#yazeba’s b&b

[kingwormm]

I may be late irl but I can never be late in canon! Happy (late) Birthday Gertrude!

[woyms]

Hey Kiddd!!

[windienine]

i love making my own ttrpg characters as much as anyone but i have a specific adoration for any game or module with the chutzpah to go "you're this yahoo and her twenty seven unique neuroses we've sublimated into a mechanical framework"

[thoughtsfromyazebabnb]

It do be like that

[yellowhoothoot]

happy birthday gertrude! today i wrapped up my playthrough of yazeba's bed and breakfast chapter ♡ as gertrude ventured forth into the haunted woods to begin a new story. this was so fun and i'm definitely going to miss spending my morning bus ride on journaling about her day but it was such a wonderful game to play from my birthday to hers. highlights include not one, but two friends who were stray cats and the 3 days in a row i drew kings and didn't write anything.

[breathing-stories]

Lyrical Ludology Guest Announcement!!

With just 2 weeks until launch, I reckon it's time to share none other than Jay Dragon ( @jdragsky ) as our first guest!

You might know Jay for games like wanderhome, Yazeba's B&B, and more - but I first knew Jay through lyric games...

Learn more about the pod and where to listen in here!: https://redcircle.com/shows/lyrical-ludology

[fiovske]

Do you have any recs for other non-DnD game systems? I've only ever played 5e, and I'm a little intimidated to get into other systems, but I also want to branch out and get away from WOTC's bullshit.

Sure thing! I am also including a link to the itch.io pages since that's where i get most of these games!

Blades In The Dark: i'm mentioning this first bc the rules are very easy to grasp and if you're looking for a setting that has a touch of ghosts and steampunk, this game is the perfect gateway to that! it's the best for a heist i have found and the game mechanics and names are so soo sick here's just a slice from their itch.io page:

personally i find the setting and the stress mechanic very cool, because it takes into account the mental toil that an action can have and i find games with inbuilt consequence mechanics very compelling! it introduced the concept of clocks to me and i am obsessed.

a) adjacent to Blades, are all Forged In The Dark Games which are third-party blades games, and the most notable of them is Scum and Villiany which is space-western setting and also my favorite and if you're looking to play a game in the breadth of star-wars like interplanetary politics and everything, i highly recommend this game! b) if you're looking for a Blades game with mechanics to suit something more royalty-adjacent, with court-politics and agendas and masquerade parties and all, like say d20's court of fey and flowers vibe then i recommend Court Of Blades! I havent gotten around to playing this yet but it looks really promising and i soo badly want to play a game in this setting!

2. The Ground Itself : this is a world-building game. focused on one single place over time and how it changes and how it's people change, the events of this game can be spaced out from a week to several millennia depending on the rolls of ur dice or your choices! i have found that this game serves very well as say, a session zero game also, for setting up a place before you play in it, and not only a very fun session of making a place together for your party to play in, but also not leaving all the work to the gm! so it's a win win situation!

tbh, all games by everest pipkin are very good! i wanna get my hands on world ending game as well bc it is a game about giving your campaign, your world-building and your characters the perfect send-off.

3. Wanderhome : if you're looking for something ghibli-esque (this is the closest i can come to defining this game thru popular media) then i highly recommend wanderhome! it's got a very cozy pastoral vibe to it and the art is really beautiful and you get to pick from a range of animal-folk to play as it's very cool!

also honorable mentions,

a) Sleepaway is a game by the same creator in which ur a camp counsellor to a bunch of misfits and horror stories around campfires ensue! b) Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast which is an upcoming game which you can still back and it looks really interesting so i'd recommend checking it out as well!

4. Lancer: this game has mechs it has space-battles and you get to be a pilot in a future set years in the future and a thousand directions to take ur campaign in! he relationship between pilot and mech is smth that can be so personal.....

i wanna play lancer sometime it has very cool mech designs and it has very much piqued my interest, if i find ppl who wanna play lancer w me im 🏃🏃!

5. Heart The City Beneath : honestly, one of my fave settings of all time, it has strong horror components so mind the cws! but the classes and the game mechanics are very intuitive and overall it helps you not only build a character that feels natural and organic, but since this is a horror setting, things do not have happy endings... however it will ensure that your characters have a well-built journey whose ends will be terrifying and magnificent.

I got introduced to the fallout mechanic through this game and oooo how i love it, it's the perfect blend of your actions have consequences + every consequence is interesting and will affect your character deeply and emotionally, which is <33

this list got too long so i will just mention some more here:

the quiet year (very good map-making game, for before the frost shepherds arrive in winter.)

beam saber (forged in the dark game that deserves its on mention! austin ramsey's games i highly recommend!)

thirsty sword lesbians (ecactly what it says on the tin, i wanna check this game out also)

lotr's one ring rpg (this one is the closest substitute to classic d&d bc lets be real. tolkien is where d&d got it's shit from. and i have heard good things abt this game even tho i've never had the chance to play it)

mothership rpg (space horror whose build mechanics are very easy and user-friendly and i've had a LOT of fun with this!)

orbital (one very beautifully written rpg about life in space and it's only 32 pages but well-worth the time, highly recommend)

that's all i can give off the top of my head, i might've missed a few but these are strong standouts, so i hope u find at least one to your liking!

[jdragsky]

do you have any advice for how to make people more comfortable with improv when playing yazeba's b&b? i would love to play it with great people who are excited about the premise of the game but are anxious about their creativity and having to imagine things on the spot in a way that makes the game fun for everyone. it seems a bit harder with a slice of life game than the more common goal oriented ttrpg

hi! so Yazeba's B&B is very much designed around having a lot of answers to this question. here's a few tools it uses to make people more comfortable!

the game uses prewritten Chapters that create goals and set expectations and tempo, along with providing resources for making things up. it's hard to just freestyle slice of life stories, it's much easier to catch fireflies with your friends, or go to the beach.

similar to this, the specific characters you play as are a great anchor point — you're not just stumbling around, you're Gertrude, and you're given tools to understand what she's like.

the game has some great advice on how to approach improvisation within its confines, that helps ground the story

all in all, i'd say — give it a shot! it only takes an hour to play a chapter, and that's plenty of time to see if it's your cup of tea and if you want to play more. i think your friends will find that the game is a lot more scaffolded and capable of holding them than they realize.

[carecrowgames]

Yazeba Read Through #4

We are on Page 18 now, and I am extremely excited, as it seems we have actually entered the rules this time folks! And I thought that might make me go less granular .. BUT as I said I have been wondering how the book would begin to explain to its reader what it actually is, so I just have to immediately hone in on the second sentence of the page.

It's a bed & breakfast of course but it's also this book right here.

There is something about stating these two as a dual existence that just works so well with the magical realism of the bed and breakfast itself. I guess I also just love when a fictional world gets legitimacy as existing similar to how the book (or in this case pdf) does

The playful voice from the welcome section continues here, but as it invites you to explore the bed and breakfast it also gains a gentle tone. The specific metaphor used, the sprawling bed and breakfast standing in for the complexity of a rulebook, both promising to become easily navigateble after some guidance, somehow manages to make both of them a more imaginable space. My mind begins to draw in what's missing within my image of one one with what I know of the other and conjures my own experiences of sprawling social spaces to lend familiarity and extrapolate development over time. I find myself remembering how I got used to life in the computer science faculty until it’s sprawling series of laboratories and hallways were simply another home.

I get away being able to imagine both Gertrudes life in the b&b after months and years pass and my own potential relationship to the version of it that could manifest in my games in it.

This is where the melancholic Amelie OST (the fact that this movie has the same name as one of the residents will break me oh my god. I am only noticing now) reminds me that at some point in this book there are late chapters, the last of which is Goodbye Yazeba and I have to wonder how much this is going to be a story that will have to end. What I can also imagine is the late chapters giving a number of open ending points, that would still allow you to replay some chapters, but this also feels like the kind of story that at some point just. Ends. I think I would find myself feel very content and sad in the healthy measures about that.

As a note, I am delighted to see the playlist I'm making for this already influencing how I interact with the book. The fact that the moon princes melancholic longing was able to carry forward to make me think about how this story might end is just really cool. Can recommend the method!

And now we get the confirmation that there are parts of the book that are off limits to start with - a super cool decision for a ttrpg book honestly. Explaining the choice by likening it to the way some parts of a bed and breakfast might be off limits to a new visitor is so clever too. It continues to build the book-building double reality, and in that playful way puts rules for reading the book down without having to spend much time explaining them immediately. It just makes sense this way!

This is also why this reading experience is extremely different for me than the usual ttrpg book I read. Normally I would have jumped immediately to the playbooks, read up on central mechanics and started browsing different parts of the book as I put some first session prep together. And I know that's not how other ttrpg books are intended to be read either, but the way Yazeba specifically presents itself as overlayered fiction book / bed & breakfast / ttrpg makes me want to engage with it as an authored experience more then I tend to with a ttrpg book, that invites me more to approach it as a box of toys.

 If i were to read it like I usually do though, this is where I would actually feel invited to start jumping, as the page continues to lay out how exactly Yazebas Bed and Breakfast is played it gives us all the needed key elements to get started, and importantly all of their page numbers.

I find this whole buildup so far works really well for me. We've been invited layer for layer to the fantasy and fiction of Yazeba, got first impressions of its central cast, narrative hooks to go along with then and some character voices to lead us along when trying to play them.

Now the book is pointing all the unruly readers with no attention span, who might have been hooked by the fiction, but won’t stay long for rules explanations (that’s normally me!) to exactly where the toys are - with just enough context to use them well. The rest, I would feel if I took on that mindset, can be figured out in play.

I really appreciate when a game recognizes, that not all its players are going to approach it the same way. Laying out different courses through it, that reward different interests and needs is a great way to do so.

The entire part laying out the rhythm of play is wonderfully efficient btw. Every section is at most 3 sentences long, contains bold keywords to keep attention going and manages to leave me with a good grasp of what's going on. For how gigantic this book is, making such short work of the overview feels very restraint, I'm super impressed.

I also love how encouraging the language is. You WILL be able to confidently guide your friends. Remember to take breaks, the bed and breakfast will wait. Rules often are hard for me to keep focus on mentally, and I know for many they can be overwhelming. The use of a strong, friendly and guiding voice here I think really helps keep the mind motivated.

In honor of that, the new song added to the playlist is Ben E. Kings “Stand by me” which, is a song that has symbolized a vibe of positivity and support for me since years now.

Speaking of language, the Nouns for the mechanics integrate so very well into the fantasy. Concierge for the facilitator for example is very flavorful. I feel like this book makes a consistent effort to make the feeling of playing the game make you feel like you’re a part of the b&b and that rules. In addition, Whoopsies and Bingos as names for what I’m pretty sure are going to be weak and strong moves feels like they very much help reinforcing the genre space, making the characters feel less mechanic and more like people with fuckups and cool moments to come, you know?

But now I’m really getting ahead of myself. Afterall the section is about the flow of play and I have not talked at all about it yet!

Let's get this out first: chapters are so cool! They are so cool it makes me want to work out my thoughts on them so bad, that I forget we don't even know much about them yet as far as the book goes. I already know a bit on how they look like from the ashcan (which released along the indiegogo campaign), but that only leaves me burning to revisit them as part of this more!

In addition, i think this is where we actually see how powerful the fiction book/ttrpg double-life the book is living is in communicating information. It is obvious from the text that chapters are at the core of playing out life at the bed and breakfast, being the thing characters are used to play, and putting out what is needed to unlock more chapters and characters (more on that in a sec). They are how you interface with life in the bed and breakfast, but that alone would not give much of an impression of what they are. But the name *chapters* and the consistent fiction book/ttrpg duality that has been build up, immediately conjures the kind of stories they will tell in your mind. We already know what it is like to read a chapter in a story, now our mind is left to ponder what it will be like to play them.

Excitingly, we have learned how unlocking works now!! As I said I already knew how to play a chapter from the Ashcan, but with added context much more about it is coming together. The way the loop works feels super elegant to me. You get familiar with characters and their connected narrative threads, you look at what chapters you are able to play and which might allow you to explore what you are interested in, you slot in your preferred characters and play to find out what happens, you go and check what characters and chapters you’ve unlocked and that gives you new chapters to pull on more threads, and new characters to explore and play with. The entire thing feels a lot like a narrative exploration loop I would design for a video game, which is actually the second time in today’s session that I was reminded of video game design specifically (the first being the way the page numbers create a dynamic playspace that can be explored based on player preference). I am fascinated to see these strategies implemented with how you interact with the BOOK instead of in play loops only.

Talking about game mechanics, the whole Shelf, Journey and Track system reminds me a bit of achievement systems. Which in turn makes me wonder if the game will invite us to look at the potential unlocks and what we’ll need to do for it beforehand. If it did it would give extra incentives to explore the chapters as well as extra prompts of what to do with them. If it doesn’t it makes for nice surprises. I am super curious about this!

As a last note on the page for now, Mementos you can put on your Shelf is another one of these amazing images, that already makes me nostalgic for experiences I didn’t even have yet. It actually reminds me of my favorite game Signs of the Sojourner ~ maybe I’ll add an ost from that game to the playlist at some point.

Aand I think that’s about it for the day. I might actually have even more notes on this tomorrow, but I need to sleep at some point don’t I.

See you tomorrow as we enter Page 19: Characters.

---------------

you can find my other Yazeba readthrough posts under #zeebthrough!

Preorder the game on https://possumcreekgames.com/pages/yazebas-bed-breakfast

[mishahandman]

The Federation of Birds

Far away in the clouds lies the Federation of Birds.

This fractious coalition of various inter-connected anthropomorphic bird-folk have long been uninterested with the goings-on of the surface world. Instead, they focus on internal politics, drama, and the joys and troubles of day to day life in the clouds. However, an enterprising travel journalist is set to upend the Federation’s easygoing affairs, as he travels to the groundlands in search of more exciting stories. One of his first destinations is a small bed and breakfast rumoured to be run by a witch with connections to the Moon, which is simply too juicy to pass up!

Hello, everyone!

Some time ago, as part of a jam, I put together a couple of guests for Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast, which if you haven’t seen it is a truly lovely tabletop RPG and campaign about the residents and guests of a magical B&B.

The full game recently released, and I’ve decided to mark the occasion by finishing that campaign and releasing The Federation of Birds, an independent supplement produced under the Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast Third Party License. This includes: Two chapters, four great bird guests, and a new Mood that you might want to use if you’re designing your own chapters! 

Go and have a look. You can find the Federation of Birds here, and I hope you’ll enjoy their stories!

[mossdaggar]

Still can't talk about it with 100% certainty, but...

My next project after HELLWHALERS is a minigame collection, and I hope to feature a lot of guest designers for the minigames. Inspired by Tiny Library, Cozy Town, Yazeba's B&B, Warioware, Mario Party, Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, etc.

[firesalamander]

Books 6 & 7!

time for a few more entries~ book 6 is the rulebook for Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast by the folks at @jdragsky and the other folks at possum creek games! i was waffling on if i should count this since there’s technically a bunch of locked content i haven’t read yet, but also i make the rules for my log and i’m counting it. Yazeba’s is an incredibly darling set up for a game with great mechanics and fun characters. i’ve played two chapters so far and can’t wait to play more soon, once me and my online game group get the virtual version set up book 7 is The Mycocultutral Revolution: Transforming our World with Mushrooms, Lichens, and Other Fungi by Peter McCoy. This book is great, has lots of interesting stuff (i’ll be real, i skipped the chapters on brewing ale with mushrooms and growing them at home b/c i don’t want to do those things). i’m going to be learning to mushroom hunt soon from a coworker at my university, so learning more about edible species and cooking was a real highlight. definitely some claims i would consider spurious and sensationalizing, but what mushroom content isn’t?

i have a few more books i’m halfway through, and a ton on the backlog, as well as a friend who agreed to do a monthly two-person book club with me, so hopefully i’ll have more entries soon!

[woyms]

for the gazebos request: Hey Kid, dancing!

They’re playing just dance~

Gertrude is surprisingly good at it!

[windienine]

between yazeba's and chuubo's i'm now 100% of the mindset that pre-generated ttrpg characters are an excellent idea so long as you imbue them with enough love and provide a framework for what storytelling with these archetypes will look like

customization as an ongoing process of watching a set archetype change over time rather than decisions made at the outset... *chef's kiss*

oh and you have to get silly with it that's the most important bit

[thoughtsfromyazebabnb]

Hm. Now what's going on here?

[yellowhoothoot]

played the "gone fishing" chapter of yazeba's and sal could not stop catching the same 2 fish over and over, poor guy. in the end we gave the boot to hey kid (who didn't play) so they can try to plant something in it. as parish i got a golden fish statue that i'll have to find a spot for in the b&b and mr. boggs immediately caught his fish then caught parish twice (once on purpose and once by mistake)