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.dungeon//remastered by snow

This whole book, as with all of snow's work, is nothing if not wholeheartedly devoted to its visual conceit. In this case, the style is of old-school video games. I chose this page in particular to highlight because I think the "toggles" is an interesting take on lines & veils (which is a safety tool I have some hesitations about).

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The one who create new inventions to change the world, hopefully for the better

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I still can’t believe it’s gone

fuck i miss indianapolis so much

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Go check out my funky little pre game!

It’s just the character creation guide atm but it will be filled out more over the next few months. Made as a part of the @eternalttrpgjam

You’re explorers in a massive “Library” with little to no context for the world you are stepping into. I’m also exploring some light imagery of Gnosticism and Kabbalah. 

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Only with Lancer RPG have I seen players race towards the healer “class” instead of away from it. Maybe more games need to make their healers horse or shrimp shaped.

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Will loving jazz save me?

if you hate jazz you will die and go to hell

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Ariana Papademetropoulos (Greek-American, 1990) - Titania (2022)

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GOG is taking a stand against payment processors caving to fundamentalist religious groups and is offering a bunch of "banned" games for free. (via Ashley Lynch on bsky)

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Wolf, Descending

Collage mixed media for @psychhound !!

Magazines, art paper, candle packaging, pressed floral (roses, carnation, and aster), calendar page, game book sample, jewelry gear, sharpie, wallpaper sample, gold twine, shell fragments, cicada wings, and gold ink stamps (one carved by me)

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the cultural object of the black hole is kind of remarkable. It's almost an anti-God in a sense, a negative infinity. Yeah there's this kind of dead sun that's collapsed into an infinitely dense point, and if you fall past its event horizon you're fucked. Every schoolchild knows this. A black hole can be introduced in a superhero blockbuster without any explanation except for its established look and the name "black hole", and this will be understood as the ultimate natural disaster, which even superman could not hope to defeat. truly S-tier cosmic object

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Wait Orks reincarnate?

Basically. Kinda. Orks definitely believe they reincarnate. The belief is that, when Orks die, their souls go to their particular psychic realm/afterlife (Da Great Green) and are eventually placed into new bodies.

It's not a "full" reincarnation most of the time. If you kill Grozbit Axebreaka, he's not inherently going to come back as Grozbit Axebreaka. His soul, his fundamental consciousness, genetic memories and psychic spark of life, will be reused to create a new Ork.

There are exceptions to this (Like Makari and potentially Da Red Gobbo) who always come back as themselves. You also will also see the occasional Greenskin who remembers bits of previous consciousnesses, or retains personality elements.

Pulling back from the Orks' view on it, it does make sense that they possess these features when you consider what they were. The Krork were (as far as we know) a warrior species designed by the Old Ones to assist the Aeldari in the War in Heaven. The ability to be rapidly formed from a psychic storage point with genetically encoded information already in you would be exceptionally useful, and necessary given the scale of the war and the death tolls involved. Since that time, the Orks (and the Warp) have both degraded, so what we see of them is, ultimately, an imperfect, less consistent rendition of the original.

I recommend the Ghazghkull Thraka novel by Nate Crowley if you want to take a look at a narrative that more strongly explores/infers what Orks were, and how alien they actually are. There's a great scene where, if you read it purely from the Ork perspective, Ghazghkull has a seizure, has a vision from Gork and Mork, and then tells everyone that they need to clear off from the planet they're on because Gork and Mork are bored of it. If you read past that, though, it becomes clear that he's straight up had a seizure due to an informational overload drawn from his genetic lineage, and has basically done freehand astrophysical equations to predict the approaching death of a nearby star based on the appearance of the aurora it was projecting. Lots of shit like that.

Anyway, I digress. Yes, Orks can sort of reincarnate, and it's very interesting.

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Join Eternity in August

The Eternal TTRPG Jam is a monthly game jam with rotating themes and challenges.

This month's theme is...

Monster Hunt

This one kind of speaks for itself.

and the challenge is...

Player Duties

Explore how duties of the game are distributed within your game. Is the GM loaded down with all tracking and management in the game? What design elements are you able to add to help spread these duties evenly. Alternatively, how do player duties effect GMless and solo games? Is the game itself able to carry some of the weight of game management?

Come join us!

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I’ve gotten a couple of suggestions about this one. I will end up checking them out, but this post was really about a frustration I’d been having with the design of my own game.

The gist of it is: in describing the function of an object, you have to dissolve a lot (but not all) of the ambiguity around it if you want it to be a functional part of the the games mechanical apparatus.

As an example, I’m working on something that is doing a bit of the vancian/botns “magic is tech/tech is magic” thing. That’s all fine and dandy, no problems there from the characters perspective. HOWEVER, if I want to preserve that feeling of discovery and realization in players reading and interacting with the game, the mechanical descriptions would also have to blur that line.

This would probably be easy if I was making a different type of game. But unfortunately, this one has a decent amount of hard mechanics. That is one of the underlying goals of this project so I can’t jettison any of it.

I’m not really looking for suggestions. More just working through my thoughts about this.

Tabletop games feel like they can never quite do the weird unknowable shit that I love in fiction. Everything always has to be codified in some way that pulls the curtain back from the real squiggly head space that I like in a lot of weird/horror fiction.

Maybe an extremely hard player/gm split would help? You can’t be a player if you’ve read the book, you have to gm. That nicely mimics the unknowable scarring that is left on a lot of horror characters. That might actually be a fun idea.

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