#ttrpg hack

[rosielav]

Do you like fun?? Do you like whimsy??? How about mice???

Boy, do I have two games for you!! Both hacks of the Lasers + Feelings system, each game is one page, rp heavy, and can be played by small and large groups alike!

16 Mice in a Mech features the Mousey Mech Brigade and their many adventures! Create your perfect mousey crew, customize your mech, and pick from multiple customizable mission objectives!

16 Mice Make Soup (AKA MouSoup) is the culmination of two decades of watching cooking shows and wishing they weren't always so mean to each other. In this collaborative competition, you and your fellow MouChefs work together to create unique and unforgettable dishes using their customized Special Ingredient, but don't forget, at least one round MUST feature soup!!

I'm currently sitting at 247 + 189 sales respectively, and would absolutely love to hit 250 + 200 this month!! Since it is free+, I don't expect to make much/any $$, I just would love to share my silly little mouse games with as many people as possible 🐁

Thank you for your time! Keep Calm and Mouse On!!

[games-franco]

TTRPG Hack

Create a minecraft world and explore the first map quadrant. There’s your homebrew campaign setting’s layout!

Just fill it in with cities, factions, and key locations and you’re all set! Biomes and all 🌎

Makes you think about elevations and any cave/dungeon systems naturally

[vintagerpg]

Black Sword Hack: Ultimate Chaos Edition (2023) is a beautiful little system derived from David Black’s Black Hack of D&D. The obvious literary touchstone is Elric and Moorcock’s larger cosmic conflict between Law and Chaos. There are many other clear influences, though — Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, Lankhmar, Kane, Poul Anderson. I suspect that is Jirel of Joiry on the back cover, flanked by Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Perhaps they’re a trio of entirely different people — Goran Gligovic’s art vibrates on strange frequencies, as if you’re looking at archetypes from a parallel universe.

The core systems work essentially as they do in Black Hack, so I won’t go into them here. The additions contribute to the doomful atmosphere. These amount to a set of different sorts of pacts — demons, evil swords, fairies, and so on. There are a varieties of powers to draw on and be consumed by.

The rest of the book is given over, mostly, to tools for collaboratively creating a world and a central city for players to inhabit, explore and, eventually, ruin and destroy. Goes with the territory, really. A couple scenarios round things out. A fantastic appendix lays out a method to create adventures using your favorite paperback fantasy novel.

Black Sword Hack touches on many of the same themes as Chaosium’s Stormbringer, but in a more minimal, smoother sort of way. It’s more direct, really. It’s also its own thing, and every game is unique, thanks to the world generation. I’m keen to see it develop further.

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played Oh Dang! Bigfoot Stole My Car With My Friend's Birthday Present Inside!

By Paul Matijevic

A 1-page hack of Lasers and Feelings where you and your friends chase Bigfoot on a long-haul pursuit to recover a stolen car, and the birthday present Inside.

[ostrichmonkey-games]

working on gear liiiiiiists. a decent chunk of the Character Stuff update for the Ostrichmonkey Hack is just more gear and stuffs

[ersetu-gazette]

*bursts into the room with a ruffled lab coat, my hair a mess, and soot covering my face* "I HAVE DISCOVERED THE ANSWER!"

So I had an epiphany to solve an issue with making a MoL ttrpg that I've been struggling with for like 3 days.

So generally speaking there's 2 types of "skill systems" that I enjoy. One is like pathfinder 1e where on level up you get a certain number of points (called ranks) that you can put into skills that you need. You can only have a number of ranks in any skill equal to your level so you have to pace yourself and there are crunchy ways to increase the total bonus to skill rolls. Things like feats, class abilities, and "class skills" all help in allowing you to maximize the number. I like the degree of player control and agency in this type of system. I don't like how out of control the bonuses can sometimes get and how disconnected from the narrative it can be. "Oh on level up in the middle of this dungeon I realized how necessary climb is so I'm investing all my ranks into it and shooting up to max capabilities. So now the wizard went from falling from every rope to freeclimbing a sheer cliff face." That can be . . . weird. The other skill system is the sort of "use the skills to boost them" method. In some systems you fail a check with a skill you earn xp you can spend to increase that skill. In another every success you get to mark on your sheet and at the end you make a roll and if you roll above that skill number then you get to bump it up. All sorts of ways of doing it. It's a very narrative system that makes sense. There's actually one where you need to get a number of successes AND failures equal to your ranks already before you're allowed to upgrade it. You need to fail and practice to improve right? That makes sense. But I'm hesitant to implement it into my vision of a MoL ttrpg. For one thing, it works best in a levelless system. My idea of MoL ttrpg has levels, I can't abandon that yet. And secondly, I don't like that the only way for players to showcase agency is by trying to fish/grind for situations to trigger the upgrade.

So how do I balance my want for levels, player agency, gameplay that encourages practice without grinding, and a system to support the method? How do I let players enact the "fantasy" of honing their shaping skills without it being busted or narratively dissonant?

And then I found it: apparently in Dark Eye 4e whenever you crit (succeed or fail) a skill check the price to upgrade the skill during point buy decreases! I think this would be perfect! If you use a skill more often you're more likely to crit and decrease the cost, but you don't get the boost immediately! You still have some player agency during level up to assign points to new skills you're bad at but you can't immediately become an expert in something with no practice!

I could also implement a downtime rule so that if you just don't get crits and the gm allows you to make time you can just earn the point decrease with dedicated practice between adventures.

There's still some tweaking that probably needs to be done to make it more streamlined and balanced, but I really like this core idea and I had to talk about it in some way.

Now the question is: do I keep this only for shaping skills like I originally intended, or do I combine this with the non-magical skills under the same system for simplicity's sake? Because originally I wanted the magic system skills to be separated from the non-magical skills to highlight the mechanical differences in play, but I really like this idea and think it would fit for "mundane" skills like stealth and bartering.

[psychhound]

[ID: a cover image for a game. large brown text says "bagel, lox, golem talks" and smaller text says "a for truth's sake SRD solo-journaling game". the background is a faded photo of houses in a village. there are white stars, an eye with wings, a kippah with a star of david, and a golem on the image. end ID]

Bubbie Blumenthal has a leaky roof again. The leviathan in the river keeps lying its head on the thatch to sleep. Rebbe Ezra has instructed his golem to scare the thing off, to no avail. It’s a stubborn beast, even if it does seem to have a soft spot for the schoolchildren who feed it latkes on the way back from learning Talmud.

All you know is that you’ll need a new notebook soon with how eager all the old zaydes are to chat your ear off after a little post-Shabbos wine. One glass in, and every one of them claims a dybbuk encounter that week. Well, it’s good material. You’ll figure out how true it is after it goes in your field notes!

Bagel, Lox, Golem Talks is a solo-journaling game where you travel to a magical Jewish shtetl in order to learn more about the community and write an ethnography on them. 

Pull cards to ask questions of the residents, roll dice to see how well interactions go, and get to know a host of colorful characters from young mensches, to golems, to nephilim, to the community rabbi. Unlock 12 different locations and gain levels in friendship and familiarity with the community as you document more and more in your field notes.

You'll need: A d20, d12, and d8, and a deck of playing cards

BLGT is a hack of For Truth's Sake by @hmooncreates

Get it now on itch! BLGT is free/pwyw!

[lady-rosceline-hurst]

...<WARNING: CATASTROPHIC SYSTEM FAILURE>

...<RECONSTRUCTING DATABASE>

...

...

...<ADMIN LOGIN REQUESTED>

...<AUTHORIZING...>

...<ACCESS GRANTED>

...<WELCOME ADMINISTRATOR 'ROY'>

Ohoho, shit, what do we have here?

Oh no. What did you just log into?

Nothin'

ROY.

Don't worry about it. Don't you have exams to study for?

I might be able to if you could go a week without doing something illegal ;-;

I am something illegal.

:(

Fine, I'll tell you, just stop whining. Some Karrakin Minor House just had their security fucking shredded. The hacker left a back door wide open so I'm poking around.

Roy. Stop. We aren't hackers anymore.

You aren't a hacker anymore, Little Miss Pacifist. Why can't you ever let me have fun?

Last time you had fun was when you overrode my leg controls!

If you wanted to spend your life with one of your normal human girls you should have cycled me when you had the chance.

You're impossible. Fine, just promise me you won't get caught. And don't hurt anyone. I don't want you going full meltdown on anyone again. Frankly, we don't need the heat.

And I thought the Baronies were on your cute little bad guy list. Fine. Now get back to your studying and leave me to it.

...

...<DOWNLOADING FILES>

[ri47]

NOMAD​/​VIRTUE - Soundtrack for Mechanised Roleplaying [Act 1]

This album includes four original songs and two alternative arrangements blending mechanical undertones with a rustic sense of adventure. Additionally, this special release includes five sound cues intended to accent your tableside adventures.

Whether you're freelancing or engaging in the more evergreen trappings of military mecha piloting, let NOMAD/VIRTUE complement your fireteam's soaring highs and crashing lows.

Also probably compatible with non-mecha ttrpgs. Rin hasn't tested this and can't safely confirm or deny it.

[damsels-n-dice]

Have you ever wished that your TTRPGs had more teenage angst in them? Do you love playing Lasers & Feelings but prefer fantasy & magic over science fiction & lasers? Do you just want to add another indie RPG to your endless list of games to play? Introducing...

Kisses & Curses is a free (with optional donations) game, based in the Lasers & Feelings system! It includes bonus mechanics for personal relationships and social status, to support that teen drama feeling, as well as all the standards Lasers & Feelings rules. I'd love it if you checked it out and/or had a go at playing it :)

[mysteries-x-mistakes]

a little Q&A about the cowboy ttrpg I'm writing

What made you want to write this game?

So a card game I play (Magic the Gathering) came out with a wild west themed expansion set recently and I didn't pay too much attention to since it seemed a bit too... campy. But I randomly saw a card from the set and did a double take saying "Is that a SNORSE? (snake horse)". And it was! It was pretty cool creature design, I thought- like a centaur with the head and torso of a snake on a horse's body and legs. or like a whole snake with horse legs. And then I started thinking, ok what if we were all cowboys in a ttrpg riding snorses? And it all spiraled out from there since I couldn't find a cowboy game that I liked, that hit the vibes I was looking for.

What makes this game different from other cowboy ttrpgs?

Most cowboy ttrpgs that I could find were crunchy or gritty (or both) and I wasn't looking to play a game where everyone is covered in dirt and miserable all the time. And I'm so tired all of the time irl, I didn't want to play a system with dozens of things to keep track of or do math on. So that's a huge part of what sets my game apart. I designed this game to be light-hearted and rules-light. I wanted it to focus more on the narrative than the math. (But I also didn't want a game that was "cozy"; I still wanted there to be some combat since that's a huge part of the genre.) That's why I chose the Kids on Bikes system! It's so elegant in its simplicity and seemed like it would be a great fit, reflavoring the space ship mechanics (in Teens in Space) to be horse mechanics. (Or just mounts, you can make your friend any species!)

Speaking of mounts, that's also part of what makes this game unique. Many of the cowboy ttrpgs, despite being super crunchy, didn't focus much on the mount. Like sure it was there, but it felt more like an object or a character feature. I grew up on Horse Girl™ media; I wanted a cowboy game where you become friends with your mount, where it feels like it's its own character with thoughts and feelings and actions of its own. I wanted to design a game where your bond grows over time and is meaningful to the way the game works.

Who is the intended audience?

Adults. There is space in the rules to run games for kids/teens, but the intended audience is adults due to the inherent adult nature of many of the genre conventions. You know, things like drinking and gambling and visiting the brothel. In fact, one of the Tropes you can be is the Saloon Worker. I was not about to leave out something so important since the saloon girls were a significant part of any frontier town's economy, but I also don't want to imply that teens could be saloon girls. (Hence me not naming it "Teens on Horses".) Just the same, I don't want to encourage teens to be gamblers.

I'm also designing this for adults because I wanted there to be room for adult levels of nuance and to discuss mature topics. I'm an adult and want to engage with media for adults- I have been getting tired of having to choose between adult media with gratuitous violence or blood and children's media with often simplified storylines and messages. I recognize that there are outliers, but the vast majority of things fall into the binary. I was looking to make a game be any of the above, but be mainly designed for stories that fall into the middle- something that is neither "cozy" nor "gritty". I wanted to play a cowboy game that could be anywhere from a light-hearted romp to an emotionally heavy story following traditional western storylines where life is a struggle to survive. So this is for anyone else who feels similarly.

I'm particularly aiming this towards anyone else who grew up on Horse Girl™ media like Barbie Horse Adventures and The Phantom Stallion, on The Saddle Club or Horseland, on Heartland and The Black Stallion, on all the cheesy movies. People who want to play a game with horses where you can build a friendship with said horse, where the horse is its own character.

You mentioned the Kids on Bikes system- what did you add to it or change?

I explained a little about Kids on Bikes in my previous post so I won't rehash how the system works here. I reflavored the space ship to be a mount. So as you progress through the campaign you get points wit which you can purchase Improvements for you and your mount, to show the training you are going through together or new skills you have learned. But I have added a trust mechanic and a mechanic where your mount can help you on various skill checks while you are riding it. I'm pretty excited about how it feels!

I added and changed up the magic system to attempt to balance it with the guns and other physical weapons. Unlike in Kids on Brooms, magic is always reckless and impulsive since there's not really anyone to teach you magic out on the frontier. It has potentially deadly consequences and can kill you if you aren't careful. Magic is also not endless. I introduced a "spell slots" system, as reduced and simplified as possible, like the rules for the Powered character in Kids on Bikes.

I added a Reputation system based on- Honor, Notoriety, and Bounty. This changes how the other characters in the world see you. I also used this system to allow characters to make a name for themselves, a title or nickname they are famously (or infamously) known by. All of these are huge parts of the western genre.

I added a handful of optional rules if you did want a little more crunch for your game. One of them is for Survival, if you wanted to focus on how difficult life was out on the frontier. One is Cattle Drives, if you wanted to participate in this classic activity. One is the Rodeo. I came up with some little minigames for the events which also encourage everyone at the table to participate even if their character is not the one competing. One is owning property- if the players wanted to buy a ranch and do some base-building. (I've been doing a lot of research to find out the average costs for things in the american wild west (about 1880) and other various agricultural metrics (like how many calves to expect to sell vs how many do you need to keep to continue to grow the size of your herd))

The game starts off with some collaborative worldbuilding- I came up with some questions to ask the table so you can create your own frontier if you don't want to play in the traditional american wild west setting. You can make it as fantasy and as wild or as peaceful as you'd like. (I also added a sensitivity note about including indigenous people to your frontier.)

Lastly, I added a bunch of new Tropes and Improvements, both for you and your mount.

[thirteene42]

if you're struggling to find a way to reward your players for silly things they do as a DM, make them Xbox achievements. If you look up Xbox achievement maker on most browsers it's at the top. they love it. it's enrichment in their enclosure.

[tlwebb]

[fl0wr1ngd1gitalis2441]

UwU 24F and 1/2 Frame looking for stronk pilot and frame with thick hull :hearts:

UwU 24F and 1/2 Frame looking for stronk pilot and frame with thick hull. 💕

You get

Sensors, Tech Attack, E-Defense, and systems 🎥

To have me watching over your frames vital systems 👩‍💻

To protect me 🛡️

I get

Hard Cover 🧱

Requirements

Can’t take too much heat damage. I will cook 🔥

can’t be in Melee most the time I’ll squish 🪓

F4F (Frame for Frame) ✨

Must be at least size 1 no short kings 👑 ~Must be open to a poly connective relationship you’ll be my symbiosis but I will have a meta hook attachment aswell~ D1GIT :P

[ostrichmonkey-games]

The Ostrichmonkey Hack

Hey, its out!

Behold, the Basic Rules iteration of my personal NSR/OSR ruleset.

This ruleset came to life when I needed something to run an Into the Cess & Citadel campaign, and decided to take a stab at cobbling something together. It ended up being a mix of different N/OSR conventions I liked, plus some other twists to fit my own personal preferences.

Fundamentally, its a "roll under your attribute" system, and should be broadly compatible with your favorite NSR/OSR/minimalist rulesets and adventures. Made with fantasy-adventure stuff in mind, but with some bending, could probably be made to work with other genres.

So let's get into what's inside.

This first release covers the Basic Rules;

Classless character creation

Rolling the dice

Items

Characters have no defined class, and are made up of a Knack and a Domain. Knacks cover any special abilities and skill you might have, and are activated by spending attribute points (and typically circumvent rolling the dice - spend the points and do the thing!). Knacks are specifically inspired by how Whitehack's Wise class casts "miracles". Domains are broad fields of knowledge and understanding.

Like I said, rolling the dice involves rolling under your attribute score, but there is also a way to apply full/mixed successes to a roll. These rules also cover things like combat. Enemies are immune to damage unless you can target a weakness, meaning that the bulk of combat is about trying to discover and exploit an enemy's weakness.

For the items section of the ruleset, I ended up adapting some of the mechanics I'm developing for Stampede Wasteland, specifically the abstracted resources and money. Gear is also one of the main ways you can change your stats by altering everything from HP to your attributes.

The long term plan for this ruleset is to continuously update and tinker with it, adding in extra subsystems, mechanics, and whatever else I feel is interesting at the time. There's no set schedule for this, so expect updates eventually and whenever.

Right now, you can pick up a text only version of the Basic Rules, which will always remain free (scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the demo files, including character sheet), and then the paid files will be getting the major updates.

First planned update is to finish up the Archetype rules to introduce a class system that can replace or be used alongside knacks. So look for that down the road.

Anyways, go check it out!

[evlynmoreau-blog]

I am busy working on a big commission so not much updates to post.

Here is the world my RPG group generated for our new campaign of the Black Sword Hack, a RPG inspired by the Saga of Elric. But instead of playing in the Young Kingdoms you created your own world to doom. Will the group be able to find the Rune weapon and save this world? We will see...

It was fun to map what we rolled on the random tables. :)