#rules lite

[dungeonofthedragon]

I've added some more free community copies of Explorers. Get in there and start adventuring today!

[acrisius-ii]

HAVE YOU EVER WANTED TO RUN DOOM OR ULTRAKILL WITHOUT THE COMPUTER AND WITH YOUR FRIENDS?

Guess who turned it into a TTRPG?

DEMON CALIBER is a new game that I made! It's focused on fast everything! Fast character creation! Fast killing of enemies! Fast movement! Fast dying!

If you've ever wanted to feel like V1 Ultrakill smashing through the hordes of hell or Duke Nukem or Lo Wang or B.J. Blazkcowicz, this is for you!

If you've also wanted to do something akin to Left 4 Dead, CoD Zombies, or Payday, this is also for you!

It's also pay what you want, so for free as well. There was also no CC0 art online that held the exact type of violence I wanted for the cover art, so I suppose what you see will have to do for now.

You can get it now at itch.io!

Good hunting!

[magicalinternetwinner]

Hello.

I am a real person and not a spam bot. I'm based in Ireland, and didn't really know what to do here at first. I was just liking and reblogging stuff, but not posting, and that certainly looks like bot behaviour.

Anyway, I wrote one post about ttrpg stuff, so I think I'll keep it on that trajectory with this blog.

I play d&d when other people are running it, but I run "scum & villainy" and "kids on bikes" for my friends, because I'm more into rules-lite and keeping the story moving. I once spent 9 hours (3 different sessions) in a single combat encounter in d&d, so I'm trying to get away from that.

[chrisairgames]

Time to Play Curios: Albrecht Manor

When it's Halloween, I like to play creepy Halloweenie games. Ok, well I might like spooky games all year-round, but for the horror season it's time to pull out all stops. When I received this package in the mail last month, I knew it'd be perfect for the weekend before Halloween:

Curios: Albrecht Manor is "an epistolary horror mystery experience" by Seb Pines, the first in the new Curios series from Good Luck Press. There is no single person who runs the game. No one knows what they're about to open, other than what you see on the blurb.

The notion of the game is that the players are "Researchers" of "The Archive" who receive evidence and ephemera leftover after the appearance of supernatural phenomena. The details on the Archive is sparse, but you an unbothered dayjob vibe oozes from the tone. This manila envelope is all you're going to get, and your job is to make some declarative statements by the end of the research.

It's a fun space to play. I could see the experience of play spanning the spectrum between a total LARP and completely player-facing. For our game, we were closer to the player-facing end of that spectrum, and had a fabulous evening.

What's inside?

The Albrecht Manor manila envelope contains 11 letters and two postcards, along with a short mailing notice and the "Archive" report card. Like any good horror story, the letters start off tame with bits of weird, yet quickly start including photos, newspaper snippets, blueprints and administrative papers.

From tearing open the letters to the difference in paper textures, styles and handwritten bits were thrilling to handle. We were surprised how each piece, and sometimes innocuous details at first, came back to have us rifling back through what we'd read before.

Play Experience

With the stack of letters in the center of the table, without prior discussion, we naturally began to play by each picking up a letter/postcard, and circling, writing notes, and sharing weird details. This created a fun, anachronistic revelation of details, as sometimes one bit would go unremarked earlier would pop up in someone else's letters.

When an important detail came to the forefront of this developing narrative, I appreciated how the spotlight would pass around each of us adding more context or details or asking questions we weren't sure how to answer. But it's extremely difficult to discuss direct details without spoiling the contents of the letters. The discovery of certain documents and finding the inter-connectivity is the fun of this game.

The game comes with a single paragraph of instruction, which can seem daunting, but I was in awe of how the physical presentation made space for our own curiosity to define the bounds of how we approached the mystery. We examined photos under different types of lamplight, tried using the zoom on our smartphones as impromptu magnifying lenses, and folded paper in all sorts of ways. Most importantly, we were enraptured by this game for nearly three hours and were astonished at how fast the time passed.

We all appreciated how there is no direct, singular answer, and that we the players were the ones to define the story from our collective interpretation. It's not a good mystery, especially a ghost story mystery, if you're not left with more questions by the end.

Spoilers at the next heading!

Three specific moments literally gave me chills. I don't want to spoil those here. After the photo and line break is the report that was sent to the Archivist at curiosarchive.net. I realize now that we didn't "even "formally" discuss how we would classify the Albrecht Manor phenomena, but the classification is hinted at.

While I don't intend to spoil specific details in the letters, the submitted report has major spoilers. So if you haven't played this game, don't read any further!

Submitted Report to the Archivist

29/10/2023

Dear Archivist,

The first sentence on the first postcard, unwittingly, says it all, "the house is a dream."

This group of Archive researchers have deemed this household, built by one Damian Albrecht, to be a spiritual machine. This trap inhabits the mind of its occupants, and grows and shifts according to its creator's and past occupants' hopes and dreams of a warm household. The researchers are even hesitant to call this a haunting, but agree the house appears to be a spatio-temporal machination propelled by the spirits it is required to consume to keep operating. The fire, in this interpretation, is a convenient excuse for the house to re-enter its slumbering stasis. The researchers' consensus is that there must be only one true fire, but could not access WHEN that may be.

The researchers agreed, though without substantial evidence, the purpose of this machine is to sustain not only long life to its creator, Damian Albrecht, but also to impose HIS dream onto others, and subsume their dreams to feed his own. Again, the fire is a convenient cover-up for the displaced spirits Albrecht has trapped.

The researchers were divided on several facets, foremost questioning the actual existence of the principal figures: Alex Dunn and Anne Wilson. Could it be that Alex Dunn is in fact Albrecht? Has the persona of Alex Dunn created the character of Anne Wilson to represent the inhabitants of St. Ann? Will there be an all-consuming fire that destroys the town, and this house (and letters) are calling the community to action, as a sort of warning? Does Albrecht Manor's machinery twist and channel the powers of the Catholic Saint Ann, whose emblem is a Door, to imbue itself with supernatural power? If Alex Dunn is/was a real person, were they drawn to the house due to past trauma involving Anne and the implied kitchen fire that took place in the past? Did this oft-alluded-to fire kill Anne?

Many loose ends remain, but these Archive Researchers remain confident that the initial readings of the Albrecht Manor as deviating from the traditional haunting are correct. The "ghosts" are most likely Albrecht himself, and the temporal echoes of the Manor's past occupants. We put forth that through mechano-spiritual insights, "Damian Albrecht" built Albrecht Manor to trap people into its/his dreams of a perfect home. As a single household can never be "perfect" in his madness, the Manor and its master yearn to consume more ideals to feed this imperfect spiritual machine.

Thank you for reading, dear Archivist.

All best, Chris Air & Friends.

[bugbearsandbookends]

Beneath the Sunken Catacombs: Rules Lite Dungeon Crawling Done Right

Paul Bantok’s Beneath the Sunken Catacombs (2nd edition shown here) may be as close to the platonic ideal of an old school dungeon crawling roleplaying game as I’ve found yet.

This is 150 tightly written and handsomely illustrated pages crammed full of content, covering everything from characters creation to dungeon design, all designed with an eye toward squeezing as much variety and option from as few rules as possible. Sorcerers, rangers, arcane archers—you can have it all with the tiniest of tweaks to basic player character archetypes. The same goes for the monsters. All of them come with six different random variants, which in effect gives the DM dozens upon dozens of unpredictable foes for play groups.

Play is brutal, of course—this is old school, like I said—but Beneath the Sunken Catacombs knows what it’s all about, and gaming groups who can get with the vibe will find no end of adventure in this single volume.

This is a desert island game for me, essentially. Hand me a set of dice and this little book and I could run campaigns for years and years with those alone.

[openstorygames]

Games as Invitation

Yesterday, I chatted with an artist who has created a beautiful piece for my upcoming game Invitation.

This artist had never played TTRPGs before, and we're casting a broad net with the audience, which means Invitation is incredibly rules-lite (and honestly pretty RP-lite as well).

It's a coloring game where you collaborate and discuss with the other players as you go.

So much to love about the talented artist, but my favorite moment was when she revealed that she'd playtested the game to make sure her piece was playable. She and her daughter sat down, read the rules, and played together over multiple sessions!

They brainstormed, got creative, and ended up with a unique and stunning piece that they worked on together.

An artist and her child, collaborating, playing, creating together.

That's the point of Invitation. It's welcoming players to make the game their own. It comes with suggestions but invites you to ignore any that don't work.

And the piece that this artist created is absolutely an invitation as well. There's a story in it, a mystery. And the mystery will be solved a thousand ways by a thousand players (okay, that's a bit ambitious).

Invitation is coming in early November, and I can't wait to share it with all of you!

[guidedbynors]

Guided Adventure: 01: Mischief in WaleGate for Old School Essentials

Mischief in WaleGate is out! Download it as a Pay What You Want title on DrivethruRPG.

Mischief in WaleGate

Welcome to WaleGate a town of Whaling and strange happenings. Here, Whalers harvest Deepdive Whales to carve out Deephearts, a glowing golden crystal within each whale. These Deephearts are magically powerful and can be used for all types of magical doings.

But something strange is going on. Peoples swords have been turned into fish. The Harbord Lodge was robbed but with no sign of entry. Little winged people have been seen at times in the streets--but they are gone before anyone can point them out.

[polyhedralmice]

It’s Saturday night and the comic convention has shut down for the night…

The industrial light slams off with a crash, and for for several heartbeats you are plunged into darkness. When the dim auxiliary lights finally come on, you find that you feel somehow…different. As you survey the lobby of the convention center two things feel certain- one, you’re definitely trapped here, and two, you definitely aren’t alone.

Cosplay After Dark is a rules lite narrative TTRPG designed for spooky one-shots. It features

Low GM prep

1d6 core mechanics with degrees of success

A pool of flex points to enhance rolls

Zombie bites don’t turn PCs until sunrise so the whole party can play ‘til the end

[theresattrpgforthat]

Any recommendations for a rules-lite mecha game?

THEME: Rules-Lite Mechs.

Hello friend, I sure do! I had a really fun time putting this recommendation list together, so I hope you also find something fun in here!

Reactors & Romance, by JP Bergamo.

Reactors & Romance is a rules-light, narrative-focused, one-shot-oriented RPG featuring mechs and flirting.

Players take on the role of a hot-shot mech pilot with only two ways of problem solving: flirt your way through with your romantic charm, or fight your way out with your mech. Your ability to do either is measured with one stat, your HEAT. Your HEAT measures both how hot your mech’s reactor is getting, and how hot of a pilot you are. Your mech will get less and less reliable as it builds up heat and takes on damage. Fortunately, you have always done your best flirting under pressure.

Say hello to a beautiful, quick game that focuses on the emotions that sizzle inside the gigantic battle machines, as well as the fights that might make those relationships complicated. With a nod to Lasers & Feelings, Reactors & Romance has some additional bits and pieces to play with, such as heat, which both propels you into the danger zone and also makes you very attractive. You also have Keepsakes, which are meant to represent romantic connections that help you clear your Heat. The author references Thirsty Sword Lesbians, Promare, and Gurren Lagann, which all make me super excited about this game.

Mech and Kaiju, by Minbot.

You are the pilot and crew of the Dominator, an advanced bio-mechanical skyscraper sized battle suit designed and built to fight the Kaiju, gigantic leviathan creatures from beyond the depths of space.

Based on the popular Lasers and Feeling RPG by John Harper and created for the Minimalist TTRPG Jam 3.

Simple and descriptive, Mech & Kaiju asks you to determine a few traits of your characters, a few traits of the mech you pilot, and a few truths about the Alien Overlord and the Kaiju you're going up against. When it comes to rolling, it's typical Lasers & Feelings: roll under your target if the situation is related to logic, reason or technology, and roll over if your approach is related to emotion, reasoning, or biological understanding. If you want a contrast between flesh and metal, you might like this game.

Resonance, by Foolhardy Press.

You and your team are Pilots; called upon as a team to control a single Mech capable of defeating the Intelligence

With your skills combined, your party alone can pilot the mech via Resonance, a state of understanding acquired through intense training and compatibility.

Each of you has an individual role to be expressed through your control of the Mech; the Captain, the Gunner, the Engineer, the Hacker, or the Muscle.

You must defeat the enemy Intelligence within a constricted amount of rounds or fail your mission.

Resonance feels very much inspired by Pacific Rim, what with the idea that all of your team is responsible for piloting a single mech, and the fact that the game defines success as relative to a target called The Drift. I like the idea that success here is related to how aligned the crew is in regards to the goal; it's an excellent example of a game that tries to weave the themes of the story into the mechanics.

Mechers, by Jason Pickering.

Welcome to Odin Corp new employee. You get to start your exciting new career as a Mecher working with our resource gathering facilities on the planet Sif 11. Your exciting career will see you wearing an Odin Corp Mech Suit as you transport cargo and supplies between our many different planetary stations as well as light resource gathering duties. In your journey you will see the wondrous sights, flora, and fauna this planet has to offer. Yes! It’s dangerous work, but your hard work will allow the facilities to keep operating so we can supply Odin Corp products to families galaxy wide.

Mechers is a rules-lite ttrpg that uses a 2D6 system, to determine outcomes for player actions. Players pilot a mech equipped with gear and adventure across an alien planet dealing with wild flora and fauna and an overbearing corporation. So grab your Dice, Load your tools, and head out into danger.

If you love mechs but you want to do something other than fight, Mechers is probably where you'll feel most at home. Your players are using mechs as tools to help them explore planets, rather than fight battles, although I wouldn't be surprised if you have to get a little bit physical to get yourself out of some tricky situations. Getting past obstacles requires filling tracks to represent the effort it takes to work through difficult situations.

Attempting to overcome an obstacle involves rolling 2d6 and trying to get a 7 or higher, with results of 10 or higher being without any consequences. It feels very akin to PbtA in terms of result range, but I think the ethos is a little less about generating interesting results and more about using what resources you have to improve your rolls and reduce any damage you take.

Immortal Gambit, by TitanomachyRPG.

IMMORTAL GAMBIT is a pick up and play 1-page mecha TTRPG you can start as soon as everyone has arrived to the session. Every player picks a different role (Pilot//Pilot’s Mech//Battleship Captain// Faction Leader//Rival//Rival’s Mech) and their own goal. Try to accomplish your goal while deducing who you can trust--and who is working against you!

Immortal Gambit looks to be about pitting children against each-other in gigantic mechs, all for political gain. I think it's interesting that a character and a character's mech are two different roles that are played by different people. Each character has a personal goal, one that is hidden from the rest of the table. You take turns trying to turn the tides of battle in your direction, using a d20 and a coin. I think it's interesting that this game is very competitive, and encourages your characters to work against each-other. It's a little bit like a hidden role game, so if you like keeping secrets, I think you might like this.

Big Robots, Big Feelings, by RentAThug.

Prime your laser cannons, draw your energy sword, and pilot your mech to glorious victory the only way you know how: how by feeling more feelings than anyone has ever felt! Battle enemy mecha and your own raging emotions in BIG ROBOTS, BIG FEELINGS!

Big Robots, Big Feelings is a one page RPG designed for the 2024 One Page RPG Jam! The game uses a simplified version of the Powered by the Apocalypse system, with Action Rolls determining outcome. Inspired by mecha anime, these Action Rolls are influenced by your character's emotions and relationships with other characters, allowing you to literally use the power of friendship to destroy your enemies.

This game feels very in tune with the color-coded superhero genre, with bright colors and themes that really double down on tropes. Your character has a background, three emotions, and a Mech that's designed to reflect their personality. When you try to do something, you use 2d6, as per a typical PbtA game, with modifiers related to your emotions and your relationships. In Big Robots, Big Feelings, you truly do win fights with the power of friendship!

Sad Teen Mecha Pilots, by Unknown Dungeon.

INCOMING TRANSMISSION….

Over twenty years ago, the first Demon attacked. Humanity fought back, but suffered great losses in the process.

In the decades since, a secretive program was initiated to build monstrous bio-mechanical mechas to fight the Demons, and to train the young pilots who control them.

You are those pilots.

Sad Teen Mecha Pilots is a collaborative story-telling RPG about the lives of young people faced with the impossible task of saving the world, and the strain it puts on them and their relationships.

A simple one-page game, this is all about the motivations behind a war, and the strain of trying to hold off Doomsday. The lose state of the clock is represented in a Doomsday clock, which looks like it's already partially filled when you start to play the game, although I'm not entirely sure if that's the intention. When the clock hits the Eleventh Hour, your characters are pulled away from their teenage lives for a nearly-hopeless battle.

The bulk of the game is definitely focused on the daily lives of your characters; their family relationships, their struggles with school or friendships, and recovering from wounds. I'd be interested in seeing how this game might combine with a more mechanically complex mech game to provide a lot of pathos in between high-combat scenes - although you as a group would have to be OK with going up against pretty impossible odds.

Also Check Out…

Mechs Part 1 Recommendations

Mechs Part 2 Recommendations

Gundam TTRPG Recommedations.

Metal Sword, by Mousewife Games (simplified Beam Saber!)

If you like what I do and want to leave a tip, you can check out my Ko-Fi!

[morimox]

Once again "oobh i got plany off time" got the better of me and I procrastinated and started on a game jam SUPER late, lmao. But I'm actually really proud of what I was able to create in such a limited amount of time. Destroyed my sleep schedule, but hey, I made something! It's a MÖRK BORG-compatible creature supplement available for free or PWYW on itch. If you enjoy it, please consider donating~

https://morimox.itch.io/shrouded-sovereign

[dungeonofthedragon]

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[acrisius-ii]

DEMON CALIBER: DEVILHEAD UPDATE

Well hey if you're not gonna download the thing, spare a boy a reblog?

Well, I'm not sure you could call it an update, but it sure is a big-ass change. We have an actual layout and design now! Even a little art! Though not that much, because I don't have the assets to do it. Mostly just text in boxes.

But c'mon, don't tell me you don't want to launch a fascist through a door straight onto a jump pad and shoot him in midair, richocheting the bullet into five other Nazis.

Don't tell me you don't want to blast a demon into a fine red mist with a megavolt tesla and then burn whatever's left of him into ash.

Don't tell me you don't want to blast yourself into the air with a kiloton explosive and plant a shovel through a mutant skull on your way down

I will tell you that not only are these things possible, they are encouraged.

If you've ever wanted to be V1 or Soldier from TF2 or Jacket or Doomguy or generally just have BFG Division play in the background whenever you enter a room, this is the thing for you.

Pick up Demon Caliber today on itch.io! It is completely and totally free unless you want to pay me, in which case it costs as much as you want it to.

Oh, and the motivation held out. Five new maps! Go, my players-- create more of your own! Let this be the great spring from which all great things flow!

[chronosaurvs]

girl what's happening like. astrologically speaking right now.

[gravityr00m]

[openstorygames]

GM under the weather? Game night at risk of being cancelled? Try By the Book, a FREE introductory TTRPG for all ages!

Just grab a deck of cards and some dice, and start playing in minutes.

Anyone can GM with this highly collaborative game, perfect for when you've got zero prep time. Draw the cards, describe the challenges, and add your own twist as players seek solutions to obstacles that stand between them and their quest.

Start your story at https://open-story-games.itch.io/by-the-book Like what you see? Find more kid-friendly games (and a few just for grownups) at https://open-story-games.itch.io/

[dragongirlbunny]

also on the topic of tabletop rpgs i hate how autism makes them significantly more difficult/stressful than they need to be like

a) i already have a hard time knowing when it is appropriate to interrupt people

b) auditory processing issues plus needing to filter everything through "how would my character react" plus actually finding the right words to speak means the lag time between the GM or a player talking and me forming a response is so wide that it's almost guaranteed that someone else will have already responded

c) it causes me to be absolutely atrocious at open-ended prompts and downtime and the like because i have to shift gears from "objective-oriented" thinking to creative thinking which is at best slow and at times impossible if i am too focused on a given objective/task/goal