#Apocalypse Keys

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

Trans made TTRPGs

Due to… recent events that I would rather not talk about, today's post is a highlight of different tabletop games made by trans peeps! These games are fantastic in their own right, of course, but you can also know that they were made by incredibly cool and attractive people

(Also, these are flyover descs of the game, they'll get more in-depth singular posts later, this is because I am lazy)

Perfect Draw is a phenomenal card game TTRPG that was funded in less than a day on backerkit, it's incredibly fun and has simple to learn hard to master rules for creating custom cards, go check it out!

Songs for the dusk is fucking good, pardon my language, but it's a damn good post apocalyptic game about building community in a post-capitalist-post-apocalypse-post-whatever world. do yourself a favor and if you only check out one game in this list, check this one out, its a beautiful game.

Flying Circus is set in a WW1 inspired fantasy setting full of witches, weird eldritch fish people (who are chill as hell), cults, dead nobility, and other such things. It's inspired by Porco Rosso primarily but it has other touchstones.

Wanderhome is a game about being cute little guys going on a silly adventure and growing as the seasons change, its GMless and very fun

https://weregazelle.itch.io/armour-astir Armour Astir has been featured in here before but its so damn good I had to post it twice. AA demonstrates a fundamental knowledge of the themes of mech shows in a way that very few other games show, its awesome

Kitchen Knightmares is… more of a LARP but its still really dang cool, its about being a knight serving people in a restaurant, its played using discord so its incredibly accessible

https://grimogre.itch.io/michtim Michtim is a game about being small critters protecting their forest from nasty people who wish to harm it, not via brutal violence (sadly) but via friendship and understanding (which is a good substitute to violence)

ok this technically doesn't count but I'm putting it here anyways cuz its like one of my favorite ttrpgs of all time TSL is a game about baring your heart and dueling away with people who you'll probably kiss 10 minutes later, its very very fanfic-ey and inspired by queer narratives. I put it here because its made by a team, and the expansion has a setting specifically meant to be a trans "allegory", so I'll say it counts, honestly just go check it out its good shit

https://willuhl.itch.io/mystic-lilies

Mystic Lillies is a game inspired by ZUN's Touhou Project about witches dueling powerful foes, each other, and themselves. Mystic Lillies features rapid character creation and a unique diceless form of rolling which instead uses a standard playing card deck.

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/141424/nobilis-the-game-of-sovereign-powers-2002-edition I… want to do a more general overview on Jenna K as an important figure in indie RPG design, but for now just know that Nobilis is good

https://temporalhiccup.itch.io/apocalypse-keys Apocalypse Keys is a game inspired by Doom Patrol, Hellboy, X-men, and other comics about monstrousness being an allegory for disenfranchisement. Apocalypse Keys is also here because its published by Evilhat so its very cleaned up and fancy but I love how the second you check out the dev's other stuff you can tell they are a lot more experimental with their stuff, this is not a critique, it is in fact a compliment

Fellowship! I've posted about this game before, but it is again here. Fellowship has a fun concept that it uses very well mostly, its a game about defining your character's culture, and I think that's really really cool

Voidheart Symphony is a really cool game about psychic rebellion in a city that really does not like you, the more you discover for yourself the better

Panic at the Dojo is a phenomenal ttrpg based on what the Brazilian would call "Pancadaria", which basically means, fucking other's people shit up. Character Creation is incredibly open and free, meaning that many character concepts are available

Legacy 2e is a game about controlling an entire faction's choices across time, its very fun

remember to be kind to a trans person today! oh also don't even try to be transphobic in the reblogs or replies, you will be blocked so fast your head will spin

[inspiredrawaw]

My TTRPG character Nova Aries I drew while playing with my friends last night!! She’s a black hole whose event horizon is the shape of a human :]

[prokopetz]

Flipping through Apocalypse Keys for the first time, what immediately strikes me is that a lot of playbooks have moves where rolling too high can result in accidentally spawning additional monsters, who will implicitly or explicitly go on to become significant antagonists. While this is perfectly consistent with the game's genre, suddenly I'm picturing a group where – whether by collusion or coincidence – every single player character is built with one of those moves as their thematic cornerstone. The poor GM has a whole arc planned, but it never gets off the ground because the party keeps generating new monsters of the week in an endless chain reaction of fumbled rolls. "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly"-ass campaign.

[summoningcirclepress]

We're so excited to have Meg and Vince Baker AND Rae Nedjadi (@temporalhiccup) together to talk Powered by the Apocalpyse for Splat 5!

[paladinbaby]

division: guys who suck

[id: two square portraits of apocalypse keys characters from the thigh up. the first is of julian (she/her) on a dark red background. she’s a slightly older woman in an off the shoulder red evening dress. the dress matches the background colour. she has dark brown hair greying at the temples pulled into a low bun. she’s holding a champagne flute. She has freckles, a large scar across the left side of her face and bloody knuckles. she wears a rectangular mens watch. the second is of cynthia (she/it) a pale young with five eyes on her face. they form an arch, her eyes have black sclera and yellow irises. she has chin length blonde hair, half up in space buns with yellow bows. she wears a pink crop top and tiny blue shorts. she has a floral tattoo on her thigh. she’s holding a cigarette and the smoke from it forms a pattern of wavy lines in the background. end id.]

[hmooncreates]

belated apocalypse keys post

APOCALYPSE KEYS IS A VERY FUN GAME

i played The Summoned playbook - aka Cynthia - aka disaster 21 year old

(game DMed by @theresattrpgforthat and fellow players include @psychhound and @paladinbaby along with someone who does not have tumblr)

i’m not super good at explaining mechanics without like. showing someone the book but i wanna go over some highlights as a person who before this had only played; 1) dnd, 2) games with the people who designed them, and 3) solo games. i had read other games but never played them.

apocalypse keys was a bigger system where the worldbuilding was very collaborative and i loved that!! obviously mint did a lot of prep, but there were also a lot of spaces that allowed for player collaboration and exploration! mint also did a good job of directing and calling on people so it wasn’t one person (often me, tbqh) answering all the questions.

(i wouldn’t necessarily suggest this game for a beginner dm but it was leather friendly)

i liked the bond system and exploring that was a ton of fun!!!! we all made guys who suck bc that’s our brand

now onto the story! we got the chance to fight a library and i’m such a magical library bitch. the librarians is one of my fav shows. the game felt very cinematic and i think the mechanics leaned into that but so did mint and the other players!!!

cynthia very purposefully got tempted into becoming a harbinger of doom and i fucking loved it. i love strife and conflict and romance!!!

@psychhound played a character who was there when cynthia was summoned and they had a complex father-daughter relationship that was very very good

another pc was 15 and was majorly crushing on cynthia but cynthia was like. oh. baby. and that was such a good point of conflict of like. cynthia doing the right thing and it still breaking this teenager’s heart.

@paladinbaby played a character who had weird old people shit going on with luka’s character and that was fun as hell to witness.

this was my first time having safety tools so Directly used in a game and i def recommend them. in my home games we have each said our triggers and squicks so we don’t like. trample on em and ive used boundary and safety tools but we used them very explicitly in this game and that was def the best call!

this is a very long rambly game reaction (not review) because i cant stop thinking about these characters

(even in apocalypse keys i was essentially playing a support caster)

[temporalhiccup]

Intimacy in TTRPGS

(art by @geezmarty)

It's been a while since I geeked out about ttrpg design and I thought I'd dive into it! Some time ago there was discussion about intimacy and romance in games, and I wanted to talk about that today.

In particular this is about the Reveal Your Heart move in Apocalypse Keys and how it's a response to games that came before it.

Above is the Comfort or Support move from Masks: A New Generation. It's representative of what a lot of similar Powered by the Apocalypse moves are like (and many PbtA games since Masks have emulated this too).

In my experience with Masks it created a lot of lovely drama, "on a hit, they hear you" suggested that on a miss, they didn't. This often lead to delicious moments filled with angst: misunderstood feelings, good intentions not being enough, or being interrupted at the worst possible moment!

My main issue with this move and those like it (and it came up with various groups and players) was that most of the time it's hard for a player to correctly guess what would actually comfort or support another character in the moment.

It was also interesting that this was a move that was mostly about the person you were trying to comfort or support! Like most PbtA games, you're statistically more likely to roll a 7-9, which meant the target of the move was the only one who benefited mechanically.

This lead to a lot of awkward play. If we were lucky, the target of the move would speak up and offer a clear alternative "Oh that wouldn't actually comfort my character, he doesn't like being hugged or touched. I think what he'd want to hear in this moment is that he matters to you, that you think he's an important member of the team."

But most of the time something would go wrong somewhere - the target player wouldn't feel comfortable with speaking up, the triggering player would insist that this is what their character would do, etc. So the move would effectively not trigger, or we'd pretend it would and everyone would be awkward.

It just reminded me too much of my own personal experiences, where I would have to pretend I was happy with someone trying to comfort me because they had good intentions and it didn't matter if I was actually comforted or not. Seeing it play out, again and again, in Masks was something that always made me feel uncomfortable.

The trigger includes keywords like "offer" (suggesting acceptance is not guaranteed), "in a way that could be meaningful to them" reminds a player to place the target of the move's preferences first. Both results require the target to "open up to you", if they don't, the rest of the move just doesn't trigger.

Thirsty Sword Lesbians, which has a lot of Masks DNA in it, addresses this in an interesting way. It spells out a few things by refining the trigger and response of Emotional Support.

It felt a lot better in play, but for Apocalypse Keys and my own design preferences I wanted to shift the move into a different direction!

Reveal Your Heart (like every move in the game) taps into the relevant central themes. In this case the PCs are Omen-Class monsters who struggle with staying in control and handling difficult emotions (as well as the horrifying truth that they may become a Harbinger one day, and bring about the apocalypse instead of stopping it!).

The trigger here is dependent on a revelation of some kind, what are you revealing to another? This suggests vulnerability, or at least an innate truth of self. "try to sincerely connect to another" replaces the awkward and difficult task of trying to figure out what would comfort another person. This is a move that prioritizes an attempt towards intimacy, whatever that may look like. This is usually much easier to figure out, the question then becomes "how vulnerable are you going to be in this moment?"

Like in most Apocalypse Keys moves, I wanted each narrative choice to lead to a mechanical reflection. This further supports the idea that the narrative and emotional are mechanical and structural truths in the game - roleplaying and characterization are not separate aspects, they are connected to the act of playing. It also gives the players room to interpret what that means, "they gave you hope", what does that hope look like to you? How does it quell and calm the Harbinger that shifts and aches in your soul?

But! In general, I love how much intimacy and romance have flourished in the indie ttrpg space! It's definitely improved my play experience, and it's something I love to design around in my own games!

Essentially this move offers the players the room to name the feelings they have and lay bare the nature of their relationship. By the end of the move there's usually a sense that we've learned something essential about the relationship between the characters. No matter how small, it bears significance.

Many of the moves in Apocalypse Keys focus on relationships and intimacy of some kind, it's just very very queer that way.

[moofahdrome]

In regard to your pin post, what games do you like to play? I'm always a sucker for hearing about other tabletops people enjoy.

Ooooooh thank you for asking!!! I'm a big sucker for easy to run character focused games like Thirsty Sword Lesbians or Masks: A New Generation, but I also love love love games with potential for really cool and creative combat like Eidolon: Become Your Best Self, Gubat Banwa, and LANCER.

My primary experience is with Powered by the Apocalypse games, but I'm looking to expand my horizons a bit in the future! Blades in the Dark is super cool, but other Forged in the Dark games appeal to me a lot, especially Brinkwood - The Blood of Tyrants, a super cool game about organizing a revolution against colonialist capitalist vampires.

There's really so many amazing games by queer indie creators out there - Apocalypse Keys recently had its full release, as did EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER the TTRPG! There's really something for everyone. I really need to play more Ryuutama for its lovely adventure vibes, Hard Wired Island for a return to true anticapitalist cyberpunk, as well as Flying Circus for amazingly accurate WWI-era plane action in a miyazaki-inspired setting! Other stuff I've had for a while but need to play are Monster Care Squad, Heart: The City Beneath, and Comrades, a Revolutionary RPG.

There's also plenty of nice, charming, slower paced games as well. Wanderhome is a beautiful pastoral journey game, where everyone comes together to heal a land and experience wonders. Our Traveling Home is inspired by Howl's Moving Castle and has everyone play a unique role as a queer found family. Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast just released, and it's an amazing episodic experience packed full of beautiful content!

One of my favorite game creators is Dinoberry Press, creator of fantastic titles like Justicar, What Waits Beneath, and GUN&SLINGER, a cool 2-3 player game where one person plays a magical gun and the other their haunted wielder. It's got a couple great extra modes of play, too, like SWORD&BEARER or MECH&PILOT !

And there's even more amazing games in development. Dinoberry's You're in Space and Everything's Fucked just funded, as did HELLPIERCERS: TACTICAL HARROWING ACTION. Guns Blazing and Wetrunners are really close to being funded, too, check them out! Some other great games that aren't fully complete but you can play right now are ICON, Bloodbeam Badlands, Red West, and In the Time of Monsters, all of which are some of the COOLEST things I have ever seen.

Feel free to ask more questions about any of these! I love talking about them and I'm thrilled to see interest in indie ttrpgs!!!

[ostrichmonkey-games]

Oh hey! The stretch goals for Apocalypse Keys are fully released now! This means you can go check out the new playbook I wrote: The Chained.

It is a pretty wild playbook that's all about creating bonds (for good and for ill). It also features a starting move that takes up a whole spread, whoops. You can do some truly wild stuff with this playbook.

Plus there's everything else. Two more playbooks, more DIVISION branches, characters, factions, harbingers, a mystery written by Kieron Gillan???

Absolutely wild. Everyone did such amazing work, and it's so cool to have been a part of it!

You can check out the pdf below!

[geezmarty]

more of Bambi, my apocalypse keys player character 🌞 (part 1 here)

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

Guillermo Del Toro's Apocalypse World

Touchstones: RIPD, Hellboy

Genre: Mystery, Monsters

What is this game?: Apocalypse Keys is about being a group of strange monsters solving mysteries in order to find the apocalypse keys and doors to stop the end of the world

How's the gameplay?: Apocalypse Keys runs in the standard PBTA framework, with a core difference of punishing overly high rolls by having your character feed into their darkness if they overextend their powers, Playbooks represent the character's origins, for example have they been transformed, summoned, are they a shade of the dead? etc. Another core mechanic are Ruin moves, which always succeed but tick up your ruin counter, if it fills up you could end up becoming the very harbingers you fight against. Apocalypse Keys' mechanics are generally pretty clever and understand the core tenet of PBTA, that being increasing drama

What's the setting (If any) like?: Apocalypse Keys puts the cast in a government agency whose aim is to contain Apocalypse Doors and Apocalypse Keys, strange mystical items which when combined can lead to the end of the world as we know it, meanwhile players must also fight Harbingers, people hunting for the apocalypse keys to bring on the apocalypse. It's a fun setting with a lot of room for interesting and strange plotlines, and the modules that come with the game truly show it, ranging from strange murder mysteries, Control style adventures, and other strange horrors

What's the tone?: Apocalypse Keys puts you into a world where everyone actively hates or shuns your cast from normal society and asks you to grin and bear it, characters are often toxic and float in and out of shitty relationships, but you will always at least have eachother

Session length: Apocalypse Keys' slightly complex tone compared to other PBTAs lends itself to longer 2-4 hour sessions

Number of Players: 3-6 is recommended

Malleability: Apocalypse Keys has many mechanics related to its setting, but it shouldn't be TOO hard to hack it into slightly different settings

Resources: Apocalypse Keys, as an Evil Hat game, has a ton of very well made Roll20 resources as well as non-roll20 for those who prefer that, a lot of industry standard stuff 

Apocalypse Keys is all i could really ask for in a Hellboy inspired TTRPG, its weird, gritty, and most of all, queer as fuck

[open-hearth-rpg]

#RPGaDay2024

RPG You’d Like to See on TV 

I always give this answer for this, I’ve been giving this answer for years: somebody needs to make a #iHunt TV series. Really, seriously, right now. 

We’ve already had lots of classic monster-hunting series: Buffy, Supernatural, Grimm, izombie, etc. It’s a tried and true formula– especially when that’s mixed up with messy lore. An #iHunt series could have that, with an outside looking in approach. 

We have hunters but they don’t know much about their supernatural quarry. What they get is contradictory and incomplete. The people who do know probably chase the same quarry or know that the info has value. And frankly shit shouldn’t make sense. Over time our protagonists should be putting together their own sense of this world– only to have it overturned by some new encounter. 

That’s the monster/target side of things. The more interesting side is the gig economy of monster-hunting and what that that does to our heroes(?). They’re desperate and hungry. The system’s an even bigger foe than that which they pursue. Lots of room for great character development, real life tensions, and moral quandaries. It’s also a sharp comment on tech bro culture, the rapacious nature of gigging, and the drive to the bottom of capitalism. 

Make our characters have messy lives tied up with some supernaturals– love, sex, family disputes. It could be dynamite. Some recent media have glanced off the edge of this. Day Shift, for example, has an exploitative hunter company, but it really avoids engaging with any real critique. Any show should be messy, with a non-comedic version of the vibes of something like Los Espookys, Chambers, or 30 Coins. 

If forced to give another answer, probably an Apocalypse Keys animated series– maybe with the vibe of Suicide Squad isekai. I think that could be dynamite. I would also dearly love to watch a show based on Danger! Unexploded Spell. A prestige mini-series of that would be incredible– magic, desperate characters, and constant danger. The Magicians meets The Hurt Locker.

[aitze]

Heresy, my character from a campaign of Apocalypse Keys. A shadow demon that has become holy, Heresy is based on the idea that if angels can fall, demons should be able to rise.

[thegiftofgabes]

The Gift of Dice - Intro Post

I am Gabriel Caetano (they/them), and I am a queer, Latine parent, TRPG creator, audio producer, and game facilitator (aka GM) from Brazil.

Roleplaying Games

I make tabletop Roleplaying Games, as well as TTRPG-adjacent experiences.

I like fantasy, science fantasy, and weird fantasy the most and I have been more and more invested in looking at games as enablers of social experimentation and questioning.

I like to say that every game I make is a product of excellent taste and developing skill.

You can find my games at https://thegiftofdice.itch.io/

Indie Games Facilitator for Hire

I run and facilitate (aka GM) roleplaying games as a gig.

I have over 100 session under my belt, and growing, and a large catalogue of indie, alternative games to facilitate for players anywhere out there in the world, including Masks, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, Nibiru, Apocalypse Keys, Noctis Labyrinth, Troika!, Blades in the Dark, CBR+PNK, and many more.

You can browse through the dates I setup, or make a custom request.

Politics and Ethics

All TTRPG content has a price tag, except when I think it shouldn't, and all of them should have alternate methods of access for anyone who does not enjoy the privilege of earning dollars, euros, pounds, and other hegemon currencies.

Yet, non-white people, non-het, and non cis-male people anywhere who cannot afford to buy anything I make without putting their safety and well-being financially are welcome to get my stuff for free, one way or another.

I also offer seats for free or at a greatly reduced fee to people in the Global South, where the dollar exchange would make access to my game sessions absolutely crushing.

None of the content I create is compatible with Hasbro or Paizo products, or products by any company or individual that shares their ethics and predatory approach to industrializing an art form, on principle.

Additionally I do not use or rely on artificially generated content to create my games or run my sessions.

Game Design Principles

I've come across this game design manifesto and I've decided to adopt it for my own game design as best as I can and let it evolve as I grow as a game designer and writer.

against coercion: a game design manifesto by JPLeBreton

let players wonder about things and trust them to find answers;

connect players with patterns they find intrinsically fulfilling;

never treat a number going up as an inherently positive or meaningful even;

teach respect for the autonomy and boundaries of all things;

posit alternatives to fantasies of accumulation and extraction;

do not think of emotional responses as something you extract from players;

produce and distribute ethically;

aspire to more than escape.

Whether I'll succeed or fail at following these principles, or even how they will evolve over time, all I can say is let's play to find out.

Kindly, Gabriel Caetano

[monsterfactoryfanfic]

My latest essay is about Apocalypse Keys by @temporalhiccup (Rae Nedjadi)!! Reading through its moves and playbooks, I was hit with the overwhelming sense that this game wanted me to want to belong, in a way that really hit me hard in a lot of weird, personal ways. I hope this video does justice to the themes of exclusion, diaspora, queerness, and the constant and all-important struggle to save our own individual worlds, the ones we build with the people we love, that this game evokes.

Transcript here.

[dungeonofthedragon]

TTRPGs About: Playing Monsters!

Delicious, fulfilling rpgs where you get to play as a monster. I have already done a separate post on vampires, but here's the best of the rest!

Apocalypse Keys by Evil Hat

I often call this one 'my favourite game I have never played.' One day! Play as 'omen class' monsters with the potential to end the world, who struggle against doing so while taking down monsters who actually are causing an apocalypse. Be frightening! Be vulnerable! Bond with the only others who can hope to understand you! It's so many things I love in one beautiful, Powered by the Apocalypse package.

My favourite playbook is The Hungry: a monster which yearns for intimacy but also very much eats people.

No Sacrifice Without Blood by hyphenartist

What if everyone was playing The Hungry? This game is kind of like that. Except you're not trying to save the world- you're just trying to catch a warm (blooded) meal and survive! At least you have each other.

Gods and Monsters by Evil Hat

This game runs on the Fate system. It requires special dice called fudge dice, but that's nothing online dice rollers can't deal with! In Gods and Monsters, players take on the rolls of deities in a young world. They must be careful not to become monsters as they shape the world around them.