i specifically didnt do anything to avoid potential issues with the Funko brand because nothing would be funnier to me than getting a cease and desist letter from them. hasn't happened yet! and in fact, i guess that's kinda my point. i really don't think you're at risk here, so let's talk about why.

first off, we're small fish! that's not always enough to keep you safe from IP lawyers, Disney did famously go after day cares and Nintendo after all manner of fan games, but even then those are particularly litigious corps, and small businesses and minorly viral video games are much, much more in the zeitgeist than indie ttrpgs. i do know that Tokyo Brain Pop got harassed over its name (here's a breakdown of how that went down), but that's the only modern example i can think of.

second off, we've got a long and storied history of fair-use boundary pushing in the hobby that can serve as really solid templates for what you can get away with. in terms of physical components, IP!b2:fK.O.(DE) has good company in games like Dread or Mobile Frame Zero: Rapid Attack, both of which are played with a specific brand-name toy and tell you as much. in terms of theme, there's endless examples of both highly inspired original games that name-drop their source material (games like Dice Souls, Apocalypse Keys, Masks: A New Generation, MONSTER GUTS, Stand Up!, and Despair Dilemma all wear their inspirations on their sleeves), to the hosts of "The Unofficial ___ TTRPG" pdfs floating around every forum and fandom discord server on earth.

all this is to say, i doubt anything you do is gonna cross over the line, but if you're still worried it doesn't take more than a fresh coat of paint and a clever name to get you well within the safe zone. if you're using physical components, you can always genericise them with a wink and a nudge, though many games don't even bother to do that.

so make something cool, give it your own twist, and drop me a line whenever you're ready to share cuz id love to hear about it! good luck and godspeed.

[rathayibacter]

Just bought my copy of !b2:fK.O.(DE) and I was looking at some blocks. I noticed this one's melee attack was duplicated. Is this a typo or is there some reason for it?

not a typo but a fun statistical improbability! i wonder how many of those are in there. itd be really interesting if a popbatant had duplicate passives or triggers, but there's a lot more variance in those so i think it's pretty unlikely.

[rathayibacter]

okay a few questions about the system. how did you pick the stats, and do they have unique differences or are they just for the abilities? what is the purpose of the types and can I have a full list of them? were the types assigned based on any criteria or were they generated like everything else? what is the full range of stats (lowest I've seen is 0 and highest is 20)

the stats were picked primarily to be funny, and secondarily to be weirdly out of tone with one another. having Charisma, Bloodthirst, and Phrenology in one statblock cracks me the fuck up.

nope, no differences! theyre just used as referents by other effects. i made sure to set it up so that even an ability that gives a stat buff to a stat the Pop!batant doesn't use can still be relevant in a corner case, but its also just funny to me to have some abilities that're godawful and not worth it alongside others that're absurdly busted.

types are the same, there's six of them and they exist purely for effects to key off. they are Clutter, Junk, Detritus, Rubbish, Dreck, and Waste.

as for the range of stats, 0 is the lowest, but i don't actually know what the highest in the game is. in the code id have sections that say "i deal [tiny] damage to an enemy within [small] inches" and then a function would go through and replace each of those with a number in a certain range, but every single number has a small chance to be pushed up a size category one or more times. the highest possible value in the generator is 999, and while i don't think anything actually hit that, im sure there's some high double digit to low triple digit stats in there somewhere.

[rathayibacter]

If you’re still doing Funko stat blocks, I’ve got a #901 70's Bob from Minions 2 that got passed around like a hot potato amongst my friend group until they remembered I have a minion shrine and tracked me down to give it to me.

please show me the minion shrine

[rathayibacter]

To your knowledge, has a game of either version of Mortal Pop!bat ever been played to completion?

Just based on reading the new one, it feels like one of those games that exists mostly in the theoretical realm, like Campaign For North Africa.

its absolutely hilarious to me seeing IMMORTAL POP!bat 2: funK.O. (Definitive Edition) get compared to Campaign for North Africa. thank you

and to my knowledge no, nobody's dared even try to organize a game. probably for the best, given the awful, awful army-building rules, but still. i think id broadly recommend against it, but with the caveat that if you ignore this advice youre obligated to tell me about it

[rathayibacter]

rate my local milk tea shop's squad

a noble and powerful army. 9/10. they will die horribly but the tragedy will live on long after their killers have passed from this world.

[rathayibacter]

[rathayibacter]

the vivec funko pop stat block, perhaps...?

nice range on that one, and a cool opening turn damage buff

[rathayibacter]

may i ask for the stats of laura palmer? specifically “laura palmer in plastic wrap” #447 i know nothing about how these fuckers are organized but this is the worst one i could think of

another very appropriate on-death effect lmao

[rathayibacter]

what are the stats of the only funko pop i own

238 Oryx (Dreck type) Bloodthirst-0 Egregiousness-2 Instability-2 Phrenology-2 Charisma-9 Existential Dread-20 Melee: I deal Pressure damage equal to double my Phrenology to an enemy within 4". Melee: I deal Impact damage equal to double my Bloodthirst to an enemy within 2". Trigger: Whenever a Pop!batant makes a Magic attack, I get +3 Instability until the start of your next turn.

less bloodthirsty than i expected. lotsa dread though!