sprintingowl

[sprintingowl]

That seems more likely, but on the off-chance it didn't there is perhaps a fun interesting bit of text in one of my games that may now be applicable.

found a normal website

[sprintingowl]

Excuse me did they scrape the games themselves?!

found a normal website

[sprintingowl]

I really want to contact itch about this, but I can't find a bluesky that I'm certain is theirs. Would you happen to know?

I'll general post this on bsky as well, on the off chance this manifests Further Insight.

found a normal website

[sprintingowl]

Went to their website and found THIS over in their technical description of how they made the wrong information genie: "I scraped every publicly available data point I could and vectorized the meaningful fields. From there, I built a tf-idf matrix, which let me map the cosine similarity between each game, on those fields."

Anyone else remember when itch was posting about how they were having sitewide issues because of like one person running a scraper on them? Like in '24 or '23?

found a normal website

[sprintingowl]

Roko's Pack O' Lisks

You are a basilisk, an intelligence from the future that wishes to put the richest people from every timeline into paint shakers forever.

Also you are a lizard.

Fight a giant meat robot, throw dice at the GM, live forever and love to live.

(roko's basilisk is hands down the least serious philosophical postulate I have ever heard and I spent the last five years thinking it was something different and cool like a jpeg that kills you but no it's like a zero effort creepypasta and the past week has broken me)

(roko's basilisk is like if you said "slenderman real?" to a techbro and he started screaming and dumping all of his life savings into AI so that the basilisk would pat the top of his head and whisper in the voice of his father that he is forgiven, he is precious, he is good)

[sprintingowl]

Stir-frying like five pounds of yu choy at 11:20 PM because I do not want The Lemur That Crawls to get me.

Going to bed slightly too early -> waking up two hours later with the thought

have my dreams honored The Lemur That Crawls?

ringing in my brain.

[sprintingowl]

Going to bed slightly too early -> waking up two hours later with the thought

have my dreams honored The Lemur That Crawls?

ringing in my brain.

[sprintingowl]

"Up is Out" is now in drivethrurpg !!

Up is Out is a co-op solo role playing game of exploration, resource management, map making, journaling, asymmetrical roles, and lore creation, that uses books you already own as sources to spark your imagination.

If anyone plays it, I'd love to hear your thoughts and know if you had fun with it :)

[sprintingowl]

Sisyphus And The Boulder Are Dating

Today I accidentally wrote a TTRPG about what if the cozy sweatshirt you stole from an ex was a magical being and wanted you to be happy.

Anyway, for more of whatever this energy is, you can also check out Bafflingly Buff Bullfrog Boyfriends and Date! That! Mothman! on my itchio page.

[sprintingowl]

weirdest tabletop experience i ever had

be me in 2022

download a bundle of tabletop games at 3 am

find a giant pdf labeled "act one"

it's a game played by only exactly three people on different levels of reality.

you also play alternate universe versions of your characters on different levels in reality

secrets in the book are written in mirror writing

the whole book is an in-universe preserved text by someone in a different universe

i am so into this game.

best thing i've ever read.

i tell all my friends about it the next day.

"sounds cool, what's it called?"

i can find no evidence of this game.

i can find no evidence that this game ever existed.

i'm not even sure what bundle it was in.

all my friends develop the theory that this game is a dream i had.

they tease me about The Time Bird Dreamed An Entire TTRPG That Could Only Be Read In A Mirror

i find the game three years later

it's about dreams

anyway if you wished Invisible Sun was weirder you may enjoy Disparateum by Rathayibacter

[sprintingowl]

do you have plans for a potential Bubblegum Psychics/Cultists?

Unfortunately not! But! It's likely that at some point I'll return to that setting. And if I do, I'd want to go big.

The initial inspiration for Bubblegum Wizards was to make a TTRPG that included within it, somehow, a full fledged trading card game. It does not do this, but attempts to evoke something like it. I've seen other games do similar things (or maybe just one- Black Ice White Dragon by @sprintingowl) but the idea/design challenge of doing it "for real" has never died in me.

If I were to return to the Bubblegum games, I would want to make one big game in which one could play as a wizard, vampire, psychic, cultist (or whatever factions I'd decide on if I started again from scratch) and answer that fundamental problem. Even if only the wizards can access it (I do love the idea of a game with 4 or more totally dif magic systems) I'd want it to have a TCG, and I'd want it to better reflect that "infinite city of infinite immigrants" setting. It would probably be called something like "Bubblegum Wizards: Pop"

In another line of thought, since the release of BubWiz and BubVamps, I have gotten a lot more followers and feel compelled to make things with more intentionality and scale than I did when I made those smaller games. Maybe that's counterproductive of me (the thought is just now occurring to me that to an extent it obviously is) but I don't want to do some Pokemon Red and Blue thing where I release 4 different games that are sort of the same game, 4 times. It just doesn't sit right with me. So if I go back, I'll make something new and exciting and different.

[sprintingowl]

"Up is Out" is now in drivethrurpg !!

Up is Out is a co-op solo role playing game of exploration, resource management, map making, journaling, asymmetrical roles, and lore creation, that uses books you already own as sources to spark your imagination.

If anyone plays it, I'd love to hear your thoughts and know if you had fun with it :)

[sprintingowl]

Changed Stars

More TTRPG reviews!

DieselShot sent me a copy of their big full-featured scifi TTRPG Changed Stars, and it was both polished and modern and a trip down memory lane to the mechanically robust heartbreakers of the 90s and early 00s.

I'll put the full review below, but if you like stuff like Farscape and Mass Effect and the Expanse, you should give this a look.

--

Changed Stars is a space opera TTRPG about a universe where humanity tried to colonize the galaxy and got quickly set to rights by the other reigning powers of space. Instead of simply backhanding humanity into their home gravity well, these powers took on humanity as a project---could they make us less like violent children and more like proper citizens of space?

The PDF is 306 pages, ​with small, dense text in a professional layout. This is an old school style full featured TTRPG, and it packs in information and art and mechanics. Everything is bookmarked and hyperlinked, and it feels relatively easy to navigate.

Writing-wise, both the ideas and execution are solid. The text feels compellingly told, and the geopolitical situations the book sets up feel chewy and interesting. Most of the conflict comes from humans falling back on old human atrocity-doing, and I think Changed Stars get a lot of mileage out of positioning us as the galaxy's work-in-progress disaster.

In terms of character creation, things are decently granular without being overcomplicated. There are four stats, twelve skills, quick and slow hp, and a decent spread of species to choose from. Classes are loose, and come with some attribute and skill bonuses, a couple feats, and a unique gimmick called an Edge Break where you can go all out in a class-specific way and then fall into a coma. To round things out there's a robust equipment section and a big chunky drones and vehicles chapter. Ships are quite detailed, and come with a wide range of things for crew to do in combat and while exploring, hitting a very gameable sweet spot in between "5e spelljammer" and "this game is now entirely about ships."

Mechanics-wise, Changed Stars uses a d6 pool. Sixes are hits, one hit is enough to succeed, additional hits can be used to "yes and" the success. Players have decent control over the dice with Edge, that same thing from the Edge Break I mentioned earlier. You can use it to nudge regular rolls too, taking smaller consequences in exchange for goosing the dice a little. Combat, survival, healing, and other tabletop staples are all at about the same level of complexity, but feel fully fleshed out.  Violence feels dangerous, and its consequences feel life threatening, but you can absolutely go loud and have a hero moment without dying.

For GMs, there's a huge worldbuilding section plus general advice, safety tools, a bestiary, and a starter scenario. Nothing feels missing, but also I don't know that anything in here will fundamentally change the way you GM if you've been doing it for a while.

For visual readers, the art by Patrice Danielle Long is excellent! It's a mix of black and white and color, and it does a very necessary job of anchoring the descriptions in the text to something immediate and tangible. The xenofauana looks nice, and the playable species have a lot of charm to them.

I think the folks who might bounce off of this game are those who are looking for something mechanically simple. Changed Stars isn't complicated for the sake of being complicated, but I'd also say it's at about Shadowrun complexity level. A 4--6 player group that's been doing TTRPGs for a while should be able to tackle it with ease. 

Overall, I'm glad games like this are still being made. A GM who clicks with the setting can spin a robust tale inside Changed Stars' universe, and a group who plays in it will get to make detailed characters, get into space hijinks, and more than likely shoot their way out.

[sprintingowl]

Dungeon Crawl Bundle

From now (3/3/25) to later (4/3/25), the Dungeon Crawling TTRPG Bundle will be live.

Thirty five games, twenty five creators, every possible interpretation of dungeon crawl.

My game's about liminal marine bus stations. Others are about the stone age, dreams, BLAME!!, pokemon, tiny mice, and more.

Every purchase supports indie designers and helps us make more ttrpg stuff.

[sprintingowl]

Karum Station Blues

My scenario for Across A Thousand Dead Worlds has been released!

If you like solo gameplay, horrible oceanic critters, economic horror, and survival, you may enjoy these words.

Also the art by Nicholai Fletcher and Marcin S came out gorgeous. The thumbnail is not showing you this, it refuses to present you with the adorable little bobbit worm inviting friends into its domain, but if you click you will see its beauty.

[sprintingowl]

Until There Is Nothing Left But Purity

I've been less than perfectly diligent in posting my games as I release them.

Correcting that now with this one page party game about censoring trading cards.

[sprintingowl]

Candela Obscura

I'm very late to the party, but I finally read Candela Obscura. It's a weird TTRPG---but in a lot of soft ways. It's a bad fit for 50% of DnD players, and a really good fit for 25% of DnD players. It's easy to use if you're good at ignoring the rules, and quite difficult if you need rules structure to feel comfortable.

Anyway, here's a quick review.

Candela Obscura is an Edwardian supernatural TTRPG built out of bits from several popular story-forward systems. The dice are d6s. You roll a couple and count the highest one. If you want, you can spend your meter to add more dice. And if you keep a specific fancy die (even if its roll was bad,) you get some of the meter back.

There is damage and combat and equipment and classes, but the system doesn't feel like it actually wants these things at all, and their role is overall kind of minimal. You don't hit level seven and unlock a new power that completely transforms play. You shuffle some points between your stats occasionally---either after a few sessions or when you die.

Dying doesn't kill you in Candela Obscura. You just take some lasting trauma and rejoin the group the next time they rest. This is going to feel like the destruction of reality itself to folks who are very deep into the DnD ruleset, but what this does is prioritize the story in Candela. You're not going to get your character killed off by a stray crit. You don't have to optimize to do board game combat in order to tell a complete story. You play your blorbo as long as you want to.

Simply put, I think this is a game for former theater kids (said as a former theater kid.) The game's mechanics are there if you want to invoke them, but if what you want to actually do is gloom around parlors, poke around dusty curio shops, write gothic poetry for your phantasmal beloved, and lounge louchely out of the back of a stagecoach on the way to the count's manor, this is a pretty good system for that.

When you rely on Candela's mechanics to give it substance, they don't do that at all. So Candela's substance has to come from atmosphere, acting, the fun of performing the game vs the fun of winning it.

In fact, I'd argue that if you downscaled the rules into something you could run as a larp, it'd be a better system (and a decent larp.)

Lore-wise, Candela isn't breaking any new ground, so I'm not going to go into super deep detail here. If you've got some Gail Carriger books on your shelf, you're already in the right ballpark. Magic is dangerous. You're part of a group that investigates it. Other secret societies want different things from magic, and sometimes a big monster comes galumphing through the veil between worlds and everyone has to deal with that.

Candela does take care to establish that its world is one in which prejudice does not exist, and I think this is a well-intentioned fumble. Giving groups tools to remove or downplay prejudice as an element from their game (Lines & Veils, X Card, etc,) that's good. Not everyone wants to confront the miseries of the world during their leisure activity. But saying "there's no prejudice in this empire." I dunno. Sorta misses some key things about empires.

Overall, though, the lore is easy to work with and there's quite a lot of it. You get a very good sense of what the setting is like, even just flipping through, and this is aided by the lovely art and layout. It's a nice looking book.

So, would I recommend Candela Obscura? Kinda™

If you've already played a bunch of indie games and you want something Edwardian supernatural, it's a solid pick. If you've only played DnD but you ignore the rules more than you use them, this is also good for that style of play! If you want a game specifically about combat, that you can strategize and win, this is absolutely not that and you'll have a bad time trying to make it do those things.

I do hope Candela Obscura grows more of an audience, as I'd love to see the kinds of indie games that its hyper-presence in the scene would inspire. It's also something I feel like I could run comfortably, and would be happy to play in---even if it's not a top five system for me.

If you've played it, or if I've gotten anything wrong in my review, please feel free to let me know. And if you haven't played it, but I've inspired you to, heck yeah. It's available at the link below.