#tabletop games

[joelchaimholtzman]

Happy to share this weeks DUNE painting I just finished!

Based on last weeks most popular voting; Here is Gurney Halleck, the Master of Arms of House Atreides, and mentor to Paul. He likes to play the Baliset, a nine string instrument. Overal he is embodiement of the ''warrior poet'' archetype, one of the earliest in modern entertainment if I am correct.

Two more DUNE characters to go! Which one should I paint next?

1. Emperor Shaddam IV

2. Rabban

Hope you like it!

Best,

JCH

[theresattrpgforthat]

would you happen to know any rpgs explicitly about the Great Chain of Being?

Theme: The Great Chain of Being

Hello friend, I don’t think I know of anything that’s explicitly about the Great Chain of Being, although I think I have a few ideas for games that might flirt with either a Christian hierarchy or the concept of ascension. Nothing here's an exact match, but maybe there's still something that catches your interest?

If you are a follower of this blog and you know of a game for this, please add it in the comments or reblogs!

Hellwhalers, by Brewist Tabletop.

HELLWHALERS is an original TTRPG of both nautical and Christian-religious horror. Play as damned whalers, sailing hell's oceans to hunt a monstrous leviathan whale in a bid for redemption of your immortal souls. 

Whalers will earn souls through roleplay, challenges, and gambling, eventually collecting enough to pulse the Hellwhale's disembodied heart, a blackened, grisly organ kept locked away by the captain. To pulse the heart is to summon the monster you seek: the dreaded Hellwhale. Slaying this titan of Hell's waters is said to earn you a place back in God's graces.

Gambling plays a central role in the gameplay loop, creating a procedurally generated series of events each day. Gambling takes place on a Sic-Bo board, a game played with three six-sided dice.

This is a game of ascension to some extent, in that you are fighting to ascend from Hell. You choose from six base playbooks, and you’ll have to track your resources to make sure you have enough to keep you hale while out at sea.

Trash Mob, by mothermultiverse. After an untimely death, you reincarnated as something weak and potentially hated- but you don't have to stay that way! In a video game like world, your skills can grow simply by use, and while initial survival in the world may be harsh and difficult, it is only a prelude to a grand adventure that only you (and potentially your friends) can manage!

Trash Mob! was made to be Solo RPG ready, but also allow for some epic, GMless team up action or classic Narrated play. In the basic edition of Trash Mob, there are 16 playable Mobs, 4 basic zone setups, a series of charts to help you explore the world, and over 50 different skills you can gain as your monster grinds in their quest to survive, thrive, overcome the odds, regain some measure of their humanity, and become an overpowered anime protagonist that can shape the world with their actions!

While Trash Mob may not look like it from the cover, this entire game is about becoming a more and more powerful monster! You start as something weak and small, like a zombie or a chicken, but as you make your way through this magical world, you’ll find yourself levelling up, all the way until you become the most powerful thing in the dungeon!

And You Shall Shatter Temples, by Anna Landin.

Sing songs with the words they could not take from you. Raise the banner woven from the flags you stole back from them. Arm yourself with the swords you forged from their discarded bones.

And You Shall Shatter Temples is a game about rising up against an overwhelming power that is trying to crush you. All you have is what you carry with you, and those who rise up by your side. Together, you can turn the tide. Together, you can dethrone a god.

This game is more about fighting a god than anything else, but I think the very act could be part of the whole process of climbing the ranks. You don’t dethroned God all at once; you have to claim symbols of their power before you can topple them completely.

You Might Also Be Interested In…

My Destroy God Recommendation Post.

[quinnydoll]

being a GM is really fun because sometimes you can make your players go through some really traumatic Evangelion bullshit, but other times you can force them to go bowling for no reason

[takitakos]

This year I got to work on a tabletop RPG doing some MonHun inspired characters and it was a ton of fun ✨ The game revolves around the wilders, mutated rangers that try to stop the frenzy, a virus that makes monsters violent and self-destructive. Not only hunters but also chefs! WILDERFEAST is live on kickstarter right now, you can check all about it and support it here!

[sympyl]

Warhammer fandom elsewhere on the internet: *nerd bros with memes from 2011 and vaguely weird vibes talking about which primarchs could beat up which*

Warhammer fans on Tumblr: Omg. my guy. My dude. My little humfus blumfus. My skroinky paloinky. My blorbo. Littlest of meow meows. *points towards Deathkiller Skullscream the Vile, Lord of the infamous warband the Boneflayers from Planet Murder, whose least significant warcrimes involve torturing civilians to distill hard drugs out of their neural tissue (its more potent if they die screaming) and owning an entire planet as his own personal torture chamber which he goes to to unwind after a hard day of orphan murdering and slave trading*

[unnerd]

Places you should add to your little town/city in your fantasy world!!

Post offices. Wild, I know. But give me the unhinged kind. Pingeons and little postal dragons all over the place. You enter. The most disgusting smell fucking assaults your nostrils. You know what it is. Letter in hand, you go up to the counter. The postal worker is just a slightly bigger pigeon. You shed a tear.

PLAYGROUNDS!! Create the most dangerous kinds of playgrounds, the ones suburban moms would TRIP if they ever saw one. Monkey bars that are way too tall, swings that go full circle... The metal slide stays the same, it's already painful enough.

PARKS!! MAKE IT ALIVE!! Show people going on walks, reading beneath trees. C'mon most of them are already hundred years old (And are going to die after that CR 15 creature wrecks the town) anyways!! Show couples and picnics, show a family enjoying the sunday, give me someone picking flowers for their loved ones.

A bakery! Do you know how much these places are underrated? And do you know how much plot potential they have? Every good story starts with food poisoning or granny's recipe! Give me a place your players/readers are going to treat like home and, for once, it's not a tavern or a guild.

Government buildings! Give me a town hall that has a kilometric line in front of it. Give me a registry that is as old as this town. Give me police stations! Give me courtrooms! Make one of your players get arrested and now all of the party has to go through burocracy like a bunch of normal people!

(Who am I kidding? You don't need to make them get arrested. They are going to do that for you.)

Touristic attractions! Give me a full-on statue of the country's leader! Give me museums! Give me streets, ruins and whatnot that attract thousands of tourists everyday! Give me an annoying city guide that tries to get the party's attention everytime!

Magazine stands! Magazines don't exist? Newspaper stands! From the Queen's Journal to the most questionable new piece of Fox's Tailtracker, you have it all! Make your players doubt what's actually happening, sprinkle a little fake news... Or is it fake at all?

...Toy stores. OK HEAR ME OUT. Make magic toys; miniature skyships that actually fly, metal toy dragons that expel fire, little wands that make little light spells, wooden creatures that can move and make noises... Make children happy! And your players too because they will waste their money on these stuff.

Instrument store!! Make your bards happy with special instruments or just weird ones! Give me a battle in one of those that is just filled with funny noises and the worst battle soundtrack ever!!

Not exactly a place but... Cleaning carts!!! Show me people cleaning the streets, picking up the trash, cutting trees!! Make the town look clean!! Give me an old man that is really proud of his work!!!

(or ways to make your players feel even worse when the villain destroys the town later on :) )

[jovial-thunder]

Lancer on a physical tabletop with Lego minis!

We finally did the thing! I roped my siblings into playtesting a game of Lancer using Legos and a physical tabletop. The sitrep was to destroy five buildings, marked in red, because the Karrakins were using the installation to track their mobile hidden base (our home campaign is a blatant ripoff of Deserts of Kharak).

Things that need improvement:

better way to measure tiles. We were doing 4cm/space and had to do a lot of multiplication. Going to try wood dowels with tiles marked + get some kind of grid underlay.

similarly, we need aoe templates

I used too much terrain, it got messy

should get status rings/tokens to mark lock-on, etc

Things that worked well:

it was sick as hell to be able to physically destroy Lego terrain and mechs as they fell

we used physical dice? For lancer?? And it turns out clicky clack math rocks continue to be inherently great.

witchdice works well on mobile devices for character sheets so not every PC had to have a full laptop

different height-terrain was fun, though it made movement costs tricky to calculate

I'm excited to keep trying out different setups. All the terrain and stuff I've collected is pretty modular (lego makes that easy) so it'll be fun to see how wide a range of map types is possible.

[andi-o-geyser]

The 5 Stages of DM Grief

[crtgirl]

my wife’s game, stewpot, is finally crowdfunding today!!

it’s an incredible game about adventurers settling down and starting a tavern. if you have been enjoying dungeon meshi this is a game for you!

[thesixthstar]

Hey don't mind me but I playtested a really fun game at a local board game convention a little while back and I just found out they finally launched their kickstarter and I'd like to shill for it a little because its mad fun and I backed the kickstarter and I want it to succeed so I'll actually get the game lol.

Its basically a quick-and-light timed cooperative game for up to 4 people thats emulating a movie car chase. Its got a bunch of different "scenarios" for different movies/genres, but the basic premise is each player is in a different seat in the car (driver, shotgun, back-left, back-right) and you have a bunch of items and weapons and a limited amount of time to decide among all the players how and where to use those items, and in what order each round, to beat the Bad Guys(TM) that are chasing you.

Tumblr isn't letting me embed the Kickstarter link but it'll let me hyperlink it lmao

[joelchaimholtzman]

nd here is the final painting for my Avatar: The Last Airbender series! Avatar Aang himself, master of the Four Elements and savior of the world.

The cartoon was significant for me when I was growing up. Now that the live action is releasing tommorow, after 20 years since the original I felt that its the time to create my tribute.

This was the first one of the three (Katara, Sokka) that I made, and the piece I spent the least amount of time on. I also had plans for more characters but time constraints wont allow me to work on them just yet! Perhaps in the future.

I hope you like it!

All the best,

JCH

[theresattrpgforthat]

@martianworder asked me about this on my Forged in the Dark post, so here we go!

Clocks

So Clocks have been a tool that have been used before and outside of Blades in the Dark, but BitD was where I think they were made really popular.

Golem Clocks designed by cmartins on Itch.io

For all intents and purposes, a Clock is just a track that you fill, but in some cases it's preferred over a track because it fills less space, and it's easy to just draw a clock on a piece of paper to help you keep track of something as you play.

A Clock can be more than just a track. It can be a countdown, a timer, or a representation of a person or faction's goals. The larger the Clock, the bigger task it is. Here are some examples of how you could use them.

A Healing project clock from Blades in the Dark.

A player could have a project Clock that they fill over the course of many sessions. Perhaps they want to research a cure for a vampire virus that is threatening a loved one. The GM would ask them to make a research roll every downtime, and how successful they are indicates how many slices they fill - effectively, how much progress they make towards finding a cure.

Rebellion and Sedition Clocks for Brinkwood: Blood of Tyrants.

A play group might use a Clock to track a common goal, such as winning over a number of anarchists to help take down a mega-corporation. If this is a campaign-long goal, you might use a series of linked clocks to represent the jailbreak you need to assist before you can win over a computer hacker, and then the massive hacking project you need to support before you can overwhelm the corpo servers.

Faction Clocks from Scum & Villainy.

A GM might use a Clock to track the work a Faction makes towards their goal. Every downtime section, they GM might roll to see how successful the Faction is, or simply tick one slice of the clock if the Faction has no reason not to be able to do what they want. If the Faction is allowed to work unimpeded by the PC's, they might eventually do something that changes the world around them, for better or worse.

Mission Clock from External Containment Bureau and Doomsday Clock from Apocalypse Keys.

Clocks might also be used as a timer, to indicate when something terrible might happen, or when the group's time is up. This might be the amount of time before a murderer next strikes, before the haunted house claims another victim, or before the world begins to end. In some games, specific points in the clock (such as halfway, or a quarter of the way through) may trigger special events that give the PC's more information, or remind the group that the pressure is really on.

Clocks for Protect the Child.

All in all, Clocks are a great visual tool to help you and your game group keep track of what's going on in the fiction, and it can also help you keep track of a number of narrative threads in a fairly condensed space. Even if they're not built into the game you're currently running or playing, I think they're a fairly easy addition, and can certainly help with bookkeeping!

[prokopetz]

I'm not going to do this as a reblog because I don't want to shit up somebody else's notes with pedantry, but the really funny thing about that joke about how the British and the United States can't play chess because the British are missing their Queen and the US is missing two towers is that in chess handicapping, queen odds (i.e., beginning play with no queen) and two rooks (i.e., beginning play with no rooks) are roughly equivalent – that'd actually be a fairly evenly matched game!

[estragonhelmer]

Tahu!

First Toa painted up, and my last mini for the year.

[sheydgarden]

the Jewish TTRPG renaissance continues! there's 15 days left to back my latest project, a collaboration with other amazing Jewish creators that funded on Kickstarter in 15 minutes (!!!) & includes some fun add-ons & stretch goals we have yet to hit.

also, how great is this video that animates some of the art Shari Ross & i made for this game?

[ordheist]

PLEASE BOOST

hey! I’ve got some bills coming in so I’m opening up these sketchy commission slots for only 60GBP!! that’s 50% off my fully rendered character rate.

get at me if you want something drawn! you can probably tell but I specialise in gooey swampy alien stuff but I’ll draw just about anything