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A reminder that this generator exists! Blind Date with a TTRPG is great for discovering new games, such as Monster Care Squad and Mappa Mundi.

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Indie ttrpg designers

We seem to be back in the “dnd sucks why don’t you just play Other Games (yours)” and I have a single question for you in return

Do I get to roll a d20?

Because I like the d20

That shape pleases me

I do not wish to roll a random amount of d6s or d8s or any of them other fuckers

I wish to roll the d20 because icosahedrons please me

I will also accept d12 but the other shapes all have less mouthfeel so if that’s what your game’s based on, it is not for me

I’d also prefer more than four stats but I’m not gonna lie it is the shape of the math rocks so like

Rec your d20 based indie ttrpgs friends cuz every single one I’ve opened is them little cube fuckers or the double pyramid and I Require Round

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dorfs

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so i’m writing a tabletop game

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Wanna shout-out hexroll, a fantastic app that basically generates a ready to play B/X compatible hexcrawl, with populations and everything

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I feel like witches are sedentary and wizards are migratory. A witch has a home, a cauldron, herbs, you go to them with your problem. A wizard wanders, disappears, shows up at inconvenient times to fix nothing. am i making sense

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What are Old People Names from other languages?

Like I know in English there aren't many young people named Carl, Howard, Minerva, Agnes, Matilda, Beatrice, Pearl, Violet, Viola, Alvin, Albert, or Earnest (at leat not in Canada) but I've come to the realization that I don't know ANY non-english old people names

Alternatively, YOUNG people names- Blaze, Hunter, Jackon, Savannah, Tanner, Taylor, Mackenzie, Ocean, River, FTeegan, and Zach

And what makes names fall in and out of style???

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This is the standard winged nightjar and it has one singular stupidly big feather on each wing... if you even care.

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Baby Displacer Beast

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Freshwater.

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one of my very favorite obscure story tropes is when there’s an episode/plotline/tabletop campaign session where the conceit is ‘each member of the gang gets trapped in a specially tailored dream/nightmare/illusory mindscape and has to break out’

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I get a lot of questions about religious world building. I tend not to answer them (because I charge by the word) but lemme give y'all some advice:

Make sure your religion would still be interesting if gods and magic weren't real. The real-world Catholic Church is interesting because of how social and political power flows through it. Judaism is interesting because of the history and culture it represents. Islam is interesting because of the non-religuous innovations that it fostered. Et cetera et cetera. Real world religions are varied and complex in a thousand different ways.

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I was worldbuilding two bog standard fantasy species, wise old tree dudes and impulsive little rat guys, when I realized it was far funnier if they had each other's personalities.

The rat guys think fast and talk fast, but they're incredibly conservative and like to cover all the angles before they take any action. This comes with being a prey species: their ancestral environment had lots of clever traps and devious hazards, so you get rat councils wisely working the problem.

The tree dudes speak and move slowly, but they will propose and then do the most insane things you can imagine. They can slot together a rocket in an afternoon and will then use it without so much as a test fire first. They test new potions by quaffing them down, sometimes not even waiting for it to cool (though they're tree dudes, so I guess quaffing a potion just means pouring it over their root legs). This comes from the ancestral selection process too: the tree dudes that won were the ones that took big risks, that grew faster, stronger, and tried new things without worrying about consequences. The tree dudes evolved in an era when they had no natural predators and their only competition was each other.

And this is, of course, initially confusing for any human who makes contact with them. If a giant bearded tree nods at you solemnly and tells you to go through a portal, your first thought is not that he's curious about what will happen to spacetime. And if a hyperactive little rat guy tells you with some urgency that you must accompany him into a ruined city, you won't immediately think that this is step 11 of his branching 27 step plan.

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Norman Lindsay (1879-1969) - Shipwreck with Sirens

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Cotton Pygmy Goose (Nettapus coromandelianus), male, family Anatidae, order Anseriformes, Kerala, India

photograph by Nidhin Basheer