luuma-makes-games

[luuma-makes-games]

Rose Lotus is free on itch.io!

This is a "powered by the apocalypse" game with little tidbits of other excellent RPGs thrown in, and my first crack at a GMless game - which meant I got to playtest it extensively. Which means I can say confidently that this game is a good story engine, and has remarkable replay value. And also that the spells are my kinda shit.

Rose Lotus really scratches that itch for a magical hero survival adventure against overwhelming odds. It's tough, it's imposing, it's full of danger, but your character just might be good enough to beat it.

Dive in, and find out what happens along the way.

If you're longing to go on a terrifying deadly trek through mystical realms... or if you've got a bundle of OCs you've never had the chance to put through a campaign... or you just want to read some cool magic stuff and lift some ideas from a wild, biochem solarpunk setting? This might be the game for you.

You have 20 hours and 50 minutes to deliver the package

Don't die. Think of the delay it'd cause.

[luuma-makes-games]

Now at IPR: Scurry! A Game That Gathers Speed (Third Edition)

Welcome to Scurry, a hectic heisting roleplaying game where you walk in the paws of crafty beasts out for a big score.

One player acts as the Scurry Master, while the other players act as crafty Beasts participating in a fast paced heist, called a Scurry. Throughout their adventure, the Beasts will be faced with obstacles to overcome. The group’s stamina is represented by the Scurry Dice, which start as D12s. All Beasts share the Scurry Dice between them.

https://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Scurry-A-Game-That-Gathers-Speed-Third-Edition-Print-PDF.html

[luuma-makes-games]

Who are some designers who you think are doing especially interesting or ground-breaking work in ttrpgs rn? Who are the up-and-comers?

Hello friend! This is a kind of difficult question for me to answer, I think, particularly because my experience of the indie scene feels a little skewed. There are names that are consistently recognizable to me because I'm a very big fan of what I see from them on Itch, but I don't know how big and/or popular they are on the outside! Additionally I'm not sure how recent is recent! Is a designer who started releasing stuff in 2023 recent? 2021?

Anyways I can definitely talk about interesting work that I've seen in indie ttrpgs, stuff that's out-of-the-box and exciting to me, stuff that I'm excited to experience at the table. All of these games are games I stumbled upon when I was looking to fit the requirements of various requests, which I think really speaks to the value of curiosity in the process of finding something truly special.

BXLLET, by Rathayibacter. @rathayibacter

"If you point a loaded gun at someone and pull the trigger, they die. Exceptions to this should be vanishingly rare, if they never exist at all. Your best way to survive a gunfight is to never get involved in one. Failing that, pray you shoot first." - [BXLLET>, page 3.

In BXLLET, violence is an instant solution to a problem; if you shoot someone they die, no rolls required. If your players choose to use this kind of violence to solve a problem, they had better be willing to chance death. It's an ethos I see often attached to deadly OSR games, but BXLLET feels like a much stronger statement; nothing about this ethos is hidden in the rules, it's stated plainly on the page.

It's more than that though; bullets are a resource, rare and worth collecting. You spend bullets should you choose to shoot someone, but if you hold onto them, you slowly become more and more powerful. A Hunter can protect themselves from ambushes at 2 bullets, and command dangerous Beasts of the Wastes at 20. I like the fact that this game contrasts the desire to find the most effective solution to a problem with the desire to hoard a version of experience in order to be able to do cool shit. I can see this setup causing some really interesting moments at a table, where players may decide to look at the other things on their character sheet before resorting to the most violent, most deadly option - even though the rules are very clear about what that option does.

Let Justice Be Done by Mynar Lenahan.

"…this is not a game about clever investigators looking to discover An Objective Truth. This is a game with an unclear or unimportant sense of what truth is. Instead, this is a game about creating whatever truth you need to accomplish Justice." - Let Justice Be Done, page 4

I'm a big fan of the mystery system that's most commonly referred to as Carved from Brindlewood - the system that allows the play group to construct an answer to a mystery using clues that the GM sprinkles into the narrative as the characters nose about. As a play mechanic I think it takes a lot of the burden off of the GM in regards to planning a session, and it allows the play group to contribute to the story and the world-building.

At the same time, there have been some arguments that the way this system works takes away the feeling of solving a puzzle - it's not really solving a mystery if you're creating the answer as you play. While I don't mind that dichotomy when I play these games, I appreciate Lenahan's approach being that of "yeah, you're not solving a mystery, you're framing some shitty billionaire," because it re-contextualizes a familiar mechanic into something new and interesting, and creates a story that feels informed by the game process. The connection feels thematic and at the same time taps into the feeling I got when I was watching Glass Onion, and for that reason I think I'd have a blast bringing this game to the table.

The Sun's Ransom by pidj. @pidj

"Maybe even now you're still filled with inner turmoil, everything that is vampire screaming at you to not bring back that oppressor, the sun. But your mind is made up. You will bring back the sun. Vampires are full of irony, really, they can't un-live without the living." - The Sun's Ransom, page 4.

I really enjoy the tragedy of this game. You are playing powerful creatures tasked with reviving the bane of your existence, in order to be able to live in a world that in the long-term, will support you better. The central game mechanic involves moving successful dice from the cover, which displays the image of the sun; indicating that as you succeed, the sun becomes more visible. It's a magnificent visual representation of the goal you're attempting to achieve in the game.

Furthermore, this game doesn't make the decision for you in regards to what vampires mean. You can be a haunted figure, chasing redemption or a vindictive bloodsucker, whose only goal is to renew their food supply. I think you could also just as easily be a sympathetic victim, who's been placed in an catch-22 situation regarding their own survival. Over the course of the game, you'll be asked to compare and contrast your past self with your current one, and with each obstacle, you'll roll the entire dice pool. This is a narrative exercise, a ritual - not a game of strategic choices. If you enter the game with that mindset, I think you can have a really powerful experience.

doll.bod by curatrix-ribston. @ribstongrowback

"Dolls are an exercise in loss of agency: other players will make calls about your doll, and you will have to comply… The point, however, is that a dolls' person is no longer their own, and the character creation process reflects that." - doll.bod, page 16.

doll.bod makes a lot of statements about corporate ownership and how it encourages people to become uncaring, unfeeling machines. In a world where your characters have very little say in who they are and what they do, I think it makes a lot of sense to have other players make choices for you, both in character creation and in regards to the amount of control you have over your own abilities.

Let's take a look at an example; The Gargoyle. The person to the Gargoyle's left picks zer fashion sense; the player to zer right picks a secret about zem that may or may not be true. The Gargoyle has a Panopticon Drone Array that allows ze to record everything within eyesight - and ze have 360-degree eyesight. The downside? Zer brain can't balance the strain very well, and if ze use the ability for too long, ze can only do one thing at a time for an entire turn. The class rewards players for unveiling secrets and hiding truths; I think it might be interesting to play a character who can't un-see certain things, or who might be unwittingly recording even private moments for some shadowy financier to look upon at their leisure.

His Red Hand by Carrie Imago @concealed-carrie.

"When we decide to end the game, we answer the following… How does the CHOIR eventually fall, and by whose hand? What small way did we contribute? Who makes a home of our Sanctum after we're gone? For those of us who didn't make it: Who mourns us? How is our memory honored? For those of us who did: What kind of stability do we settle into? What did we have to abandon in order to achieve it?" - His Red Hand, page 2.

This game is built on The Nameless Engine, so I suppose the credit really goes to @jdragsky here, but I don't have access to the game this engine is built on, so His Red Hand is what I have as source material. This is a diceless game that uses tokens, moves, and a Threat Map. The Threat Map is interesting to me because it gives the table an image to help conceptualize a narrative space even though all of the distance and positioning is relative. Each player controls both a Character and a Threat, which means that each player contributes equally to the protagonist and antagonist forces in the story; I think this is important in a game like this because it allows the whole table to take responsibility for their own tragedy.

There are specific moves attached to each character that are uni-directional: they only target specific threats. The Morningstar can raise their voice to drown out the PIT, but they can't do the same to the CHOIR or the SERPENT. (You can ask the Serpent if you deserve your fate though). Like Belonging Outside Belonging games, you can give and spend tokens, but you can also do something much more cruel - take tokens from other players by doing something terrible, like treating them like a piece on a chessboard, or prying too deep into a painful memory. The game is a personal downward spiral, as each character slowly marks something called Castigation, up until they meet a doom of their own choice. And yet, at the very end, you know that your enemy will lose.

***

If there's a common thread between all of these examples, I suppose I'd say that the game designers who I admire the most are the ones who are using their art to explore stories that allow the players to embrace pain and injustice. I'm looking for games that allow us to sit in those moments of discomfort, and perhaps give us the ability to think about how to address those moments. It's not the easiest experience to bring to the table, but I think it's definitely worth it when you can pull it off.

If you like what I do and want to leave a tip, you can check out my Ko-Fi.

[luuma-makes-games]

Small finishing touches I think add to any medium to large TTRPG:

Write the reading time - the time it takes to read enough rules to begin playing. I calculate this based on a reading speed of 200 words per min.

Order the document to minimise the time taken before players are playing. In character playing games, this means ordering it like: all the context necessary for context for character creation -> character creation -> detailed gameplay and how to run it -> detailed setting. Starting to create a character is fun.

Quick reference sheets! Powerpoint is surprisingly good for making these. You can change the slide size to a4.

[luuma-makes-games]

A rectangular shape built of gleaming silver; impenetrable to all attempts at force. Those walls held as a vessel of demons, so the stories went. Any who was able to break through would be set upon by devils clad in the same gleaming metal and devoured before the carapace was resealed by those same demons bodies. There were no concrete records of this in living memory.

But time has turned. The great door has creaked open, splitting itself at its center and wheeling away into the walls. The dais at the foot of the door, that has stood at various times as a sacrificial alter, a throne of sovereigns, a house of law, and a stage; now houses busy market district trading in exploration and discovery.

A generation has passed since the opening of the door. The initial excitement of new land, new discovery has been cut down like so many delvers that ventured in, never to return. A formal guild has formed for Delvers. They hold the monopoly on claims in the library, and the arcane artifacts that have since been pulled from its depths. The center of these are the MindDeck and the Books.

Slotted into the base of your skull when you sign with the guild, the Deck is a rectangular device carried over your shoulder with four slots in it. In these slots, books may be place in order to read the information there in. Some of these "Books" contain conventional information which is conveyed seamlessly into your mind, only for it to be erased when the book is removed. Others contain more obscure information: abilities that change your body in ways that challenge reality.

Armed with these Decks, a new class has emerged: Delvers. You join their ranks now, seeking... something from the library.

[luuma-makes-games]

Backgrounds for TTRPGs

Working on Rose Lotus I realised I wanted a really solid random character generator, and I wanted to have a way of generating backgrounds! When people start to flesh out their character's backstory, it's the first point people go to. I wanted something good. I think I found it! In short, I cannot recommend Wikipedia's "List of Fictional Characters by Job Occupation" enough. It is a brilliant resource for this. You can see what tropes are most common in fiction really easily. Wikipedia my beloved.

When it comes to backgrounds, I really think it's better to avoid doing a cross section of society. I'm sure there are lots of middle managers, insurance underwriters, salespeople, and so on, and I'm sure those can all yield interesting characters. But backgrounds like these don't help players improvise in character, because they are basically never portrayed in fiction. People want to read the background they got and go "oh, like blorbo from tv". The worst thing that could happen is that I assign a player something as dull as "guild merchant" and force them to look up what that even is and whether or not it has ever been portrayed in a work of fiction they've seen. This is a mistake made in a ton of crunchy rpgs - for example PF2E. It makes "butcher", "labourer" and "miner" be common backgrounds, and then stuff like "kaiju hunter" is "given out by the gm". like come on pathfinder, nobody's going "oh thank god I'm not a kaiju hunter how tedious. I'm so glad to be writing a backstory about how I did physical labour." One central conceit of these sword and sorcery games is that the player characters aren't random people, they are exceptional heroes of fiction. The backgrounds can, and should, be exceptional heroes of fiction too. The average player backgrounds should differ from the average backgrounds of random npcs, and shouldn't look anything like the average background of the population. Anyway for Rose Lotus I wound up with this! The section proved a good way to drip-feed lore to the reader too. Image description provided

[luuma-makes-games]

VOYAGER | RESPIRITED Created by rain-junkiednd for D&D'24 PDF version & more of my work artwork by Saltmalkin, Wenjun Lin, and Anton Fadeev

[luuma-makes-games]

I am working on a GMless game for 1 to 3 players called Rose Lotus, and I just wanted to share one of the items, which I wrote while Giggling & Kicking my feet in the air. As a DnD item this would be, I think, Rare - but it's very open ended indeed.

"A copy of your Character Sheet, from after you finish this current campaign. It looks like you made some prescient notes in the margins."

[luuma-makes-games]

This is true for a few games but not all. For a game like, say, cthulhu or fallen london or dnd or pathfinder or anything in essence20 or heck, Eureka itself, people won't be able to "pick up and play" unless they are given a strict pathway framework for that first adventure, because they are a bit more prep heavy, and they intend for the GM to offer a simulation of the world in which the characters work and find a pre-set story or solve a satisfying pre-defined mystery. So they need to be given a full complete setting in order to begin. Any game inherently based around mystery probably has to take this path! But for a game that's more freeform, more about storytelling, and more character-focused (microscope, the quiet year, fiasco, apocalypse world, masks and so on) it's antithetical to the entire RPG design. The game is intended to give a framework for a GM to construct the story, setting, and major characters around the players and their backstories. Most PBTAs fall under this category. Adding a sample module kills a core aspect of the game design - which is that the setting, and the plot, is partially defined by every single player or character at the table, and is meant to be totally unique. Let's not forget, also, some video games don't have any levels. Civ 5, Dwarf Fortress, and Minecraft all generate everything from scratch. Party games like Drawful or gartic phone have no levels. Many video games consist of a very long list of instructions and prompts to generate a unique experience for a group of friends. You see the parallel, right! TTRPGs can do exactly the same thing.

I think we're both getting at how every TTRPG game should be possible to pick up and play within about 1-2 hours' effort - same as a board game. To make that happen you need excellent GM tools, good prompts, and a sturdy framework for making it your own. In some cases, you might need a module. But only some, imo!

The more I think on it, and I know this greatly differs from what people have come to expect in recent years, but to me a TTRPG with no adventure modules is like booting up a video game and finding out the devs didn’t make any levels. Like I wanted to play this but I guess we’ll have to wait until someone in the group, who may have never played the game before, spends a not-insignificant amount of their free time in the level-editor throwing something together for us to play.

[luuma-makes-games]

If you got engaged in the DashCon 2 ball pit, please contact us!

We're very excited for you, and the team would love to send you our personal congratulations

[luuma-makes-games]

Here's how some major indie systems solve it :D

Virtually all PbtA systems work by saying "every time any failure happens, something occurs". They *also* have the rule "when the players look to you for what happens next, something occurs". And lastly, most info gathering checks let you ask three questions of the GM who must answer honestly. In particular, check out Monster of the Week which handles a drip-feed of info from the GM in a nice easy prescriptive way that ties very directly to the info gathering check's questions.

Burning Wheel says "let it ride" as a core tenet. When you aim to find info out and roll badly, that's the best you can do until something changes. Therefore a failure kind of always has some impact - it's a mental block for you, and you cannot progress on it until you've actually done something about it.

GMless games inherently have no hidden information! I've really enjoyed Fiasco and Space Train Space Heist in particular.

An important rule of thumb I like to use for virtually every RPG is "failing forward". All that "failing forward" says is that checks only happen if - success is interesting - failure is interesting - there's a risk of failure The most common set of checks that don't work for this in DnD are info gathering checks like perception, arcana, nature, and so on. You're like "I search for clues", you roll a check, and roll low, and any DM reading the rules in full and following them in detail would say "ok you don't see anything. anyone else wanna do something". A check happens where there is virtually zero consequence of failing it. Like, why did the game zoom in and leave that up to chance? Why did it focus on me not seeing something? That's what failing forward avoids. And it's good.

[luuma-makes-games]

More fantasy western

[luuma-makes-games]

AFTER NEARLY 2 YEARS OF MY LIFE IT'S DONE!

GUTGUN IS OUT NOW!

THEY TRIED TO SACRIFICE YOU TO THEIR GOD. THEY FAILED, AND NOW, BLESSED BY A RIVAL GOD WITH THE POWER OF THE GUTGUN, YOU WILL TEAR THEM DOWN.

YOUR GUT IS YOUR GUN. YOUR GUN IS YOUR GUT.

GUTGUN is a solo TTRPG that translates the blood-pumping fun of a classic PC shooter to tabletop. You are a lone force of nature tearing through whatever gets in your way.

[luuma-makes-games]

Making a shitty one-page RPG called Oh Shit It’s the Killer. The premise is simple: you’re a high schooler spending the weekend in the woods with your besties. The Killer is there also. He is trying to the Kill you

[luuma-makes-games]

Hi! Can you recommend solo journaling rpgs?

Ooh, yeah! I don't play them often, but I've played a few that I've enjoyed and gone back to a couple of times. If you want more in depth and someone who REALLY knows what they're talking about, @theresattrpgforthat has anything you could ever want.

Some that I have played and enjoyed:

For medium-to-heavy on the journaling:

Over The Mountain by Marchcrow (@hillbillyoracle here on tumblr). [FREE] You live in the mountains! You have neighbors! Some are human and some are spirits! It's just one double-sided page of tables that you roll on for locations, neighbors, items, events, etc. There's stuff like dungeons, seasons, a friendship mechanic, all with enough structure to give some writing prompts, but freeform enough for you to make it what you want. Being a single page, it's really easy to fold in half and tuck into your journal. Have a pen with you and a way to roll dice, and you've got your whole game right there.

(Actually while I'm here, anything by Marchcrow. Check out their itch.io page! Over the Mountain is not the only thing they have done, and you'll probably find something that fits your vibe. There's one where you use a tarot deck to grow a garden. There's a rage room. See what you find!)

The Lighthouse at the Edge of the Universe by lostwaysclub. [$10.00, but pay-it-forward Community Copies are frequently available for those who can't afford it). What it says on the tin, pretty much: You're a lighthouse keeper at the lighthouse at the edge of the universe. You keep the light on, observe the ships that pass by through the stars, maintain the lighthouse, collect things that wash up on the island. It's a little melancholy and peaceful. This one is played with a deck of cards and... I forget whether it's a die or a coin? But it's very simple gameplay, easy to pick up and play quickly, or for longer entries if you wish. I have found myself playing this one at night when I can't sleep, or if I'm feeling just a little bleh. It's nice to go retreat to the lighthouse for a bit.

A Little Less Journaling, A Little More Action:

It's In the Vents! by biggayuniverse. [Pay What You Want] It's Alien. You're on a spaceship, there's an alien, you gotta get off, but there's a cat that you have to go retrieve first. This one is played with a deck of playing cards laid out in a grid, and a token representing you. You move through the grid, flipping over cards and reacting to the prompts while you search for the cat, then (hopefully) get back to the escape pod. You can journal this one if you want to, or just play it like you'd play a quick game of solitaire.

(If you enjoy It's In The Vents! then look up other games using the Carta system. That's the playing-card-grid system, and there are plenty of other games on itch.io that use it)

Dungeon Hero by Lone Spelunker. [Pay What You Want] Sometimes you just want to roll some dice. Dungeon Hero has three different adventures that you can play through, all with the same basic idea of gameplay. There's a long list of rooms. You start at the beginning, roll to see how many steps you advance, and then deal with what's in that room. It might be a battle! Could be some treasure! Maybe a puzzle that you'll need to use your skills about! Roll some more dice to hopefully beat that encounter or see how much treasure you acquire, then roll again to advance. It's really good for when you want to play something by yourself, but you don't necessarily want to put too much effort into making up a story about it (though you certainly could). I also love this one because you print it on a single page and then fold it into a little pocket-sized zine, so I frequently have one of the adventures tucked into my dice bag.

[luuma-makes-games]

"just write a little every day" ok but what if i write nothing for 3 weeks and then suddenly type like i’m being hunted by god

[luuma-makes-games]

On the Four Table Legs of Traveller, Leg 1: Mortgages

Mongoose Traveller’s starship mortgage-payment-system is the most brilliant game mechanic I’ve ever encountered, as a DM. It’s also the first rule I’d ignore if I wasn’t consciously trying to play the game exactly how it’s described in the book.

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