#yazeba's

[open-hearth-rpg]

Open Hearth Podcast Ep 7: Protect the Child, Yazeba's, Blades '68

In our new episode host Rae Nedjadi (@temporalhiccup) talks with Open Hearth community members Mint (@mintandrabbits) and Casey about their recent gaming and one ttrpg they want to explore in depth. Really interesting insight into all three games discussed.

And hey episode seven! Pleased we're keeping it going. We've been lucky enough to get an excellent group of co-hosts to vary up the show. You can check out all of our episodes and more at our Around the Hearth podcast feed.

[xavidotron]

As a sort of counterpart, I'm fond of negative outcomes that are either impossible to reach or hard enough to reach you need to be really trying to get there, but sorta loom over you anyways.

One example is the Ending Books in Glitch, which sorta make any Wound or Cost expenditure make you feel like your character is that much closer to being unplayable, even though it'd be actually pretty difficult to cross the unplayability line even if you gun for it full speed ahead in the length of most Glitch campaigns.

Another is some of the darker chapters of Yazeba's, with "bad end" outcomes where it might not be immediately obvious how reachable that bad end is, which creates some good bleed re-enforcing the emotional state of the characters.

i love games that play with impossibilities in the mechanics to create mood or storytelling through empty space. roll tables that have numbers too high or too low, dice that don't physically exist. i imagine there's a lot more you could do with it. tarot cards not in any real deck, 42 of spades, dice towers 100 dice tall

i've always been such a fan of blank space in narratives but sometimes the best use of your time really is just to spell it out. here's something you can't have. this is exactly what i want you to think about and know that you won't get, not in this game at least

in my lyric game about werewolves, your 'beast' stat goes up a die size for all the animals watching you, and if you get past a d100 you have to roll using the moon. in my most recent little bookmark game, you take a baby girl (your daughter? someone else's?) and leave her to be raised by humans instead of the fey, like you. it's a simple game. roll a d6 to find out what happens to her when you come back 10 years later. lower numbers are worse outcomes, higher good. pretty simple. the outcome for 6 is pretty good, she knows shes a fey and has some friends who know too, she's even happy to see you, and i couldve left it at that. but it was for the 36 word jam and i had some words left. so i made a 7 where her new parents also know and they still love her. and that just really changes the whole game for me. sometimes its sad and sometimes its less so. but even with your best chance at a good life for her shes never actually going to be loved for who she really is, and you did that to her. it might not be on her mind but its going to be on yours and you know you know you know its out of reach. thats what the whole game is about now, to me. the 7 you can't ever roll

i think the impossible mechanic is definitely something that fits well in a certain genre of game (lyric games or really absurd ones especially) but i wanna see it used more in general. what should the players be aware of the absence of? whats your mechanical haunting of the narrative? if yall have examples or self-promos feel free to drop em

[jdragsky]

possum creek games is doing a sale on their entire library right now, which is completely fucking bonkers

so if you like queer tabletop rpgs, found family, weird liminal creepy shit, or just new ways to play games that you've never thought of before, go fucking nuts

[fakedtales]

The physical version of Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is gorgeous.

[transbookoftheday]

Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast by Possum Creek Games

Our story begins in a sprawling old house outside time and space, where it’s always September 15th and there’s always room for a new visitor. A teen girl sits on the windowsill, reading a well-worn paperback and listening to the splashy-crashy rain come down. She's alone in the world, but soon enough the strangers who reside here will become her closest friends, family, and mentors.

If you love slice-of-life fantasy, queer found family, and cutting-edge game mechanics, then read on!

Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is many things. It’s a bed and breakfast, of course, but it’s also this book. And this book is a book, of course, but it’s also a role-playing game—the sort of game we can play with our friends around a table, or on a voice call while hanging out, or even very, very slowly by mail.

Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is played over the course of 48 chapters, each of which is a 1 to 2-hour scenario with its own unique but quick-to-learn rules. Players can take control of one of the 7 long-term residents of the B&B or choose from a cast of 50 quirky guests, each of whom has their own ongoing storylines.

The adventures contained within each chapter include lazy afternoons, frightful nights, insurmountable chores, and zany competitions, so every play session is full of surprises. There are bespoke game rules for overcoming mountains of laundry, picking berries, surviving a trip to the scary basement, naming constellations, and everything else that matters in a slice-of-life story. These mechanics are simple and modular, meaning you only need to know the rules for the chapter in front of you. It can take as little as 15 minutes to start playing.

After each chapter, we’ll be able to make changes to our characters and to the book—unlocking new guests and chapters and advancing the individual storylines of each character who played. Whether they've traded their heart away for magic powers or are just doing the everyday business of growing up, everything about a character can change through play, including their core identities. Over time, your copy of Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast will become a unique artifact of your group's play experience, a treasure that you can revisit and replay for decades.

Yazeba's unusual blend of premade characters, modular rules, and legacy mechanics makes it a perfect game for pick-up play: busy players can drop in and out without ever feeling lost, and anyone who wants to jump in can make a long-term impact without a long-term commitment. We’ve spent months playtesting and working with our developmental consultant Avery Alder to make sure the game is as easy as possible for new players to step into, while still offering incredible depth for the more experienced player.

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played YAZEBA'S BED AND BREAKFAST ?

By Mercedes Acosta, Jay Dragon, M Veselak, and Lillie Harris

A slice-of-life legacy tabletop role-playing game about a found family and their magical home.

[caterjunes]

this sucks. this all fucking sucks. i wish my dad cared about me like he thinks he does, or like he wants me to think he does, or like he pretends he does. when it's not inconvenient, when he isn't forced to remember i'm trans/mentally ill/disabled/unemployed/unemployable/a Failed Citizen.

i wish anybody was treating it like a big deal that i traveled halfway across the country to spend time with them. it felt like a big deal to me.

[yazebas-tchotchkes]

There is incredible potential for growth in Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, in a way I have never seen another TTRPG present. It is a single place, fixed in time, a single story that can be told a thousand different ways, but growing, always growing. About community. About becoming who you have chosen to be - and having the agency to decide how fast that happens, when that happens, and how that happens. It is a game about making memories.

- Armaan Babu

[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"

[ttrpgbookclub]

This month, we read Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast, a game so huge we had to break it into two episodes. We also had our first special guest and one of Yazeba's co-creators, Jay Dragon, on to discuss it with us!

You can find "Yazeba's" on Possum Creek Games' itch[dot]io linked here.

[loreraptor]

Played Gone Fishin' in Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast tonight, which requires each player to draw a fish or something fish adjacent on a scrap of paper and assign it a point value from 0 to 4.

Presenting, for 4 points, the Cunty Octopus.

[notaboyscout]

I don't think it's possible to overstate just how much I'm enjoying Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast. This game is brilliant and silly and whimsical and heartfelt. Just so much <3

it has been a very very long time since I've drawn or put stickers in a book. too long. this book is begging to be loved and made into your very own art.

the first page of the safety tools spread

which is written entirely in the voice of

[cryptid-coyote]

rough little butch dullahan sketch between coms and artfight

[s-che]

From the Game Designer Tarot, I'd like to draw JUDGEMENT. Tell me about something you designed that taught you something important, please?

From yesterday's Game Designer Tarot ask game

Judgement — Talk about a game you’ve made that taught you a lot.

In 2022, when I was, like, a year out of college and already pretty burned out by teaching, I wrote the extremely quick and angry first draft of Queen of the Moon, a game which yanked the lindworm oracle from Jay Dragon's Sleepaway, slapped a couple of playbooks in for different the types of children, and said there you go. There's a game. Kids and a thing that hurts them. That's all there is in the world. I was angry with the educational system, I was pessimistic about the craft of teaching, and I wrote a game that was miserable as a result. It was extremely important to me to write it the way I did — to make a point — but it wasn't until last year when I finally started revising it that I realized how little fun there was in playing the thing.

All this to say, I think a lot of people write bit-based games. Polemical games. Games that only exist to make one point. And I think it can be really therapeutic to write that way, or just to write for a joke (God knows Queen of the Moon isn't the only time I've done it — Ritual & Experience, another early game I'd love to come back to and make into something more interesting, basically works the same way). But I do think it's worth considering the limitations of writing one-note games.

I had a really good conversation while helping @jdragsky move apartments a few months back (great setting for design yapping, tbh) about how super duper rules light, one-mechanic games can be extremely restorative to play after dealing with a bloated, clunky, D&D-esque system — but that there's something to be said for the fact that D&D & co. have all those goddamn mechanics in them. There are, whether we like them or not, multiple things to do in dungeons & dragons, and playing a game with that much shit to do in it can be fun! I don't want one universal dice roll -- I want lots and lots of little bespoke systems overlapping nibbling at each other! I like it when there is a lot of games in my games! One good mechanic is still just one mechanic — it might be better than any one of D&D's twenty mid mechanics, but D&D still has 20 of them.

Anyway, I bring up Jay's writing specifically because that's a hallmark of what PCG does — Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast most obviously, but Sleepaway too. It took me a long time to get to a point where I could joyfully make Queen of the Moon less one-note. It's still pretty pared down compared to Sleepaway (although some of that is on purpose), but it's a lot bigger than it was when I started. And that isn't because of bloat: it's because it's good to write more good game.

[whatsuphoneybee]

My Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast box set arrived just in time for my birthday 🧡💜🩷💛

It’s a gorgeous piece of work! It’s a much bigger game than I initially realized but in a ‘I can’t wait to get playing an uncover things’ kind of way and not at all overwhelming

I’m already pouring over the instructions and already discovered one secret 👀 I can’t wait to play this with my friends soon!

[rollforfelicity]

RPG a day thread! I will probably forget to do this after a week like I did last year but what the hell! First RPG bought this year is almost impossible to say. I bought Odd Gobs by Madness Heart Games as a gift for my friend and I think that was for their birthday, and if so, that would have been it. I actually am pretty reserved with my game purchases, especially since I already have so many games I haven't played, so I think I've only bought a handful of games this year, most of them from bundles.

Most recently played: Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast by Possum Creek Games! I played a chapter with Mike a couple of weeks ago when my physical copy arrived. We played the chapter The Longest Night of the Year and had so much fun. I'm hoping to play it more soon! Normally I would have played a few other things more recently but I have been recovering from covid so I canceled a few games.

It's almost midnight so what the hell, I'll do day three right now, too. An RPG with great art: Justicar from @dinoberrypress! I love how varied and expressive the character art is in the book. It does a good job of showing the variety of characters you can play in the courtroom setting, and also pays homage to the character designs from Phoenix Wright, which is clearly a big influence on the book. I love this lady and her dog. The art is heightened by the great layout and use of fonts for the game. It's a lot of fun to flip through (and a lot of fun to play).