summoningcirclepress

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reading a bunch of haunted house games for a potential article and This Discord Has Ghosts in It may have the best single example of play in any rpg

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Gonna drop the first three pregen character playbooks for Over the Wailing Wind – my in-dev supernatural gothic romance game – early tomorrow morning for Dirtgoblin Community Center paid members.

Doing super tight, succinct character and game design while giving it the full layout and illustration treatment is an interesting exercise, it's getting my gears spinning about how to potentially approach future projects

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happy nearly halloween :D it's itch sale time!! come get yalls ttrpgs

the sale features ...

two solo games

the graveyard game: write an ethnography of a magical, haunted graveyard, built on the for truth's sake system

osteotzee: play as a bone auger putting great beasts to rest using a yahtzee scorecard

one duet game

mama werewolf: play as a werewolf mother and her child, playing out emotional scenes over the course of a month with tokens you find out in nature

three multiplayer games

familiar field trip: play cooperatively or competitively as witches' familiars trying to wreak havoc in the village, completing challenges and wracking up points

crescent grin: play as noir detectives in an eldritch world in a twisty turny one shot built on horseshoe srd

interstate 10 1/2: play as roadtrippers facing bizarre threats in a light horror comedy game build on horseshoe

one lyric game

you are thinking about silver: an autofictional game about a memory from when i was 14, reimagined as if my family were werewolves

two d&d 5e homebrews:

psychopomp sorcerer: a subclass for playing as a sorcerer tasked with delivering souls to the afterlife, featuring three unique flavors and spell pools

witch class: a constitution based half caster class with a whole new way of casting spells (no slots!), familiars, curses, and more! includes 3 subclasses. made with @hmooncreates

get everything for 40% off or all 9 for $18!!

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I'm not sure how else to tell you that Splat 5: Golden, the latest issue of our TTRPG magazine is out on itch.io

Tell a friend! And the tell us you loved it.

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I'm not sure how else to tell you that Splat 5: Golden, the latest issue of our TTRPG magazine is out on itch.io

Tell a friend! And the tell us you loved it.

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Splat 5 is now out to the public

That's right, the latest issue of our TTRPG magazine: Splat, is available on itch. Community copies there for ya if you can't afford it! All funds help us make another one.

What's Inside

Meguey & Vincent Baker in conversation with Rae Nedjadi about Apolcalypse World, the Powered by the Apolcalypse school of design it launched, and how games like Apocalypse Keys are redefining that system.

Filipino designers momatoes and Waks Saavedra discuss the TTRPG industry and culture in Southeast Asia, the rise of #RPGSEA and other regional tabletop movements, and how to support their continued growth.

Industry icons Orion D Black and Jay Dragon give an inside look at the life of an indie designer: how indies fought for better pay and won, how they built new communities online, and where the scene will go from here

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You've started growing gills and it's time to get good at your improvisational firefighting because you're about to form a symbiotic attachment with the freaks of this new world.

Plasmodics is live on Kickstarter now!

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Happy Pride Month from this queer co-op zine publisher to you. Support your local queer artists and writers and businesses. Support your local mutual aid networks so queers of all generations have access to safe and affordable housing, food, jobs, and a good life.

And chase queer joy whenever you can!

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Happy Pride Month from this queer co-op zine publisher to you. Support your local queer artists and writers and businesses. Support your local mutual aid networks so queers of all generations have access to safe and affordable housing, food, jobs, and a good life.

And chase queer joy whenever you can!

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How To Support Indie TTRPGs

A lot of indie ttrpg people are coming back to, or trying out tumblr for the first time. For better or for worse (I'd argue worst lol), twitter has been the main marketing tool and driver of sales for a lot of indie people. Whether or not twitter is going to completely fade away, who knows! But it's never a bad idea to take some eggs out of that single basket.

So what does that have to do with tumblr? Well, if you see a post about an indie ttrpg (games, art, podcasts, streams, design, whatever!) give it a reblog! Same as you'd do for any cool art, gif, video, or music!

Want to take it a step further? Go check out that person's links (which related, to all the posters out there, make sure your links to your itch pages, drivethru pages, personal sites, etc are handy!) and here's the crucial part, if you think something is cool, buy it! Indie ttrpg stuff is nearly always wildly underpriced (which is a convo for another day), so chances are you can find something that's within your budget.

If you can't buy it, bookmark it for later! Also, it's super common for itch.io creators to have a pool of community copies freely available for their games. Take one! Check out the game! If you like it, buy it later! If you grab a community copy, an extra cool thing you can do is leave a 5-star rating!

I would love to see the indie ttrpg sphere flourish on tumblr, but that can't happen without support! So show your favorite indie ttrpg creator some love, and also go exploring to find some new favorites!

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OK COOL NOW LETS PAY ARTISTS FOR MORE ART!! ✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨

FUNDED! This means we're gonna get to bring Little Wolves to life, and you'll all get to explore the mystical Enchanted Forest at your tables, with your friends. We can't wait to get to work finishing it up :)

We still have stretch goals & community achievements to unlock! We're pretty close to the next achievement for a free sticker at 250 backers, and once we hit $22k raised we'll be getting more amazing art packed into the final book!!!

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Have you played SPINDLEWHEEL ?

By Sasha Reneau

Spindlewheel is a tarot-like storytelling system where you weave a story from card to card. It is genre agnostic but plays with archetypes from tarot, fairy tales, and the turn of the century.

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Thanks for the added other resources to check out!

SPLAT 5: Golden (out fall '24) will feature some discussion of these topics as we delve into TTRPG history.

ALSO

I've been seeing stuff about Side Quest: A Visual History of Roleplaying Games which comes out in October! Here's an interview with the creators that I found. I don't know the folks who made it but it looks rad!

When the internet dies, where will we have archived the digital world of TTRPGS?

It has become a raison d'être for us to keep publishing Splat, especially in print, to preserve game history.

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THE ACCESSIBLE DESIGN SURVIVAL GUIDE: OUT NOW!

My zine covering accessible design basics is now free on itch!

If you'd like to start making your work more accessible for everyone— check a look, download it here!

Please share this with anyone you know who makes flyers for key events like protests and fundraisers, especially! We want to make sure these things are successful— and accessible design will help with reach!

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What People Are Saying About PSYCHODUNGEON

"Psychodungeon does what some of the best Belonging Outside Belonging games do, which is create a setting that is a powerful mirror to our own, and then weave that setting into the very marrow of the game. The setting, its dungeons, clients, and psychoplumbers are inescapable in the best way possible because you don’t want to escape it. You want to dive in and see and feel everything that the postdungeon city of Glyndain has to offer. And then come out the other side changed by the experience." - Josh Hittie/Ostrichmonkey Games (Vibe Check and DEATHGRIND!!MEGASRUCTURE!!)

"Well-designed playbooks seamlessly fuse fantasy archetypes with honest descriptions of the stations of career." - Lyme (The Lurking Fear TTRPG)

"'A perfect medley of magic and mundanity" - ReprobateGamer

"PSYCHODUNGEON is a post-Blairite, post-Dungeon, modernist nightmare laced with hope. Imagine if the adventuring party sent to accompany you into the labyrinth spawned from your traumatic past are employed by the same company who decided to skimp on COVID protections for their care homes as it made more money than ensuring nobody living in them died, and overseen by the government department tasked with making sure nurses are as overworked/underpaid as possible. Sure, this band will try their best to help (most of the time). But also, their lives are hard as fuck. They are gonna be messy and imperfect and it is going to get weird somewhere along the line. Truthfully, I'm surprised this game didn't first appear as a strip in 2000AD." - Tanya Floaker (The Connection Machine, Solstice, Be Seeing You)

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🔥a tabletop rpg that is neither D&D nor Lancer

it drives me nuts when people talk about wanderhome as 'cozy' or 'wholesome' when my overall impression of it is that it is deeply melancholy and bittersweet! you cannot fundamentally change the places you visit--you just drift through, there was a revolution and it failed, there are small, forgotten gods remaining around every corner. yes, you're cute animals, but some of those animals are traumatized veterans or mistreated children. wanderhome is full of has-beens and could-have-beens and lost hopes. care is foregrounded, moments of genuine connection and growth are foregrounded, but they gain their signifiance from a profoundly unhappy background they're set against! and of course i think that's all good, i think it pulls off its tone masterfully, but the way people talk about it as a chipper upbeat animal-crossing esque thing is crazy

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hi! your tags on that “history of the idea that gods draw power from their worshipers” say you dislike the idea, which got me curious: aren’t the small and forgotten gods of Wanderhome relying on that same idea?

I assumed they were gods that are small because they’re forgotten, but maybe I’m conflating ideas here. idk! just want to better understand some different frameworks around gods in fantasy.

hi! so there isnt any answer to the nature of small and forgotten gods in the text of wanderhome (and this is on purpose), but theres a few different ways you can think about their demonym:

they are small because theyre forgotten (perhaps because gods in wanderhome need belief to grow, or because gods waste away when theyre not being given offerings)

they are forgotten because theyre small (perhaps because the dominant religious beliefs of the haeth have lost track of a historical animism, or because theyre overlooked in favor of the north wind god, the slobbering god, etc)

they are the intersection of small and forgotten, where maybe there are also small (and yet not forgotten) gods or forgotten (and yet not small) gods, and yet for some reason the folk beliefs of travelers singles this group of gods out in particular

"small and forgotten gods" is a term for a category of tutelary spirit that doesnt map cleanly onto any known real-world religious framework

maybe different parts of this are true in different parts of the haeth?

something else entirely that didnt even occur to me?

i think all of these are valid reads of the way small and forgotten gods are handled, and while i have a personal sense of what small and forgotten gods are (that intersects in some complicated ways with my own idiolect of syncretic neopaganism) i have used multiple different interpretations based on how the table presents them! i personally tend to avoid the first interpretation because its not compelling for the kind of stories i want to tell, but i wield no power over how other people play wanderhome, and i think part of the fun of "anti-canon" as a way to approach game texts is that all of these options emerge from whats on the page