#And literally any other ttrpg system

[direbeastrex]

i think i need to stop being a player at ttrpg games and start being a DM

The fear of rejection and disapproval from past DMs makes me too nervous to play characters i want to play and show stories I want to show, because the threat of being seen as too cringy has loured over me since I was a teenager and kept me from persuing literally every good thing i have ever enjoyed

I think enough is enough

I want to be the DM that tells people *yes, and*. I want to skip the slog of having to prove you're worthy of being powerful. All my friends have earned that right by surviving to this point, frankly. I no longer believe that happiness must be earned or bargained for with years worth of time.

I want to run a high level, dragon centric campaign, where nothing is set in stone and no one is shamed for having a power fantasy come true. We all deserve to see level fucking twenty without waiting years just to prove that we have 'earned it'. Thats deranged nonsense.

I want my players to give me the most insane concepts and broken game mechanics and i will be so happy if they do because it proves they are thinking enough about my game that theyre not just rolling off their sheet because they expect combat to be mechanical and paint by numbers. My job isnt to prevent them from killing bosses in creative ways. Its to give them opportunities to use their concepts. To gestalt with each other, too.

I am just sick of anxiously playing by other peoples rules. Im neurodiverse and trans- i break several rules every day before I even get out of bed. Fuck the expectations. Fuck towing the line. Im gonna DM a fucking game in which there will be dragons and fuck the bioessentialism of chromatics being evil. Just Fuck it. What does it serve? Nothing and certainly not me.

And damn it, if you ask for a seat at my table and ask me "can i be a dragon?" I promise you, i will say "yes, and-" and you will not fucking believe the shit i will lay at your feet. You are gracing my headworld with an opportunity to flesh it out in ways I could never have imagined. The least I can do is let you shape it with me.

[jiimwii]

cyberpsychosis could maybe be so cool if it was people being possessed by some sort of rouge ai,or as part of a corporate conspiracy. like as a planned obsolescence thing where certain parts during production are programmed to make people Do That after a certain point so you have to buy the next new 20,000eddies cannon arms to replace the nearly identical previous model or else you might kill everyone you love and die because your cyberwares "outdated". or untraceable viruses infecting competing corporations cyberware using their rival's customer's livelihoods to sabotage their profits. and maybe any one of those things works in such a way that its designed to detect atypical brain chemistry in a host,and thus triggers more frequently with them to tage advantage of and use those people as a scapegoat and a way to further fear monger against them,and you can uncover that this is the case. or something along those lines. and the more cyberware someone has the more likely it is that they could encounter any of these scenarios. but no it is just #crazy people being too #crazy.

[zincbot]

misfits and magic has me smiling like you wouldn't believe. i'm enjoying myself so so so much

[jessica-problems]

Seeing @thydungeongal constantly wrestling with people interpreting her posts about D&D in ways that seem completely alien to me has convinced me that there are actually multiple completely distinct activities both being referred to as "playing D&D" Before we begin, I want to stress that I'm not saying one of these groups is Playing The Game Wrong or anything, but there seems to be a lot of confusion and conflict caused by people not being aware of the distinction. In fact, either one works just fine if everyone's on the same page. So far, I think I've identified at least two main groups. And nobody seems to realize the distinction between these groups even exists. The first group of people think of "Playing D&D" as, well, more or less like any other board game. Players read the whole rulebook all the way through, all the players follow the instructions, and the gameplay experience is determined by what the rules tell each player to do. This group thinks of the mechanics as, not exactly the *whole* game, but certainly the fundamental skeleton that everything else is built on top of. People in the second group think of "Playing D&D" as referring to, hanging out with their friends, collaboratively telling a story inspired by some of the elements in the rulebooks, maybe rolling some dice to see what happens when they can't decide. This group thinks of the mechanics of the game as, like... a spice to sprinkle on top of the story to mix things up. (if you belong to this second group, and think I'm explaining it poorly, please let me know, because I'm kind of piecing things together from other people saying things I don't understand and trying to reverse engineer how they seem to be approaching things.) I think this confusion is exacerbated by the fact that Wizards of the Coast markets D&D as if these are the same thing. They emphatically are not. the specific rules laid out of the D&D rulebooks actually direct players to tell a very specific kind of story. You can tell other stories if you ignore those rules (which still counts as "playing D&D" under the second definition, but doesn't under the first)And I think people in both groups are getting mad because they assume that everyone is also using their definition. For example, there's a common argument that I've seen play out many times that goes something like this:

A: "How do I mod D&D to do [insert theme here]?" B: "D&D is really not built for that, you should play [other TTRPG] that's designed for it instead" A: "But I don't want to learn a whole new game system!" B: "It will be easier to just learn a whole new system than mod D&D to do that." A: "whatever, I'll just mod D&D on my own" And I think where this argument comes from is the two groups described above completely talking past each other. No one understands what the other person is trying to say. From A's perspective, as a person in the second group, it sounds like A: "Anyone have some fun inspirations for telling stories about [insert theme here]?" B: "You can't sit around a table with your friends and tell a story about that theme! That's illegal." A: "But we want to tell a story about this theme!" B: "It's literally impossible to do that and you're a dumb idiot baby for even thinking about it." A: "whatever, jerk, I'll figure it out on my own."

--- Whereas, from B's perspective, the conversation sounds like A: "How do I change the rules of poker to be chess, and not be poker?" B: "uhhh, just play chess?" A: "But I already know how to player poker! I want to play poker, but also have it be chess!" B: "what the hell are you talking about? What does that even mean. They're completely different games." A: "I'm going to frankenstein these rules together into some kind of unplayably complex monster and you can't stop me!" ---

So both people end up coming away from the conversation thinking the other person is an idiot. And really, depending on how you concieve of what it means to "play D&D" what is being asked changes considerably. If you're only planning to look through the books for cool story inspiration, maybe borrow a cool little self contained sub-system here or there, then yeah, it's very possible to steal inspiration for your collaborative story from basically anywhere. Maybe some genres are kind of an awkward fit together, but you can make anything work with a little creativity.

If, however, you are thinking of the question in terms of frankensteining two entire board games together, then it becomes a massively difficult or even outright nonsensical idea. For example, for skill checks, the game Shadowrun has players roll a pool of several d6 at once, then count up how many rolled above a target value to see how well a character succeeded at a task. The whole game is full of specific rules about adding or removing dice from the pool, effects happening if you roll doubles, rerolling only some of the dice, and all sorts of other things that simply do not translate to rolling a single d20 for skill checks. On a basic level, the rules of the games work very differently. Trying to make them compatible would be much harder than just learning a new game from scratch. Now, neither of these approaches is exactly *wrong*, I guess, but personally, I find the rules of TTRPGs to be fascinating and worth taking the time to engage with all the weird little nuances and seeing what shakes out. Also, the first group, "TTRPG as fancy board game" is definitely the older and more widespread one. I kind of get the impression that the second group largely got into D&D through actual play podcasts, but I don't have any actual data to back that up. So, if you're in the second group, who thinks of D&D as basically a context for collaborative storytelling first and a game second, please let me know if I'm wildly misunderstanding how you approach D&D. Because I'm pretty sure it would save us a whole lot of stupid misunderstandings.

[anim-ttrpgs]

Disabilities and Monsters in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy

Through a discussion with @vixensdungeon (great blog to follow for TTRPG stuff by the way) it came to our attention that some of our more jokey and memey posts and reblogs may have given some people a slightly skewed idea of what Eureka, and particularly the “urban fantasy” parts of Eureka are really about, and its tone. We like to joke around about it, and the “cute monster girl” angle really sells on tumblr.com, but actually playing these types of characters in Eureka is not exactly a power fantasy. They eat people, and often eat them alive. If you find that cute, funny, and/or sexy, well, Eureka is still probably just the game you’re looking for, but that isn’t the main thing. Eureka uses the fact that many of these characters necessarily subsist off the flesh and/or blood of other people as a loose metaphor for mental and physical disability.

Imagine you need something that everyone else has but you don’t. If you don’t have it regularly, you will literally start to waste away. The only way to obtain this thing is to take it from another human being, who also needs it, and others will deny that you need it, and abhor that you need it. It’s not uncommon for people, even “progressive” people, to say something along the lines of “they need to all be killed for the good of society,” even if they don’t realize that’s what they’re saying. You didn’t choose to be this way. This is the reality of monsters in Eureka, and many people in real life.

And then even when you have that thing you need, for now, there are many facets of society that you just can’t participate in because your condition makes them impossible for you, like if a vampire wanted to take a run on a sunny beach. Monsters in Eureka will be challenged by their supernatural weaknesses at every turn, while hiding their abhorrent needs from society and even the rest of the party, and asking why they have to be this way. Finding clever ways to get around and circumvent their weaknesses is a core part of the gameplay of monster PCs in Eureka. Imagine you and your friends want or need to go somewhere, but that somewhere is on the other side of a river. The river has a well maintained bridge. For everyone else but you, a vampire who can’t cross running water, getting across the river is the simplest task in the world, so much so that no one would even consider it a task, but for you, it’s a challenge, and for gameplay, it’s a puzzle.

It isn’t totally hopeless, as many of the jokes and fan comics show (those aren’t just memes, they’re only showing one side of the coin and not the other). Monsters who accept, or even embrace and celebrate their monsterhood, can and do exist canonically, alongside monsters who can’t bear to do what they do. In some cases, these may be the same monster on different days.

I’m going to conclude this post by posting two excerpts from the rules text itself.

Disabilities are Disabling

So why don’t disabilities grant any advantage? It isn’t too uncommon for RPGs to have some sort of “flaw” system, where during character creation you can give your character “flaws” or some kind of penalty, and usually get that balanced out by being able to add extra bonuses elsewhere. Sometimes, these “flaws” may take the form of disabilities.

One particular high-profile indie TTRPG takes this beyond just character creation, and makes it so that if a PC receives a “scar” in combat that reduces their physical stats, their mental stats automatically go up by an equivalent amount, and proudly imply that to make any mechanic which results in permanent consequences or makes disabilities disabling is ableist. We think you can probably tell what we think of that from this sentence alone, and we don’t need to elaborate too much. 

We do think, in the abstract, “flaw” systems in character creation are not a bad idea. They allow for more varied options during character creation, while preserving game balance between the PCs.

But in real life, people aren’t balanced. The events that left me injured and disabled didn’t make me smarter or better in any way - if anything, they probably made me dumber, considering the severity of the concussion! Some things happened to me, and now I’m worse. There’s no upside, I just have to keep going, trying harder with a less efficient body, and relying more on others in situations where I am no longer capable of perfect self-sufficiency.

A disabled person is, by definition, less able to perform important daily tasks than the average person. To deny this is to deny that they need help, and to deny that they need help is to enable a refusal to help. This is the perspective from which Eureka’s Grievous Wounds mechanic was written.

When a character is reduced to 1 HP (which by design can result from a single hit from many weapons) they may become incapacitated or they may take a Grievous Wound, which is a permanent injury with no stat benefits. Grievous Wounds don’t have to result from combat, they can also be given to a character during character creation, but not as a trade-off for an extra bonus.

“But then doesn’t my character just have worse stats than the rest of the party?” Yes, haven’t you been reading this? There is no benefit, except for the opportunity to play a disabled character in an TTRPG. This character will probably have to be more reliant on the rest of the party to get by in various situations. Is that a bad thing?

Monsters Essay

All investigators in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy are regular people. They can also be a monster, like a blood-sucking vampire or a broom-riding witch. Importantly, this works because despite their unique nature, monsters are still regular people. You can read more about this in Chapter 8, but the setting of Eureka does not have a conspiracy or “masquerade” hiding supernatural people from normal society. Though they are still largely unknown to modern science, they exist within normal society - and a lot of them eat people.

The default assumption in RPGs has been that monsters are just evil by nature, doing evil for evil’s sake. RPGs that seek to subvert this expectation often instead make monsters misunderstood and wrongfully persecuted, but harmless. Eureka takes a wholly different approach.

There are five playable types of monsters in the rulebook right now, and it’ll be seven if we hit all the stretch goals, but for simplicity’s sake this discussion of themes will just focus on the vampire. Despite them applying in different ways, the same overall themes apply to nearly every monster, so if you get the themes for the vampire, you’ll get the gist of what Eureka is doing with its playable monsters in general.

Mundane investigators have to keep themselves going by eating food and sleeping (see p.XX “Composure” for more information). Well, vampires can’t operate the same way. They don’t sleep, and normal food might be tasty for them as long as it isn’t too heavily seasoned, but it doesn’t do anything for them nutritionally. Their main way to keep themselves functioning is fresh living human blood, straight from the source. To do what mundane PCs do normally by just eating and sleeping, vampires have to take from another, whether either of them are happy with this arrangement or not. They do not, of course, literally have to, and a player is not forced to make their vampire PC drink blood, just like you reading this in real life don’t literally have to eat food. You do eat food if you want to live in any degree of comfort or happiness, and vampires do drink blood or they eventually become unable to effectively do anything.

This is numerically, mechanically incentivized and not simply a rule that says something like “this character is a vampire and therefore they must drink blood once every session,” to demonstrate that the circumstances a person faces drive their behavior. In America, there is a tendency to think of criminality and harm done to others as resulting from intrinsic evil, but people do not just wake up one day and decide “I think I’ll go down the criminal life path.” Their circumstances have barred them from the opportunities that would have given them other options. 

People need food; food costs money; money requires work; work requires getting hired; but getting hired requires a nearby job opening, an education, an impressive resume, nice clothes, charisma, consistent transportation, and so on. For people without other options, crime becomes the only method left to meet their basic needs. Would you rather take what you need from other people, or go without what you need? There are people who don’t have the luxury of a third option. Failure to meet the needs of even a small number of people in a society has high potential to harm the entire society, not just those individuals whose needs are unmet.

As their basic need for blood becomes more and more difficult to ignore, a vampire is going to encounter much the same dilemma. There is really no “legal” or “harmless” way for them to get their needs met, even if they do have resources. Society just isn’t set up for that. And no, your kink is not the solution to this, trying to suggest every vampire just find willing participants who are turned on by vampires or being bitten is suggesting sex work. It’s one step removed from telling a girl she should just get an OnlyFans the minute she turns 18, or that women should just marry a rich man and be a housewife that gets their needs taken care of in exchange for sex and housekeeping. Being forced into such a dynamic isn’t ethical or harmless for the vampire or for their “clients.”

“Oh well, then the vampire should just eat bad people!” You mean those same bad people we just described above? Who gets to decide which people are “bad people?” Who gets to decide that the punishment is assault or death?

Playable monsters in Eureka are dangerous, harmful people. They were set up to be.

Society not being set up in a way that allows monsters to make ethical choices brings us to the next theme: monstrousness as disability, and monsters as “takers.”

Vampires have to take from others a valuable resource that everyone needs to live, and the extraction of which is excruciatingly painful and debilitating. No one knows what happens to blood after a vampire drinks it, it’s just gone. Vampires are open wounds through which blood pours out of the universe.

This is a special need, something they have to take but cannot give back. Their special needs make them literally a drain on society and the people around them. In the modern world, there is a tendency to feel that people must justify their right to life, that they must pay for the privilege of existing in society. This leads people to consider “takers” (people who take much more than they give back, such as disabled people) as something that needs to be pruned away for the betterment of everyone else. Even many so-called “progressives,” while they claim not to agree with pruning “useless eaters,” still hold the unexamined belief that people must justify their existence. To reconcile these two incompatible ideas, they instead simply deny that disabled people take more resources than most people, and are capable of giving back less. This sentiment is perfectly illustrated by the aforementioned game’s insistence that disabilities are never a net reduction of a character’s stats.

Vampires and other playable monsters are inarguably “takers,” but in positioning them as protagonists right alongside mundane protagonists, Eureka puts you in their shoes, and forces you to acknowledge their inner lives and reckon with their circumstances. You have to acknowledge two things: first, that they are dangerous, that they are harmful, that they take more than they give - and second, that they are people. Because they are people, Eureka asserts that they have inherent value, a right to exist, and a right to do what they need to do to exist. (We also acknowledge that their potential victims have a right to do what they need to do to exist and defend themselves, but that is a separate discussion.)

One final point to touch on is mental illness. Mental illness is a disability, one pretty comparable to physical disability in a lot of ways, so all of the above points can apply to this metaphor as well, but there are a few unique comparisons to make here.

It’s not the most efficient, but there are a couple of loopholes deliberately left in the rules that allow vampires to sometimes sporadically restore Composure (and thus their ability to function) without drinking blood. Eureka! moments and Comfort checks from fellow investigators can restore Composure.

When writing the rules, we came to a dilemma where we weren’t sure if it was thematically appropriate for monsters to be able to regain Composure in these ways (since it could lessen their reliance on causing harm), but ultimately we decided that yes, they can.

People with mental illnesses may have the potential to be harmful and dangerous, but all the information we have access to has shown that mentally ill people with robust support structures and control over their own lives are much less likely to enact harm, whether through physical violence, relational violence, or violence against the self. This is why we kept that rule in for playable monsters. Being able to accomplish their goals, and having friends who are there for them, makes that person less likely to cause unnecessary harm.

Vampires are especially great for demonstrating this because they’re immortal and they always come back when “killed.” They can’t be exterminated, they aren’t going away, there will always be problem people in society, no matter how utopian or “progressive.” Vampires are a never-ending curse, who will always be a problem whether they like it or not. The question is how you will grapple with their inevitable presence in society and how you will treat them, not how you will get rid of them.

Eureka is as much a study of the characters themselves as it is the mystery being solved by the characters. It is a game about harsh realities, but it is ultimately compassionate. It argues through its own gameplay that yes, people do have circumstances which drive their behavior, people do have special needs that are beyond their ability to reciprocate, many of those people do cause harm or inconvenience to others, and all of them are still valuable. 

Elegantly designed and thoroughly playtested, Eureka represents the culmination of three years of near-daily work from our team, as well as a lot of our own money. If you’re just now reading this and learning about Eureka for the first time, you missed the crowdfunding window unfortunately, but you can still check out the public beta on itch.io to learn more about what Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy actually is, as that is where we have all the fancy art assets, the animated trailer, links to video reviews by podcasts and youtubers, etc.!

You can also follow updates on our Kickstarter page where we post regular updates on the status of our progress finishing the game and getting it ready for final release.

Beta Copies through the Patreon

If you want more, you can download regularly updated playable beta versions of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy earlier, plus extra content such as adventure modules by subscribing to our Patreon at the $5 tier or higher. Subscribing to our patreon also grants you access to our patreon discord server where you can talk to us directly and offer valuable feedback on our progress and projects.

The A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club

If you would like to meet the A.N.I.M. team and even have a chance to play Eureka with us, you can join the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club discord server. It’s also just a great place to talk and discuss TTRPGs, so there is no schedule obligation, but the main purpose of it is to nominate, vote on, then read, discuss, and play different indie TTRPGs. We put playgroups together based on scheduling compatibility, so it’s all extremely flexible. This is a free discord server, separate from our patreon exclusive one. https://discord.gg/7jdP8FBPes

Other Stuff

We also have a ko-fi and merchandise if you just wanna give us more money for any reason.

We hope to see you there, and that you will help our dreams come true and launch our careers as indie TTRPG developers with a bang by getting us to our base goal and blowing those stretch goals out of the water, and fight back against WotC's monopoly on the entire hobby. Wish us luck.

[who-is-page]

The Sol System's Alterhuman Writing Challenge

In November 2021, we challenged ourselves to write an alterhuman-oriented piece every day until the end of November, ideally building up to 50,000 words written overall. We wanted to take this challenge up for several reasons—to help strengthen our writing habits, to set up routines during a time we normally struggle to do anything due to our seasonal depression, to finally learn to put our first drafts out there fearlessly instead of being ornery perfectionists, and to just generally get better at handling mixed reviews with our rejection sensitive dysphoria.

All in all, it was a huge success and a ton of fun-- we wrote about topics we might not have otherwise touched on, made a TTRPG, and just had a grand time overall with all the responses we got from the community. And because of that, we want to offer it to any of y'all folks who might be interested in tackling the challenge yourselves (even if it's a few days late, but who's counting?)

Here are the rules we bound ourselves by:

You must finish and publish at least one piece of writing a day, on your platform of choice—DreamWidth, Tumblr, Mastodon, PillowFort, DeviantArt, Twitter, Discord, Neocities, anywhere. It has to be publicly accessible and (if possible) tagged appropriately.

That piece of writing must either be about or in connection to alterhumanity (in general or your own), the alterhuman community, a community typically classified underneath the alterhuman umbrella, an experience related to or connected to alterhumanity, or otherwise be something inspired by alterhumanity/alterhumans/alterhuman experiences/etc. This category is meant to be as broad as possible, while still sticking to theme. Use prompts or go off the cuff, whichever works best.

Other than that, go nuts! Fiction, nonfiction, games, NSFW, do whatever you want. There is literally no limit on what type of thing you write, just that you write. You can also start a piece at any given time—for a couple of our pieces, we started them one day, after we’d already published something, and then finished them and posted them a day later. I also personally recommend dedicating one unique tag to it on your blog to help keep track, but it's your writing and your rules all the way down other than what I've listed out here.

And if you do decide to take up the challenge, consider tagging us in it! We'd love to see whatever you write!

[thydungeongal]

out of curiosity, are you aware of any games that mechanised notetaking? just was walking the dog and thinking about making something explicit that's oft implicit

Oh, immediately could think of one! Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy by my good friends at @anim-ttrpgs basically necessitates note-taking not just because it is an investigative game but because of one of its mechanics: Eureka!

Eurekas are one of the many systems the game has in place to make sure that the investigation doesn't stall or lead to a dead end simply because the investigators aren't being lucky that day. It is a very trad game where to gain clues investigators investigate scenes and use their skills to draw clues from evidence. Which, being random, means that there's always a chance that an investigator fails all their rolls and doesn't end up gaining any clues!

This is mitigated in part by the use of graded successes (the most common result on an unmodified roll is actually a partial success), but also, whenever a character makes an investigation roll they gain investigation points, with failures yielding more. Once a character's investigation points reach a certain threshold they can be used to gain a Eureka (and the game even encourages you to stand up and shout "Eureka!" when using it) which allows a character to suddenly gain a clue from one of their previously failed investigation rolls as if they had succeeded at it!

So it's a game that basically necessitates writing down ALL of the clues the investigators gather as well as every single failed investigation roll! It's highly ambitious and crunchy, and I love it. You can also get the prerelease version of it for free at the moment by joining their indie RPG book club where I'm also around to help out a bit! :)

I'm sure there are other games as well, but I literally immediately thought of Eureka when I saw this ask. :D

[dailyadventureprompts]

Tableskills: Creating Dread

I've often had a lot of problems telling scary stories at my table, whether it be in d&d or other horror focused games. I personally don't get scared easily, especially around "traditionally horrifying" things so it's hard for me to recreate that experience in others. Likewise, you can't just port horror movie iconography into tabletop and expect it to evoke genuine fear: I've already spoken of being bored out of my mind during the zombie apocalypse, and my few trips into ravenloft have all been filled with similar levels of limp and derivative grimdark.

It took me a long time (and a lot of video essays about films I'd never watched) to realize that in terms of an experience fear is a lot like a joke, in that it requires multiple steps of setup and payoff. Dread is that setup, it's the rising tension in a scene that makes the revelation worth it, the slow and literal rising of a rollercoaster before the drop. It's way easier to inspire dread in your party than it is to scare them apropos of nothing, which has the added flexibility of letting you choose just the right time to deliver the frights.

TLDR: You start with one of the basic human fears (guide to that below) to emotionally prime your players and introduce it to your party in a initially non-threataning manor. Then you introduce a more severe version of it in a way that has stakes but is not overwhelmingly scary just yet. You wait until they're neck deep in this second scenario before throwing in some kind of twist that forces them to confront their discomfort head on.

More advice (and spoilers for The Magnus Archives) below the cut.

Before we go any farther it's vitally important that you learn your party's limits and triggers before a game begins. A lot of ttrpg content can be downright horrifying without even trying to be, so it's critical you know how everyone in your party is going to react to something before you go into it. Whether or not you're running an actual horror game or just wanting to add some tension to an otherwise heroic romp, you and your group need to be on the same page about this, and discuss safety systems from session 0 onwards.

The Fundamental Fears: It may seem a bit basic but one of the greatest tools to help me understand different aspects of horror was the taxonomy invented by Jonathan Sims of The Magnus Archives podcast. He breaks down fear into different thematic and emotional through lines, each given a snappy name and iconography that's so memorable that I often joke it's the queer-horror version of pokemon types or hogwarts houses. If we start with a basic understanding of WHY people find things scary we learn just what dials we need turn in order to build dread in our players.

Implementation: Each of these examples is like a colour we can paint a scene or encounter with, flavouring it just so to tickle a particular, primal part of our party's brains. You don't have to do much, just something along the lines of "the upcoming cave tunnel is getting a little too close for comfort" or "the all-too thin walkway creaks under your weight ", or "what you don't see is the movement at the edge of the room". Once the seed is planted your party's' minds will do most of the work: humans are social, pattern seeking creatures, and the hint of danger to one member of the group will lay the groundwork of fear in all the rest.

The trick here is not to over commit, which is the mistake most ttrpgs make with horror: actually showing the monster, putting the party into a dangerous situation, that’s the finisher, the  punchline of the joke. It’s also a release valve on all the pressure you’ve been hard at work building.

There’s nothing all that scary about fighting a level-appropriate number of skeletons, but forcing your party to creep through a series of dark, cobweb infested catacombs with the THREAT of being attacked by undead? That’s going to have them climbing the walls.

Let narration and bad dice rolls be your main tools here, driving home the discomfort, the risk, the looming threat.

Surprise: Now that you’ve got your party marinating in dread, what you want to do to really scare them is to throw a curve ball. Go back to that list and find another fear which either compliments or contrasts the original one you set up, and have it lurking juuuust out of reach ready to pop up at a moment of perfect tension like a jack in the box. The party is climbing down a slick interior of an underdark cavern, bottom nowhere in sight? They expect to to fall, but what they couldn't possibly expect is for a giant arm to reach out of the darkness and pull one of them down. Have the party figured out that there's a shapeshifter that's infiltrated the rebel meeting and is killing their allies? They suspect suspicion and lies but what they don't expect is for the rebel base to suddenly be on FIRE forcing them to run.

My expert advice is to lightly tease this second threat LONG before you introduce the initial scare. Your players will think you're a genius for doing what amounts to a little extra work, and curse themselves for not paying more attention.

Restraint: Less is more when it comes to scares, as if you do this trick too often your players are going to be inured to it. Try to do it maybe once an adventure, or dungeon level. Scares hit so much harder when the party isn't expecting them. If you're specifically playing in a "horror" game, it's a good idea to introduce a few false scares, or make multiple encounters part of the same bait and switch scare tactic: If we're going into the filthy gross sewer with mould and rot and rats and the like, you'll get more punch if the final challenge isn't corruption based, but is instead some new threat that we could have never prepared for.

Art

[sprintingowl]

TTRPGs As Terrariums For Blorbos

One thing that I think isn't covered enough in TTRPG recommendations is styles of play.

There's a lot of "this game has this tone," or "this game is this amount of crunchy," but less "what are you playing towards?"

In games like Microscope and I'm Sorry Did You Say Street Magic? and The Quiet Year, you're playing to see what happens to the setting.

In games like Mork Borg and Into The Odd and Mothership, you're playing to see how far your character can get.

And in a lot of games, you're playing to create a blorbo, an OC, just a little guy, and the soul of the gameplay is the story of who your guy is and who your guy becomes.

This is blorbo style play.

And the thing about styles of play is that you can apply them to any game, even games that aren't really built to enable them. So I wanted to take a moment to shine a spotlight onto some games that do specifically enable you to fully blorb out. (I'll try to cover a mix of genres and tones, but the rpg scene is vast so if you have a favorite that I missed please feel free to shout it out in the replies.)

-Golden Sky Stories. This is the English translation of the Japanese TTRPG Yuuyake Koyake. You play as shapeshifter kids and spirits in a small town and, instead of tracking EXP, the thing that you carry from session to session is your relationships with other characters. The tone of the game is heartwarming, and if combat happens, both sides lose. There can be emotional turmoil, but this isn't a game where you have to worry about bad things happening to your blorbo.

-New World Of Darkness. On the other hand, let's say you *want* bad things to happen to your blorbo. You want to play a guy that's really going through it. If you also like modern supernatural stories, New World Of Darkness was built for you. Characters in NWoD can be entirely non-combat, or a literal werewolf, or a noncombat werewolf. The game places a lot of emphasis on navigating through the setting socially, as its supernatural creatures tend to run in factions and starting a fight usually means making a bunch of enemies.

-Pasion De Las Pasiones. Of course, not everyone wants a fantastical setting. Sometimes good old melodrama is hearty and comforting. Pasion De Las Pasiones is a playable telenovela, and it encourages you to play your characters bold and recklessly. Every class even has a built-in Meltdown, where if you're pushed to the edge they become extra reckless, ensuring a broad fallout of messy drama when they do manage to calm down.

-Cortex System / Unisystem. Perhaps you want to drop your blorbo into an existing fictional universe? But you also want stats and meaty character creation instead of just freeform roleplay? There are easily a dozen games on the Cortex engine, including Supernatural, Firefly, Smallville, Battlestar Galactica, Marvel, and Leverage. And on Unisystem, there's Buffy, Army Of Darkness, as well as a somewhat rare I Can't Believe It's Not Planet Of The Apes.

-Lancer / Gubat Banwa. If you like blorb-y play but still want a heavy side of combat, both of these games have you covered. Lancer has a sprawling scifi universe focused on mech pilots, and Gubat Banwa has a violent and lavish mythological Philippines setting. Both of these games also have stunningly beautiful artwork, so if you like seeing a setting visually come to life, these are for you.

-Fabula Ultima. My final recommendation is also an extremely gorgeous looking game. Fabula Ultima is built on the bones of Ryuutama (itself an excellent travel-fantasy game) to enable meaty, blorby Final Fantasy style campaign play. Combat is a rich and deep option in Fabula Ultima, but so is everything from spellcasting to crafting, and players have built-in resources they can spend to affect the story. If a scene isn't quite going the way you want it to, you can spend a point to nudge it in the right direction. Fabula Ultima also feels extremely complete without being too complicated.

So there you go. Eight options, and that's barely scratching the surface of the sea of blorb-y games (Seventh Sea, Exalted, Blue Rose, Legend Of The Five Rings, Coyote And Crow, Timewatch, Nahual, and more!)

It's also not wrong to play non-blorb-y games in a blorb-y way. Do whatever you're comfortable with! But you might enjoy dipping into these titles.

Finally, if you've read this far and you're somehow still looking for MORE recommendations, I wrote this game about runaway changelings trying to find their place in the world, and it's probably the blorbiest in my catalog.

[canmom]

social mechanics in RPGs

not a metaphor this time

so. a comment prompted by seeing this float by the dash.

some TTRPG mechanics are designed to abstract over something. you don't want to intricately simulate climbing a wall so you make a mechanic that says 'roll your Climbing Up Shit number and see if you get up the wall in time' (or whatever the stakes may be). any time you need to climb a wall, you just roll one die, and done. maybe offer a little description.

some TTRPG mechanics are designed to draw the game towards the thing they're simulating and make it a focus. these rules might be elaborate, intricate subsystems - the combat rules in D&D being the archetypal example. particularly in later editions, D&D is really interested in combat, it wants to have an elaborate tactical sim where you're juggling different resources to gain an advantage, it wants combat to take up a lot of game time.

in D&D the combat rules are largely self-referential (i.e. game constructs interacting with game constructs) and don't leave a lot of room to determine things by pure narrative logic, so the system needs to have enough depth to carry that. some systems, such as The King Is Dead, structure nearly every interaction.

other TTRPG systems leave more to player improv. there are various frameworks to account for the interface between the fuzzy narrative game world and the hard, procedural, mechanical one. PbtA has its 'moves', which trigger based on conditions to push the narrative in a certain direction. OSR games like to say 'rulings over rules', where the rulebook is silent on a subject and the GM makes a call on the spot based on the narrative situation. exactly what qualifies as 'going aggro', or whether your gambit is feasible and what dice you should role, is a judgement call.

exactly what should be precisely litigated by a rulebook and what should be left to the improvisation of the players, shaped by various vague prompts, is a huge part of the art of TTRPG design. it depends a lot on the group as well.

I think when it comes to social situations in RPGs, it is easy to get lost in these ambiguities. 5e D&D has three numbers on your character sheet called Deception, Persuasion and Intimidation. (in 3.5e the first two were instead called Diplomacy and Bluff). exactly when you should roll these numbers, and how it interacts with the fiction, is left to the discretion of the group.

the stereotypical "I roll to seduce" could be one approach, an approach where the dice system completely abstracts over social encounters - pretty boring. but equally there is the approach where you roleplay a conversation, and after a certain amount of back and forth, the DM declares 'OK, role me a Deception check' and evolves the fiction accordingly - now you're using it a lot more like a PbtA move, pushing the course of events down bifurcating paths at specific moments, and otherwise pursuing free improvised roleplay. however, from the numbers-and-dice side of things, this looks exactly the same.

some games like Burning Wheel offer a conversation system of comparable complexity to its battle system, designed for tense debate-like confrontations. it has something like a dozen actions - e.g. you can make a Point, Obfuscate, or make a verbal Feint, just as in combat you can Attack, Push or Disarm. Is this to Burning Wheel's advantage? it worked pretty well the one time I played it like 10+ years ago, but I also had a very talented GM who could probably have staged a very convincing debate scene regardless. however, the system provided structure, and prompts (how do I make a point? how do I obfuscate?), so it would surely have played out differently without it. it certainly led to a very intense and fun moment of roleplaying where I had to step out onto the 'stage', which has honestly informed me in TTRPGs ever since.

that said, a lot of the time, the best system for adjudicating social situations is literally just to roleplay it out and make a decision - 'what is this character feeling', 'what that character would say'. no mechanical abstraction can beat the human mind when it comes to simulating human beings. that is the unique advantage of TTRPGs as a medium, which no computer or board game can match! don't throw it away lightly.

the problem for a lot of discussions of RPG design is that how the group handles social situations at the table - what they say and when, when they call for dice - is something that depends a lot on the specific group dynamic, rather than something that can effectively be engineered by a rulebook. like many aspects of RPG practice it is something you learn by doing it and watching other players, not by reading about it in a book. you can try pretty hard - Apocalypse World and cousins are statements of a paradigm as much as anything, most trad games have pages and pages of GM advice - but that's not the same thing.

what makes D&D D&D, what makes indie story games indie story games, are their various play cultures, their habits and traditions - and the book is only part of it.

some players might find the prompts given by the notional buttons that say 'persuade', 'deceive' and 'intimidate' (or equally 'go aggro', 'seduce or manipulate' etc.) to be useful pushes in the right direction to play a highly social character, especially if they feel shy or awkward in life. others might find these limited options constraining, or simply irrelevant. or they might find a way to make them fit the rhythms of their group.

thing is, though, it's highly contextual and you aren't going to solve it forever by turning it into an argument about which is the best book-product-tribe to belong to.

[keplercryptids]

the more i run ttrpgs, especially in systems other than d&d 5e, the less i'm interested in a culture of secret-keeping at the table.

by that i mean, characters can and should have narrative secrets. that can lead to plot hooks, character growth, etc. characters having (temporary) secrets can be a good thing, but i don't think players should have narrative secrets between them, as a general rule.

when the players have more knowledge than their characters, they can make more interesting narrative decisions. they can choose to explore certain themes, start specific conversations or introduce interesting parallels that they simply would not be able to do otherwise.

i started implementing this culture shift with my newest campaign by being upfront with my players that "secret" back stories weren't going to be a thing. in fact, we played a couple sessions for each PC, exploring elements of their back story. these are details that the characters don't know about each other, but now the players do. it's been a blast, everyone is so much more invested in each other's characters and their stories, and there literally hasn't been a single downside to this approach. like. IMO we're just immediately telling a better, more cohesive story.

with PCs, a general rule of thumb i follow is that any secrets the players keep from each other should be: 1) rare, 2) relatively unimportant to the overall story, and 3) resolved quickly during play. meaning: if you do have a secret, you won't have it for long.

as the GM, of course there will be some secrets **i** have to keep from the players - but honestly, i'm finding that with this culture shift, i also have fewer secrets. part of that is that we're playing scum and villainy, where by design a lot more information is shared with the players about the machinations of the world, etc. but part of it is that i am finding a lot of fun and fulfillment in letting my players know more than i might have when i first started GMing.

for example. in our campaign setting, everybody has a shadow signifier, meaning that their shadows take on a unique shape/symbol. my players have access to a document listing a bunch of factions in the world, as well as notable NPCs and their signifier shadows. last session, i introduced NPCs with fake names or completely unknown identities, but visible signifiers. and it was honestly a thrill for all of us once the players caught on and began searching for these signifiers within that document, and gaining meta knowledge of who these NPCs actually were. having this knowledge 1) is much more interesting for the players, and 2) can make it so the characters start exploring areas of the world they may not have known to explore.

i think belligerent secret-keeping is kind of a d&d cultural staple, and this is partly out of fear of "metagaming." but the more i GM, the less and less i care about metagaming, and in fact am starting to embrace it. some of the gameplay is more fun if it's meta. the story is often better when it's one we're telling on purpose. i trust my players not to use meta information in a way that's unfun, they trust me to divulge information in a fair and balanced way, and it feels much more like we're all on the same team and learning things about the world at the same time.

regardless of systems i play in the future, i am going to keep "no out-of-character secrets" as a blanket rule from now on.

[txttletale]

having thoughts about your point that players/the gm shouldn’t have to design anything for a good ttrpg and wondering if i’m thinking of the gm’s role using inaccurate terms. what would you call the gm’s responses to uncertain mechanical situations in a given game (e.g. a mixed success in pbta - the onus is on the gm to come up with what that means, following some guidance from the rules.)

it seems like something that people find comforting about d&d is that even though the rules are overly complex (and often confusing), many of the common mechanics have clearcut (and boring) outcomes (such as save or suck, hit or miss, etc), meaning the gm doesn’t have to produce/interpret a result themselves. is the other approach (i.e. rules-light) putting more “design” weight on the gm? or is that thinking of it too formally?

otherwise, good design being the gm’s responsibility seems like it just falls under the umbrella of playing in good faith - whatever the situation, it’s bad faith to create untenable/insoluble scenarios that the players can’t meaningfully navigate

yeah, i mean--PBtA games have a list of GM moves, right? when a player has a mixed success, usually that means they succeed and the GM makes a GM move. and obviously those moves have choices and stuff the GM needs to come up with -- something like Monster of the Week's "Put someone in trouble" or "Separate them" definitely require the GM to think of how that works in the fiction -- but that isn't game design, right? the mechanical aspect of that has been handled by the game's rules text. so i think that if there's more weight on the GM i think it's strictly creative weight rather than design weight, unlike the 5e GM who is forced to mechanize anything they might want to make up and is often left without any mechanical guidance

and i mean, i think in general 5e (and dnd more broadly) give the GM absolutely fucking nothing to work with. there are literally no GM-facing mechanical levels other than enemy statblocks (which also, unlike something like Lancer or even fucking 4th Edition, come with no guidance on how to use them or how to assemble combat encounters with them). it's much, much easier to GM a game with GM moves, because then you have an actual set of mechanical levers available to you--and of course, like the aforementioned "Separate them", these levers automatically lend themselves to telling the sort of stories the game advertise for their genre. here's some GM moves from other PBtA systems that, just by seeing them as a mechanical lever, can push the story into the genre and tone directions the game wants to emulate:

Put innocents in danger (Masks, teenage superhero drama)

Reveal an unwelcome truth (Fellowship, high fantasy adventure)

Make honour and shame real (Sagas of the Icelanders, saga-era viking drama)

Bring their gender into it (Night Witches, Soviet airwomen war story)

Make them teach a class (Pigsmoke, magic-school cutthroat academia)

and one of the absolute best things about GM moves (and similar mechanics, like BitD's consequences, or BOB's setting sheet moves) is that because they are clearly delineated and restricted, there's no self-policing. because a dnd 5th edition DM can, rules as written, say at any point "100 ogres appear and beat you to death", they always have to be navigating a series of unspoken social contracts, creating threats but never threats which can win, introducing problems and consequences at a rate that keeps stakes up but is also fundamentally winnable, make everythign feel 'fair'. and dnd players have learned to accept this all as just the table stakes of a GM role, but it doesn't have to be. because all that is game design, and in a better game, that design is taken care of. GM moves say 'look, we've already thought about pacing and fairness, here's the levers we've pre-designed for you to pull, go nuts and tell a story with them'.

so in my opinion PBtA mixed successes represent a lot less onus on the GM to design the game for the designers than anything that happens in 5th edition outside of individual clearly resolvable combat actions--and it's one of the reasons i started having much more fun with TTRPGs once i stopped GMing 5e and realized that other games gave me actual tools and support to work with instead of expecting me to do all that bull shit

[ttrpgcafe]

Heya! TTRPG trick or treat, please! 🎃👻

This one's got a backstory, so stick with me.

When I first got into TTRPGs, I learned about the big 6: D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, Cyberpunk, WoD, and Shadowrun. Of those, I've still, to this day, only played 5, and Shadowrun has remained the odd man out, despite having probably my favorite setting of all of them after Pathfinder. Part of this is its reputation for being a really crunchy game, keeping me from getting players, and part of it was that it's a very crunchy game that explains its rules SO POORLY (in recent editions at least, I'm told 3rd is the best in this department) that I couldn't even really convince my friends to get over the hump because it's hard for ME to grok the rules.

For well over a decade, Shadowrun has been my white whale, always on my shelf, never my table. So I did what any other well meaning TTRPG player does when they have a setting they like but a system for that setting they hate: I looked at every hack on the planet for every other system.

So here's your treat: every Shadowrun hack I've found!

Up first, Runners in the Shadows by Mark Cleveland:

This is a Forged in the Dark hack for the Shadowrun setting that is probably one of the better ones for emulating the "crew going on heists and doing cool shit" vibes that Shadowrun tries really hard to say is its core. I'm a sucker for FitD games in general, I think the system is *so* elegant, and I struggle to find a system more suited for the setting (SR's own rules included) than Blades, so this one has to go at the top.

With that said, there are still plenty more!

I'm going to give 2 PbtA games a shout out here, the first I've played, the second I haven't, but have heard plenty about.

Up first: City of Mist!

"But that's not a shadowrun hack!" I hear you saying behind your screen, and you're almost right, it technically isn't, BUT it's asymptote certainly approaches shadowrun, for my math nerds out there. This is a game about the (literal) power of stories, about struggles against an unseen and unknowable force trying desperately to remove every semblance of magic from your life, and about the yearning to keep your mundane life despite, or maybe in spite of, your magical adventures. City of Mist proper is a fantastic gritty noir urban fantasy game that works wonderfully as the framework for an early 6th world setting with minor tweaks, but it's sequel: Metro Otherscape, leans into the Shadowrun of it all, adding a 3rd axis along which your character can struggle, being "noise". In Otherscape, you're balancing a mundane, magical, technological life, and trying not to let any of those three overwhelm your being. A lot of cyberpunk games try to say that cybernetics reduce your humanity in one way or another, but I think Otherscape does the best job at embodying that balance in a way that isn't deeply ableist in its messaging. It's ALSO the only PbtA game I actually LIKE.

Hot take: I can't stand Moves, they annoy me to no end, and needlessly complicate an otherwise brilliant system. I might make a follow up post if anyone wants to hear my deeply bad take, but for now, just know that I'm a ttrpg heretic, and we can move on.

Otherscape completely does away with moves, and instead just lets the MC and the players decide whatever is most relevant to the action being attempted! It solves almost every problem I've ever had with PbtA games, AND kicks ass as a shadowrun stand-in, so this also deserves a place at or near the top.

Second PbtA game: Shadowrun in The Sprawl. This one is a hack of The Sprawl, a PbtA cyberpunk game in its own right, SRiTS adds the setting and magic of SR to its formula, and that's all I know about either system, due to my aforementioned PbtA-phobia. I've included this one for thoroughness, not because I have any stake in it.

Most of the other hacks I've seen use generic systems like Fate, Savage World, Cypher system, Genesys, and a hero system hack I've heard a bit about but can't find anywhere. All of this is to say that there is a wealth of options for generic systems that try to emulate SR, and most of them are fine. The last game I'm going to talk about though uses its own system, its own setting, and manages to be completely, utterly unique while capturing the vibes of SR so well that I'm still a little in awe at how well it does all of the above. I'm also not 100% certain it's a particularly good game, but the fact that I'm unsure about it should tell you that it's definitely still better than SR proper, because I KNOW that system is bad.

Without further ado: NewEdo

NewEdo is fascinating to me in that it feels like the same jump from Shadowrun that 3rd edition D&D made from 2e, or even the same kind of jump from 3rd to 4th, where you can clearly see the spine of the game it's evolving, but almost every other part of the system has been changed and improved in new, interesting ways that can still be used to tell VERY similar stories, but has its own identity at the same time. I mentioned that City of Mist is Asymptotic to SR earlier, and I stand by that assessment, but I'd say that NewEdo is closer to a parallel line, or a tangent from SR's line, if we're using the same terminology. To get into the nitty gritty, NE uses a system the author describes as "Crunchy lite easily managed", which amounts to a priority system during character creation very similar to the one SR uses, but with each tier you can select having pretty impactful ramifications for your character going forward. The easiest example is the modifications priority, at its top tier, you basically make a mythical creature into robo cop for your character's ancestry, but at its absolute lowest tier, your body actively rejects any and all implants, such that your character will NEVER have implants. On the same note, cyberware is handled REALLY well, with your body only being able to handle so much at a time, but otherwise the only ramification is a "biofeedback" line on your fate card, which I'll get to right now!

Almost every option your character picks gets added to a little personalized random d100 table on your character sheet called the fate card. This includes your character's crit rate, the possibility of a deity intervening on your behalf, or the aforementioned biofeedback line, which briefly fucks you up as you cyberware malfunctions. You get new lines on your fate card through picking certain character options, making impactful decisions during the story, and otherwise fulfilling the express goals of your character. The entire system kind of hinges on the fate card as a mechanic, which is weird, because I don't think I super love it, as it adds additional rolling to an already pretty dice heavy system.

Which brings me to the dice! New edo uses a d10 as its primary die for dice pools when rolling your characteristics like strength, speed, etc, but the rest of the polyhedral family for your skills. (D20 excluded) The skill system is a little funky, but I like it. Basically, each skill has a rank, which indicates how many dice it has, but each rank is assigned a die, each having a different cost associated with it. So my swordsmanship could be rank 4, but what that really means is that I've got 1d6, 2d4, and a d8 that I get to add to my strength rolls every time I attack with a sword. As far as resolution, you total all of your dice together to try and hit a target number. I don't have the table handy, but it's something like 15 for a moderately challenging task, and up to 40 for a nearly impossible task. I dislike addition in this context because math at the table usually slows things down, but it looks like you're probably only rolling 2-5 dice at a time at the beginning, which isn't *that* bad.

You'll notice that the two major mechanics I've mentioned so far have received pretty luke-warm responses from me, and that sounds like I hate the system, but those aren't that makes me like (\love?) this system is the back end, the choices that happen during character creation, and the things that those choices let you do. Every skill is attached to feats that unlock at different skills, magic is a skill, and its feats unlock better relationships with the Kami in your repertoire (magic is up next, I promise) and your class (path, they call it) doubles as a way to tie your character to the world, with each being associated with an in world faction which gives your character an immediate stake in the world and their community. It's a lot, but it all comes together to make something greater than the sum of its parts.

The last thing I want to talk about is the magic system, because I found it deeply interesting, as it's one of the very few skill based magic systems I've interacted with, and one of my favorites on a narrative level. Instead of spells or spell schools, your character instead develops relationships with Kami, and each new "order" or "type" of Kami your character gets access to represents them finding out how to supplicate, make an offering, or otherwise convince a given Kami to do a certain effect. If you have a relationship with the fire Kami (that's plural, not singular), then your character has learned that their local fire Kami really like a certain type of hot bun, so they offer them that hot bun after a scene where they invoked those kami, to maintain their relationship. Mechanically, this works instantaneously, you simply make a roll on your "Shinpi" skill, invoke whatever "rote" you want to use, and the relationship building is left for the GM and player to work out at the table.

(That's the last I have to say on the game itself, but I would ask anyone who has read the game and is more intimately familiar with Japanese culture to tell me if the game feels respectful to that culture, because I truly don't know, and the book doesn't list any sensitivity consultants. The author is Canadian, but spent many years sailing to and from Japan as a professional sailor, so idk. )

I guess the moral to this post, if there is one, is to acknowledge when a system or setting has faults, but learn from them, and don't ignore the good or cool stuff that's there! It might inspire you to make some amazing shit like City of Mist, Metro Otherscape, or New Edo, all of which, their relationship to Shadowrun aside, are fantastic games in their own right! (NewEdo is still up in the air, but it has its teeth in me, and that has to count for something)

That ends my trick or treat, thanks for asking!

[arnamantle]

Can a house be haunted even while it burns down?

A not-so-hypothetical question in a world with Embergeists – spirits so mournful or vindictive that their very ectoplasm combusts, setting their haunts ablaze. Players enter the scene as a brigade of Burnaways – mercenaries who must act as fire fighters, detectives, and ghost hunters to stop the Embergeists by means of force or empathy.

A near-future retropunk setting and “grimhope” tone puts focus on narrative growth, contrasted with a unique “level-down” advancement mechanic in a lightweight, accessible system geared toward one-shots and short campaigns.  

WHAT MAKES BURNAWAY UNIQUE?

🔥 Burnaway’s mechanics are easy to pick up for first-timers, while still offering depth and detail in skilled hands. The hit-based system allows the use of any type of dice, so bring your favorite mix to the table!

🔥 Each mission is a unique puzzle with many different solutions, though not all of them are satisfying, and the puzzle is constantly on fire. Characters’ decisions are the greatest determiner of their fate, with no railroading to hamper their actions (or to protect them from fatal disaster).

🔥 Who said anything about getting stronger? BURNAWAY eschews traditional TTRPG power up mechanics. In a line of work where retirement or death are the only prospects, it’s up to the characters to process their own Grief and avoid suffering permanent Burns at the end of each session.

🔥 Acknowledgement of hope is just as important as the acceptance of Grief. Characters may build Bonds with each other, relationships forged in literal fire, and gain mechanical benefits from their evolving interpersonal dynamics.

🔥 BURNAWAY adapts to how your group wants to game, providing a full ruleset for traditional, GM-lead or collaborative GM-less play.

KICKSTARTER FUNDING NOW!

READ MORE ON OUR SITE!

[anim-ttrpgs]

Our first official original TTRPG, Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is planned for kickstarter launch late 2023/early 2024!

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is an original, fully fledged, 200-page 2d6 TTRPG from The Agency of Narrative Intrigue and Mystery inspired by The X-Files, Kolchak: The Nightstalker, and much more!

Eureka features investigation mechanics that let players take initiative, use their characters’ unique strengths to find clues, and deduce conclusions themselves rather than to just walking into a room and roll Investigate.

Failed Rolls are not the End!

The Eureka! mechanic accumulates points throughout the adventure that can be used to help prevent investigators from getting totally stuck, but also a reward investigators for solving the mystery without ever getting stumped, because these points can be saved for life-or-death situations instead!

Tactical Combat!

High-stakes realistic combat can end lives in seconds through deep strategy that encourages careful thinking and allows for complex maneuvers. Thoughtful positioning, understanding of one’s surroundings, and having the right weapon for the job play as much of a role in victory as a character’s stats, if not more, which is good, because most of these PCs will not be larger-than-life action heroes!

Roleplay-driven Mechanics, and Mechanic-driven Roleplay!

Player characters’ personalities and ideals determine many of their gameplay mechanics, giving each character a totally unique way to play through Eureka! This won’t get confusing though, as all of these different mechanics use the same underlying systems that are easy to understand! Changing characters won’t require you to completely relearn the game!

Man-eating Monsters Hiding in Plain Sight!

 As investigators face off against metaphorical (or sometimes literal) monsters, the rare investigator may literally be a monster themselves, and keeping it secret from the other players while having to sate their sinister hunger is a game of intrigue all its own.

Extreme Versatility!

Eureka is designed to be able to run (just about) any adventure module set between about 1850 and the present day with hardly any adjustments to either the system or the module, no matter what system that module was originally made for! Investigation, action, survival-horror, you name it, Eureka can run it!

Player-driven investigation, a rewarding system for solving mysteries themselves, realistic high-stakes combat, gameplay determined by roleplay, and inter-party deception are all features you can look forward to in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.

Launch is still a ways off, but it doesn’t hurt to get the word out early!

Follow this blog to stay up to date on our launch preparations!

[theresattrpgforthat]

Hi folks, it’s Mint.

I’m on a mini-vacation this week so I’m going to be releasing some recommendation posts for things that aren’t related to requests (easy to queue), and I’ll be back to doing regular rec posts when I get back!

THEME: Mysteries.

I love love love mysteries. I think mysteries might be one of my favourite things to do in a TTRPG; presenting players with a problem and watching them piece together a solution is so fun! There’s a number of different ways to run mystery games - maybe you will find a helpful new tool in the list below! You can also look at the folder of mystery games that I’ve compiled on Itch, if you want more.

The Lurking Fear, by Lyme.

The Lurking Fear is a free, lightweight, simulationist investigative horror ttrpg in the style of classic horror tabletop games. You can use it to run most systemless horror adventures or, with a little work, most adventures for popular horror games.

The Lurking Fear is an exercise in running investigative games through an OSR framework, complete with rolling randomly for your stats, weapons that have dice attached for damage, and a roll-under mechanic to determine whether or not you succeed at any given task. Characters have a Stability track and an Energy track: Stability is lost when they fail to bolster themselves in a stressful situation, while Energy can be lost when you are subjected to paranormal consequences. The game has rules for magic (spells found in tomes), but no spell list, so you’ll likely need to write your own spells or get inspiration from other OSR-style games. Spells are costly, time-consuming, and cost Energy to cast, which I think will make successes feel hard-won and satisfying.

If you want a challenging game that has just the bare bones so that you can scaffold over it, you might want to take a look at The Lurking Fear.

Public Access, by The Gauntlet.

A roleplaying game of analog horror, based on the Brindlewood Bay mystery system!

Public Access is a tabletop roleplaying game about a group of people in 2004—the Deep Lake Latchkeys—who find themselves investigating strange mysteries in and around the town of Deep Lake, New Mexico. In the ‘80s and early ‘90s, Deep Lake was the home of a notorious public access television station called TV Odyssey, the history and fate of which—the station literally disappeared—is the source of much speculation in certain corners of the internet. As the Latchkeys conduct their investigations in Deep Lake, they will become increasingly aware of the central role TV Odyssey plays in everything that’s going on, and will have to face whatever terrible truth lies at the heart of the infamous station...

This one is for the horror fans, especially if you like found footage-style horror. You’ll be playing a bunch of adults returning to their hometown to try and find answers about the disappearance of a television station. Similar to other Carved from Brindlewood games, Public Access uses a day/night cycle, will give you certain moves and repercussions unique to the mode of play you’re currently in. If you like collaboratively creating a mystery as a table, you might want to check out this game.

Suspect 2e, by Arcane Atlas Games.

SUSPECT is a catch-em out game of character creation, memory and mystery. A crime has been committed, and you have to work together to create and then solve it. In Suspect the players take it in turns to play as the investigator and the suspects. The investigator asks questions and the suspects answer, building an ever more complicated web of events. As the suspects slip up and make mistakes the investigator challenges them until they finally accuse the culprit.

This is a great option if you want to try out a duet mystery game, with one person playing the Investigator, and the other playing the Suspects. Each role has special abilities and rules. For example, the Investigator is the only one who has access to the timeline of events, allowing them to sort through the clues and rule out false leads. The Suspects player can use a special ability to shift the Investigator’s suspicion onto a different character, introducing new facts to complicate the case. The game feels like it would be great at replicating Columbo-type stories, with the Investigator slowly going over the facts until they find the only solution that makes sense.

The creator is also collecting different mystery cases that you can play through for this game, which can be found in the Suspect Cases collection. If you love procedural detective fiction, (or maybe if you want to create a mystery for people to play) you might want to check out Suspect 2e!

Junk Noir, by JadeRavens.

You are a malfunctioning robot detective solving mysteries in a noir retro-future.

Junk Noir is a cooperative, zero-prep, GM-less mystery game for 2 or more players.  Players share control of Tracer as the titular robo-sleuth investigates mysteries, visits Locations, meets Characters, finds Clues, and triggers Events. In Junk Noir, you'll dramatize scenes, form connections, make moves, and play to see what happens! 

When you reach a consensus, roll the dice to test your theory. Maybe your theory is correct and you have one last scene to prove it and risk it all! Or maybe your theory is just that, and things are more complicated than you thought. It's time to challenge your assumptions and continue your investigation…

Junk Noir uses similar mechanics to Brindlewood Bay or Paranormal Inc, allowing the players to generate the mystery as they play. However, the game is meant to be run without a GM, all the players embodying the persona of a single robot detective. If you like the noir genre and you want to add a little bit of robot flair, you might want to check out Junk Noir.

Let Justice Be Done, by Mynar Lenahan.

Let Justice Be Done is a one-shot murder mystery game inspired by Brindlewood Bay, Eat The Reich, and Blades in the Dark.

In it, you play ingenious Consultant Detectives who use their skills of deduction to discover (and invent) Clues to frame the wealthy for crimes they absolutely didn't commit. But be careful: If your suspects start to figure out exactly what you're up to, you could find yourself in a world of trouble that they absolutely will not let you escape…

This is a delightful twist on the typical murder mystery, allowing you to construct a false crime as a form of revenge. Pull from a variety of colourful backgrounds to add dice to your roll, using a resolution system similar to Forged in the Dark games to achieve success. This is a great homage to the Benoit Blanc movies, especially Glass Onion. If you bought the TTRPGs for Palestine bundle, you already own this game!

BubbleGumshoe, by Evil Hat.

Someone stole my kid brother’s bike…Someone sabotaged the pep rally…Someone destroyed the Homecoming queen’s reputation…

The world is full of mysteries. It’s up to your group of intrepid teen sleuths to solve them. In BubbleGumshoe, players step into the shoes of high-schoolers solving mysteries in a modern American small town. Discover clues, solve problems, and throw down with enemies in this streamlined RPG based on the GUMSHOE system.

BubbleGumshoe is for the Nancy Drew lovers, mixing the drama of teenage social life with (typically) mundane mysteries. It is built off of the GUMSHOE system, which ensures that players will always find the clues necessary to figuring out the mystery, but rewards successes with more specific or helpful information.

In BubbleGumshoe, your relationships are an integral resource, which you can leverage to get access to locations you might not typically be able to go, knowledge from various experts, and favours from people who like you, or at the very least, owe you one. If you like tropes that involve leveraging social capital in order to bring local troublemakers to justice, you might like BubbleGumshoe.

Myths & Mysteries, by CrlBox.

This is a diceless and rules-light ttrpg.  Encounters receive a difficulty number, which will be determined by cards. Skills are used to reach the difficulty number, without rolling dice. It is just a matter of how much you will exhaust yourself to succeed…

The system doesn't rely on stats, which makes it very conversion friendly.

This is a genre-agnostic ttrpg, allowing you to explore eldritch horror, fantasy intrigue, or Scooby-Doo style adventures. Using a deck of cards, you build your hand and use your cards to determine whether your not you can succeed. Your character has a few things to make certain actions easier: an occupation, which gives you a +1 for any task related to it, and skills, which can be used and/or discarded to give you a temporary bonus.

The entire game can be printed on a brochure, which makes this game easy to travel with and probably also easy to pull out and teach for a one-shot or pick-up game. If you want simple mysteries that you alter to fit whatever genre you like, you might want to check out Myths & Mysteries.

Other Mystery Games I’ve Recommended

Eureka: Urban Investigative TTRPG, by ANIM.

Brindlewood Bay and The Between, by The Gauntlet.

Unlikely Investigators, by Luciano Correa

EYE: A Murder Mystery Generator, by Zak Makes Games.

Fedora Noir, by lessthanthreegames.