#rpggeek

[prokopetz]

I was about to ask you for a TTRPG suggestion but realized it's not nearly specific enough. Which got me wondering: where IS a good place to look for TTRPG suggestions? Googling just leads to the usual suspects, and going to RPGGeek or itch and just clicking around is going to find you a lot of hasty hacks, gimmicks, and supplements all mixed together.

You might check out @theresattrpgforthat, for starters. Their whole blog is about curated tabletop RPG recs, and they're a fair sight less picky than me about what sorts of requests they take because they're open to questions of the "I'm idly curious whether tabletop RPGs with feature X exist" variety, whereas my rec posts are more about "I need a tabletop RPG for specific purpose X". (And yes, I can tell when the requesting party doesn't have a specific purpose in mind – it shows!)

[italiancardskarsus]

Eight cards from Draconomicon booster (1996). Signature appears to be the same for three of them; the other four here match a number of features (look at Venomdust foreground human figure and Confusion). All signatures appear to be an eHM, or EHM for Venomdust (still looking for superior scans).

This set showed me not all cards were the same! Some are cut slightly to the left, right, up or down, and for these that obscures or reveals some of the signature. Looking through Boardgamegeek and RPGgeek shows no one of note by those initials - but a single artist in Boardgamegeek, Heidemarie Ehm, has that as her last name.

She worked on Cross City, a German boardgame, and that's her only known credit. Her signature there reads as "Ehm", quite the opposite of the "eHM" apparent in this game. However, the rest of her handwriting appears to be quite similar. I want to attribute this art to Heidemarie Ehm, but I can't be quite sure just yet.

[open-hearth-rpg]

#RPGCovers Week Fourteen Historica Arcanum (2022) Yağmur Kıyak

Nothing fills me with joy right now then a new cover, out of the blue, hitting me right between the eyes. That’s what happened when I saw a new collection from the Bundle of Holding. Historica Arcanum, it turns out is an amazing looking campaign setting from a Turkish Publisher, Metis Creative.

Empires of the Silk Road and Herald of Rain offer an alternate 13th Century Silk Road designed as an open world, and an adventure designed to build up to one climactic struggle in a legendary dungeon. The City of Crescent presents an alternate 19th-Century Istanbul. Those are complemented by map packs, wallpapers, tokens, and a soundtrack album. 

This is very much my jam– I loved historical sourcebooks, it covers two periods I dig, and I love Islamic history in general. It’s for D&D 5e which is not my jam, but seems easily ported over to other systems. I’d never heard of this before, but it apparently had a Kickstarter back in September 2022. It isn’t on DTRPG atm and isn’t listed in the RPGGeek Database. 

But the covers. Wow. Empires of the Silk Road sets the template. We have a dark black background with striking geometrical Islamic patterning around the outside. It’s like the finest woodcut. Then there’s the skull– the top of the head vanishing under the overlay of the title. The jewelry here is ornate, elaborate and, like the page border, nearly symmetrical  despite the complexity. It is such an amazing feat of draftsmanship. Then there’s the skull beneath the chains with whirlpool-like eye sockets. And then open mouth and the screaming fangs. I love that the skull image is the thing which breaks the symmetry. 

One thing that you might not take in the first time you look at it: the head-scarf, the sigils to the left and the pentagram to the right. 

The paired image to this is Herald of Rain, the campaign sourcebook for the setting. We have the same page border here, but done in dark red and difficult to see. But our skull face here is, in contrast, distinctly non-symmetrical, split unevenly. I love the fine detail on the metalwork of the mask. I can only assume it's a funerary one given that the eye slit doesn’t line up. Is it the mask of a Chinese lord or from some other stop on the Silk Road. Here the head scarf is replaced by flowing brown hair.

Finally, the more modern sourcebook, City of Crescent presents the border in a striking orange, but this time the border which boxes it in is thicker and more distinct. The orange here matches the tan of the uniform. The big signifier here is the fez atop the skull’s head– a sign of the 19th Century Ottoman attempts to mark themselves as modern and part of the supposedly advanced colonialist world. And, of course, there’s the characteristic mustache, out of place on a skull. I love the incongruity of that.   

But that mustache does draw attention to a detail which I find striking: they’re all the same skull. I don’t know if that means anything, but I love it.  

It also reminds me of the great series of covers done for the Brian Lumley Necroscope books from the 80s & 90s.

[sk3tchisworld]

Dreamscape Update!

The name is now SLEEPING WILLOW.

I was doing my due diligence and researching the original game name: Dreamscape. While the other game with the same name was released in 2004 (on rpggeek) I decided to play it safe. I changed it to Dreamcraft. This game was done in 2020. Too close to home. So now the current name I have chosen points to a major part of the setting and still has a dreamy feel to it.

NEXT

I have settled on three main mechanics: Blackjack, Five Card Poker, and Card Dueling.

Blackjack is the main mechanic to have a conversation with a Dreamer and to craft dreams.

Five Card Poker covers the ‘Town Social Play’ a mode in which you experience events throughout the town of Dreamscape.

Card Dueling is used against Nightmares. I’ve considered removing this mechanic . It’s one I’m making up and requires a lot of explanation to understand although the actual gameplay is simple and has some tension.

Removing Card Dueling means I may be able to ignore a different concept for ‘Nightmares Severity’ and ‘NPC Complexity’. I want to be as focused and streamlined as possible.

NEXT

I am working on the oracles. Hearts as Emotions, Diamonds as Materials, Clubs as Challenges, and Spades as Dangers are safe bets. Unfortunately, the last two things felt confusing to me. There is a gray area between danger and challenge depending on who you’re talking to. I also didn’t want to get too dark and lose the cozy feel. So…

Themes for Suits:

Heart - Time

Diamonds - Mystery

Clubs - Connections

Spades - Mystical (name pending)

And I have a theme for each kind of card Ace, Face Card, and Numbered. I want to keep the Jokers in, but that may have to come with a later update. That may be hard if I want to join the next months Jam!

LAST

My remaining tasks are at least:

Complete Oracle (Just a universal one for now)

Layout (it's just a mess of material right now)

Art & Design (Procreate Doodles and Game Icons)

Grammar/Spelling/Word Choice (So much will slip by)

Setting Description (Enough to set a mood and with literal room for expansion)

Brief Lore (To ground players and create a mindset)

Example Gameplay (Technically me playtesting)

Anyway! This is my game so far (without getting too in-depth). It's due in 9 days, but I’m trying to make it 8 and use 9 to fix anything if I find it last minute.

[seaofstarsrpg]

Game Theory - What makes a Character Background useful?

So, if you are interested in good. friendly, and sometimes even useful RPG discussion, I recommend you visit RPGGeek where one of the things they do is a Question of the Day to spark discussion.  Recently, one was about character backgrounds and backstories (it is here if you are interested), which got me thinking about how I use character background / backstory to help my roleplaying and give…

[axial-twist]

a thousand kisses for ttrpg designers who include detailed information about their game dimensions, format, number pages, etc on the itch/kickstarter page so i don't have to spend 5 years tracking it down when adding their game to rpggeek

[worstactionhero]

In a rare posting involving something I actually did instead of rebloggin something I have a mild to severe fetish for, I was inspired last week by a photograph from the Vietnam War to create something for a RPG I have not plaed in 35+ years and will most likely never play again.

Never the less I am flexxing derivitive creative pursuits of mild to sever talents for in creating a fan fic, a sketch/drawing/painting, and a possible game module for.

[pathologicallypedantic]

Are you looking for Dreamwalker: Roleplaying in the Land of Dreams?

Gonna slightly abuse my audience power to find a lost RPG from the early 2000s

premise was some kind of unspecified apocalypse was coming and the players must find some method of finding it out/stopping it in various dreamworlds.

There were four types of dreamworlds (which I think might also have been stats), two of which were "nightmares" and "dreams that mimic reality".

One of the sample dreamworlds was based on the song "what else is there" by royksopp (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4rZE_J1beA)

I had it as a teenager and now I don't have it anymore and "dreamworld RPG" finds 2 million rpgs.

If anyone knows what it is I will reward you with literally nothing!

Pencil

[onlyonesecrets]

Ei!!

Você aí!

Isso mesmo! Você aí revisando todas redes sociais ao mesmo tempo porque está sendo consumido pelo tédio. Deixa eu te fazer um proposta, Que tal entrar em um mundo inteiramente mágico, com interação com bruxos de todos os confins do país??

Isso mesmo que você acabou de ler *Bruxos*!!

Talvez você já nos conheça ou talvez ainda não.

Se já nos conhece saberá que está prestes a voltar com um dos melhores passatempos das suas noites, e se não nos conhece ainda prepare-se para entrar em um dos melhores RPGs dos últimos tempos!!!

Estamos voltando com tudo e esperamos vocês em nossos salões!!!

💚💙❤️💛

[zontco]

Preeeepppppppppp.... #backinthegmseat #5e #rpggeek https://www.instagram.com/p/BxbVub_j_2Z/?igshid=1bnn49y8zluen

[ludorg]

J’ai une collectionite aigüe :)

[another-rpg-sideblog]

This was an absolutely invaluable guide to RPGs and the history of the industry, published just at the dawn of the World Wide Web when this sort of information was not easily accessible. I only found out about Heroic Worlds itself through a two page quiz/advert in issue #177 of Dragon magazine (TSR, January 1992).

I guess it has now been superseded by online databases like RPGGeek and the RPG.net Game Index, but I’ve always preferred physical books. I’m fairly sure we’re not going to get the promised updated second edition anytime soon…

This is Heroic Worlds (1991), by Lawrence Schick (of White Plume Mountain fame).

There are a bunch of books from the ‘80s and ‘90s that attempt to catalog and review RPGs and they kind of boggle my mind (the same is true for the similar genre of print paperback tip guides for videogame). Even having lived in the pre-internet era, I don’t understand the rationale for these books from a publishing perspective. Which is not to say I don’t adore Heroic Worlds. I do! It just seems…improbable.

The book essentially amounts to an index of every RPG product produced from 1974 to 1990. It feels a tiny bit like an Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide (another publication I’ve always been baffled by), except without the prices (though there is a small section on collecting — the advice still rings true today, primarily: be patient!). The listings are interrupted periodically with short essays by a rogues gallery of RPG designers: Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, Greg Stafford, Steve Jackson, Jennell Jaquays, Michael Stackpole, Ken St. Andre, Tom Moldvay, Ken Rolston, Sandy Petersen, Erick Wujcik, B. Dennis Sustare, N. Robin Crossby and Greg Gordon. That is a pretty all-star cast of characters talking about tabletop game design!

The main attraction for me, though, is Schick’s commentary. Nearly all of the listings are accompanied by very brief appraisals; they give Robert Christgau’s album reviews a run for their terseness. Schick has a dry wit that creeps into the capsule reviews that soon becomes addictive. And there is just something wonderful about having a period of time captured so exhaustively in a single volume. I don’t think EVERYTHING ever published through 1990 is in the index, but Schick sure makes the book feel like it does. I refer to it constantly for my Instagram posts, it was a constant companion when writing my own book and honestly, it deserves a lot of blame for the size and scope of my collection. Damn you, Schick!

(Repost from April 30, 2020; revised)

[open-hearth-rpg]

Loresheets: Great RPG Mechanics #RPGMechanics: Week Five

In the early 2000s I didn’t really have a FLGS that I went to for rpgs. One was pretty much a miniatures-only place and the other I avoided because of bad past experiences. So instead I got a lot of things by mail order– I say mail order rather than online because in some places I literally had to send them a check. I still don’t remember how I heard about Weapons of the Gods. This was pre RPGGeek or G+. I suspect I followed a link from something Robin Laws or Ken Hite reviewed or mentioned. 

At the time I was in the middle of playing Exalted, but also fascinated by the idea of doing a high fantasy wuxia game which could emulate Jade Man Comics I’d read in the 1990s: Force of Buddha’s Palm, Oriental Heroes, etc. After waiting a long time, the game actually shipped– in a preview form for Gen Con 2005. Eventually the full glossy book arrived and it was…

…a lot: colorful, wild, and imaginative. The text contained more ideas than I’d ever seen, presented in new and novel ways. This was the first time I’d encountered the work of Jenna Katerin Moran. I hadn’t seen the first or second edition of Nobilis at that time But if you know her work you can feel it throughout. In particular the approach to the setting material. 

Because Weapons of the Gods is, in addition to being deep in non-Western cultural elements, a licensed game. There’s a massive backstory for a world which pretty definitively players will have no idea about. Let’s leave aside the issue of the complexity and sheer weirdness of the mechanical system for WotG combat (seriously I have read it several times and played it twice and couldn’t explain it to anyone). The book tackles the question of how to present the world in an interesting way. 

Just about everything that’s talked about, the usual backstory sections of an rpg, is presented as a loresheet. Basically it is a tight block of information about the topic (the factions, special weapons, historical events, famous people, mystical happenings, philosophies, sexuality, etc). 

And for just about every one of those things you can buy yourself into that story. You have a currency called Destiny for character creation and development. You can spend that to shape your place in the world. As (name-dropping) Ken Hite pointed out to me, the brilliant thing here is how it monetizes the setting. 

For example, Destiny Binding: Brothers talks about the bond between male siblings. For 1+ destiny you can “increase the role of one of your elder brothers in the story. This makes his motivations more complex, gives more resources to offer you, and makes him more troublesome for you.” You can also do this for your younger brother or spend more to make yourself a middle child and both sides create complexities. There’s also an option for broken familial bonds. 

This is pretty conventional but there are other things, like being associated with divine figures. Take for example the legendary concubine Kung Min. If you’re descended from her you have a chaotic influence on the world of the wulin and you can use the strength of your lovers as your own. There’s material for having reincarnated souls, for homosexuality, for Confucianism, and hundreds more. Each one of these also offers discounted costs on related destinies. The designers present a web of connections which binds everything together. 

Everywhere there are brief drops of setting which radiate interesting ideas– and then the book tells you how to tie it to your character. It is chaotic, messy, hard to follow, and extremely ambitious. I adore it. It makes Weapons of the Gods an absolute pleasure to read and bounce around in. I’m not saying it's a great game, but it offers a new way to connect players to the world. I can almost imagine building a set of world-specific background moves for something like PbtA or FitD.

[sk3tchisworld]

So Dreamscape is a taken name. By a game that is only mentioned on rpggeek, but still it exists.

And DreamCraft was found on the same site in 2020.

So, now I have make it Sleeping Willow, which is fine with me.

Just fine.

I'm speed-running this game creation bit, but I'm learning so much about balance and mechanics. I thought I knew, but oh boy. Could I have gone for a tiny one-page game? Yes. But also no. Condensing replayability to a single page is actually really hard.

But with 13 days left I've employed 'Done is better than perfect'. Always moving forward, never looking back. Do I have a long list left, yes! Might need to double up some things each day.

Sleeping Willow is about being a Dreamcrafter who weaves dreams for weary travellers. You craft dreams by playing blackjack. If you bust, you must card duel nightmares! And when you want to hang out in the boughs of the Sleeping Willow with the other residents, you play poker. Oracles and resolution is baked into the entire process with nothing extra from the player.

[kimgunhee-blog]

Legends of the five rings #rpg #trpg #geek #nerd #rpggeek #dnd #tabletop https://www.instagram.com/p/BsUPm89jFbh/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=csu64ki0k6ub

[skullsplitterdice]

Roll for perception! Click Here to Read the Full Blog Post! #skullsplitterdice #dnd #dungeonsanddragons #tabletopgames #advanceddungeonsanddragons #dandd #rpg #roleplayinggame #tabletoprpg #gaming #gamer #RPGgeek #nerdy #DungeonsandDragons #geeky #tabletoprpg #tabletopgame #fantasy #d20dic #gamergram #postoftheday #oldschoolgames #oldschoolgamers #pathfinderrpg #Pathfinder