antescompany

[antescompany]

I’m so excited to show you my 5 of cups that I made for Star Crossed a Queer Tarot. There are so many incredible artists and just a few days left!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/novaandmali/star-crossed-a-queer-tarot

[antescompany]

I wonder if people mistake D&D as queer because they see queerness as an esthetics/vibes thing (therefor, art and queer employees are enough) instead of as defined by personal experiences (in which the game must support that directly through mechanics)

if true that makes those people kinda dumb

I mean it is partly that but I feel there's also this sense of. You know the whole "every piece of media I like is secretly leftist" thing? It's the same thing. Especially here on Tumblr but in fandom circles in general people want the media they consume to reflect well on them as a person. This means that even the most surface-level queer representation media needs to be seen as Gay, Actually, and similarly the Politics of the Show I Like are Actually Good and Unimpeachable.

So yeah it's partly people seeing queerness in terms of aesthetics and vibes but also it intersects heavily as "consuming the right media as a form of activism." Or as I have seen in the past when Wizards of the Coast had done something or other to anger people again, "actually, still playing D&D but saying that we don't need WotC is the most powerful statement we can make to really stick it to the man!"

[antescompany]

worldbuilding and collages for brilliant twilight bloom

[antescompany]

It's great to see people in other media getting into writing indie RPGs, and also very entertaining to some of the resulting design choices. They'll be like "hey, I'm making a tabletop RPG adaptation of my VN about cute witches with big dicks", and I'm like cool, and then they're like "it's a full-conversion Lancer mod", and I'm like: huh.

[antescompany]

New werewolf oc?? 🐺

[antescompany]

I don't think I ever posted this here but I pixelated Spiffo a looong time ago, this was a remake of my first Spiffo sprite you can see on my twitter here

Zomboid is my favorite game ever, I've been playing since the game was 2d pixels and before multiplayer even existed, I put ungodly hours in the tech demo, I have the book that inspired it and the plushies, I just love it so muchhh, I only wish I had more time to play it or more veteran players to play with :')

[antescompany]

Chaos snail riders! Proxies for Beasts of Nurgle

[antescompany]

Cairn is very cool. More games should just have sections dedicated to sitting the player down and spelling out how to play the game, not just in a "these are the rules" type of way but also in a "this is what the game expects of you as a player" style.

Not only does it address antisocial play (the sort of stuff that gets valorized in supposedly funny RPG memes) it also makes it clear that the Warden's (the GM in this game) role is not to fuck with their players. It is so cool.

The overview and principles section is well worth a read. Some of it is not applicable to every game because it is heavily opinionated towards the type of game Cairn is, but it's still a good read.

[antescompany]

It's like night and day, isn't it? Showing off the lighting differences! 🌵 Tip jar/commissions

[antescompany]

Join my Patreon if you would like to see more horse : )

[antescompany]

[antescompany]

The world of Harn is all about the creation of a richly detailed and plausible medieval fantasy world. Plausible, not realistic, though realism is often a driving design concern. And that’s the approach that was taken in Nasty, Brutish and Short: The Orcs of Harn (1997). This is a dicey proposition.

Orcs are not a product of the natural world of Harn. They were either created somehow, in an earlier age, by an evil sorcerer, or imported from a different dimension. They are alien in a couple key ways — somewhat hive like, they are born from eggs (ew) laid by a single queen and share an innate tribal memory. Thus, they inherit learned behavior from the generations before, which informs and reinforces their actions, sometimes irrationally. This seems to indicate both an awareness and wariness of the idea of a type of monster existing as monolith. These orcs are still sort of a monolith, but an attempt has been made to explain why, and it works well enough because they are surrounded by various other cultures that are, for game purposes, somewhat monolithic on the surface.

It’s maybe not ideal, but I also don’t really know how you handle orcs differently in the context of Harn, and for what this is, I think it’s rather well done (at one point, in an explanation for a scenario involving helping wounded orcs, the author suggests rolling up the module to “thrash them soundly about the ears” if the players seem inclined to meet requests for mercy with violence). Brutal as most orcs are, it’s the plotting of humans and dwarves that most often uses them as instruments of violence, usually for political gain. The scenarios, for the most part, put players in the way of those schemes.

As usual for Harn, the visuals of the book are in good hands with Chris Hotz, who did all the illustrations and maps. I think the maps are particularly sharp and the cover art stands as one of the line’s very best.

[antescompany]

I’ve been reading about werewolves on Wikipedia and I just have to say. “Werewolves are warriors that descend into hell to fight demons” kicks unbelievable amounts of ass as a concept

[antescompany]

the thing about that dnd post is that like. ironically all the guys who are high and mighty about Normal Human Communication are failing to understand that implicit communication like 'are you sure?' depends on context clues and when you're making up a thing that isn't real those context clues don't actually exist. even if you have lovingly spent hours describing every part of a battlemap you might still have a different idea of it in your mind than your players do, because it isn't real, the only consensus reality built up is the one built up by the communication between players at the table. and of course i prefer that this kind of communication is done 'above-table' because i don't care about 'immersion' and instead enjoy collaborative storytelling--e.g. "if you do that, there's a good possibility that you'll die."

but even if that kind of 'immersion' is really valuable to you and you want to be making decisions as your character instead if for them--your character exists in the situation and they should know a lot about it and so you and the GM should still be actively working to establish consensus reality for those decisions to make sense in, e.g. "you've encountered this sort of powder before and you're pretty sure if it goes up in flames it'll be the sort of fire that you can't outrun". if it really matters to you that you're not told directly about consequenes because 'your character wouldn't know that', i think it's also fair to say that your character wouldn't be imagining a completely different reality to the one that exists and making their decisions based off that. no matter whether you take the 'writer's room' or 'actor' approach to roleplaying, clear and explicit communication about the situation is always the best way to make sure everyone has a nice time with their brain blorbos

[antescompany]

The Unicorn of the Peloponnese ✨

[antescompany]

A couple members of our Lancer group and I put together a module over the last two weeks for the Lancer game jam. I'll be posting the art I did for it over the next couple of days, but you can get the whole thing below on itch morganjanearcane.itch.io/a-wake-writ-in-void The pdf is pwyw since we'd much rather it be accessible to anyone interested in Lancer. It's designed to be played as either a one-shot for PCs to be able to try out new builds at a mid-high level, or to be slotted into a campaign around that level. Thank you to my co-creators in this, Morgan (http://tumblr.com/morganjanearcane) and MK for the writing and the layouts getting everything put together. We'd love to do more of these in the future and are looking to adding some extra material for this module over the next month.

[antescompany]

the ornithologist and the lady of the forest