#Numenera Adventures

[honourablejester]

Numenera Setting Notes: Points of Interest Part IV

Cracking open the Ninth World Guidebook for the weird and wonderful areas beyond the Steadfast and the Beyond. We’re heading south into the tundra of the Frozen South beyond the Southern Wall today.

Part IV: The Frozen South (Ninth World Guidebook)

Just the opening description of the Frozen South as an area makes me happy, but I really vibe with tundra and polar regions in fantasy. I have a thing with ice magic, with the polar night and polar day, with the calling ice. So, you know.

I also like two general setting details for the Frozen South: there’s a kind of common madness that comes from the silence and the isolation called ‘the evanescence’, which can result in someone completely isolating themselves to death, OR disassociating completely from humanity and becoming blankly murderous. Which is a cool background thing to have going. And then there’s the religion of the area, the Frozen South believes in thousands of ice gods called the Nacrescenti, who are so numerous that some people believe that every person in the Frozen South has their own Nacrescenti that watches over them. The Nacrescenti festival is called Thousand Eve and it’s on the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. There’s no organised Nacrescenti religion, because a person’s relationship with the Nacrescenti/their Nacrescenti is private and personal. And, again, I’m vibing with this a lot. Heh.

The Seraph Tempest, in the Southern Wall. This is written as a little mini adventure, and it’s lovely. The Seraph Tempest is a sentient ship/crawler-sized war machine lost in the honeycomb of caves riddling the vast artificial glacier of the Southern Wall. It’s being sought by a lot of people, including the ice automatons of the Southern Wall, who’d like to use it to expand the Wall, but also by others, because war machine. But the Seraph itself is sentient, and might have its own opinions, if allowed. I have immediate opinions here. But this is a lovely little mini-adventure.

The Spheres of the Urulivan Plain. Bright blue ‘glass’ spheres that mysteriously move around the ice plain when no-one’s looking, and make things very weird in their vicinity. Aging young creatures to maturity inside days, restoring spoiled food, disintegrating glass, making you lose the ability to say your own name, yeeting random objects into space, altering your eyesight, etc. They’re just weird, and people on the plains tend to avoid them. I would immediately try and poke one, because I’m like that.

The Turral, in Arxil, the Frozen City. AKA The Magnetic Peak. It’s an artificial synth-and-metal double peaked mountain that the city is built across that increases magnetism the further into you go, until you reach the centre where magnetism stops working altogether, but if you bring a level 6 or higher magnet into the inner chamber, you rip a hole through to another universe. Because naturally. The hole lasts an hour per level of magnet, and you lose the magnet. In theory this is controllable, but there’s no known way to pick which alternate universe you rip through to. The city mostly ignores this and lets it be to do its own thing. Despite the fact that the city fully does have an academy dedicated to salvaging and understanding numenera, as the whole city is built on a previous prior-world city, but let’s all leave the universe-ripping magnetic chamber alone, hmm? (Sidenote: the Academy of Antiquity itself is also pretty cool, with entrenched rivalries between the salvagers and the scientists. Cool place to set out from on adventures).

Dythe, on the western coast, one of the few towns on the coastal side of the lethal Matemal Mountains. It doesn’t have anything particularly notable besides its paralyzed but incredibly psychic mayor who runs the town via her family, but I just like the place. It’s a stubborn little fishing town on the lethally stormy coast of a lethally frozen mountain range, and it’s just chilling out here, still kicking. It does have a mysterious obelisk lying on its side just off shore, acting sort of like a barrier island, that is the exact twin of the Amber Monolith back in the Steadfast, and no one’s successfully made it into this one, so there is that. But I just like the town itself.

The Invisible Vale. Which is not invisible, but is defended by an invisible shield, which gives the vale a temperate climate compared to the tundra outside. The shield may be fading, but at a rate that’ll still leave the Vale warmer than everything around it for millennia yet. And it is, of course, run by a tyrant. Darcadian Everlar runs the city of Cyanachor in the centre of the Vale, a city of art and beauty, and seeks to eventually conquer all of the Frozen Lands. He’s helped by the fact that Cyanachor has ancient matter-replication devices called ‘Creation Pits’ in the caves beneath it that can supply endless raw materials for him. I’m not sure what it is specifically, but I’m getting powerful pulp SF, planetary romance, Flash Gordon sort of vibes from this place? Very ‘The Fantastic Journey’. Which I enjoy! Also, they have a deathly rivalry with the military of Arxil, above, owing to a previous assassination-and-takeover attempt, and I’m here for it.

The City of Smoke in Suruliath, the even-more-frigid tundra in the very south of the Frozen South. Which, sidenote, has ‘burst events’ where lethal crystal shards randomly explode upwards out of the permafrost, which is cool, that is a thing that happens here. But the City of Smoke is a vast flying city of smooth crystalline synth in a cloud of ‘smoke’. And if you fly up to it and attempt to enter/land on it, sometimes it’s solid, and sometimes it turns back to smoke. Or rather, back to nano-particles. It’s a pristine prior-world ruin, a whole city, interiors and numenera and artefacts and all, and a whole mirage of a city at the same time, that occasionally just completely discorporates itself on a whim and reconstitutes itself again later.

Moird, in Suruliath, on the coast of the Lucid Sea. For much the same reason as Dythe above, I just like polar coastal fishing towns, as a setting. IDK? Moird is on the coast of the Lucid Sea, also called the Last Sea, the last stretch of water between the continent and the South Pole. The Lucid Sea is almost always frozen over, but parts of it are clear, like Moird’s Erthan Bay, and the deeper central Reaches. And the people of Moird go spear fishing and whale hunting in razorboats, prior world ships that are basically floating heated ice knives that can cut through pack ice. For bonus fun points, in the Weird of the Frozen South, there’s a note that there’s a slumped 100ft tall humanoid frozen in the ice of the Lucid Sea, and it may be still alive.

I don’t know what it is about polar settings in fantasy? Well, science fantasy in this case. Or science fiction, too, with Starfinder and Verces’ night side. I just like frozen settings when there’s mystery and horror and magic about. Maybe I read/watched the Snow Queen too young? Or, again, I can probably blame some of it on my dad reading us Robert W. Service’s The Cremation of Sam McGee as a bed time story as kids. That probably shapes a person, maybe. Heh. But yes. I very much enjoy the Frozen South in Numenera. A very excellent piece of the setting!

[theresattrpgforthat]

How do you know so many games to recommend? I feel like I’m always scrambling to find games on a certain topic, and itchio’s search function is tricky at best.

Hello friend! I have a few methods, and I think they all tie back to my pretty big obsession with games. Let's take a trip through my indie RPG journey, because this is kind of the result of approximately 5 years of interest.

DriveThru RPG

When I first got into TTRPGs, I didn't have a lot of money (let's be real, even right now I don't really have that much spending money) but I did have a little more time, so I combed the net for free tabletop games. I got acquainted with DriveThruRPG first, and I took everything I could that was free and put it into little folders on my computer. Since then I've realized that I can access my folders through the DriveThru App, so there's much less on my computer and more just waiting to be downloaded and perused.

I also get notifications from DriveThru about deals of the day, and occasionally I just browse the storefront to see if anything catches my eye. DriveThru's navigation system is not great either, but one of my friends does some of his own sifting and has directed me to some real gems. I learned about Pandora London, Swords of the Serpentine, and Savage Worlds this way.

Podcasts

I love TTRPG podcasts but I didn't want to listen to D&D podcasts. I found Fandible first, when I was looking for a play through of Changeling: The Lost. I walk to work and I also like to listen to podcasts when I clean my house, so I usually get through one episode a day. I usually look for podcasts that play in multiple systems, although you'll see a number of podcasts here that focus on just one non-D&D system. Here's a few that I recommend:

Fandible: Just a group of friends who love playing games together. All of them are GMs, and they all GM different games. Jesus is the most adventurous, and is constantly bringing new games to the table. I found Slugblaster, Numenera, and Unhallowed Metropolis through them!

Character Creation Cast: I started listening to CCC last year, thanks to a recommendation from a friend, but I fell in love quick. The hosts focus only on the character creation aspect of games, and they also spend time talking to other gamers about the parts of play that each guest feels is important. I found out about Descent into Midnight, Nova, and Blue Planet this way.

The Gauntlet Podcast: This Podcast no longer releases episodes but I learned so much about safe game play through this podcast. Once a month the hosts would sit down with guests and highlight a game of the month for each of them. Often they would talk about games that they adored even before those games made it to publication. I found out about Brinkwood, Apocalypse Keys, and Poutine through this podcast. I miss it so very much.

I would also recommend My First Dungeon, Party of One Podcast, The Eternity Archives, One Shot, and +1 Forward for exposure to many indie games.

Itch.io

I didn't interact much with Itch.io at first - I thought it was mostly for indie video games and generators - but when the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality came out I went feral. I sorted through each and every page of games in that bundle and put all of the TTRPGs into folders - which I am still refining to this day. As you can see, I get very excited whenever a big bundle comes out, as it gives me a lot of exposure to games that people have made.

I also sort through the most recent additions on Itch every one or two days. I usually categorize my folders via genre and rules system, but I'm currently in the process of curating folders for duet and epistolary games. If I think a tag will help me, I usually use https://itch.io/physical-games/tag-[tag] and then insert what I'm looking for in the [tag]. It doesn't get everything but it gets me started.

Often if a game was entered in a Game Jam, there's a tab that you can click to see other entries in that same Jam. So occasionally I'll browse Game Jams for other games that I might find interesting. And for games that I know that I'm personally passionate about, I have a Games that Intrigue Me folder to flip through for when I'm choosing which game to play, or if I want to spotlight a game that I've been itching to put on a rec post.

Other Avenues

I am actually subscribed to you on Youtube, along with a number of other great reviewers!

The Gaming Table is a wonderful Aussie creator who reviews copies of indie ttrpgs. She started a year ago and already has a truly delightful backlog. I recently listened to her review of Bluebeard's Bride and it was wonderful!

I found 11dragonkid when I was looking for Lancer content and was pleasantly surprised to find other ttrpg reviews for games such as ARC and Gubat Banwa.

I watch A.A. Voigt's and Talen Lee's (@talenlee) mini-essays about games and the pieces of those games that speak to them not just to learn about new games but also to learn about what makes those games matter. I found the videos on Capitalites and Girl By Moonlight very informative!

I also watch Dave Thaumvore for reviews for big-print games (Vaesen, Symbaroum), and Questing Beast for updates on what's happening in the OSR scene (Vaults of Vaarn, Mothership).

I'm also subscribed to a number of newsletters and RSS feeds! Bundle of Holding has a blog announcing new bundles, the Indie RPG Newsletter has some great indie rpg coverage in their monthly updates and associated links, and I have an RSS feed on Feedly for game musings on whatever blogs I can find.

In Conclusion...

Much of my TTRPG knowledge comes from constant osmosis. I talk to friends about games, spend a lot of time on Itch.io, and I'm also finding new games here on Tumblr. I have an RPG server where me and a bunch of my friends play pretty regularly, and I'm constantly introducing them to new games. We finished up our Monster Squad Arc a month or two ago, and we're currently getting geared up for a Galaxy Games arc - this time with games that other players are bringing to the table!

I started sorting games for my own enjoyment - I love having all of my little boxes that I can go back to when I am hankering for my own game. I started this blog because I found there were too many games that I was excited about and I was never going to get through all of them just gaming with my friends.

[thydungeongal]

I was browsing through DriveThruRPG going through products authored by Monte Cook (one of the lead designers of D&D 3e, creator of Monte Cook's World of Darkness and Numenera among other things, and former Rolemaster guy) when I noticed that Wizards of the Coast has their old D&D 3.0 adventures up for sale for $0.99. The really funny thing is that these things used to be downloadable for free and at least in the case of one such module (The Tower of Deception) they have left the blurb of the adventure intact to such a degree that the product itself tells you that it used to be free.

I think that's just kind of hilarious.

[the-ampersand]

Since I am still chewing on the DIE Stapling post, I am going to do another about effort mechanics in ttrpgs because I am trying to write that Blasphemous inspired Trophy Gold hack (placeholder name: Penance). And one of the coolest mechanics for Trophy is its Risk Roll, which is basically an effort mechanic.

"But, Ampersand, what is an effort mechanic?" I hear you ask, dear mutual I am making up in my head. An effort mechanic allows you to reroll an action you have already attempted but failed or to get a bonus to a roll at the expense of some resource. Usually, that resource being the character's health. But it can also be something else like clues in an investigative game or even a narrative consequence (but that's usually called a Devil's Bargain).

The important part is that it gives a benefit but requires a sacrifice. And that's when the whole fanfare of psychoeconomics start. Because you need the sacrifice to be big enough to give the player pause and not use it every roll. And also you need the benefit to be significant enough to make it worth the risk and the expense. If properly adjusted, an effort mechanic can become a slow but sure spiral into the characters downfall.

Let's look at some examples!

Numenera is the first system I learn that had such a mechanic (but certainly was not the first ever). It is pretty straightforward in its implementation, too. You spend a fixed amount of the appropriate life pool and you get to reduce the difficulty of a task. Easy enough. But Numenera, being a tradgame as it is, the power creep upends any weight of the sacrifice. Once you level up enough, your pools become deep enough as to make effort something to just add to whichever skill roll you thought it needed a bit more oomph. This is not something wrong per se, but it can easily make your characters overly competent!

On the other hand, there's Dungeon Crawl Classics. DCC is a peculiar OSR game in that it is a really spiced up retroclone, wriggling DnD B/X ruleset to a point where it is almost unrecognizable. I am sure there are plenty effort mechanics peppered in the text, but I want to point out its magic system because I absolutely adore it. To be a wizard in DCC requires active dedication. That is because almost every spell has a writeup of about an A4's length, filled with the various effects a spell may have once the dice is rolled. And the effect can be wildly different from a roll of 5-10 to a roll of as high as 30 or more. There are many ways in which you can tweak your narrative positioning to get bonuses to a spell roll (components, helpers, magic foci, whatever), but when the die is cast and the result is just not good enough you still have a last chance: to sacrifice your own atribute values to get one last push that might be the difference between a proper spell and a fiasco. This is the main cause of withering of elder wizards: they have sacrificed too much in order to achieve the power they sought.

And then, there's Trophy. Both Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold have excellent effort mechanics baked directly into their ADN thanks to the masterful procedure that is the Risk Roll. These are games in which you are tempted first and consumed later by an evil forest. You have a really small ruin pool and once it is filled, you are lost to injury or its dark influence. You are also a destitute adventurer that needs to get any gold or face almost certain death. So you need to get shit done, you need to amass enough successes as to bring bread home and you need to survive the process (or try to, at least). And that's when the Risk Roll comes and lures your with the most satisfying effort mechanic I've ever seen. You can always make a reroll, adding an extra die to your pool to boot. But if those extra dice, dark dice, ever become the highest ones, you automatically mark ruin. You get your success, yes. But you become closer to losing yourself. It exactly hits the spot between actually worth it and inescapably dooming the character.

Obviously not all games need to be about losing oneself to fate or circumstance, but I feel an effort mechanic very much pushes the narrative in that direction. You are sacrificing yourself, in order to achieve your goals.

And I think that's a quite powerful narrative device.

[fantasyfantasygames]

SPULTURATORAH!! 2ND EXTERMINATION

SPULTURATORAH!! 2ND EXTERMINATION, Keetoms, 2024

Hot. Off. The. Presses. Directly into my hands before the edges were even trimmed or the cover placed on it. Seven hundred pages of raw ancient retro-future. The author gave this to me on January 2nd and it took me until now to actually read the whole thing.

SPULTURATORAH!! 2ND EXTERMINATION (S2E from here on out to avoid overwhelming us all with Teh Capslock) is a gonzo mashup of different game styles, settings, and genres. The original game (S1E, I guess) is a classic of maximalist game design in a tiny package. In fact, it's so small that there are more pages in S2E than words in S1E. That's ultra-maximalist game design for you.

So what did they do with the 698ish new pages? A lot, thankfully.

30 pages total of ToC, index, thanks, and license. It has its own bespoke license that I am not good enough at lawyer to understand.

10 pages of extra explanation for the original ruleset, which honestly it needed.

20 pages of gonzo backstory for King Gilgamesh. I appreciate that they did not in fact explain where he got the Levitating Darkness Throne. They did a great job folding in the new chapter of the Epic of Gilgamesh that was discovered only recently.

A 40-page adventure set in the Ziggurat of Ur, complete with a Narrative Dungeon linking this place to the Eternal Realm of Narrative Awesome.

9 pages of random-roll tables you can use for Trait One, Trait Two, and Trait Prime.

2 pages to explain the difference between what you can use for the numbered traits and what you can use for the prime trait.

30 pages of alternate uses for TRAIT ZIGGURAT BARLEY.

18 pages of equipment.

31 pages of vehicles and riding animals.

2 pages on currency.

14 pages of hacking rules.

7 pages of rules clarifications from the unofficial 1.4th edition. Nice to see them supporting fan works.

114 pages of monsters, each of which is a mutated version of King Gilgamesh from another universe or a shattered piece of our own, come to drag you back to his den and devour you. There are big ones, scaly ones, porcupine-like ones, multiple fragmented body parts moving together, one rolled into a beholder-like shape, one fused forever into a throne of pure orange light, all kinds of stuff. I like this.

A 6-page writeup of the God Shamash, which is sort of unnecessary but interesting anyway.

A 4-page running edge-to-edge map of Babylon and its rivers

8 pages of word jumble. I think it's a code. I am not entirely certain.

115 pages of adaptations from S2E to other rule systems: Deadlands, Torg, Fate, Altaplana, Numenera, Dungeon War, MSR, and Fantasy Wargaming: THLOA.

Good lord 700 pages is a lot of pages.

1 page accidentally taken up by a single dangling word ("it") at the end of a sentence. I have been there. Doing layout sucks sometimes.

96 pages of color art plates. Right in the middle of the book. The rest of the book has no art. The center has almost 100 solid pages of pinup Babylonian future barbarian blade hunter psychics. It's all the work of one mad genius who is credited as a bunch of black rectangles with diacriticals above and below them

A 3-page essay on why Nobilis is the greatest game ever, which has an acrostic that disclaims the entire section.

4 pages of detailed wargame rules.

22 pages of domain management guidelines.

12 pages of "spoilers". I still do not know what most of these mean.

A 2-page spread of Gilgamesh's family tree.

15 pages of writeups for miscellaneous folks on said tree.

28 pages on the language used in ancient Babylon, complete with cuneiform how-to.

A 16-page "node map" of the retro-future Babylonian cybernet that leads to outer space, where the planets are manifestations of deities.

21 more pages of detail covering the strange planets of our solar system as the Babylonians knew them: their cities, their rulers, little adventure seeds, advice for GMs for running stories in them. I do kind of wonder if someone else wrote this section.

1 page of probability notes, which is all you need for a 1d6-roll-under system really.

An 8-page character sheet, which is a bit excessive for characters with 4 traits.

2 pages that just contain the original game.

I will admit - there is actually too much in this game. I'm not sure it would have worked to make it a string of 50ish short supplements, but it's still an awful lot to absorb. The "maximal game, minimal package" has turned into "ultra-max game in a doorstop package". If S3E ever arrives (presumably with three exclamation points) I hope they do some judicious trimming.

I have no idea if this behemoth will make it to stores, or whether the shipment will collapse under its own gravitational pull and become a black hole. Either way, heck of a collector's item.

[laguzmage]

hello. do you have any recommendations for ttrpgs that enable robust roleplay? my friends want to get back into dnd after not playing for a few years but i think it would be fun to branch out, espscially considering how they like to focus more on character & story than combat encounters. thanks in advance!

The best one for like, roleplay and storytelling IMO is probably Numenera, the game has this really really good system in which players have stat pools instead of numeric bonuses, that serves both as their health, and as a kind of Stamina bar that they can use to apply Effort to a task to make it easier.

So what this translates to is if you want your character to accomplish some physically or mentally arduous task, they can do it and there's a gameplay mechanic around like, "And Nemo the Glaive does indeed climb that wall, her muscles are ragged, her fingers are torn up and bleeding, she collapses to catch her breath" because it wasn't just a close roll, it was one in which you spent some of your Brawn/Speed to do so - in fact Numenera features this really smart thing where if you fail a roll, as long as the GM doesn't specifically say "yeah you can't try again", you can immediately reroll but you have to spend Effort. So that can even feed back into the story of like, "Nemo starts to climb but she slips, hits her side against the rock face, gulping up the air that just got pushed out of her lungs she tightens her grip with her one remaining hand and swings around to get more stable footing, and tries again"

It also features this really ingenious thing where the players always roll the dice - the players (almost) always roll a D20 - and what they have to roll is a target number based on what the GM says the task's difficulty is (1-10) - very rarely with math after the fact. So unlike say, 5E/Pathfinder/etc there's no "Whoops we got caught in the moment and forgot what half the mechanics and dice rolls are here", you know it's Always gonna be a D20 and it's Always gonna be what the dice says, without adding your stat bonus and your proficiency modifier and whoops you still have guidance I forgor so add a D4 and-

The other thing that I really like about Numenera (The other game I'm gonna recommend does this too), is it has a THICK rulebook (418 pages!!) that contains short stories, lore snippets, Numenera also specifically has these long segments about each nation and tribe in their map, their culture, cities, who each nation beefs with and why, all contained in the Core Rulebook so you can get a sense for the world without needing to find a bunch of supplementary text.

As an aside - you mention not wanting to just do combat. One other thing Numenera does that I really like is that it's bestiary features a wide list of creatures that have motivations and thoughts other then "Eat adventurer, roll initiative" - for example, one creature in it just wants to eat Numenera and gain their power, so players with sufficient observation skills and enough self control to not immediately attack can figure out it just wants to eat that weird cube in your pack, and you weren't planning to use it anyway, and resolve the encounter that way

Lorewise, Numenera is a setting in which civilization has risen and fallen something like 8 previous times, sometimes reaching the level of galactic spacetravel, sometimes reaching the point of being able to build Dyson Spheres and new worlds, and sometimes getting beyond even that. All contained on a feudal alt-earth with a fantasy flair to it. It kind of takes the "Sufficient enough technology is indistinguishable from magic" phrase and builds a whole setting based off of it. Players delve into ancient vaults, ruins, and ships, and its obvious its like, an ancient spaceship, a forgotten lab, and so on, but do the characters know that? The world is full of mysterious magical artifacts except the magical artifact is like, a vial of liquid that if poured on you hardens and becomes steel, a mysterious box and sphere and the sphere you can place somewhere, and view what the sphere sees from the box anywhere on the world, the one where they just straight up describe a sniper rifle as if its an esoteric staff,

This ask got kind of long so the other one, Shadowrun, is below the cut ⬇

The other one is, way more mechanically complex, but I'm a bit of an evangelist for it, is Shadowrun. I can't speak to how 6th edition is (I'm sorry Catalyst game labs I'm sorry I bought like 10 Shadowrun 5 sourcebooks and I'm not ready to let them go yet), but in 5th edition the game has this insane level of character customization to where I'd strongly recommend downloading a program to help you (Like Chummer5, I think some people back when I played it at a game store used Hero Forge somehow. I saw another one called OMAE) - point is, you're gonna be doing a lot of math making a Shadowrun character, and spending a lot of time juggling priority tables, weighing minor differences in stats for cars and commlinks, optimizing your starting perks and flaws, etc.

Once you get out of character customization though, all you're really rolling is an insane number of D6s and counting the ones that are 5 and 6 (The rulebook will call them Hits), based on a combination of your stat, the skill being rolled, and any specializations you have and gear bonuses you get. The game can get pretty complex if like, you're playing as a hacker and using the erratas that add new stuff for hackers, but a solid 80% of that is gonna be the GM doing the lifting, so they get the choice on how crazy they want to get with the rolling and rules.

So why would I say "Oh Shadowrun is good for that" if its way more number and dice crunchy then Numenera?

Well, the first reason is that Shadowrun has no character classes, there's a few stat caps based on if you're playing as an Elf or Troll or Orc or something instead of a human, but beyond that you can take your starting character and go anywhere with it. Don't like that bards in DnD still have a wide list of combat things they can do? Want to play someone with the charisma skills and they immediately eat SHIT the second that bouncer gets tired of them and goes to toss them in the street? Well you're in charge buddy! Want to make a wizard but instead of being smart, you want to be good at physical tasks so when spells don't cut it he pulls out his glock and starts casting bullet? You KNOW you can do that!! Hell, there's even things that can raise those aforementioned stat caps so that if you want to play as The Scholarly Troll you can do that

The other reason Shadowrun can be good for that is that the Shadowrun core rule book is *502* fuckin pages, and that's not all mechanics and tables and rules and example maps. Shadowrun 5's CRB (And every single errata) is full of short stories, forum style messages from people in universe discussing the merits (or demerits) of gear, setting the stage for the world and the megacorps that run it, and so on.

Lorewise, Shadowrun is set on earth - but specifically an earth where in 2012 magic returned, and violently. Dragons flew around and set stuff on fire, wizards and warlocks immediately awoke to their abilities, oftentimes without the ability to fully control them, the fae, and so on. Flash forward to the 2050s, all of that still exists, but now it's the cyberpunk future on top of it. Dragons run a couple of the big 10 megacorps. Your elf or orc ranger can get cybernetics, the spirit shaman can be the spirit shaman of the mysterious sewer sludge, and so on. Its the big classic cyberpunk setting that, well, isn't called Cyberpunk

[cycas]

Some Non-D&D roleplaying games that don't use the Open Gaming Licence (v1)

RuneQuest - One of the oldest and most popular D&D alternatives, with a ruleset that its many fans swear by; now in its 7th edition

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay - now in its 4th Edition; WFRP's 'The Enemy Within' is a strong contender for the title of 'Best Fantasy RPG Campaign Ever Published.

Chivalry & Sorcery - a more realistic, crunchy and grounded take on fantasy roleplaying

Symbaroum - super-atmospheric Swedish fantasy RPG

GURPS - Generic Universal Roleplaying System, " one set of clear, comprehensive rules to cover any background"

Rolemaster and HARP (High Action Adventure Roleplaying)

Savage Worlds - another multigenre system and the rules set behind the Deadlands, Weird Wars and Monster Hunter International RPGs among others.

7th Sea - "swashbuckling & intrigue, exploration & adventure"

Cypher System - a modern multigenre system with an innovate rules set Numenera - standalone RPG but uses the Cypher System rules, "set a billion years in our future…a roleplaying game about exploration and discovery"

Troika! - a gonzo science-fantasy RPG with "built-in wonder and room for everyone at the table to go wild!"

Fantasy Age - as run by Wil Wheaton on his Tabletop show!

Earthdawn - sort of the fantasy prequel to the cyberpunk-fantasy RPG Shadowrun

The Hero System and Fantasy Hero - another multigenre ruleset, also used in the Champions super hero RPG

Legend of the Five Rings - famous RPG based roughly on feudal Japan with influences from other East Asian cultures.

The One Ring - roleplaying in Tolkien's Middle-earth

King Arthur Pendragon and Paladin: Warriors of Charlemagne - roleplaying the Matter of Britain and the Matter of France

Forbidden Lands - "a new take on classic fantasy roleplaying…an open-world survival roleplaying game".

Legends of Avallen - inspired by Celtic mythology in Roman Britain

Man, Myth & Magic - a roleplaying game "set in the ancient world"

Overlight - A fantasy roleplaying game "of kaleidoscopic journeys: a visceral, dangerous and brightly coloured setting"

Paleomythic - "grim survival and mythical adventures in…a harsh prehistoric world"

Romance of the Perilous Land - "magic and adventure set in the world of British folklore"

Robert E. Howard's Conan - Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of - probably the best of several Conan RPGs, now coming towards the end of its licence.

Swords of the Serpentine - "a sword & sorcery game of daring heroism, sly politics and bloody savagery" using the investigation-focused Gumshoe system

The Black Iron - grimdark fantasy in "a world broken beyond repair"

The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game - roleplaying in the world of Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories

The Witcher - roleplaying in the world of Andrzej Sapkowski's The Witcher stories

[the-orange-wizard]

Greetings, traveler.

I am Cruxien, an artist, musician, and game master. I'm here on Tumblr in a variety of forms, but this blog is dedicated to my endeavors as a professional GM.

I have been running games for 8 years among my friends, and given my recent difficulty in finding work, I have decided to try my hand at telling stories for others as well.

I love running games for new and old players alike, and tend to attract players who are LGBTQIA+ or neurodivergent like I am.

My Style

The adventures I run are almost always completely homemade. I find a great deal of joy in creating worlds, and watching them be changed by the choices of the players.

On a campaign-by-campaign basis, my games might feature building a stronghold on a mountain of glass, escaping from a prison-plane run by angels, or something as simple as queer characters dungeon-crawling.

My Blog

On this blog, you can expect me to share information about new campaigns I am running or plan to run, stories about games I’m running, or reblogs of pretty art I like.

I typically run TTRPGs like D&D 5e, Candela Obscura, and Numenera.

My Stuff

If you want to read reviews or look at my active TTRPG adventures, you can look on my Startplaying.Games page here.

I also run a lore-filled Minecraft server in my spare time which has its own Tumblr blog here.

[utilitycaster]

Ok I just looked up murder mystery ttrpgs and all of them* are like "AND THEN CTHULHU SHOWED UP" and it's like I just watched Glass Onion. I want to do THAT but in a ttrpg. If I wanted Cthulhu to show up I would tell you that.

*The three I saw by glancing briefly at a reddit thread (Brindlewood Bay, Gumshoe, MotW) and one more I found via a quick search (an adventure made for Numenera).

[msviolacea]

What with the D&D/WotC OGL fiasco going on right now (google it, I don’t have the inclination to look up a link to something explicable at the moment), I’ve been thinking a lot about the pros and cons of other TTRPG systems, and what might appeal to gamers with different priorities. It’s a hard topic, because there are several reasons why D&D has been the cultural juggernaut it is. Longevity and advertising go a long way, yes, but in the 5E era, one of the things that has influenced a lot of people in my circles to try it is the particular combination of solid direction/format and freedom of imagination. 

It feels a bit like fanfic - it gives us a “canon” to start with, where “canon” is a system of rules, parameters for characters, even stories, if you go with pre-written adventures. You just have to plug your own ideas into it and go from there. D&D makes it easy to start and continue the game, as long as you’re willing to put in the time to understand the rules. And the proliferation of Actual Plays (and other cultural touchstones) has made it that much easier to learn the rules in advance. 

The issue, I think, is finding another system that will give players approximately the same combination of freedom and structure, and can be demonstrated to be flexible enough to tell a wide variety of stories. 

I am a super fan of Powered By the Apocalypse systems, but one of the problems I have with running them is that there aren’t a whole lot of pre-written adventure paths. This makes them somewhat unwelcoming to people who are not used to making up their own stories - there’s some direction in the source books, yes, but they don’t have the same resources as D&D for inspiration and structure - no monster manuals, no pre-written adventures. Once you get into playing a PbtA game, I find the storytelling options to be infinitely more flexible, but for a GM, creating the story beats and enemies from scratch can be incredibly daunting. 

(City of Mist, which is kind of a combination of PbtA and FATE systems, makes it slightly easier with a very solidly built world/city to play in, and lots of adventure hooks within that city. But it’s still a little hard to wrap your brain around sometimes, and leans heavily into the noir flavors. I mean, unless you’re our group of weirdos, but that’s a different story entirely.)

Pathfinder exists on the other end of the spectrum; they’re the one system I know of that has a similar amount of structure to D&D, but from my past experience with their first edition, the rules are a lot crunchier, and involve more math and stat tracking, which does not appeal to a lot of people who have discovered gaming through the more storytelling aspects. This might be improved in their 2E, but I’ve heard mixed reviews of how smoothly 2E plays from various people. It might be worth checking out, but it’s not going to be for everyone.

I’ve played several other systems, but they all seem to fit in a very specific niche - Blades in the Dark is AMAZING, if you want to play heists, it has what feels like exactly the right amount of structure to help you design a story, but it’s not going to work if you want to tell a different type of story. Numenera (and other Monte Cook games) are absolute bangers for cool worldbuilding and atmosphere, but the rules systems can be really difficult to wrap your head around and don’t always feel intuitive even after you’ve been looking at them for a while. Green Ronin’s AGE systems, last time I tried them, leaned a bit on the crunchy/complicated side for my tastes, though they might be worth another look since it’s been a while. The World of Darkness systems are forever favorites for dark urban fantasy style storytelling, and work really well for telling character-driven stories about how power can corrupt, but they’re never going to entirely be for people who want to tell more heroic, uplifting stories. 

And honestly, the biggest issue here is time - even the simplest TTRPG requires an effort investment to learn how to play, and it all depends on whether the people you play with are willing or able to put in that effort, especially if you’re not 100% sure a new system will be right for you. TTRPG community folks can talk all they want about how little effort it takes and how it’s “lazy” to not be willing to learn something new, but that’s the myopia of immersing yourself in one community without getting outside perspectives. In the real world, everyone has limited time and energy, and we can choose what we want to spend that limited energy on. Many people understandably don’t want to spend that energy on a brand new TTRPG system when they already know how to play D&D, or when they’re half-learning already because they watch CR or D20, or listen to TAZ, etc. And if they wanted to free-form RP without rules, they’d probably be doing so already. 

I think it’d be great if people would start to put together resources for learning their favorite systems - YouTube videos about how to play, or links to good Actual Plays, especially short campaigns that can be more easily digested, or other starter resources. And also share any experiences they have with modifying these systems to fit their own needs, how they tell stories, what they’ve found to be the pros and cons of these systems. The current drama may or may not be blown out of proportion - we will see when WotC actually releases the final draft of the new OGL - but considering how to broaden the audience for smaller game systems is a good idea regardless. The easier you can make it, and the more appealing you can make a system look, the more likely people are to check it out. And the more competition other companies/creators can give Hasbro/WotC, the better off everyone will be.

[chill]

First, what lit the fuse, all the way back in 1999, was a very strange game called Planescape: Torment. If you look up a list of “best RPGs” of all time, you’ll always find it near the top, often along with its spiritual successor, Torment: Tides of Numenera (ignore the terrible names if you’ve never played them, they’re very good). They are effectively big philosophical fantasy novels you can walk around in. In Planescape: Torment the ultimate enemy is your own immortality—you are trying to figure out a way to die. It is as if you are in a fight with the Save/Load system itself. The Torments are what are called “isometric RPGs” (a single point-of-view, from the top-down) and lean heavily on long chains of dialogue and thick chunks of text, making them almost literally just like reading a high-minded sci-fi or fantasy novel, albeit with a choose-your-own-adventure twist.

[honourablejester]

Numenera Setting Notes: Points of Interest Part VI

Heading now to two very different and widely separated parts of the world: Vralk, a volcanic militarised nation to the northeast of the northern Beyond, and the Rayskel Cays, an island archipelago far out into the ocean west of the Steadfast.

I’m putting these together because, to be completely honest, I’m not really vibing with Vralk? There’s  a couple of cool bits and bobs in there, so I wanted to include it somewhere, but it’s just not the bit of this world that’s exciting to me. If anyone else wants a survivalist expansionist military nation state that lives in a volcanic hellscape, Vralk is for you! But it’s not really my scene, so I’m gonna skim through it and then move on to the Rayskel Cays, an island chain that is very much more my speed. Most of this entry will be the Cays, to warn you. I love them a lot.

(Got a little long, because I love the Rayskels, allow me to burble about them)

Part VI: Vralk & the Rayskel Cays (Ninth World Guidebook)

Vralk:

Hellsfont, in the Firefang Mountains of Vralk. It’s a five mile radius field of living fire just hanging out. And by ‘living’, I mean fully intelligent and empathic, and therefore capable of being negotiated with to a limited extent, so you can, for example, ask it not to burn you. If you make it safely into the field, there’s lots of fire-immune lethal biomechanical monsters in there, and also the ‘cinder giants’, which are eleven 9ft tall humanoid skeletons in numenera armour just scattered randomly around the field, still standing but inert, coated in white ash, and immune to all attempts to loot them.

The Gate of Stars, in the city of Nabir Enthru, Vralk. Nabir Enthru is an industrial forge city with an ancient rivalry with Morlash Kor, the Vralkian capital, but the bit that intrigues me is the Gate of Stars, which is the main entrance to the city. The wall around the gate has been riddled with small alcoves that hold the ‘stars’, small motes of solidified light that were looted from the crystalline crown of a vast statue in the Firefangs. These lights flash under various circumstances, and several have been identified as flashing if, for example, an ultraterrestrial entity passes nearby, or an invisible creature passes nearby, or a weapon of level 7 or higher comes into range. But there’s a bunch more that flash and what they’re flashing for hasn’t been identified yet. IDK, it just feels really cool to me.

Norde, a port city on the River of Sorrows, Vralk. It’s built below the river, in a sunken depression 120ft down from the water level, with a thick wall and set of levees keeping it from being flooded. All the piers and docks are built at the top of this wall, and a single floodgate lets a cascade in from the river above to bring water into the town. The physical set-up of this place is just fantastic. There’s also three 3000ft spires in here, wide at top and bottom and narrowing in between, which makes me wonder if the depression was meant to be a foundation/base for something that the spires were meant to hold up. It’s just a cool town.

Mount Errow, in the Firefangs, Vralk. This is another of the mini-adventures scattered through this book, and it’s … It’s giving me Subnautica vibes? Despite being landlocked? Basically a nano named Demanisix Mal discovered that Mt Errow, a very active volcano, has a synth facility inside the caldera that is attached to a three mile deep shaft that deposits you into a vast magma chamber with an ancient subterranean city along one wall. Demanisix, before she vanished into the depths never to be seen again, left a journal naming this place the Errow Cascade and describing it as ‘a voluminous installation—possibly an entire hibernating city—that straddles a subterranean magma sea’. Which, you must admit, is cool as hell.

The Rayskel Cays:

The Slavering Falls, the central structure around which Rayskel culture is based. The Rayskels are a spiral archipelago that curl around the Slavering Falls at the centre of their inner sea. The Falls are what look like a circular underwater waterfall, actually cascades of silt falling over the ends of a massive circular pillar structure that, every so often, and randomly so no one knows when it’ll happen, becalms the seas around it and rises above the surface like a giant piston, causing an actual waterfall at the surface. It’ll stand up there for a week or so, and then plunge itself back down in under an hour, sucking anyone still on it down with it. All sort of things are collected on the Falls as they rise and fall, treasures and airels (spongefish used as currency and also considered living pieces of the moon), so trying predict when it’ll rise is a huge deal. And kids in the direct vicinity of the Falls are raised from birth to be ‘moonbabies’ to dive the Falls and search the tiny nooks and crannies for treasure even while it’s sunken.

As well as material gain, the Falls are the centre of Rayskel religion. While religion differs from island to island and settlement to settlement, most Rayskel religion is based around the worship of the moon, considering the sky another sea like theirs, and the moon as the mirror of the Falls in the sky. So the Falls are variously considered to be trying to mate with the moon as they rise, or perhaps a lover or sibling of the moon trying to reunite with her. And, the little detail from the Rayskel religion that I love so much, most of the islands consider that when a person dies, they need to be put under the waves for three days so that the soul can leave the body to become a bioluminescent creature in the skysea. I adore this. At the end of the three days, the body is pulled out, and can be recycled. If someone drowns and is not pulled out, or dies on land and is not able to be brought to the sea, they are considered lost forever and never mentioned again. That has so much pull for me. The stars are bioluminescent souls swimming in the skysea, and you have to spend your time beneath the waves after your death to join them. And if you can’t, you’re lost forever. There’s a lovely cultural thing to get teeth into, the tension and time limits around the care of the dead (also it’s just really beautiful).

I don’t know, this immediately feels so vibrant and real. I love this element so much, this central phenomenon of the islands, and the culture and beliefs that have grown around it. Also … when I die, I absolutely would not mind becoming a bioluminescent fish swimming the skysea. At all.

The Cays also have a bunch of cool transport options. You’ve got your normal range of small boats, of course, but there’s also things like iuskies, which are 40ft tall kite-like plants that you can use as natural sails for small craft and/or surfboards, and bubbleboats, which are hardened semi-circular top shells of duems, huge jellyfish looking creatures that shed their hydrophobic shells once or twice a year, that have been turned into quite efficient near-hover boats.

They also have very common non-human inhabitants that mingle with humans freely in the form of the Echryni, amphibious humanoids.

The Cays are known, somewhat, from the Steadfast, particular in Anculan and the Sea Kingdom of Ghan, and work is being done to confirm where the archipelago is and establish actual trade routes with it. I just. Further sight unseen, I’m already loving them as a setting. But. Some specifics:

Vonnai, on Darnali island, possibly the largest city in the archipelago, a massive, compact, walled construction that piles interlocking buildings on top of each other, docks tucked into their bases and passages and walkways running through buildings into each other. There are four lunar (tidal) powered gates that allow access in and out, two by land and two by sea, only during the day. The ruler lives in the only separate building, a four storey hovering tower, along with her husband, the architect behind most of the city, a man who specialises in harnessing tidal power. Which means this is a ninth world city, not a prior-world city, built by modern genius (with, granted, the usual understanding of prior-world numenera as a helping hand). I love it.

Kinider and the Terrible Exhale, down the southern end of Darnali island. The Terrible Exhale, or just The Hale, is a seasonal phenomenon of the southern peninsula of Darnali, where small bubbles of noxious fluid, containing small creatures, detritus and debris, are carried across the peninsula by a wind. The bubbles explode, releasing noxious gas and turning anything in them into shrapnel, laying waste to anything in their path. This happens several times a year. As a result, the village of Kinider is buried under a beach in strange structures called ‘sinkers’ to avoid it. Sinkers are strange, transparent, glasslike tubes buried in the earth, with webbed membranes across the top. There are exactly 100 of them, and no one knows what they are or how to make more, so the town is extremely pressed for space. Also, the tubes are fully transparent, and not much sticks to the inside of them, so privacy is also an issue, as well as seeing … crawling things in the earth around them. And stuff decaying in the earth around them. The views aren’t good, is the thing here. This is such a weird little town, and I love that it exists. Interestingly, because of the housing shortage, a shanty town village has sprung up on the surface a little up the beach, but it’s destroyed every Hale, and its survivors have to rebuild all over again every time. So there’s … tension. Heh.

Dyn’s Scar, on Augh-Chass island. A milky white stratified inland sea, the Scar has a cool top layer, a warm middle layer, and a lower layer that often freezes, sending sunken icebergs floating to the surface. The surface is covered in float pods, 10ft by 15ft floating plants. The shore is ringed by hyperfungi that sprout after rainstorms, shoot up to 6ft tall, and then violently fling spores everywhere, which would be fine, but each spore release includes one ‘hyperspore’, an intelligent spore that floats into a living creature’s ear and tries to steer them somewhere new to start a new colony by submerging the host in water. If you can’t resist the spore’s ‘suggestions’, you find yourself somewhere strange with no idea how you got there, and feeling the urge to go for a little swim. In the depths of Dyn’s Scar, in the warm middle layer, is a city of an extremely intelligent race of multi-eyed tentacled amphibians called gedyr, who think humans are mostly dumb animals to be hunted, and are fully capable of speaking human languages. This whole area is just fantastically weird, and I love it.

The Omaris kibics, on Omaris island. The whole island is scarred by hundreds of miles worth of open trenches called kibics, some of which are a mile wide and half a mile deep. The walls are golden cement inlaid with elaborate designs, including designs made of light, fossils of ancient or non-existent creatures, ancient languages, and inlaid technology. The floors of the kibics are made of a porous silvery substance with a consistency varying between packed earth and warm tar, and which secretes a viscous purple substance called glaili, which a group of local nanos have discovered can be compressed by certain machines, although the process is a work in progress and results vary from a pretty red stone, to a power source, to actual numenera. The walls of the kibics also contain entrances to various underground structures and complexes across the island, many still unexplored, with the potential to contain ancients know what. The whole island is just one massive weird constructed landscape full of weirdness and discovery.

Maer Outpost, on Omaris island. It’s a trading outpost built at the site of a collision between a ship and a young bellowing naek, which if I’m reading this right is basically a weird sky whale: “Bellowing nyeks are behemoth amphibian creatures with multiple finwings and a long, serpentine tail. They spend most of their lives in the air, flying and leaping above the ocean’s surface. Once they reach a certain size, however, they become waterbound, able to breach the surface only rarely. The sight of a fully grown bellowing nyek breaching is one of wonder to even the most hardened and experienced Ninth Worlders.” The Outpost is built in the midst of the wrecked ship and the naek corpse, and the survivors found that there was a lot more salvage than had been in the ship. Apparently naeks are full of numenera? Or possibly portals. Because the shipwreck camp developed into a trading outpost where anything can be got, and if you can’t find it the first time, you might be asked to come back in a couple days and it’ll miraculously be there now. Heh.

Edelmid island, as an environment. Because it’s weird. The whole island is covered in huge strange ring structures, called Grask’s Hoops, made of compressed dirt and sand that’s hard as rock and about as fertile. When dry, it runs in rivers, but hardens when wet into perfect rings, spreading outwards. They can go up as well as out, and the largest is 200 miles in diameter and a mile high. At the centre of these hoops are groups of plants called Crowns of Kavess, which gelatinous raspberry-red growths in crystalline shapes. They’ve adapted to Edelmid’s weird as hell weather, which rains sensations, including scent, sounds, and touch, which can be lethal if the sensation happens to be pain. The Crowns of Kavess ‘drink’ these sensations, and, after large storms, come together as colonies to ‘fruit’ numenera from the largest growth. Specifically artifacts, the most permanent and powerful of numenera. They defend these numenera and themselves during this vulnerable time by dusting the entire area in red dust that compels any creature it touches to defend the Crowns and their fruit to the death for 1 hour. So. This island is a fun and possibly lethal, but also possible profitable, time?

Rynach island, I’m only going to skim this, but it’s an island defended by psychic trees and housing a city-lab complex inhabited by transhumanist bioautomatons called kathons who believe firmly in self-improvement through self-modification, and have a lab complex made of light hovering above the forest. They have bioenhanced cybernetic symbiotic dolphin-like mounts/companions called guins that live in canals through their houses. It’s whole weird thing in there.

Darrad, a sprawling mining town on Angmorl island. It’s sprawling to cover the massive network of mining tunnels seeking ‘blue essence’, material found between rocks in the area that can power numenera, but is only sparsely inhabited, less than 2000 people. And possibly part of the reason for that is that, a while back, a rumour started circulating that the blue essence was the souls of creatures buried in the earth here, and the miners promptly rebelled, terrified they were messing with their own or other people’s ancestors. Blue Datasphere, the mining company running the town for a faraway investor, responded by basically massacring the town when the miners refused to cooperate, and built a second one, where miners have to agree to a temporary mutation that renders them mute to work there, in order to keep the rumour from re-spreading. But verbal communication isn’t the only communication, and keep that lid tight is still an issue.

The Rysors, between Angmorl and Augh-Chass, ten tall, towering, near identical ‘islands’ that rise hundreds of feet above sea level. And they move. They’re called the ‘Walking Islands’ or the ‘Walkers’, as if you’re watching from the shores of the nearby islands at exactly the right moment after twilight, you’ll see them get up, shake themselves off, and start weaving through each other as if interacting. Around when this happens, a high-pitched echolocation signal is emitted in their vicinity, and sometimes the Rysors glow during this event. People trying to go near the Rysors feel heavier and heavier the closer they get, and often find they’ve lost time when they return home. So like. Alien islands? Just hanging around.

The Rayskel Cays are definitely up there with Lostrei’s Glass Sea as one of my absolutely favourite parts of this world. I love them so much. Though, yes. If anyone is getting the impression that I like the maritime, watery parts of this setting a lot more than the burny bits of it, that’s probably true. But the whole thing about the dead needing to be placed under the waves in order to become a bioluminescent skyfish in the afterlife is just … I want to play someone from the Rayskels. In the Rayskels. I want to explore this place. It’s fantastic.

[theresattrpgforthat]

do you have any games with a sci-fi fantasy setting that are adventuring/exploration focused, similar to numenera or wildsea? the flexibility to play more or less mature games, lots of character creation options, and a solid combat system would be a bonus

THEME: Exploration

God I wish I could recommend As the Sun Forever Sets yet but it’s still in development. It’s a game inspired by The War of the Worlds, and is a Forged in the Dark hex crawl. The creator is partnering with Evil Hat so you’ll want to keep an eye out for when they start crowdfunding it.

If you’re interested in games like The Wildsea, I’d also recommend checking out the Wildsea Discord, where there are plenty of games in the works using the Wild Words engine. I don't think much there has reached playtest levels yet, but there's a lot of game-things that look very interesting.

Anyways, let’s see what else is out there.

Dreams and Machines (Players Guide) (Game-Master's Guide), by Modiphius.

Dreams and Machines is a brand new RPG setting where people come together to rebuild their world following a catastrophic war. You will venture into a world of mystery and adventure, a world where slumbering mechs dot the landscape and people build their lives anew in the wreckage of paradise. Take on the role of one of the new tribes of humanity, an Archivist, Dreamer, Everan, River, or Spear, and forge a path for yourself and your people.

The war against the machines was 200 years ago, but many threats from that era abound, along with others, like raiding parties of Thralls from the deep ruins, that have arisen in the intervening years. The machines are dormant, but they sometimes awake, causing death and destruction until they are stopped. Hideous, mutated, creatures infest the landscape, vicious byproducts of the war. Ghostly nanograms lurk in the ruins promising knowledge or luring the unwary to their deaths. Yet against all this, humanity is rebuilding. People live full, happy lives despite the threats that assail them. Cooperation and mutual aid are everywhere, humans coming together to build something new amid the ruins of the past.

If you are a fan of Horizon Zero Dawn, this game was made for you. While it’s not taking place within the official licensed setting, the inspiration is visible all over this game. The game uses the 2d20 mechanic found among many of Modiphhius’ well-known titles, tailored for the large range of movement and large-scale conflict expected in a game like HZD. Characters are composed of an origin, archetype, temperament and bond, and refer to attributes and skills when determining whether or not the succeed. Some rolls have a difficulty determined by truths attached to locations, scenes, or equipment. Others are contests, and the outcomes are determined by the results from each opponent. These pieces point towards a complex ttrpg that has plenty of potential both for exploration and combat.

If you don’t want to get the Players Handbook and the GM’s Handbook without a bit of a first taste, you can check out the free Quickstart!

Between Clouds, by Andi Licht.

Between Clouds is a colorful, biopunk, tabletop RPG about a family of misfits navigating the open skies atop their beloved flying beast. Life among the clouds revolves around the Kirin, oversized animals that possess volatile genetics and the gift of flight. Across the skies, floating vessels and cities are held aloft by the animated remains of hunted Kirin, whose beating hearts defy gravity itself. Commoners are wary of becoming abducted or eaten by these creatures, while propaganda and folklore only stoke their fears. With an uninhabitable surface below, humanity must learn to coexist with the flora and fauna of their airborne realm or perish.

In Between Clouds players assume the role of Symbiotes, rare outcasts who have formed unbreakable bonds with a Kirin. It is not an easy choice to join forces with such a reviled creature. Those who crave power and a comfortable life seek to hunt the Kirin, and the Symbiotes with them if necessary. Few are ever approached by the flying beasts, and fewer still head the call. Those who do lead nomadic lives. They travel across Empyrea atop their airborne companions, making allies and enemies along the way, all while striving to help those in need and protect the wild Kirin that they encounter.

This game looks so pretty. The world looks very unique, with larger-than-life creatures called Kirin and a number of isolated biomes accessible only through riding on their backs. While the system uses the Year Zero engine, the creator also claims inspiration from Belonging Outside Belonging and Forged in the Dark games, so I’m expecting a complicated world with a lot of narrative prompts to drive the story forward.

Electric Bastionland, by Chris McDowell.

Bastion - The Electric Hub of Mankind. The only city that matters.

In Deep Country, the land stretches forever. The long shadow of our embarrassing past. Villages rot away, trees don’t bother to flower anymore, and the potato is eaten cold from the ground. Things were better before. Better before Bastion.  In the Underground are impossible tunnels beneath time and space. Devious machines release their creations into the corridors. All while the twisting network grows and touches everything. Connects everything. You can get anywhere, but there’s always a challenge. 

You have a failed career and a colossal debt. Treasure is your only option. A spark of hope in Electric Bastionland.

Electric Bastionland is a roleplaying game written by Chris McDowall, author of the critically-acclaimed Into The Odd. It uses and expands upon the systems developed in Into The Odd, resulting in a rules-set that’s easy to run as a Referee and even easier to play. It’s not a sourcebook or an expansion - it’s a standalone journey into an unknowable world. 

If you like OSR games this might be a game for you. Bastion is such a unique city that begs you to explore it. Your characters start as people who have failed in another career before, which is an interesting premise to give you at the beginning of the game. Treasure hunting was nobody’s first option, so your entire crew already has something in common. This feels like a game where survival is difficult, and everyone is trying to get themselves out of a rough place to a slightly less rough place. If you want a fantastic setting that might beat you up a little bit, I recommend Electric Bastionland.

Odyssey Aquatica, by Old Dog Games.

The year is 1960 and you are an Oceanographic Adventurer, a brave or foolhardy soul who goes to the most remote seas and the deepest ocean trenches to conduct groundbreaking research, help those in peril, document the wonders you discover — and bask in the glory. You will chart your character’s life work, from their first expeditions to their last, and record memoirs of the years lived in-between. 

ODYSSEY AQUATICA adapts the fast and flexible PARAGON system to a world of 20th century oceanographic adventure inspired by The Life Aquatic, Subnautica, and the life and times of Jacques Cousteau.

I’ve talked before about how AGON is a great tool for exploration games by providing you with a new way to journey, and plenty of the supplements for this system confirm my theory. Odyssey Aquatica keeps the exploration at sea, but brings it into the modern day, adding memoir rules that expand the game’s timeline to cover your characters’ careers. It’s also beautifully laid out, with a stunning boat sheet to help you keep all of your tools and equipment organized. If you like PARAGON games, you’ll like Odyssey Aquatica.

Bug World, by Alfie.

maybe the apocalypse could have been averted, but it wasn’t, and here we are, in a brand new world. this isn’t your cold, nuclear winter, sparse and dead kind of post-apocalypse. the end sent the world on a new course, brimming with life - just not quite as much human life as before. ok, barely any. in the super oxygen-rich atmosphere of the earth today, insect life has thrived.

it only took a few decades for bugs to reach incredible sizes, and now, about a century-and-a-half after the disaster, gargantuan insects are a normal sight. from a ladybug the size of a dog, to millipedes that might as well be trains, to horned beetles with skeletons big enough to use as shelter. bugs are huge and they are everywhere. the remaining humans have domesticated some, trained others, made wary peace with some intelligent groups, and carved themselves out sections of the world to live.

BUG WORLD is a Powered by the Apocalypse TTRPG where players navigate this post-apocalyptic jungle world, with all its scavenger towns, junk economies, and incredibly huge bugs. playbooks include more classic TTRPG options alongside bug wranglers and jockeys, rock collector archaeologists, and mob bosses.

Currently a work in progress, this game is all about exploration and survival. It uses a PbtA ruleset with moves like deal damage and survive harm for combat, and playbooks that specialize in it, like the Brutalizer and the Exoskeleton. As a post-apocalypse game I think it has plenty of opportunity for death and danger, and like plenty of PbtA games, the setting is baked into the character options more than anything else. I like the premise of this game and I think it holds a lot of promise, even if your play group has to build a lot of the setting themselves.

Nibiru, by Araukana Media.

Nibiru is a science fiction tabletop roleplaying game, set in a massive space station in a neighboring solar system. Players take on the role of Vagabonds; people who woke up in the space station with no memories of their past.

Nibiru tackles themes of memory, nature and artificiality through simple mechanics, evocative art and immersive worldbuilding.

This feels like such a unique game to me. Nibiru has a character creation system that you engage with during the entirety of your campaign experience, as your characters are uncovering more of their backstory as they play. You will fill in pieces of your memory as your character tries to do new things, and each new experience has the potential to cement a part of your character’s personality. The world itself is also begging to be explored: the Skyless World is a monstrous space station with an unknown purpose. Each choice your characters make will draw them deeper into the world, and have ripple effects on the world around them.

If you want a unique method of character generation, and a truly breathtaking reading experience, I recommend Nbiru.

Games I have Recommended in the Past

Apocalypse Roadtrip, by Mynar Lenahan.

Songs for the Dusk, by Kavita Poduri

ICON, by Massif Press.

Ultraviolet Grasslands, by Wizardtheiffighter.

[thechindividual]

Dungeon23 - outlining the dungeon

Dungeon23 seems to be the perfect excuse to finally start on writing my own megadungeon, and I’m curious to see if I can stick to making it grow over the coming year.

To help me keep things structured, I threw up a rough outline for the dungeon, including a general theme, an idea of the various levels, and (my favorite) factions that are involved in the megadungeon. Feel free to read along and maybe find some inspiration for your own dungeon!

The general idea This yet unnamed dungeon is the remains of a massive spaceship that crashed into Ye Olde Fantasy World. The exact nature of this vessel is probably unknown to the people inhabiting the world, which is all the more reason for a bunch of adventurers to go and explore it. 

The impact did severely damage the ship and the land around it. Additionally, whatever hyper-advanced tech was damaged or whatever experiments contained in the ship broke free, changed the landscape and creatures around the crash site. On top of that, local communities have scavenged part of the ship, using technology they might not fully understand. 

This dungeon will go very science-fantasy, blending advanced technology with more classic fantasy. Since reading the TTRPG ‘Numenera’, I have always wanted to work with this mix of genres.

Levels If I follow the rules of Dungeon23 and stick with it for the full run, I should end up with 12 levels of dungeon-y goodness. While I have no exact plan yet on what each level will contain, here’s my rough outline of what each ‘level bracket’ will focus on:

A Changed Land (levels 1-3): the above-ground parts of the landscape and ship, which highlight how the crash and the ship have changed the world around them. These levels blend natural hazards and monsters, and how the “leaks” of alien tech have impacted the world. 

Halls of Steel (level 4-6): these levels go into the ship proper and cover what would be the command center and living areas. These levels should give PCs clues on the nature of the ship, and what might have caused it to crash.

The Laboratories (levels 7-9): the lower decks of the ship hold R&D and various containment chambers. This might have been an exploration vessel that gathered samples from various planets, and so the crash might have released things that could be dangerous or potential allies. 

Breach into the Abyss (levels 10-12): the ship’s lowest decks (engineering and cargo) have crashed into a network of caverns which reach into the deep dark of the world. What did the denizens of these lands do when this massive vessel crashed through their ceiling?

Factions What makes a megadungeon interesting to me are factions: organisations and groups the PCs can interact with, each with their own agenda and goals within the dungeon. Factions allow for “dungeon politics”, which add a dynamic layer to things.

For now, I’m thinking of at least the following factions:

A number of villages and communities surrounding the crater (both above and below the surface), each having been affected by the ship’s crash.

A group of scholars studying and cataloguing artifacts from the ship. They might pay the PCs for any new and interesting object.

The ship’s damaged and disoriented artificial intelligence, trying desperately to finish the mission (whatever that may be).

A group of aliens who have been awoken from cryo-stasis after the ship crashed, and who are trying to take control of it now. 

Well, that’s all the framework for now. Let’s see how all of this develops over the coming weeks. I will keep you posted. See ya! o/

[vasheden]

Occultists Anonymous?

Oh, this is very old and I forgot I had it. Yes!

This is the ttrpg show I do with some friends. We started off doing Mage: The Awakening, but we’ve been taking a break to let some other folks GM and explore some new systems. We’re doing Geist: The Sin-Eaters right now, with Conan and Numenera coming up. We have a couple of Star Trek Adventures and a Blades in the Dark miniseries that were all incredibly fun.

[azukailgames]

D10: Numenera Rumours – Taracal

TM and © 2019 Monte Cook Games, LLC. Numenera is a game published by Monte Cook Games. Its setting is the Ninth World, and this list has ten rumours for that setting. The rumours, which are similar to the Hearsay that can be found in the official books, can be used as adventure hooks or as simple misinformation. Fishing is one of the primary sources of work and food for the inhabitants of…