#grant howitt

[rqgender]

Today's gender is a disembodied tit.

[baddywronglegs]

People who've played Honey Heist:

I've been thinking of a game about Goblin Energy. I don't need to explain Goblin Energy to Tumblr. But the idea is that the characters' Goblin Energy is an attribute that increases and potentially decreases over the course of the game.

Does this sound like something Honey Heist's core mechanic already handles? If not, what would have to change about it?

Has anyone used Honey Heist's mechanics for anything other than a heist and how well did that go? Or ported it in as a subsystem of another system? If so, how did that go?

[haveyouplayedthisirlgame-poll]

Beautiful Space Pirates is a one-page scifi RPG by Grant Howitt.

[animesickos]

OUT NOW: Grant Howitt, a game designer who rules, joins the Sickos (plus Gwynn and Allie from Modesty City, Sicko Shock 2, and Shuffle Quest) for a one-shot game of GOBLIN PUNKS, an RPG where you are shitty goblin teens fucking around. Will we be able to disrupt the community car wash and become goth? Listen and see asshole

You can get Goblin Punks here: https://gshowitt.itch.io/goblin-punks

[disastergenius]

A while ago, someone said they had the thought of Alex Newall (DM for RQG) guesting on Critical Role because 2 degrees of separation via Grant Howitt. 

However, I think we overlooked the idea that Brennan Lee “I’m all the bad guys” Mulligan and Alexander J “a monster but we respect his craft” Newall would also get along

[merelymatt]

I got to play Grant Howitt's Fucked Up Little Man at the last Indiemeet / London Indie RPG Meetup! I have never played a darksouls so every choice I made in this game was influenced by cultural osmosis. My fucked up little guy was a tooth enthusiast with a wet cough who knew a lot of gross and dangerous shortcuts. And I took the record for fastest death of The Damned One – I tried diving straight back into the acid pit we crawled out of post-resurrection and rolled a 1, perishing immediately

And I was pretty proud of the map area I drew, a broken staircase guarded by a phalanx of soldier mummies! Drawing is not a skill I've put a lot of points into, but maps are stylised and so is Dark Souls, and that helped, and I feel like I found creative ways round my own constraints

[firstofficerrose]

Kaiju Girls by Grant Howitt is an awesome game and y'all should play it.

You play as teenage girls who have all the pressures of school and sports and the expectations of grownups... and a secret ability to turn into giant kaiju monsters!

It's a d6 dice pool system with a fun little stress mechanic that can trigger involuntary transformations.

I ran it for the first time tonight and we had a blast. My duo of Kaiju Girls had to deal with everything from tutoring your crush in physics to a rival sabotaging the culture fair to portals tearing rifts in the sky and pouring out a massive evil flying lobster!

[carfuckerlynch]

do you happen to have a link to the ‘here is the game: today you are not going to die’ piece grant howitt wrote?? i’ve always loved it as your blog title & did realise it was a larger think especially by grant howitt bc i love his rpgs so much & i just did some googling to see if i could find it myself but i wasn’t successful 😔😔

i don’t :(((( he posted it on his twitter a long time ago and i didn’t keep it :(((

EDIT I FOUND IT. LINK HERE (it’s an image no plaintext sorry everyone)

[ex-libris-craux]

So not long ago I ran Sexy Battle Wizards for my Friday night game group to give our forever DM a break, and I am dropping the opening here for posterity because I love it very much:

You are returning from a successful rescue mission, assisting The Vestal Vanguard in retrieving the holy, gem-encrusted Garter of the Order from the sleek and lovely thigh of Synchron Moreover, villain (and sexy, sexy beast). Moreover is now moreunder guard (possibly moreunder moreguards), and you have returned to the College Errant, where wine, the spa facilities, seven masseuses and masseurs, an Olympic-sized swimming pool (the mountain, not the event), a chef, and twelve puppies await you.

Oh, and also Elysian Traipse, who as you coalesce from ephemeral (and quite sexy) mist greets you with a worried expression, wringing hands, and a wailed "What have you DONE??? There are DEMONS in the INNER SANCTUM!"

A sexy battle wizard's work is never done, in this case because Traipse has locked you out of all the College's amenities until you get rid of the demons.

[jkcorellia]

"Grant Howitt made both Spire: The City Must Fall and Honey Heist" feels like the TTRPG world's equivalent of "George Miller made both Mad Max and Happy Feet"

[rqgender]

Today's gender is too busy smoking cigarettes and kissing girls.

[hopeshearthpod]

HERE WE GO SEXY BATTLE WIZARDS TIME!

Just as a caution, Dirk and Izze get very loud in this recording when they laugh lmao

Anyway uuuh back to the sexy demon and three book thieves

also here's that drawing of Husky that Izze did

[owl-ghost]

I think I peaked in my comedy ability when I ran a Honey Heist campaign over Thanksgiving as a holiday one shot.

The opposing spy trying to steal the honey was actually two turkeys ontop each others shoulders in a trench coat. When revealed they did a back flip and came out duel wielding pistols. "Gobble gobble motherfuckers!"

Then when one of my players disguised himself as Mark Zuckerburg and then they accidentally destroyed Elon Musk. Half way through they all decided they were socialist bears. It was beautiful chaos.

All this to say, Grant Howitts stuff is just as much fun to play as it is to listen to. Go check out his stuff!

[penguinpanic]

The tenth game we played was A Very Northern Christmas by Grant Howitt. Jen ran this christmas special in which a multiverse of Sean Bean's team up to break the curse that results in them dying in every film. It’s fair to say that none of us could do a great Sean Bean impression even with the ‘O2’ on ramp but we sure gave it a go!  

[savevsfacemelt]

Post-game Musings - Heart

Back in December, when talking about Scum & Villainy, I said that I was also running a slightly intermittent game of Heart.

Well, 'slightly' became 'very', and 'intermittent' became 'sporadic', and faced with the campaign continuing to not happen for the next few months, I decided last week to pull the plug. It's a bummer, but that's how 90% of RPG campaigns end - not with a bang, or even a whimper, but the nagging whine of incompatible schedules and commitments slowly grinding into each other just below the waterline.

...but what the heck is Heart, anyway?

--

Heart's great: This game? This game fuckin' rules. It throws wonderfully evocative classes (Wizards made of bees! Train paladins! Debt priests! The Crow, from the movie The Crow!) into a nightmare world of meat dungeons, subterranean moons, gangster druids, blooddrenched angels, electronic hells and interdimensional subways. The art's great, the writing's great, the setting's crammed full of evocative ideas, and the system... reads slightly better than it plays, and the exploration subsystem needs clearer explanations for how to make it work at the table, but it's still pretty bloody good. If the opportunity comes up to run/play Heart again, I'll do it in a, well, heartbeat.

Meaty beaty big and bouncy: The strongest element of Heart are beats, which are the core of both its experience system and its approach to GMing. At the end of a session, each player picks two beats - events, consequences or choices - that they would like to happen (or at least start happening) to their character. These range from the minor ('kick someone off a roof') to the major (''convert an important NPC to your cause') to the extreme ('take final revenge upon your secret master'), and the character gets a corresponding minor/major/extreme power-up when the beat is fulfilled. The GM's job is then to set up all those beats in the next session - and that's how you design scenarios and sessions. No maps, no scripts, no big plans, but a focus on giving the players what they want while building on what came before.

Planning is my heroin: I, of course, fucked that up immediately. Not by pre-planning a big story arc or dropping in railroad tracks, but by getting caught up in the coolness of every character. I wanted to see where they would end up, which meant I started getting ideas about where they'd end up, which meant I planned (rough) arcs for each character and dropped hints and foreshadowing and plot threads for players to follow those arcs. And my ideas are good! The players seemed to like them! But they're my ideas, and I struggle to put my ideas to one side even when a game pushes the players' ideas to the forefront, or to let myself take a reactive GMing role rather than actively driving things. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle - me riffing on player inputs, the players riffing on mine, everyone being happy - and maybe that's how the game would have turned out in the end, who knows.

Everyone's busy again: Look, I'm not saying pandemic lockdowns were a good thing, but at least they meant everyone was home, bored and desperate for online interaction on a Thursday night. It was a good time for gaming - I think I was running 4 games a fortnight (via Zoom) at one point. But that's over now, and folks have a lot of things on their plates again, and I'm back to competing with things like jobs and children and sex for attention again, and I tend to lose those competitions.

Am I advocating for another pandemic? Yes No. But sigh.

--

What else is happening in gaming land?

I tried to get a Lancer campaign off the ground, but I have a limited number of friends interested in a tactical-combat-focused RPG, and most of them were busy, so I'm putting that off until autumn.

I've just started running facilitating guiding a Wanderhome game, and it's got lots of promise, but it's a challenge in some ways. A game with no conflict, no plot and little-to-no external drama? Just vibes? That's not my strong suit - but then again, it's been a long time since I had to learn new gaming skills, so I’m into it.

And I should (fingers crossed) be running a one-shot, maybe even a 3-shot, of Achtung! Cthulhu next month. That'll be fun.

Nothing is more fun than shooting Nazis.

[sky-and-sometimes-others]

I am trying to reach an incredibly specific audience here, BUT for those of us who listen to RQG and/or like Grant Howitt games AND also are watching ACOFAF, you could absolutely do goblin quest with salt goblins in the acofaf world. Like that's basically the game is already inside the game