indie-ttrpg-of-the-week

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

I know a cloudbreaker write up has already been posted here but someone else wrote it and now i have on-hand experience with the system so! i’ll prob do a write up on that sometime

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

Henshiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiin!

Genre: Magical Girl, Power of Friendship, Honestly Anything Where A Distinct Line Between Two Versions of A Character would be Possible

Touchstones: Henshin anime, Mecha media, Basically Anything where characters might have an alternate form

What is this game?: Burning Hearts Forever is a TTRPG about wielding your heart in battle, whatever that may be

How's the gameplay?: BHF uses a standard PBTA 2d6+Stat rolling system, its core mechanical signature is its "Heart" system, where when its time to throw down, characters unleash their hearts! What's a heart? i dunno! thats up for you to decide! It symbolizes a characters' innermost self, it can be a mech, a magical girl transformation, or even putting on a persona for a show, when a character's wielding their heart, shit's gotten real. Characters unleashing their Heart, as well as getting buffs the moment they activate it, are tougher, stronger, can use unique moves, and are generally just more powerful, but at the same time, they're more vulnerable, showing your true blazing self hurts after all!

What's the setting (If any) like?: None, BHF's setting is left up for the players and GM to choose

What's the tone?: While you could do darker more dire stories, the game's tailored towards a very specific type of more high action games

Session length: 2-3 hours

Number of Players: 4-6 players

Malleability: The complete lack of setting makes this game very very malleable

Resources: The game includes a reference sheet

BHF is a really really cool game, I'm always a sucker for games that focus on a single theme vs a setting, going "Yeah you can run anything but you do need to have this be a primary theme" is really an interesting space that i think should be explored more

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

I'm not asking for a lot of money, I just need to buy a tent to shelter my children and family and buy medicine for my sick mother. 💔🙏 Can you share a post from my blog? Campaign verified by @gazavetters (#334).

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[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

Honestly surprised i've never seen a game try to steal armour astir advent's gravity clock mechanic, its such an awesome way to make an unstable relationship mechanic

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

every so often i do a write up and i know the game's dev is aware of the blog or follows it and i always try to put as much effort into those as possible because i'd feel awful if i misrepresented a game and the dev saw it

in any case if i did misrepresent your game do tell because i'm fully willing to redo write ups to better reflect the game

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

I'm not against violence in tabletop rpgs, obviously, and I'm also not of the opinion that every game has to be Drakengard, sometimes brutal simple violence is viscerally satisfying in a way, but I do think its important to think about those things critically, especially when your enemies are other people And in the case of other people its literally just more interesting writing wise to ponder on the implications of said violence, yk?

But yeah non-combat encounters tend to be a lot more interesting in a way because there's no obvious solution usually, in... I think No Room for a Wallflower (to avoid spoilers i won't name any specifics) there's a moment where your characters are ordered to mow down multiple civilians, its meant to be a sort of "what the fuck do you do now?" moment and its really a highlight of that bit of the campaign

btw this isn't saying lancer's depiction of violence is any good either its a game about commiting a lot of violence very fast, the critiques of violence are at a setting level mostly, and even then its. not great at that, this is coming from someone who loves lancer and thinks a lot of the critiques it gets are real dumb

i try to not get too deep about ttrpg setting design and fundamental bigotries many well meaning people fall into but every time i mention people’s elf games being a lil racist i get dissed about it so i’ll just say this

a big issue with ttrpg design is that many game designers, including very well meaning ones, seem to believe that there exists any sort of sentient life that is “OK” to kill without remorse

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

Ok back to normal, working on doing two write ups to make up for last week sorry about that, some family stuff happened, it was scheduled but it was still a lot of energy, on the plus side i did start learning how to play the otamatone

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

every so often i’ll just forget i haven’t done a write up on a game and go rush it out because its very much like “how the fuck did i not do this one yet”, struggles of changing from daily to weekly ig

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

So I'm totally on board with the anti wotc but I don't understand your issue with others rising to be the top. There's always going to be a top ttrpg and why wouldn't they want to be?

The main issue is I often see people cheering for WOTC to go down and there to be another monopoly placed on top, yes there's always going to be a "TTRPG That's the most popular", but that shouldn't come at the expense of other games

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

For a multitude of societal and personal reasons im very very very very very tired this week, I'll try to make up for no game this week but Nothing today, sorry for the inconvenience

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

I would have but I was all in on lancer at the time and Lancer doesn't have any healing abilities ;-;

5e killed my grandma, ok?

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

5e killed my grandma, ok?

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

Ok so so far my only issue with it is that the game does just feel like More Blades, but like. thats what I wanted honestly, just more blades in a funky new setting inspired by spy movies, its really cool! the new setting of Duskvol in 968 feels like such a natural evolution of the setting that I already liked quite a bit, I adore how so much of the art is clearly meant to be modernized version of old areas from Blades classic, the setting feels like a natural evolution of the Classic Duskvol, handling the idea of "Fantasy world evolved" way better than Pathfinder to Starfinder did in my opinion

Overall, great game and def something to keep an eye on! very excited to see where it goes

oh new blades game, i should sign up to get playtest material

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

I'm in

oh new blades game, i should sign up to get playtest material

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

I've had the pleasure of talking to Wendi Yu, dev of here there be monsters, a few times before, she's a lovely individual. i'd love to see you guys go support basically any of these projects

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

I also dislike how its impossible to browse itch nowadays because of the thousands of mork borg hacks and supplements that just infest the front page, and due to itch’s terrible tagging system i can’t just easily filter them out, it makes my job a lot harder especially because people have a tendency to NOT ADVERTISE THAT THEIR GAME IS A MORK SUPPLEMENT UNTIL YOU CLICK ON IT, its miserable!

>disliking both Pathfinder and Mork

Yes!

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

yeah thats my problem with it lol

I don't. like artbook ttrpgs, i think if you wanna make an artbook, make an artbook, don't lazily put in gameplay mechanics just to make it sell better, Troika runs into this exact problem and i also don't like that game

like the graphic design is great, the art is beautiful, its just not a good game, and when I talk about TTRPGs i focus on the gameplay, notice how i almost never talk about art in my ttrpg write ups

>disliking both Pathfinder and Mork

Yes!