sprintingowl

[sprintingowl]

For a split second, you feel the blade rip through your spinal cord. Then, the feelings are gone. You move down a floor. There’s a rat, a goblin, and a skeleton. You take the skeleton. You can't smell the other two. You sigh, the kind of sigh only given by fatestarved, and you realize; this is all there is.

Whalefall is a solo OSR-inspired dungeon crawling TTRPG. Take on the role of a fatestarved, a creature of habit who accepts the immortality granted by the dungeons of Lorinth. Scour dungeons, find work, and maybe even get the opportunity to slay a crypt worm.

[sprintingowl]

Shared here today by Matthew Boroson on Facebook. Gaining inspiration from other authors is great. Lifting passages and avoiding giving credit isn’t.

Tanith Lee was the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award for best novel, for the second book of the Flat Earth series. She died in 2015. You can buy Tales From the Flat Earth here in paperback or here on Kindle.

[sprintingowl]

Cthork Borgterview

The extremely excellent RPG Reanimators invited me onto their podcast to talk about my pulpy 1920s horror rpg hack, Cthork Borg.

This had the following effects:

-Several pieces of horror media get recommended, all of which I think are good

-We get decently deep into the weeds about game mechanics and design, specifically re: stripped down d20

-I realize I like the sound of my voice, this is actually momentous, please clap

RPG Reanimators were fantastic hosts, and guesting on their show was a great experience. They also have a ton of horror and pulp actual plays on youtube. Check them out!

[sprintingowl]

Culina

Publish a vegetable game, discover a vegetable game. It is the circle, the circle of life.

Culina is a 26 page cozy and charming osr vegetable ttrpg.

You play as a little fruit, allium, legume, or other vegetal critter in a world where this is normal and fine.

Rolls are on 2d6 under Body or Mind. Your HP (called Freshness) are your damage save. There's an equipment section and a bestiary and roll tables for the GM.

It's really easy to learn and teach, it's definitely all-ages friendly, and there's a lot of little details to the writing that make it really fun to worldbuild in (radishes build cities without doors.)

If anything here sounds like you might enjoy it, I highly encourage you to check it out. And if you haven't played anything osr before, it's both a really approachable entrypoint and a strong source of other game recommendations (it has a whole inspirations list and they all rock.)

Tl;dr you can play as a little radish with a mighty greatsword or a powerful avocado with a shield etc etc the vibes are impeccable.

[sprintingowl]

Radish Knights

200+ page storyteling game about chivalric vegetables riding from town to town, solving problems and doing battle to uphold their ideals.

I've somehow spent three years developing this thing, but it's finally officially released.

If you like DnD, Roadwarden, Heralds Of Valdemar, Tacticians Of Ahm, or Succulent Sorcerers, you might enjoy becoming a radish.

[sprintingowl]

Media preservation!

Media archiving!

(thank you juniper!)

Ninjago TTRPG

First off, credit goes entirely to @junipart for letting me know it exists.

Second, I'm probably going to get stuff wrong. I don't have a strong background in lego and I knew very little about Ninjago before today, so I'm mostly going to be looking at this from a TTRPG design perspective.

That all out of the way, the officially published Ninjago TTRPG is a weird proprietary OSR game that has some really fun ideas and some wild missteps and I think it's worth talking about.

So, what is it? The Ninjago TTRPG is a tie-in game with a 26 page booklet built around a proprietary board and spinner. It's pretty sparely layed out and has a very zine-y fanmade vibe despite being official. It's also got pretty good fundamentals despite being a proprietary rpg, with a GM who interprets and makes rulings and guides the story.

Checks are made with the proprietary spinner, which the book describes as a kind of funky d5. It rolls 1, 2, 3 (which you add to your stat) or a heart (critical) or a skull (fumble.) Per Junipart, the spinner the book describes isn't actually the spinner they shipped (which was a d6 with 1--3 repeated,) but the spinner the book describes is neat. Stats matter heavily, but crits happen often, so upsets are always possible.

Stats are Body, Mind, and Toughness. Body is used for physical stuff, Mind for perception and social and knowledge, Toughness for when you get hit. Also there's a Body skill called Dodge that you can use instead of Toughness, which makes Toughness seem like a terrible stat. But at least it still affects HP?

Ninjago TTRPG has no HP system. Your first hit in combat, you ignore. Your second, you get stunned. Your third, you get KO'd for a few rounds. Ninjago is very careful to keep all of its violence nonlethal, and this results in a combat flow where people kinda keep hitting the mat and getting back up. Adding to this, there's a unique mechanic (under the unfortunate heading of "Loot Boxes,") where three times per adventure a PC can pick themselves back up for free.

The nonlethality of Ninjago TTRPG is interesting as a design limitation (and leads to some of the writing of all time: "Please note that a ninja never strikes to kill,") and it clashes with the more marketable idea of life or death combat ("life or" combat doesn't really sing as loudly.) The game's prewritten adventures bridge this gap by treating everything as a puzzle---after all, if everyone gets back up after a few rounds, you kind of need to problem-solve a way to keep them from continuing the fight.

Unfortunately, the adventures are also *very* overwritten. There's four of them, and they all spend a lot of words mapping out everything that might happen in every room. This isn't a game that trusts the GM to GM, and instead of trying to teach them it hands them a narrative flowchart.

It also doesn't want the players to create OCs---you can play as the characters from the show, who have premade statlines, but you can't make your own PC unless you reverse engineer the system yourself.

It feels reasonable to assume that a lot of this is the result of conflicting priorities between the brand and the development team. The game gives genuinely good advice to the GM about going where the story is and letting the players choose their own path, and then it immediately backtracks and specifies that that path should be on the proprietary gameboard. The game has a blank character sheet at the end instead of prefilled sheets for the show's characters, but there's no character creation rules. The game has only players make rolls (rad!) but it also doesn't seem to have a plan for what happens if a player tries to roll against a player.

Overall, I think the Ninjago TTRPG is an interesting read. And I think it's *very* ripe for some mechanical tinkering. If you're a Ninjago fan, it's runnable as-is. And if you've played a session or two of D&D, I guarantee you could nudge the game into having proper character creation, adventures that don't need the gameboard, and rolls that don't need the spinner (tbh just use a d6 and reroll 6s.)

It doesn't seem to be properly for sale anywhere, but I did find some links via the site below.

Also, if there's a Ninjago tabletop community, or there's a bunch of people who've been tinkering with this system, or if you're a Ninjago fan who didn't know about the tabletop, or anything else, let me know! I'm always curious about who my posts reach.

[sprintingowl]

Ninjago TTRPG

First off, credit goes entirely to @junipart for letting me know it exists.

Second, I'm probably going to get stuff wrong. I don't have a strong background in lego and I knew very little about Ninjago before today, so I'm mostly going to be looking at this from a TTRPG design perspective.

That all out of the way, the officially published Ninjago TTRPG is a weird proprietary OSR game that has some really fun ideas and some wild missteps and I think it's worth talking about.

So, what is it? The Ninjago TTRPG is a tie-in game with a 26 page booklet built around a proprietary board and spinner. It's pretty sparely layed out and has a very zine-y fanmade vibe despite being official. It's also got pretty good fundamentals despite being a proprietary rpg, with a GM who interprets and makes rulings and guides the story.

Checks are made with the proprietary spinner, which the book describes as a kind of funky d5. It rolls 1, 2, 3 (which you add to your stat) or a heart (critical) or a skull (fumble.) Per Junipart, the spinner the book describes isn't actually the spinner they shipped (which was a d6 with 1--3 repeated,) but the spinner the book describes is neat. Stats matter heavily, but crits happen often, so upsets are always possible.

Stats are Body, Mind, and Toughness. Body is used for physical stuff, Mind for perception and social and knowledge, Toughness for when you get hit. Also there's a Body skill called Dodge that you can use instead of Toughness, which makes Toughness seem like a terrible stat. But at least it still affects HP?

Ninjago TTRPG has no HP system. Your first hit in combat, you ignore. Your second, you get stunned. Your third, you get KO'd for a few rounds. Ninjago is very careful to keep all of its violence nonlethal, and this results in a combat flow where people kinda keep hitting the mat and getting back up. Adding to this, there's a unique mechanic (under the unfortunate heading of "Loot Boxes,") where three times per adventure a PC can pick themselves back up for free.

The nonlethality of Ninjago TTRPG is interesting as a design limitation (and leads to some of the writing of all time: "Please note that a ninja never strikes to kill,") and it clashes with the more marketable idea of life or death combat ("life or" combat doesn't really sing as loudly.) The game's prewritten adventures bridge this gap by treating everything as a puzzle---after all, if everyone gets back up after a few rounds, you kind of need to problem-solve a way to keep them from continuing the fight.

Unfortunately, the adventures are also *very* overwritten. There's four of them, and they all spend a lot of words mapping out everything that might happen in every room. This isn't a game that trusts the GM to GM, and instead of trying to teach them it hands them a narrative flowchart.

It also doesn't want the players to create OCs---you can play as the characters from the show, who have premade statlines, but you can't make your own PC unless you reverse engineer the system yourself.

It feels reasonable to assume that a lot of this is the result of conflicting priorities between the brand and the development team. The game gives genuinely good advice to the GM about going where the story is and letting the players choose their own path, and then it immediately backtracks and specifies that that path should be on the proprietary gameboard. The game has a blank character sheet at the end instead of prefilled sheets for the show's characters, but there's no character creation rules. The game has only players make rolls (rad!) but it also doesn't seem to have a plan for what happens if a player tries to roll against a player.

Overall, I think the Ninjago TTRPG is an interesting read. And I think it's *very* ripe for some mechanical tinkering. If you're a Ninjago fan, it's runnable as-is. And if you've played a session or two of D&D, I guarantee you could nudge the game into having proper character creation, adventures that don't need the gameboard, and rolls that don't need the spinner (tbh just use a d6 and reroll 6s.)

It doesn't seem to be properly for sale anywhere, but I did find some links via the site below.

Also, if there's a Ninjago tabletop community, or there's a bunch of people who've been tinkering with this system, or if you're a Ninjago fan who didn't know about the tabletop, or anything else, let me know! I'm always curious about who my posts reach.

[sprintingowl]

Gingerdread Battalion

Season's greasons to all.

I spent the last forty five minutes writing a wargame in which you eat the pieces.

If your festive cheer is matched only by your relentless hunger for gingerbread, there may be something for you here.

[sprintingowl]

The Greason For The Season

When I was like five, my favorite book was Dougal Dixon's After Man A Zoology Of The Future

Anyway, I haven't been Seasons Greasons'd yet, so here have a different atrocity

[sprintingowl]

Spine of Eternity: Everybody Wants to be a Star is a Powered by the Apocalypse Tabletop RPG.

In a modern fantasy setting where fame is power you play as an adventurer traveling the land to earn the strength to reach the Stars.

On sale for 20% off!

[sprintingowl]

GEMS A Game Of Heists

When you look at a slim, sub thirty pages rpg system, you usually have some expectations. Rules light, story heavy, an emphasis on vibes to guide the spirit of play.

And then there's GEMS A Game Of Heists.

GEMS takes place in a world where evil meteoric precious gemstones have asserted dominance over pockets of society, and the only way to free those pockets is to steal the gems. People who do this are called jewelers.

And that's nearly it for what you get about the lore. The rest of GEMS is a dense, precise, GMless heist board/card game where you use a deck of playing cards to construct an extremely dynamic dungeon layout, where cards flip as players cross them and these flips can have wide ramifications across the board.

You can bypass cards or neutralize them. You can activate class-based powers to wriggle out of difficult skill checks or effects or send them at the other players. You can play competitively or cooperatively, and there's a *great* short designer's section about making your own cards and heists.

Throughout it all, the writing is really concise and clear, and the layout is highly organized. This is an easy book to use.

So, all of this is to say that GEMS A Game Of Heists surprised me. I was hoping for a narrative game, which it is extremely not, but it's equally good at being what it is---a really fun, energetic, customizable board game with some emergent narrative elements that you can whip up in a few minutes.

If you like the mechanics-y side of ttrpgs, you should 100% check it out.

[sprintingowl]

My Town Is Submerged In Cabbages

Sometimes the urge is to make a ttrpg to document a liminal moment of cultural history, a sliver of the human experience confined by time and the shifting tides of the market, a composite of late nights and off hours and time wasted but spent well.

Essentially this is about early 2000s MMOs and is a game in the same sense that suffering is.

[sprintingowl]

Thank you!

If even one person likes a game, I always consider it a success.

Share In My Cursed Design

You are apparently never too old to spontaneously generate a powerful fascination with minecraft.

Anyway here have a ttrpg.

[sprintingowl]

Share In My Cursed Design

You are apparently never too old to spontaneously generate a powerful fascination with minecraft.

Anyway here have a ttrpg.

[sprintingowl]

Cozy PWYW TTRPG Bundle Recruitment

Recruitment is open for a Cozy TTRPG bundle on itchio.

Recruitment will be open until 11/8/24 (Friday.)

The price of the bundle will be PWYW, and profits distributed evenly among all contributors.

If you have a TTRPG on itchio that you'd like to submit, please use the form.

[sprintingowl]

THEY DO NOT STOP. YOU MUST NOT FAIL.

THEY DO NOT STOP. YOU MUST NOT FAIL. is a solo survival horror role-playing game about escaping a mysterious, unstoppable and unrelenting foe in an impossible maze. 

Inspired by Resident Evil, Dead Space and Silent Hill, learn to manage your resources, navigate strange places and survive the horror intact.

Create stories about a relentless monster constantly stalking and constantly breathing down your neck. Make bad combat decisions and get punished or outsmart your pursuer and live by the skin of your teeth.

You can get the game at $4.44 OR grab one of the free community copies now on my Itch.io! Link below:

[sprintingowl]

Financially Solvent Radishes

Radish Knights is fully funded with two days to go. The campaign wraps on Halloween 2024. Until then, you can get the vegetable tactics rpg at the link below.

Thank you to everyone who's helped support this project! Whether it's reblogging, commenting, or backing directly, I couldn't have done it without you.