#ttrpg theory

[trashprinxe]

Let’s have a talk about malleability and TTRPGs

I come from a theatrical background. Did theatre for most of my life, majored in stage management, the works. Plays and the way they function are deeply embedded in my psyche.

So when I design and play games, I come from that theatrical framework.

Now — on the one hand, you have Shakespeare. Fairly universal stories, yeah? You can cut it up, switch things around, put it into a multitude of settings. And it still works! King Lear in space. Romeo & Juliet as pirates. The Scottish Play (old habits die hard) done avant-garde. It’s malleable!

On the other end, you have hyper-specific plays about hyper-specific themes. Angels in America. The Laramie Project. Venus in Furs. Etcetera. You can’t remove the core themes, change the setting, switch scenes around: without erasing the core intent of the work and the story it’s trying to tell.

And in the middle, you have plays that are somewhat malleable. Almost, Maine, for instance. It’s made up of vignettes; you can do only some of them, if you so choose. It’ll still have the same impact.

I believe TTRPGs exist on a similar spectrum.

You have systems that can accommodate many different genres or play styles. People play dnd this way. Pathfinder comes with pre built settings that run the gamut

PbtA games are hyperspecific. Monster of the Week is about, well, monsters of the week. Remove that, and you’re playing a different game.

Call of Cthulhu can be set in any time period, but you still have to be up against Eldritch horrors. If you’re able to fight the monster, that’s a different intent than the game was built for.

Lyric games are akin to 4.48 Psychosis (everyone should read that, by the way, it’s a master work of avant-garde theatre).

And so on and so on.

Nothing is better or worse than any other. It just exists, on a spectrum, in the same vein as playstyle or crunch do. Everyone has their preference.

But with any game, there comes a point where you’re no longer playing that game.

10 Things I Hate About You is not The Taming of the Shrew, though it were based on it. There’s a limit to even the most forgiving game to where you’re no longer playing that game, but something you and your table have created for yourselves.

You can’t take the queerness or religion out of Angels in America. That’s a different play altogether.

It’s a spectrum.

I choose to design in the specific. That’s what resonates with my brain. You may want to play something that’s capable of handling more universal narratives. That’s fine too!

But we can’t ignore the bones of the system, and it’s incorrect to say we’re putting on Hamlet, when we’re actually performing The Lion King.

So: the Theory of Malleability (working title).

I don’t have a great end to this. Just musings. But I hope it makes sense to you too.

[forlorn-plushie]

Styles of Prep - Games that Care

Yet another of the lies that Wizards of the Coast has sold TTRPG players, which they've bought into wholeheartedly, is that there are different styles of preparation, and all are valid for every game (because both are valid for D&D, and D&D is right for every game, of course.)

I'm gonna go over a couple games I've run, and explain that actually they all care about the type and level of preparation the GM does.

Indie games are often honest and open about what they want. To take a high-prep example, I recently ran Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. It is not subtle! In the narrator section, right after the introduction, it says "We cannot advise you strongly enough to use prewritten adventure modules". It's not just there - throughout the rules, there's an emphasis that the situation, the state of the world at the outset and thus at every time that follows, is known and rigid. Eureka is a mystery game - the who, what, how, why, and more are all set in stone. The narrator is forbidden to change the scenario on the fly.

Eureka is very forceful of this because the authors, writing a game for mystery investigations, are well aware that it's damn near impossible to make a coherent mystery up on the fly. I'm sure they've tried. I've tried. It's impossible. Something will contradict, and you won't notice until well after the players have reasoned from that contradictory information. It can be done, but not well, and the mental load on the GM is going to kill them.

It's not a genre thing - Eureka is a game about the act of solving mysteries, but so in Brindlewood Bay. I don't have experience with Brindlewood Bay myself, but I do know that the GM doensn't have a real mystery ahead of time - there's a move which is rolled to determine whether a theory is correct. Both are mystery games, but they approach them differently - and each makes a vastly different demand of the GM's preparations.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from Eureka, more in line with Brindlewood Bay in fact, is just about every Powered by the Apocalypse game. Apocalypse World is very clear about what to prepare, and it's more or less the opposite of Eureka: "Daydream some apocalyptic imagery, but DO NOT commit yourself to any storyline or particular characters."

The rules actually tell you to start on what would typically be 'prep' during the first session: "Work on your threat map and essential threats". It's more like note-taking, at that point, just placing the names of stuff that gets mentioned in the session. After that first session, and between each other, you do some real out-of-session work, solidifying the notes you made into Threats.

I won't go into it at length, but Dungeon World is much the same - though there's no 'map' for threats, as characters are expected to be far more mobile, the system of solidifying problems that were mentioned in-game into problems with some mechanically attached descriptors is much the same.

Now, on to the elephant-sized dragon in the room - Dungeons and Dragons. The game itself is, truthfully, quite honest about this. It's the marketing team and the community, having fallen for their propaganda, who pretend low-prep is a valid way to play Dungeons and Dragons.

The 2014 DMG, correctly, focuses on prepared play. It asks DMs to consider "Do you like to plan thoroughly in advance, or do you prefer improvising on the spot?", but everything in that book is either rules text or preparation guides. Mostly the latter.

D&D, as it has existed since 3rd edition, (this is what I have experience with - I can't speak to earlier editions, except to note that there are alot of modules in their time and in the OSR tradition) is a game that thrives on prep. Even if that prep is procedural - tables of encounters and wandering monsters for an area, for example - it's impossible to run the game from nothing, without a lot of background, and have it work.

Imagine not knowing D&D, at all - you pick it up, read the non-list rules (so skipping most of the classes, races, spells, feats, backgrounds, weapons, etc) in the PHB and DMG, and try to run a game entirely improv from the rules and vibes. You'd quickly end up scouring the monster manual for appropriate encounters - and the game, by the rules, demands appropriate encounters! There's a budget system! It's a game about killing monsters and does a lot of math to try and make sure it's challenging without killing player characters.

D&D, at least in the books, is pretty honest about what it wants from preparation. It wants a lot! The playerbase pretends otherwise, but they're wrong. I've yet to find another game that tries to lie like this. Eureka wants you to use modules. Apocalypse World wants you to wing it. I have yet to find any game that actually doesn't care.

[radiantmorningstar]

A RPG Soloist Reflects on 2024

1 January 25 - Up all night, New Year's Eve to New Year's Day.

The idea for starting the new year is (ironically) keeping everything moderate and under control—my sleep schedule, exercise, diet, day job, creative writing, metaphysical pursuits, reading, and RPG explorations. But everything rests on getting enough sleep. (So why am I staying up all night? Well, it's New Years!)

The Allansian New Year is that of the Bat. Therefore, today's date would be Year 298 AC of the Bat, Fireday, 1st of the Month of Freeze. Happy Year's End and Year's Beginning!

This year, I did more solo roleplaying and explored more systems and approaches than ever before. I also interacted with a lot of online RPG experts and influencers, including Geek Gamers, The Basic Expert, the OG GM, and Man Alone. I mostly enjoyed the interactions, via social media and email, and feel like I learned a lot.

Games I played included Tomb: Small Form Adventure Gaming, Advanced Fighting Fantasy, Caves & Catacombs, 2d6 Dungeon, Mörk Borg, Killshot, The Vampire: Alone in the Darkness, Riftbreakers, Alone Against Fear, A Visit to San Sibilia, Solitaria, I Have Gone This Far, Wreck This Deck, Rune, Shadowdark, Loner, Ancient Odysseys, Forbidden Lands, For Coin and Blood, Maze Rats, and Pocket Fantasy. Most of these were one-shots or two-session games, except for Advanced Fighting Fantasy and Tomb, which continues.

That's a lot of gaming, even though it doesn't feel like it. I think I've averaged three to four sessions per week. Sometimes, due to other things in my life, I went full weeks without playing. But mostly I stayed committed to answering three questions: (1) as a soloist, how strictly should I adhere to "Rules as Written" (RAW)? (2) What is solo roleplaying teaching me about myself? And (3) what sort of rule set is the most satisfying? I don't think I've adequately answered any of these, but I've come closer to what seem like the answers. And that's a very good thing.

I'm now going to carry my Tomb campaign forward, focusing on the exploits of two apprentices from the Redianterian Adventurers' Guild, Sirius and Prin, as well as a thief named Dubaine (with first-person interludes from various other NPCs in the setting). I'm using a pre-made fantasy world map as my central continent, Gaia, but there is a heavy influence from Advanced Fighting Fantasy's Titan, which is another continent on the same world (among several others). And my core rule set has moved from Tomb to Caves & Catacombs to Realms of Peril. I think, ultimately, I may settle on Castles & Crusades as the governing system; though, I am still studying it. So I don't feel ready to convert my characters and make the shift just yet.

I'd like to thank those who have been reading this small blog since I started it last October. I do intend to continue my solo explorations and I will post as often as I can.

Have a good start to 2025!

Earendil Radiant Morning Star

[scampir]

Another cohost repost

So the question is, can a dungeon be designed that can be explored in a way that is not imperial. To beat semantics out of the gate, I want to say that the Dungeon is a game artifact (toy) of an unknown place broken up into serial, self-contained rooms (though exceptions are made to subvert expectations). For Imperial, as an adverb, I want to throw out a definition from Tom Nairn and Paul James' Globalization and Violence: where Empire can

"extend relations of power across territorial spaces over which they have no prior or given legal sovereignty, and where, in one or more of the domains of economics, politics, and culture, they gain some measure of extensive hegemony over those spaces to extract or accrue value"

I'm using this definition because I think it aligns well with critiques of the use of "dungeons" as this kind of toy framework in ttrpgs.

Maybe i'm wasting my breath here, but there's a trifecta of verbs that's tied to the og dungeon crawl that I argue fulfills this definition, where we can say that we're playing at imperial relations. It's to Explore (which is not obligated to be but can be read as creating an encounter with an imperial "other"), loot (which is to say, to take regardless of who it belongs to), and to fight, which is to say to use physical violence to overcome obstacles that get in the way of the former two verbs.

Empire can seem too big an organization to apply to a band of haggard thieves who could die to a stiff breeze. With the backdrop of AD&D's lore being tied to a civilization v savagery conflict of law vs chaos it's a lot clearer, but even if you ignore or simply never touch the lore things are happening at the table that make a game out of the imperial relation. So, consider this shitpost allegory:

Dungeon Wildcatting

Let's say that instead of gold for xp it was Oil for xp. By the barrel. That's right. The more barrels of sweet elven crude you get on your character sheet the faster you get your next hit die. Here we are, trying to follow a rumour to where an untapped well of oil might be located. What happens when people are already there who disagree with your goal of setting up a derrick?

What if this is an NSR game where the pcs are in debt? Does that make it interesting? I'm all for compromised characters but I think it's a touch too charitable to forgive violence for economic gain because someone was in debt. It reads very pretty but spoils under scrutiny. In this light, debt as character motivation was really only revolutionary in that it was a way to victimize a player character and make their choices more sympathetic.

You know the A to B from here. It's been in the discourse for like, 6 years now and beyond. This is the dungeon as we know it, as some of us enjoy it, and as some of us critique it.

And now, the Dungeon as Prison

Dungeon is such a misnomer for what the toy is used for. Dungeons are prisons. They lock people away and control them. It's a different kind of game when you go into a prison, because your freedom is what's at stake. This is what I tried to achieve when I ran The Bureau by Goblin Archive in Robins by Coffee as "The Brut". An exercise in trying to scratch away and find a new kind of dungeon politic.

Let's posit this: Is it an imperialist politic when the "dungeon" is a prison complex for a government that persecutes you (in this case a Robin) and others like you, but would happily divide your community into groups that could be bent into useful purposes and those that were too dangerous to even see the light of day? Can you even sell the ritual knives you find in vaults that grow stronger the more blood it drinks? When making sure the best-made boot to put on your neck is their 9-5, are you actually encountering the other, or is this someone in your society that you understand very well actually? When you trespass around a government blacksite, is this actually replicating the colonial adventure just because we use similar verbs? Or does the political context of this imagined oppressive state actually matter? Is there enough substance to connect walking through shared office space or well-funded research labs to connect the two to the point that we can say they are the same or are they different?

I wanted to ask that question and I had been asking it for the 7 months that I ran that megadungeon. What I found was that the players never went in with the plan to make money; only to find out how to stop the place from harming them further. It was all very para-brechtian, and, I am going to say that I'm very happy with myself for at least trying to run a dungeon in a different kind of way. For three design choices I made for this dungeon:

The reason that the game revolved around exploring the dungeon and mapping it was because a state organ built to persecute, assimilate, or exploit Robins built it (or rather, dreamed it) to resist infiltration.

The reason that you have to use violence is because the dungeon was a centralized hub of information used to persecute Robins.

The reason that there are objects of wealth in the dungeon is because there is profit to be made by the state and it's collaborators in rendering the Robins into an underclass.

It's still violence. I didn't let the players forget that the people working in the facility were people too, but at the same time, I am not satisfied playing devil's advocate for fascists. Does this mean that the Dungeon is a container for the dehumanized? That's something I've tried to develop while running ICON 😜. For Robins (playtest version) It was more about reflecting on that dungeon artifact. Toy.

[the-ampersand]

Thoughts on the balance of narrative and combat?

Heya! Thank you so much for asking!

One of the coolest things Blades in the Dark showed me is that combat is just a different kind of problem solving. The traditional distintion of combat as a separate minigame inside of the game is completely arbitrary and not always necessary. Combat can (and maybe even should!) be as narrative as any other scene in the game.

That being said, I can understand the need to balance scenes focused on character interactions in which players are not using the games mechanics and freely acting like their characters (typically called Free Play) and scenes in which players are using the game mechanics as a tool to develop the narrative (which I am going to call Mechanical Play). And where lies the balance between these?

I'd say it completely depends on the players.

I've played with people that only wanted Mechanical Play because they didn't feel confident on their interpretative skills or just wanted the narrative load being completely handled by the game itself. And that's fine! I've also played with people who felt that the mechanics of a game (and specially the combat mechanics) were not allowing them to tell the story they wanted and only really felt comfortable when Free Playing. And that's fine too!

That's why it is important to talk about expectations about the game at session 0. Every player is different and the fundamental thing during a game is that everyone is having fun. So that's why all the table needs to come together and find the balance they would all have the most fun with.

Maybe everyone is all-in with Free Play, focusing on player to player interaction and acting their characters. Maybe you need a mix of both. You can only know when you have talked and worked together to find a common ground.

[cannibalhalflinggaming]

"Moreau Vazh wrote an excellent post on their blog Taskerland, entitled “System Matters, Explicit Mechanics Less So”. Framing the debate on rules density historically, the post points out that gaming groups end up behaving in patterns similarly seen in many groups of people who have come together to do something creative. Of course, given that the norms of roleplaying are a great deal younger than, say, the social conventions of playing music in a group (an activity which is highly delineated and has many, many titles associated with said groups), there’s still a lot of push and pull in terms of figuring out how everyone actually wants to roleplay. Many of the norms we do have were developed either from prior art (often wargames) or came up simply because they were written into D&D back in 1974 (or perhaps a few years later, depending on the actual rule). Either way, these norms are still evolving, and as Vazh correctly points out, the hobby spends way more time agonizing over mechanics than attempting to understand the social dynamics which lead to game preferences and styles of play. And this leads to the core thesis of the Taskerland post, that ‘system’ is so wrapped up in the social norms and conflict resolution approaches of a group that the way a group plays games often transcends mechanics." - @levelonewonk

[mindstormpress]

Illusory Sensorium ran a game of Barkeep and their writeup is one of the clearest signs that the hard work we put in was worth it.

Here's the recap. I genuinely was laughing out loud a few times. Highly recommend: https://illusorysensorium.com/b1-wand-of-embiggening/

If you want to delve into the design theory of Barkeep, keep reading! ⬇️

When we were working on the book, we came up with a sort of mantra for the encounters: Is it sticky? Is it toyetic? Do the NPCs have means, motive, and opportunity? Is there information, choice, and impact?

That's a lot of jargon, and it's been synthesized from across multiple sources. Prismatic Wasteland summed it all up here:

Sticky means that the encounter isn't something the characters can avoid. It sticks to them.

Toyetic came from false machine as well, but also from a post now lost to time from Rebecca Chenier. Basically—will the players and GM want to pick up and play with the encounter?

MMO is just a way to conceptualize NPCs in a simple, understandable form.

ICI is from Bastionland. We can't make informed decisions without information, and there's no point to making decisions if our choices don't matter.

Building the encounters meant looking at each of them carefully and considering those foundational elements. Not EVERY encounter needed every single thing. In fact, with the way WFS wanted to write the book, each encounter had to be relatively short and packing a punch.

A really really sticky encounter didn't need to be as toyetic, and a really fun and interesting encounter that the players would NEED to investigate didn't need to be all that sticky. Everything is a gear of a different size that turns the whole engine.

Illusory Sensorium thinks that they ran the game "wrong" and I disagree. They used the tools provided by the book and had fun! Mission Accomplished!

But one thing they point out very early on is how they "trusted" the encounters in the book as written. The very first one they got is quite simple: 54 skeletons in a conga line, labeled like playing cards.

Incredibly toyetic, not sticky. But the players immediately joined in!

They could have moved on, but that situation was too tantalizing to skip. The rest of the game unfolded from that first encounter, and was filled with shenanigans. The work we put in—hand crafted encounters—worked out!

I'm incredibly proud of the work everyone on the team put into Barkeep, from the writers, artists, and fellow editors. I'm especially proud that people are playing the adventure and having fun. People playing the stuff you've worked on and made is the best feeling as a creator.

Thanks for reading. There's a lot of links in this thread, because I love tracing the history of things. It's no surprise that blogs are the home for so many of these ideas—word of mouth and common practice are easily lost forever when not documented!

The bloggies, a celebration of rpg blogs, are happening now! I've got a post in the running, and I'd love it if you voted for it. My competition is FIERCE (and I recommend all the nominated posts as reading material!)

Vote for RANSACKING THE ROOM today!

[transmutationdice]

CMYK Rainbow Dice

A dice set made with only the colours cyan, magenta and yellow which combine as you look through the dice to form a full rainbow spectrum.

Plus they cast super colourful shadows!

[ahcoffeebeans]

walking sim ttrpg

What does a TTRPG “walking sim” look like?

[zedecksiew]

DECOLONISING D&D

In 2019, after seeing yet another round of alarmist discourse in Xwitter about how Dungeons & Dragons is FULL of COLONIALIST tropes and patterns, and needs to be revised, SCRUBBED of its PROBLEMATIC FILTH---I rage-tweeted this brainfart:

"Decolonising D&D"

I've seen this thread round the community, since. Humza K quotes it in Productive Scab-picking: On Oppressive Themes in Gaming. Prismatic Wasteland quotes it in Apolitical RPGs Don't Exist. Most recently, it was referenced in a 1999AD post about Western TTRPGs (an interesting discussion on its own merit; one that already has a counterpoint from Sandro / Fail Forward.)

If folks are still referring to it five years later, maybe I should give the thread a little more credit? Perhaps the fart miasma has crystalised into something concrete.

In the interest of record / saving this thought from the ephemerality of Xwitter, here is the text in full, properly paragraphed, and somewhat more cleanly expressed:

+++

"DECOLONISING D&D"

Firstly: saying "D&D is colonialist" is similar to saying: "the English language is colonialist".

If your method of decolonising RPGs is to abandon D&D---well, some folks abandon English; they don't want to work in the language of the coloniser. More power to them!

For those who want to continue using the "language" of D&D---

Going forth into the "wild hinterland" (as if this weren't somebody's homeland);

to "seek treasure" (as if this didn't belong to anybody);

and "slay monsters" (monsters to whom?)

Yeah. There's some problematic stuff here, and definitely these aspects should make more people uncomfortable.

But! I think it is an error to "decolonise D&D" by scrubbing such content from the game.

That feels like erasure; like an unwillingness to face history / context; like a way to appease one's own settler guilt.

Do you live in the West? Do you live in any Asian urban metropole? White or Person of Colour(tm)---you are already complicit in colonialist / capitalist (yes, of course they are inextricably linked) behaviour. (I can't speak for urban metropoles elsewhere, but I bet they are similar centres of extraction.)

Removing such patterns from the TTRPGs you play might let you feel better, at your game table. But won't change what you are.

I think it is more truthful and more useful NOT to avert one's eyes from D&D's colonialism.

The fact that going forth into the hinterland to seek treasure and slay monsters is a thing, and fucking fun, tells us valuable things about the shape and psychology of colonialism. Why conquistadors in the past did it; why liberal foreign policy, corporations, and post-colonial societies do it today.

Speaking personally:

I write stuff that evokes / deals with the context I'm in---Southeast Asia. An intrinsic part of that is looking at the ways colonial violence has happened to us---as well as the ways / reasons we now, supposedly free, perpetrate it on others.

A long chain of suffering. Heavy stuff.

I also write for people who want to have fun / kill monsters / pretend to be elves, of course. But for those people who want to consider serious stuff like colonialism: I offer no FIGHT THE POWER righteousness, no good feeling, no answers.

Only discomfort. Because the truth is uncomfortable.

Here's a screenshot of the Author's Note for Lorn Song of the Bachelor:

"Any text inspired by Southeast Asia has to reckon with colonialism ... This text presents a difficult situation; there are no easy solutions. "... If I offered a mechanical incentive for you to fight colonial invaders, you wouldn’t be making a moral decision, but a mercenary one. "The choice you face should echo ... the kind of calculus my grandparents faced."

I stand by that.

Also: might we be more precise and more careful about using the term "decolonising", please?

Here I quote Tuck and Yang's landmark and (sadly) still trenchant "Decolonization is not a metaphor":

"Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies ..."

+++

Further Reading

So this post isn't just me reheating a hot take, here are some touchstone writings from around the TTRPG community about colonialism as a subject and mode of play in games:

+

"Jim Corbett was called upon to hunt down another fifty maneaters over the course of the next 35 years. Together, those tigers had killed over 2000 people, for much the same reasons as the Champawat Tiger - injury, desperation, starvation, and habitat loss. Would you look at that. The root cause was British colonialism."

D&D Doesn't Understand What Monsters Are from Throne of Salt

+

"Another effect of having colonizers in my setting would be giving players the opportunity to drive them away from the islands, their home. This maybe just be for the catharsis. After all, isn’t catharsis a big part of why we play roleplaying games?"

I’m Adding Colonizers To My Setting from Goobernut's Blog

+

"When you have a slime boy and the other characters are a really fat lizard and one's playing Humpty Dumpty, it completely shatters the straight-faced serious authoritarian illusion of race, and replaces it with complete fucking nonsense. I love the idea of proliferating the number and types of "races" into absurdity, to the point where the entire logical structure of it collapses in on itself and race as a category ceases to become coherent or meaningful in any sense."

Interview with Ava Islam - Designer of the RPG Errant from Ava Islam / The Lost Bay

+

"Perhaps most critically, the fundamental basis of power is not land or even money but manpower. That’s what local rulers fight over, and what Chinese commercial networks export, in return for unique island products. It’s what the European colonists really need (even if it’s not what they most desire). There is rich loot to be grabbed in the form of spices, Spanish silver, Indian gold, sea cucumbers (the Chinese love ’em), perfumes, dyes, cloth etc. so there’s ample opportunity for piracy, trade and smuggling, but the key to long-term success – the key to independent survival – is nakedly and unquestionably uniting people."

Counter-colonial Heistcrawl: previous high scores from Richard's Dystopian Pokeverse

+

"They worked their own land—which they dispossessed from American Indians—or became small shop owners or opportunistic gold diggers or bounty hunters or itinerant ranchers. To me, substituting these situations for one ruled by industrial monopoly ignores that the Wild West is a perfect example of how capitalism operates outside of (or prior to) mass industry, instead being composed of self-employers and self-sustainers."

Fantastic Detours - Frontier Scum from Traverse Fantasy / Bones of Contention

+

"... using the Western framing and D&D's baked-in imperialist and capitalist structure to get people earnestly participating in the experience of forming imperial power structures and the early roots of regional capitalism ... The PCs aren't the drifters on the train or the townsfolk watching with apprehension - they're the railroad itself."

An Arrow for the General: Confronting D&D-as-Western in the Kalahari from A Most Majestic Fly Whisk

+++

[gorgonfuckerdotnet]

Do you have any suggestions for a "normal" Gorgon build?, AKA they murder anything that dares hurt their babies

// You poor, poor bitch // Stay a while and listen.

// You do not know the horror you have just wrought. // RA have mercy on you.

// To start, make sure you have a Gorgon // I'm telling you what you should have by LL12 // Oh and keep in mind: // I haven't tested this, // This is the Gorgon I'm currently building. // FYI: This is assuming that you'll be running the same LCPs as me.

// Licenses:

Gorgon L. 3 Hydra L. 2 Tortuga L. 2 Nelson L. 2 Raleigh L. 2 Drake L. 1

// You'll call me a hypocrite for getting so many IPS-N licenses // But I don't care. // Mech Skills:

Hull: 6 Agility: 0 Systems: 6 Engineering: 2

// You wanna prioritize being an absolute tank // Because you'll be taking damage // so your babies won't have to.

// Core bonuses:

Fomorian Frame (Size 2 to 3, no pushed around) Reinforced Frame (+5 HP) Universal Compatibility (Bonus to Core Power system) The Lesson of Held Image (Or whatever you want, dump slot)

// Talents:

House Guard L.3 Drone Commander L.3 Orator L.2 Spotter L.2 Legionnaire L.2 Skirmisher L.1 Exemplar L.1 Tactician L.1

// Equipment:

Flex Mount 1: Missile Rack Flex Mount 2: Missile Rack: Main Mount 1: Catalytic Hammer w/ Thermal Charge Mod Main Mount 2: Vorpal Gun (Obviously)

// The gist is that you use the missiles at range // The hammer when they're up close // And the Vorpal Gun when your babies are hurt

// Systems: 15 Total

2 on Thermal Charge 1 on Personalizations 2 on //Scorpion V70.1 3 on "Roland" Chamber 2 on Tempest Drone 2 on Argonaut Shield 3 on SCYLLA-Class NHP

// Your whole goal is to use the Tempest Drone for area denial // While keeping your babies close to you so that your hammer can smack whatever gets close enough to hurt them, using Rolands and Thermal Charges to get as much damage as possible on every hit // While using the Vorpal to target anything that hits your babies from a distance // It relies that you stay at a medium distance // But you have the health to tank a lot of attacks

// REMEMBER: Structure is a resource! You don't have 37 HP, you have 148!

[anim-ttrpgs]

Sorry if it's a silly question, as I'm still reading the book and haven't gotten to the full scope of the Narrator's job yet, but how 'long' are Eureka! games designed to go on for in-world wise - and more importantly, how alive are Investigators supposed to stay, generally? For context: I'd like to do multiple smaller investigations that are part of a larger conspiracy, individual mysteries that may fail or succeed at being uncovered, that give out pieces of what's actually going on. And, because progression (level-ups, new toys/weapons, etc.) are a big part of what appeals to my players, I think they'd prefer to keep their characters relatively alive to enjoy the benefits, and not replace them through multiple investigations. Is Eureka! able to be played like that? A broader campaign with "meta"/character progression for not being brash and getting yourself killed?

Like most TTRPGs they are billed as “highly lethal,” the truth is that Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is really more “potentially lethal.”

Every character has 5 Penetrative HP and they die instantly if this hits 0, and any bullet deals 4 Penetrative Damage. The most common handguns in Eureka are capable of firing up to 4 bullets in a single action, so yeah, PCs can die pretty easily. They can also kill pretty easily, and it is up to them, not the GM, to make sure they don’t get killed.

Despite this, having played Eureka myself about... 15 times maybe? I have never once personally seen a PC death.

A good number of PCs have died in other people’s Eureka games that I know of, but off the top of my head it feels like around a third of those were killed by other PCs.

The thing is, when the players know the game is lethal, and the PCs know what they’re doing is dangerous, they both tend to be very careful, and a good lethal game will provide lots or mechanics that allow PCs to mitigate the danger. For instance, Eureka is primarily about investigation. The chances that the PCs will get involved in a shootout in any given session is very slim. Most Eureka adventures end up having between 0 and 2 instances of violent danger across the entire adventure. Additionally, that combat is mechanically deep. It is this depth that allows the PCs to make smart and informed decisions that make them less likely to die. For instance, cover mechanics and incremental range penalties that make those 4 bullets each a lot less likely to hit.

As for in-world length, that really depends of course, but we find that many of the game’s mechanics are best suited for adventures that last about 2-14 in-game days. The stuff that characters do in Eureka is usually a short, but extraordinary period of their lives.

That doesn’t mean that they can’t return for another aventure later, it just means that if you’re going to try to run a real big mystery, running it as several smaller mysteries is definitely the best way to do it. Just make absolutely sure that no one of those smaller mysteries needs to be solved or completed a certain way, or in fact needs to be be completed or solved at all, for anything about the larger mystery to work. In Eureka, success is never a guarantee.

This is a good thing, because it means that accomplishments are real, but also, Eureka is deliberately set up so that there’s entertainment value in seeing the PCs involve themselves in and be affected by the mystery, regardless of if they succeed or not, or even if they survive.

Another thing that you as GM I’ll need to do to run this kind of campaign is to make sure you know ALL the facts of the mystery before it starts. This is not something you can make up as you go along. This doesn’t mean coming up with the plot or how the PCs will solve the mystery, in fact you as GM shouldn’t interfere with that all, but you need to know exactly what the bad guys have done, are doing, and will do, and what evidence their doing has left behind. This means you’ll be prepared for whatever the PCs start snooping about, and if they do ask a question you didn’t anticipate, you’ll be able to answer from a place of knowledge informed by the existing facts you did write, rather than making something up completely.

[sprintingowl]

I was thinking of Mouse Walls more in terms of "reading the rpg and rotating the characters in your head is also a form of play", but that's a dang good point.

Chuubo's is also kind of a taxonomical anomaly. I think in the above system you could call it Mouse Walls or Car Crash or AP Style or Blorbo, but I am willing to create an additional category for Chuubo's, which is This Is An Occult Text.

I can follow the individual words in Chuubo's, they're in English, but the system as a whole is far smarter than me and reading it makes me feel like I have fallen into the shadow of a more powerful designer.

If I were to run it, I would be performing the rules like rituals and hoping they produce the intended result.

TTRPGs As Terrariums For Blorbos

One thing that I think isn't covered enough in TTRPG recommendations is styles of play.

There's a lot of "this game has this tone," or "this game is this amount of crunchy," but less "what are you playing towards?"

In games like Microscope and I'm Sorry Did You Say Street Magic? and The Quiet Year, you're playing to see what happens to the setting.

In games like Mork Borg and Into The Odd and Mothership, you're playing to see how far your character can get.

And in a lot of games, you're playing to create a blorbo, an OC, just a little guy, and the soul of the gameplay is the story of who your guy is and who your guy becomes.

This is blorbo style play.

And the thing about styles of play is that you can apply them to any game, even games that aren't really built to enable them. So I wanted to take a moment to shine a spotlight onto some games that do specifically enable you to fully blorb out. (I'll try to cover a mix of genres and tones, but the rpg scene is vast so if you have a favorite that I missed please feel free to shout it out in the replies.)

-Golden Sky Stories. This is the English translation of the Japanese TTRPG Yuuyake Koyake. You play as shapeshifter kids and spirits in a small town and, instead of tracking EXP, the thing that you carry from session to session is your relationships with other characters. The tone of the game is heartwarming, and if combat happens, both sides lose. There can be emotional turmoil, but this isn't a game where you have to worry about bad things happening to your blorbo.

-New World Of Darkness. On the other hand, let's say you *want* bad things to happen to your blorbo. You want to play a guy that's really going through it. If you also like modern supernatural stories, New World Of Darkness was built for you. Characters in NWoD can be entirely non-combat, or a literal werewolf, or a noncombat werewolf. The game places a lot of emphasis on navigating through the setting socially, as its supernatural creatures tend to run in factions and starting a fight usually means making a bunch of enemies.

-Pasion De Las Pasiones. Of course, not everyone wants a fantastical setting. Sometimes good old melodrama is hearty and comforting. Pasion De Las Pasiones is a playable telenovela, and it encourages you to play your characters bold and recklessly. Every class even has a built-in Meltdown, where if you're pushed to the edge they become extra reckless, ensuring a broad fallout of messy drama when they do manage to calm down.

-Cortex System / Unisystem. Perhaps you want to drop your blorbo into an existing fictional universe? But you also want stats and meaty character creation instead of just freeform roleplay? There are easily a dozen games on the Cortex engine, including Supernatural, Firefly, Smallville, Battlestar Galactica, Marvel, and Leverage. And on Unisystem, there's Buffy, Army Of Darkness, as well as a somewhat rare I Can't Believe It's Not Planet Of The Apes.

-Lancer / Gubat Banwa. If you like blorb-y play but still want a heavy side of combat, both of these games have you covered. Lancer has a sprawling scifi universe focused on mech pilots, and Gubat Banwa has a violent and lavish mythological Philippines setting. Both of these games also have stunningly beautiful artwork, so if you like seeing a setting visually come to life, these are for you.

-Fabula Ultima. My final recommendation is also an extremely gorgeous looking game. Fabula Ultima is built on the bones of Ryuutama (itself an excellent travel-fantasy game) to enable meaty, blorby Final Fantasy style campaign play. Combat is a rich and deep option in Fabula Ultima, but so is everything from spellcasting to crafting, and players have built-in resources they can spend to affect the story. If a scene isn't quite going the way you want it to, you can spend a point to nudge it in the right direction. Fabula Ultima also feels extremely complete without being too complicated.

So there you go. Eight options, and that's barely scratching the surface of the sea of blorb-y games (Seventh Sea, Exalted, Blue Rose, Legend Of The Five Rings, Coyote And Crow, Timewatch, Nahual, and more!)

It's also not wrong to play non-blorb-y games in a blorb-y way. Do whatever you're comfortable with! But you might enjoy dipping into these titles.

Finally, if you've read this far and you're somehow still looking for MORE recommendations, I wrote this game about runaway changelings trying to find their place in the world, and it's probably the blorbiest in my catalog.

[radiantmorningstar]

Something Different: Micro RPG-R, “Into the Skeleton Cave”

Sessions: May 25 and May 30, 2025

Resources:

Micro RPG-R: Fantasy Role Playing Core Rules Booklet; One-Page Mythic GME; Cairn 1e; Break!!; Otisville region map and skeleton cave dungeon map (self-generated according to Micro RPG-R generator rules); and the Deck of Signs (Tales of Argosa card oracle)

Background:

Zamael is a human soothsayer and magic user, trained from an early age by the Lunar Order with the expectation that he would eventually become a low-level court wizard somewhere on the continent of Amya. However, he was expelled from the Order after killing one of the magisters in a magical duel.

Outcast from Ansiva, the City of Glittering Spires, generally considered to be the center of the world by those who live there, he wandered through many of Amya’s kingdoms, going mostly unnoticed by the great powers and heroes of the realm, until he found himself in the town of Otisville, broke, and in need of a place to sleep. The Inn of the First Otis had relatively inexpensive rates. Zamael was able to use his last gold pieces to pay for a few days of room and board.

Otisville was located in the forested southwestern region of Amya (Kingdom of Memda) and served as a tiny way-station for trading caravans headed down to Port Kathunder on the north coast of Bihsa Bay. As such, the town comprised a surprisingly wide array of traders, merchants, and provisioners. Goliaths, oracles, chibs, tenebrates, rai-nekos, gruuns, feykins, undelfs, wood elves, dwarves, humans, and Shar gnomes from the eastern Red Hills lived there together in relative harmony. The mayor, a half-elf named Volkabith, employed a watch of eighteen warriors and there was a friendly cleric of Sindla in a small chapel at the end of town available for low-cost healing and spiritual counsel. In general, Otisville seemed like a fairly pleasant place to live in spite of its proximity to the surrounding forest, Ye Wood of Mordred.

Feeling tired of wandering across the weird and largely uncharted landscapes of Amya, Zamael decided to remain in Otisville for a season and explore the forest, which is rumored to contain dangerous ruins. He reasoned that there were enough caravans moving through the place (sometimes daily) along the North-South road that he might be able to hire on with one eventually. In the meantime, he would look for treasure in the many (reputed) local ruins and, if worst came to worst, offer to perform day labor or some other service in exchange for something to eat. He decided he might even pass himself off as a full wizard if the town watch didn’t have one . . .

Summary:

Having provisioned himself with torches, water, rations, spell book, ironwood staff, and curved dagger of Ansivan steel, Zamael set off in the morning, heading east, into the trackless wood. Somewhere in that direction, there was supposed to be a ruined keep, said to be the center of a nameless cult over five-hundred years ago. No one in recent memory had attempted to explore the eastern area of the forest, for the Court of the Midnight Sidhe was also thought to reside there with many Black Matter Portals to their eldritch realms secreted amid the caves and trees. Mordred himself was a warlock of some repute throughout the Age of Wind and there are many towers and dungeons across Amya named after him.

The dense canopy ensured perpetual darkness and Zamael found the forest teeming with ferocious monsters, slimes, and aberrations. While he didn’t see any Midnight fey, he soon realized that the rumors about Ye Wood of Mordred were true. The place was definitely “fell” and most certainly under a longstanding curse.

He did located the ruin of an ancient keep, but there was nothing of interest, only the moss-covered foundation and a few stone walls. Zamael did, however, have to fight multiple bloodthirsty hogbats and a dire deerwolf. Exhausted, he made camp at the base of one of the standing walls and was able to sleep most of the night without interruption by monsters or other threats.

On day two, he continued into an even darker region of forest and discovered a stone door set into a mound at the base of two mighty oaks. The door was carved with sigils and would need to have several of its stones removed for entry. Zamael recalled the legend he’d heard of the ancient cult. The few explorers brave enough to enter Ye Wood of Mordred must have found the previous ruins and concluded there was nothing more to discover in the area. The stone door, overgrown with roots and half-coated with dark green moss, seemed like a secret.

Whatever magic was in the sigils did not seem threatening and Zamael was able to remove several of the large bottom pieces of the door. He shined his torch into the opening he’d made and saw a dusty stone stair leading down into the earth.

In he went and he soon understood that the sigils on the door were not meant to keep anything out. Rather, they were meant to keep the inhabitants in. The dungeon seemed like the below-ground levels of what was once a temple or monastery. It alternated between flagstone-paved rooms and natural caverns. Several large caverns could only be described as “stalagmite forests.” Some areas were bisected by rushing subterranean rivers. And the place was filled with the aftereffects of dark sorcery.

There was a vortex of dark energy slowly consuming the floor of one of the corridors (who knows what that was bound to do or create or even how long it had been there). There were more mundane traps, blocked stone and metal doors, and a veritable army of all sorts of animated skeletons—from humanoids to huge owl- and ravenbears.

It seemed that whatever found its way into the caverns over the years eventually died and rose as a skeleton; though, most signs of the necromancer responsible for this (Mordred?) had long since been effaced. There were large “white mirrors” (sometimes called “ice mirrors,” due to their appearance and the extreme cold they give off), which have been traditionally used along with the black and red variety, to store magical energy. And Zamael wondered whether these were responsible for the animated dead, but there was no way to know for sure.

The most notable discovery was a shrine to the Oerthian deity of secrets and undeath, Vecna, with a life-sized statue of the lich standing on a dais. One of its eyes was a fat, glittering emerald, but the statue was so unsettling that Zamael did not want to risk touching it.

Eventually, after many battles, he came to a lonely crypt where he discovered a sarcophagus containing an undead knight. The knight animated and Zamael barely survived the confrontation. With minimal answers, no more healing herbs, one torch left, and all his magic expended, Zamael fought his way back to the surface, chased by a gigantic undead ravenbear.

Bleeding and exhausted, he was just able to wriggle out through the opening he’d made in the stone door before the monster caught him. It could not cross the threshold (or fit through the opening). So Zamael was safe. Unfortunately, he’d lost so much blood that he collapsed on the outskirts of the forest at midnight before he could reach Otisville.

He had a dream that he came before Lady Death, the Raven Queen, and she told him it was not yet his time to transition into the after-world. Then she told him to wake up and he came to in the common room of the inn, surrounded by townsfolk and Zalt, the cleric of Sindla, offering him an herbal brew. They told him a woodsman had found him unconscious at the edge of the forest and brought him back.

Unfortunately, everything but Zamael’s spell-book had been stolen, even his old leather boots. The residents of Otisville were no doubt too superstitious (or wise) to touch a spell-book; though, merely considering its fine metallic inks, the book was more valuable than all of Zamael’s other possessions combined.

Epilogue:

When he was well enough to emerge from his room, Zamael was summoned before Mayor Volkabith at the town hall. To say the mayor was displeased would be putting it lightly. He told Zamael that every few seasons, traveling adventurers enter the Ye Wood of Mordred and never return. As far as Volkabith was concerned, this was neither here nor there. But stirring up the dead is a bad idea. And the Midnight Sidhe have a tendency to rampage and kill indiscriminately if townsfolk trespass in their part of the forest.

Volkabith gave him two days to be on his way or, “The watch will strip you, take you back to the forest you seem to love so much, and tie you to a tree for the displacer beasts.”

“But someone stole my boots.” Zamael pointed down at his stockinged feet, as if that were some kind of refutation.

“Indeed,” said Volkabith. “It seems finding passable footwear would be a quest more within your abilities.”

Zamael found himself standing under the front awning of the Otisville town hall in a torrential rain with only his humble woolen tunic and trousers and the spell-book in his empty traveling pack. Boots did seem like the most pressing concern as the North-South road through town turned to mud . . .

[DM Note: I had a great time running these two sessions of Micro RPG-R. I think Noah Patterson might be a game design genius. I’d had some experience with Micro Chapbook, and so I was a bit skeptical of what this would be. MC, while in some ways a brilliant hack of Four Against Darkness, always suffered from a kind of inconsistency and incompleteness. Patterson kept changing the rules and sometimes it wasn’t clear which rule sets superseded which. Add to that my disappointment with his highly promising but annoyingly incomplete Adventures Simplified: A Simple Solo RPG Experience and I was ready to quit his games entirely.

I’m glad I didn’t. With Micro RPG-R, I had a kind of breakthrough and developed a deeper appreciation for Patterson’s weird asymmetrical design ethos. I realized that there are some things he cares about and others he does not care about when it comes to his games. Unlike other designers, who try to cover everything, Patterson just seems to emphasize the game aspects that excite him personally. His overland hexcrawl and dungeon crawl systems are very nice, for example. But the rules lack a general equipment list and the food items for sale at the inn (among many other details) seem very video-gamey and unreal (unicorn beer, anyone?). So to add a little more grit, I incorporated elements of first-edition Cairn, which fit seamlessly into Patterson’s system.

I’ve also been reading the OSR-ish, anime-inspired Break!! That also fit in well, particularly the species, giving Amya (at least my version of it) a very diverse and whimsical dimension to offset the lethality of the combat.

That said, Patterson is all about diversity, unwilling to separate his personal politics from his game design. Much of his material is set in the “Gay Realms”; though, Amya is not overtly part of that. I’m sure it could be, especially in a game DMed by Patterson himself. And I’d want to be part of such a game just to enjoy his overwhelming creativity and clear good humor.

The “combat wheelchair,” which also exists in Micro RPG-R, has never been an issue for me. In a world where talking dragons can melt your face and “crawling batcat skeletons” inch towards you in an underworld stalagmite forest, magical wheelchairs can be there for players who want to make a hero like themselves or who want to experience another way of life. Despite the fact that I love the OSR and consider myself an old-school ttrpg grognard at heart, I hate exclusion and want to invite everyone to the gaming table. If I’m soloing (which is my usual mode of play these days), I still have that sensibility with me. The best game is the one where everyone has an opportunity to be a hero.

So I want to recommend Micro RPG-R. The PDF is inexpensive on DriveThru and worth a look if you can approach it with an open mind. I did and I had a really good experience with it.]

[catscomputerscreativewriting]

I need to start a collection of "math things that really, really sound like wizard and/or cleric things."

[cannibalhalflinggaming]

"Where people want to go in their escapes will always be different, but gaming has a way of inspiring the imagination." - @LevelOneWonk