sprintingowl

[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.

[sprintingowl]

Radish Tactics Ending

Do *you* like saving weird TTRPG campaigns?

Radish Knights, the 4e inspired vegetable chivalry tabletop rpg, is finishing its kickstart on Oct 31st, 2024.

It is not currently funded, but it is within reach. If you but spread the word, together we can bring this game to the masses that do not yet crave it.

[sprintingowl]

Wanna do something really sweet for International Ledbian Day?

Show this tired lesbian some love by downloading the TTRPG she made 🧡🤍💜

I put a lot of love and thought into making this a beautiful, easy to run, and easy to play game. Because I know I don't always want to read 200+ pages of rules. I just want to get straight right to flirting with my friends and having a ridiculous time with stompy robots! And I'm sure some of you do too

It's available to download for free!

Though any change you can spare is always appreciated. (That being said, I made this game to be played and enjoyed, so don't let that "pay what you want" deter you from downloading it. if you can't spare anything right now, I totally get it hun)

[sprintingowl]

Thank you!

Tumblr will not let me post kickstarter links (idk why) only hide them under image files.

Everyone please use the link copper posted!

Radish Hail Mary

The world is like is it right now, and so I very much understand why an extremely indie ttrpg might not be funding, but I really want to let these radishes out into the world.

If you can spare some exposure for this hapless campaign, every reblog broadens the odds that I can release this (three years of development, 160+ pages) little game.

Radish Knights is:

-combat as a puzzle

-heroism as second nature

-vegetable fantasy

[sprintingowl]

Radish Hail Mary

The world is like is it right now, and so I very much understand why an extremely indie ttrpg might not be funding, but I really want to let these radishes out into the world.

If you can spare some exposure for this hapless campaign, every reblog broadens the odds that I can release this (three years of development, 160+ pages) little game.

Radish Knights is:

-combat as a puzzle

-heroism as second nature

-vegetable fantasy

[sprintingowl]

Radish Knights One Week

When October ends, so too will the Radish Knights campaign.

Radish Knights is a tabletop roleplaying tactics game with tiny vegetable warriors. It is 160+ pages, fully illustrated by human beings, and has been in development for three years.

It is also not funded yet, so any support---especially just signal boosts, please don't spend money unless you really want to and can afford it---is extremely welcome.

Radish Knights uses grid-based combat, simple rules, deep character building, and a dice system where your roll doesn't decide whether you'll succeed but how much energy success will cost you.

Playtests are also available. If you want to check out the game before making a decision, send me a message and I'll add you to one of the timeslots. This week (10/21/24) is extremely open, with most days having availability between 8 AM -- 7 PM EST.

[sprintingowl]

Valiance Crest

Despite also currently running a kickstarter, I am still releasing a ttrpg thing every week.

This week's is Valiance Crest, a single page tactics rpg that is the direct outflow from me playing a Fire Emblem romhack last week and its mechanics and design subsequently curling around my brain like a wyrm around its hoard.

[sprintingowl]

He Is Waiting

Not sure how else to advertise my humble 160+ page ttrpg other than to say that, for a brief but radiant window of time, the strongest build in the game was Asparagus Sephiroth.

If you too would like to play Asparagus Sephiroth, you might enjoy this 4e inspired, Final Fantasy Tactics inspired, vegetable chivalry rpg.

[sprintingowl]

This playtest was immensely fun as the GM. I got to KO characters. I got menaced by the party. An entire bear got put into bramble jail. And Juniper executed the highest number of attacks in a single action that I've seen in three years of developing this game.

Also this art piece rules. The pose! The belt buckle! The embroidery! The narrowed eyes!

Support Radish Knights, but also check out Juniper's art! It's wonderful!

Played another Radish Knights session today. My character was like a glass canon myrmidon build. I dashed across the entire battlefield, perfect dodged a couple attacks of opportunity, swung 9 attacks in one turn, missed half of them, OHKO'd one enemy and then died. We won. I helped. This game is fun go support the kickstarter if you have leisure money available.

[sprintingowl]

It's really cool to see tabletop being used in the classroom in this way, and I'm thrilled to have When We Made War Upon The Slumbering Woods featured alongside such an incredible roster!

Thank you for doing these writeups, psychhound! My day is immensely brightened.

ttrpgs in the classroom (part 8)

oh boy have i not made one of these posts in ,,, like a year. grad school is crazy yall. lmao. but. i wanted to share what we do for our analysis unit now that we've hit it this semester!!

other games used in the unit:

we are but worms & graves for funerals

the assignment:

write an essay of approximately 1000 words doing a literary analysis of some aspect of a game, first forming an inquiry question, then looking in the text for evidence, then coming up with an argument about a deeper meaning of the text. the second draft of the assignment can either be an expanded essay, or a multimodal piece of the student's choosing. (the other option for this essay is to do a rhetorical analysis of an argumentative text about gaming)

the games:

[ID: a powerpoint slide titled choose your fighter game (the word fighter is crossed out, so it reads choose your game). it shows five ttrpg titles, with a short description of each, and an icon to represent them. the background is a light orange sky and green grass in a video game like art style. there is a fake game menu bar on the bottom. the games in the slide are functionally described below. end ID]

when we made war upon the slumbering woods by richard kelly @sprintingowl

a collaborate journey into the magical woods ... to destroy it

the treasure at the end of this dungeon is an escape from this dungeon and we will never escape from this dungeon by riverhouse games @riverhousegames

a lyric game about a never-ending dungeon and those stuck there

kenzie's project by sasha winter @stargazersasha

a Weird Academia horror game for three players

i love you, alive girl by anna anthropy

a 1-page game about writing love letters under surveillance

drifters by gila rpgs

a Weird West game of gunslingers and their guns

past semesters game options:

a dragon game by chris bissette cozy town by rae nedjadi @temporalhiccup

the process:

in the powerpoint introducing the games, i have a more thorough description of each one, and then three examples of inquiry questions that they could use as jumping off points to do their analysis on. the inquiry questions ask things like, what moral stance might this game align itself with, what other stories is this game in dialogue with and to what effect, what does this game have to say about the current state of our society? the students can use these inquiry questions or not, theyre only meant to be examples

the results:

this is definitely the most challenging project for my students, but i think that challenge is good for them! i've had really mixed results, with the most common issue i run into just being surface level analysis. they are, however, 18 and have never done anything like this before (for the vast majority of my students) so a lot of my feedback is just pushing them further and trying to get them to say something interesting. i really love a dragon game and cozy town, but i found they didnt have enough context of ttrpgs and dnd/pf to really Get why a dragon game was interesting, so i replaced it with escape from this dungeon since thats got some more meat for them like voicey rules and characters. and im a big fan of nedjadi's games and wanted to give my students something more cute and fun, but they struggled to find much to read into or say about it that wasnt very surface level. escape from this dungeon and ilu, alive girl are new games this semester so we will see how those go over!!

[sprintingowl]

Thank you for your support!

Radish Knights - Tiny Vegetable Champions

I'm currently kickstarting Radish Knights, my 130+ page tabletop roleplaying game about chivalric vegetable tactics.

The thing about the indie scene is, you get to make games like this. You get to slap Final Fantasy Tactics into 4e and decide that the dice system is d10, roll middle, for some unguessable reason and you get to playtest for years, slowly adding bits and bobs to the system until you've made something that's as much Into The Breach as it is anything else, and then you take that thing onto kickstarter...

...and you remember that it's *always* a rough market for indie ttrpgs.

Genuinely, I think if you like strategy and you like heroic fantasy and you like worldbuilding that takes itself seriously even when the premise is ridiculous, you'll like this thing.

The art's all hand-drawn by Jonas Wittmann, who's worked on my other games Mendicant and Rod Reel And Fist.

The combat moves fast, and you have a lot of control over the dice.

I'd love to see this thing fund, and I'm hopeful that we can make Radish Knights a reality.