#ttrpgs :]

[anim-ttrpgs]

drow rpg thoughts

Yesterday I got excited and did a design outline for another game, this time about drow. Don't worry, the Eureka Patreon updates will keep coming monthly and we are even close to another free public beta release, but i have been under a lot of stress and might need to work on something else for a few weeks after that, even if only because i think it could actually be something i could make fully playable within a short time.

It is based on a particular setting written a while back by me and a close friend, the purpose of which was to reimagine drow with reasonable post-hoc explanations for the way they are portrayed in Forgotten Realms. It would be a very specific game, sharing a few design ideas with Eureka's rules, but not as broad and generalized.

This rpg will certainly come with a bunch of lore, but for right now the only thing you need to know is that in this setting, "Drow" is a title and referrs only to the female warrior-caste of dark elf society.

Many of the mechanics will be asymmetrical. A “party” will consist of one Drow and any number of her servants, with the goal of surviving incredibly dense hierarchical social situations

>problem will come up that could embarrass the Drow, threatening her Reputation (stat)

>Drow has to delegate tasks to servants that will fix the problem

>due to stupidly dense and impossible etiquette, actually delegating these tasks is not very clear or easy. Screwing up tasks and failing etiquette will reduce a servant’s perceived Competence (stat)

>due to high pressure, impossible working conditions, and garbled instructions, these tasks are not easy and are very likely to be screwed up

>the Drow has to contend with and smooth over the screwed up tasks. She can lose Reputation if she doesn’t discipline incompetence, but harsh discipline is only going to make the servants less able to complete the task.

>Failure state for the servants is if their Competence ever reaches 0, and failure state for everyone is if the Drow’s Reputation ever reaches 0.

Half the Game Master’s job will be keeping track of the strict and deliberately impossibly overcomplicated etiquette by which servants have to address Drow, and docking their Competence when they screw up(and possibly docking Drow Reputation if anybody else sees her letting that slide), and keeping track of the strict militaristic code of honor and (evil) morality that all Drow are expected to exemplify whether they actually enjoy being cruel psychopaths or not, and docking Reputation when the Drow fails to uphold the right standard of evilness in front of other Drow.

The servant part of the “party” will either have to humorously manipulate Drow while hiding that anything is wrong, or they and their Drow will all have to all work together to maintain a facade of this brutal hierarchy

Drow lose Reputation and servants lose Competence when they fail to adhere to social etiquette that covers like 15 pages of instructions (designed to be impossible to follow). In that way, it might be considered similar to Paranoia, with a similar sense of humor.

Some of the servants’ etiquette would be like

>don’t speak out loud to a Drow unless told to by that Drow

>at the same time, don’t remain silent when a Drow expects them to answer a question even if she didn’t explicitly say they could speak

And this is why the Drow has to be a PC, because this same servant etiquette is a pitfall for the Drow. if she doesn’t make her expectations explicitly clear, it puts the servants in an impossible situation, where they will embarrass her with their incompetence(even though it’s her fault) and she will be socially obligated to go out of her way to discipline them. Of course in the in-setting society, the fault lies with the servant, because they should have intuited when they were being given permission to speak or not. Some Drow will be self-aware enough to realize that they caused this situation, most won't.

The structure of their society will often incentivize a tactful Drow to "roll with" mistakes made by servants, e.g. "No, my servants did have permission to address me out loud, you just weren't clever enough to catch it."

Each will have to cover for the other, and/or hide things from each other and the Drow's social rivals.

[johnpallo]

I truly believe that "Are you normal about Aabria Iyengar?" is becoming at the very least my personal litmus test for whether someone in TTRPG Actual Play space is someone I want to be around.

[kimabutch]

One of my favourite questions for figuring out a character’s motivations is which qualities they most fear being assigned to them. Are they afraid (consciously or unconsciously) of being seen as stupid? Ungrateful? Weak? Incompetent? Lazy? Cowardly? Intimidating? Like they actually care? etc.

It’s such a fun way to explore into who they are, why they do what they do, what they don’t do out of fear, and how they might be affected by the events of the story. And I love when characters have negative motivations—trying to avoid something (in this case, being seen a particular way) as much as they’re trying to achieve a goal.

[sirobvious]

The mcelroys made an entire generation think that playing D&D badly is activism

[vforvalensa]

90s indie ttrpgs whip ass

[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

[iraprince]

there are still five days left to get OVER 600+ GAMES for a donation of $10 or more to the TTRPGs for Palestine bundle! we are at $153k of the overall goal of $200k and i know we can make it! proceeds from the bundle will be going to Medical Aid for Palestinians, and you can read more at the bundle page. thank you for checking it out, sending it to friends who would be interested, and boosting this!!

[saja-star]

I am obsessed with this idea

[eternalgirlscout]

the ideal GM/player dynamic is when one side says "here are some problems i caused" and the other says "thank you so much! i will make these worse" back and forth forever

[rathayibacter]

guess who made a wargame with thirteen thousand seven hundred and ninety-nine unit statblocks

[anim-ttrpgs]

"Not Finished Yet," investigator Trait from Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. Every investigator has 3 to 6 Traits!

[probablyasocialecologist]

Two ongoing digital games bundles are offering more than 200 tabletop RPGs (among video games, soundtracks, books and other goodies) in order to raise money in support of the Palestine Children’s Relief Funds. The Palestinian Relief Bundle is being hosted on Itch.io, while the separate TTRPGs for Palestine Charity Bundle is taking place on Tiltify. For $8, the Palestinian Relief Bundle is offering nearly 400 total items, 103 of which are tabletop RPG systems, supplements and adventures. Mapmaking game Ex Novo is joined by the paranormal gunslinging satire FIST: Ultra Edition, along with Takuma Okada’s celebrated solo journaling game Alone on a Journey. Weird and dirty iconoclast game about money, the mind and everything else, Greed by Gormenghast is also on this list and is well worth a look. And if you’d rather keep it cosy and introspective, Cassi Mothwin’s Clean Spirit will get the whole group taking care of their domestic homes. The TTRPGs for Palestine Charity Bundle focuses solely on analogue games, providing nearly 200 tabletop games for $15. A full spreadsheet of the included titles can be viewed here and includes Nevyn Holme’s Gun&Slinger, where one player embodies an occult cowboy while the second plays their sentient, magical gun. Wendi Yu’s Here, There, Be Monsters! approaches monster hunting media from the other side of the camera with a decidedly queer lens and unapologetic politics. Makapatag’s Gubat Banwa is a lush and dynamic collision of wuxia media, fiercely romantic and tragic melodrama all set against the backdrop and folklore of The Philippines.

[threetrenchcoatsinatrenchcoat]

reblog to reblog

[cryoverkiltmilk]

Two vital lessons from Brennan Lee Mulligan

Tabletop roleplaying games can immeasurably enrich your life.

There is no hill too small to die on.

[ursamajori]

hey so we put your boyfriend in a tabletop campaign and now he has a martyr complex. yeah he got protective to the point of being self sacrificial due to his lack of self worth. we gave him a found family so he had something to live for but instead he’s just committed to being a human shield to keep them safe even if it kills him. sorry

[honourablejester]

I’m realising as I browse around that I really love lore when it comes to ttrpgs, games and game worlds. And by that I don’t mean I like to obsessively learn lists of dates and wars, and the names of leaders of factions, I mean …

I like learning weird, juicy details about the worlds of games. I like finding little nuggets that say things about the set-up and culture and assumptions of the world. I like finding fragments of ideas to hang whole story and character concepts off.

I love that in D&D 5e’s Spelljammer, the Astral Sea is full of the corpses of dead gods that you can fully sail up to in your ship. Just. Floating out there. Waiting for you to rock up to them.

I love that in Sunless Sea, the king of the drowned is the way he is because he fell in love with an eldritch sea urchin from space, and successfully married it. His niece is an angry sentient floating mountain whose mother is a goddess-mountain and whose father is a face-stealing humanoid abomination. This is fine and normal.

I love that in Starfinder, there are mysterious bubble cities in the surface of the sun that the church of the sun goddess discovered and cheerfully occupied despite having no idea who the hell built them or for what purpose.

I love that in Dishonored, the entire industrial revolution that has built the empire we’re in the midst of saving or destroying was built on the properties of whale oil harvested from eldritch tentacled whales that live half in the oceans and half in an eldritch void personified in the form of a weird-ass black-eyed shit-stirrer of a deity who was formed from a murdered and sacrificed child. And this is largely a background detail.

I love in the Elder Scrolls that the dwarves up and fucking vanished, as a race, at some point in history and absolutely nobody has any clue what happened to them or where they went, but their technology is so insane that ideas like ‘they time-travelled’ or ‘they erased themselves from existence’ are absolutely on the table.

I love that in Numenera, so many incredibly advanced civilisations have risen and fallen on this world that it’s absolutely littered with bonkers science fiction artefacts that have caused the current medieval-esque society built over top of them to develop in bizarre ways, and also you can find a mysterious artefact that absolutely baffles and delights your character, but that you the player will fully recognise as a slightly-more-advanced thermos flask.

I love that in Fallout, an irradiated post-nuclear apolocalypic hellscape, there’s a cult that worships the god of radiation as they have come to understand it, and they are mysteriously immune to radiation with absolutely no explanation whatsoever. They’re not ghouls, the usual result of fatally irradiated humans with some resistance, they’re perfectly normal humans who can somehow just tank rads all damn day. It could be a mutation, but Lovecraftian gods apparently do also fully exist in this setting, so it’s also possible that maybe they were on to something with this Atom thing.

I love that in Heart The City Beneath, there’s a mass transit train system that they tried to hook up to the eldritch beating god-thing buried under the city so that they could metaphysically chain the stations together more easily, which went horrifically and metaphysically wrong in entirely predictable fashion, and now there’s a whole order of train-knights who have to keep people safe from the extradimensional weirdness magnet the network has become.

That, and all the fantastic little details you can stumble across. There’s a biotech augmentation in Starfinder called an angler’s light that gives you a little angler-fish bioluminescent antenna on your forehead, and it was developed by asteroid miners who needed light but also both hands free for work. In Dishonored there’s a festival that everyone pretends is outside of time so nothing you do during it can be held against you. There’s a god of snuffed candles mentioned in a single line from Heart The City Beneath who has pacifist cannibal priests, and that is literally all the information you get on him.

While things like the history and geography and timeline of a world do also fascinate me, I’m not really here to memorise stuff like that. I’m here to find weird little nuggets of information and worldbuilding and delight in them. Give me funerary customs and weird myths and oddly specific circumstances and baffling little objects and absolutely bonkers cosmological implications. Give me the corpses of dead gods, and aesthetic movements with highly specific backstories, and bureaucratic fuck-ups of titanic scale, and mysterious things that seem to break all other rules of your setting with absolutely no explanation because people in-universe have no fucking clue how they work either. Why are the Children of Atom immune to radiation without ghoulifying? Not a clue, but Confessor Cromwell has been cheerfully standing in that irradiated pond that kills the player character with about 10 minutes of exposure for the last year and he’s still absolutely fine.

I just. I really love lore. I like my settings to have some meat in them, some juicy details to dig into, some inexplicable elements to have fun trying to explain. Particularly that last bit. I feel like a lot of people when building worlds feel like the rules have to be absolute and everything has to have an explanation, but nah. Putting some weird shit in makes everything immediately feel bigger, more real, because we don’t have even half an idea of how our world truly works, there’s always something we just don’t fully understand yet, and you can put that in a fictional world too. Some mysteries, some contradictions, some randomness, some weirdness. There’s a line, obviously, this depends on execution, but a little bit of mystery really does help.

Lore is awesome. And weird lore is even more so. Heh.