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what RPG would you use to run Goncharov?

Anything but the official Goncharov TTRPG which was just a cheap Dungeons & Dragons 6th edition reskin. So disappointing.

I might consider Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy 2nd edition: the long-awaited sex update looks really promising, and once they fix the infinite wolfman glitch it should be perfect for Gonchin'.

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Because you know a lot about these sorts of things: is D&D the first place where devils and demons are distinct groups of mutually antagonistic evil entities as opposed to being synonyms for one another, or did they steal that from some obscure fantasy pulp novel from the 1960s, as so much other stuff now seen as iconic to D&D is?

Much like making picky distinctions between wizards, sorcerers and warlocks, the general idea making "devils" and "demons" distinct classes of supernatural beasties pre-dates Dungeons & Dragons in popular fiction, but the specific definitions that D&D uses are basically only applicable to D&D; every work of sword and sorcery fiction I'm aware of that distinguishes between the two terms does so differently.

For example, in Robert Aspirin's "Myth Adventures" series, "Devils" are a specific race of extradimensional aliens who coincidentally resemble pop-Christianity's notion of the Devil (i.e., red skin, goat legs, etc.), while a "demon" is simply any sapient being who's been magically summoned from another dimension. Hence, Devils are sometimes demons (at least when they're away from home), but – unless there's a convention or something going on – the majority of demons in any given dimension are not Devils.

To the point, I can't think of any particular work of pre-1974 (i.e., pre-D&D) sword and sorcery fiction whose demons-versus-devils split hinges on Law and Chaos in the same way that D&D's does; I suspect that the game's authors simply took the pre-existing notion of demons and devils being different things and pasted the terms onto a straight lift of Michael Moorcock's "Eternal Champions" cosmology (which doesn't use either term) – though if anyone is aware of a prior case of fantasy fiction specifically associating "devil" with cosmic Order and "demon" with cosmic Chaos, I'd love to be corrected!

(As always, if anyone would like to offer a counterexample, please check the publication date first; works published after 1974 post-date Dungeons & Dragons, so they're no help here.)

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I've been introduced to the TTRPG called Wildsea and now I'm going to make it everyone's problem. This is Beezley. They are bees. That is, I've broken my creative slump by immediately coming up with a character concept that is a variant of the Tzelicrae race in this setting (which is officially described as "Spider-colonies wrapped in humanesque skins; thousands of tiny arachnid minds threaded like beads on a string to produce a full, rich sapience", hive-minded swarms who either create protective shells made of cloth and salvage or unnervingly puppeteer bodies that are no longer needed), but I'm arachnophobic, so...BEES. :D Yes, Beezley found a dead body and built their hive around the skull and there is 100% a sticky, honeycomb-encrusted skeleton under those clothes. :'D

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a polemic

every so often you see a conversation on this website that goes like this:

based story game enjoyer: D&D is a limiting game because of xyz design assumptions. cringe D&D fan: actually I changed these assumptions by editing the game to fit my group's needs. it works pretty good. story game chad, closing in for the kill: have you considered playing the perfectly designed game for your scenario that surely exists out there in the indie game milieu? you wouldn't have to homebrew. you'd be having better fun. foolish and wrong D&D incel: but I am already having fun with "modified D&D" and I don't particularly see a need to do that thing you said. wise story game sage, a single tear rolling down their perfectly sculpted face: do you not see that defending D&D, which the product printed by Hasbro Inc., by pointing out that you can modify it, is self-defeating? tragic. there is no hope for these people. 42069 notes

along such lines, i saw someone today refer to homebrew in TTRPGs pejoratively as 'unpaid game design' and like. my fucking god guys. i don't love D&D-as-printed either but you've lost the plot.

not only is it good to modify the games you play and make them your own, it is inevitable. nobody ever plays TTRPGs exactly 'by the book', it's always filtered through the dynamic of the group. yes, even in those games that literally tell you exactly what to say like the quiet year or whatever.

you will ignore rules and guidelines. you will put your own interpretation on the wording of this or that rule. you will develop your own rhythms and at some point, yes, you can, will, and should change the rules to better fit whatever you're doing with the game.

the designer may throw up their hands and say "you are no longer playing Sorcerer By Ron Edwards, you are playing some other game! you're messing up my perfectly tuned mechanism!"

let them. it's an understandable frustration, perhaps, but once the game is in the hands of the players, the designer has had their say.

play the game you want to play, even - especially - if you have to invent it. use whatever tools you find useful to help you get there - whether that's a printed RPG book, a blog post, a memory of another game, a story that inspires you. maybe you want to take some existing and familiar system, such as PbtA, and adapt it - awesome (I reckon 95% of indie game designers pretty much do this). maybe you want to start from scratch and make a bespoke system for that one story - also awesome.

'this book requires a lot of work to adapt into something decent' is a fair criticism. 'nobody even plays this game by the book, so it's a bad game' is dogmatism. what game do they play? how do they learn to play it? what function is the book providing in that game? if you want to criticise a game, you need to talk about actual practice. there can be plenty to criticise there, for sure. but that's where you gotta start.

and sure, if someone wants to design a game, particularly to print, I would definitely recommend they look beyond D&D for inspiration. there are some really fucking cool and creative indie games that come up with wild ways to approach 'making up a story through a game' that I'd never have imagined. very often it's fun to follow a designer's frame and discover something new.

but don't make a fucking religion of it lmao.

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Me when I give the league of legends show a chance because my friend says it's good and I go in expecting an overrated wet fart and I'm slowly forced to acknowledge that it has layered and interesting characters, incredible art direction and animation, deeply engaging political intrigue and gripping drama and I realize that despite any flaws it may have it's ultimately one of the most mature and well rounded pieces of animated television I've ever seen come out of the western world and I end the most recent episode sitting leaned forward staring at the TV actively crying at 5 am

I'm so fucking mad

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200 Word RPGs 2024

Each November, some people try to write a novel. Others would prefer to do as little writing as possible. For those who wish to challenge their ability to not write, we offer this alternative: producing a complete, playable roleplaying game in two hundred words or fewer.

This is the submission thread for the 2024 event, running from November 1st, 2024 through November 30th, 2024. Submission guidelines can be found in this blog's pinned post, here.

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I always find it a shame that people assume Vampire: The Masquerade has to be a serious, gritty game and ignore the huge amounts of absolutely batshit stuff in that setting.

Al capone is a vampire, as was Rasputin. At one point in the middle ages there was a bloodline of secret vatican vampire necromancers working for the inquisition. There's a malkavian combo-discipline to turn into a scary clown. There are multiple versions of "the fleshcrafting discipline is actually a mind-controlling disease from space." Lasombra pirates in nuclear submarines. There is an evil ttrpg company that infects you with evil spirits if you play their games.

Not stupid enough for you? There is a Banu Haqim pro-wrestling tag-team duo called 2Hot Nation of Harlem Ghetto Posse Gangsta Experience.

Vampire is an extremely silly game at times.

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But have we considered novel applications of the Demon Blade to energy production technologies

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But have we considered novel applications of the Demon Blade to energy production technologies

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Of course, now that I'm on Bluesky the real challenge is going to be figuring out how to cram a complete, playable tabletop RPG into three hundred characters.

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One of my favorite D&D gags that I ever came up with is part of a oneshot I've run a few times where the party is hired by a young wizard to help clear out a few active security measures in a tower that the wizard inherited from her old teacher.

The first obstacle to be cleared is the re-animated skeletons that the old wizard was using for gardening help. It's a pretty straightforward fight, but during the encounter, players may notice one particular raised bed of herbs that is set back in a corner of the garden by itself.

Upon further investigation, this one raised bed is absolutely shining with magical protections. There are runes carved into the wood of the bed, gemstones inlaid in the top of it, this bed is absolutely protected out the ass... and an arcana check shows that the protections are all pointed inward, attempting to keep what's in there from getting out.

What's growing in that raised bed, you may ask? What is so dangerous that the old wizard felt the need to place all these protections?

Mint.

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if people are interested in getting more into ttrpg scholarship and actual academic conversations that are happening around ttrpgs some journals to check out (pared down from a list written by dr evan torner in the generation analog discord) are:

international journal of roleplaying

japanese journal of analog rpg studies

analog game studies

games: research and practice *

journal of roleplaying studies and steam

all journals are open access, meaning you can read them for free, except for the starred one, which is half open access. the two italicized journals are bilingual, the first in japanese and the second in spanish

theres a lot of interesting discussions happening out there that i think would be very enriching to some of the convos happening here, especially in indie ttrpg spaces. so, go forth. read. enjoy

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some rp related stuff i drew on a whim, feat. me and friends' characters -- a bunch of rogue knights half of which are also legit wizards

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I'd appreciate a lil boost for my shop! ✨ My GI meds this time around were over $450 CAD (~$330 USD) and they're rough on me, so I've had to slow down for a few weeks. I also have a tip jar & other ways to support me if you've just been enjoying what I share. Much love!! 🐛💖

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Something that pops up in my notes from time to time is folks thinking I'm being excessively kind in my criticisms of Dungeons & Dragons, and I'm going to spin this off into a separate thread to address that without putting anyone on the spot.

First, if your own critique of Dungeons & Dragons is rooted in the idea that it's the Worst Game Ever, that speaks more to the limits of your experience than it does to anything else. Dungeons & Dragons in any of its iterations far from the worst the tabletop roleplaying hobby has to offer – like, you have no fucking idea!

Second, I tend to be even-handed in my discussion of D&D's rules because, fundamentally, the rules are not the problem – or, at least, not the principal cause of the problem.

In many ways, the indie RPG sphere has never escaped the spectre of Ron Edwards, sternly pronouncing that the mechanical process of playing traditional RPGs causes actual, physical brain damage, and that this brain damage is responsible for the bad behaviour we often observe at the table. We don't say it that way anymore, but on some level a lot of us indie RPG designers still kind of believe it.

This is understandable. As game designers, we're naturally inclined to think of problems at the table as game design problems. When we see a problematic culture of play, our impulse is to frame it as something which emerges from the text of the game, and which can therefore be mitigated by repairing the text of the game.

Confronted with the obvious toxicity of certain facets of D&D's culture of play, we go combing through its text, looking for something – some formalism, some structure, some piece of rules technology – which we can point to and say: "this is it; this is where the brain-worms live."

The trouble is, this is not in fact where the brain-worms live. Certainly, the text of a game, particularly a very popular one, can have some influence on the game's surrounding culture of play, but that text is in turn a reflection of the culture of play in which it was written. The Player's Handbook isn't an SCP object, spewing infectious infohazards everywhere when you crack open the cover – hell, I'd go so far as to say that many of the problems of D&D's culture of play operate in spite of the game's text, not because of it!

Basically, what I'm saying is that I don't see any contradiction between being the sort of pretentious knob who writes one-page indie RPGs about gay catgirls talking about their feelings (which I am), and speaking favourably about this or that piece of rules tech from whatever flavour of Dungeons & Dragons is in favour this week (which I do), because I recognise that you can't game-design your way out of a problem you didn't game-design your way into.

The fact that one of the biggest problems facing the tabletop roleplaying hobby is something that can't be repaired by fucking around with dice-rolling procedures is a bitter pill to swallow for a lot of indie game designers, and I won't say I wasn't resistant to it myself, but it's something that's both useful and necessary to accept.

(None of this means that the text of Dungeons & Dragons in any of its incarnations is beyond criticism on other grounds, of course, and I've never been shy about highlighting those criticisms where they're warranted. The only way you're gonna arrive at the conclusion that I'm some sort of D&D apologist is if you're starting from the presumption that The Real Problem Is The Rules.)

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they're so funny to me

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“broken builds” this. “use the orb” that. you fools. the true best strategy to beat honour mode is to encourage safer and smarter decisions throughout your adventure by roleplaying as none other than faerun’s central authority on occupational safety and workplace accident prevention legislation