#Grant Howitt

[herecomesthementalmeltdown]

[area420]

welcome to orc borg city USA

[cookiecrumbconundrum]

six months since || just another day, thank god

and i am glad, so deeply glad, that six months since the worst day it is just a normal day. i feel normal. i am on meds now. i am happier. i am in therapy. and i am no longer in the space. a thousands times happier and a thousand times more stable. i do things that make it easier for me to move through the world instead of just pushing through. it is another day and tomorrow will be another days and those days will bleed into a future.

when i was done dying, dan deacon | tired, ramón casas | “letter to violet dickinson”, virginia woolf | interior, model reading, edward hopper | sand and foam, kahlil gibran | burn it down, brian luong |tim kavanagh | grant howitt | the aeneid, virgil | jujutsu kaisen, gege akutami |undertale | nickie zimov | please stay, lucy dacus | suzanne siegel | rhythm of war, brandon sanderson  | stranger things, matt duffer & ross duffer | letter to an old poet, boygenius | sower at sunset, vincent van gogh | oathbringer, brandon sanderson | everything everywhere all at once, daniel kwan & daniel scheinert | once a lady told me, nikki giovanni | poet’s loft, david hettinger | kurt vonnegut | downtown express 72nd st. station, subway, new york, 1977, willy spiller | thanK you aIMee, taylor swift | daughters of the dust, julie dash | loose lips, kimya dawson | vincent van gogh | letters to vera, vladimir nabokov

[codassential]

More Weird Stats Please

One of the things that I love about non-D&D/Pathfinder TTRPGs is the propensity too make very specific, highly evocative, and extremely funny stats. Grant Howitt's One pagers are great examples of this like honey heist only has two stats: "bear" and "crime" which

Is easy to understand and use, especially for new TTRPG players

Encourages the players to think within the constraints of acting as an inconsistently intelligent wild animal (something they may not be used to)

immediately communicates the tone of the system

Makes me laugh

This isn't just for systems designed for one shots, Golden Sky Stories is a system where you play as a shapeshifting animal called a henge solving problems for humans in a nearby town. GSS has four stats: "henge," "animal," "adult," and "child," the first two used for your animal form and the second two used in human form to imitate their behaviors. I don't think I've played another system with any of those four stats, but they do such a good job of putting a player in the right frame of reference to tell the kind of stories GSS is trying to tell.

There's a reason why every PBTA system makes slight tweaks to apocalypse world's "cool, hard, hot, sharp, wierd," there's real power to the specific name that you use to describe a character's qualities. A Monster of the Week character with +2 charm, +1 wierd, and -1 cool gives me a much more evocative picture of how a character acts then "18 charisma" ever could.

obv there are benefits to the dnd str/dex/con/int/wis/cha spread, but whenever I open an RPG and see a stat named "grink" or somethin my heart is set aflutter

[rqgender]

Today's gender is a disembodied tit.

[baddywronglegs]

People who've played Honey Heist:

I've been thinking of a game about Goblin Energy. I don't need to explain Goblin Energy to Tumblr. But the idea is that the characters' Goblin Energy is an attribute that increases and potentially decreases over the course of the game.

Does this sound like something Honey Heist's core mechanic already handles? If not, what would have to change about it?

Has anyone used Honey Heist's mechanics for anything other than a heist and how well did that go? Or ported it in as a subsystem of another system? If so, how did that go?

[haveyouplayedthisirlgame-poll]

Beautiful Space Pirates is a one-page scifi RPG by Grant Howitt.

[animesickos]

OUT NOW: Grant Howitt, a game designer who rules, joins the Sickos (plus Gwynn and Allie from Modesty City, Sicko Shock 2, and Shuffle Quest) for a one-shot game of GOBLIN PUNKS, an RPG where you are shitty goblin teens fucking around. Will we be able to disrupt the community car wash and become goth? Listen and see asshole

You can get Goblin Punks here: https://gshowitt.itch.io/goblin-punks

[merelymatt]

Audio Drama Sunday is perfectly paced

My favourite roleplaying game! Naomi Clarke, occasional guest on @merelyroleplayers! Nathan Blades, star of @inyourbenevolence episode 8! Kieron Gillen from comics! Grant Howitt who wrote the game! This was going to be a blast even before you factor in @maddyisabstract and Cai Gwilym Pritchard in the production team. 'Going to a fucked up wedding' is such a great campaign frame for Heart, I'm incensed I didn't think of it. I've always found Heart a pacey rollercoaster of a game and the editing preserves that feel, without me losing the thread of what's going on. All the characters are so distinctive and odd right from the start. Thank you, everyone who threw money at Dagger in the Heart and made this happen.

Farewell to the Drac polycule for another year. Get some rest, friend Jonathan.

I was reading along in the Dracula Daily book this year, and on paper, the climactic scene is brisk – it goes by in a flash, it's almost over too fast. @re-dracula paces it beautifully, giving it the time for each heroic act and definitive blow to land in the listener's heart.

And new from me and @foggyoutline this week:

The penultimate episode of season 1, which is about the mortifying ordeal of being known.

We've had a run of plotty (as much as any episode of I Need A Miracle can be called 'plotty') or worldbuildy episodes, and the season finale needs to have a certain amount of narrative drive to make it a satisfying point to end on. So this episode is a pause. An in-breath before the top of the coaster. It's pure character in a way the show's premise really allows to sing. (Now's a great time to catch up on the season so far before the finale!)

[shyestbarbarian]

#6 RPG That Is Easy To Use

Can't go wrong with Grant Howitt's "Honey Heist"! It's one page, easy to learn, and chaotic to play!

[jkcorellia]

"Grant Howitt made both Spire: The City Must Fall and Honey Heist" feels like the TTRPG world's equivalent of "George Miller made both Mad Max and Happy Feet"

[carfuckerlynch]

do you happen to have a link to the ‘here is the game: today you are not going to die’ piece grant howitt wrote?? i’ve always loved it as your blog title & did realise it was a larger think especially by grant howitt bc i love his rpgs so much & i just did some googling to see if i could find it myself but i wasn’t successful 😔😔

i don’t :(((( he posted it on his twitter a long time ago and i didn’t keep it :(((

EDIT I FOUND IT. LINK HERE (it’s an image no plaintext sorry everyone)

[ex-libris-craux]

So not long ago I ran Sexy Battle Wizards for my Friday night game group to give our forever DM a break, and I am dropping the opening here for posterity because I love it very much:

You are returning from a successful rescue mission, assisting The Vestal Vanguard in retrieving the holy, gem-encrusted Garter of the Order from the sleek and lovely thigh of Synchron Moreover, villain (and sexy, sexy beast). Moreover is now moreunder guard (possibly moreunder moreguards), and you have returned to the College Errant, where wine, the spa facilities, seven masseuses and masseurs, an Olympic-sized swimming pool (the mountain, not the event), a chef, and twelve puppies await you.

Oh, and also Elysian Traipse, who as you coalesce from ephemeral (and quite sexy) mist greets you with a worried expression, wringing hands, and a wailed "What have you DONE??? There are DEMONS in the INNER SANCTUM!"

A sexy battle wizard's work is never done, in this case because Traipse has locked you out of all the College's amenities until you get rid of the demons.

[penguinpanic]

The tenth game we played was A Very Northern Christmas by Grant Howitt. Jen ran this christmas special in which a multiverse of Sean Bean's team up to break the curse that results in them dying in every film. It’s fair to say that none of us could do a great Sean Bean impression even with the ‘O2’ on ramp but we sure gave it a go!  

[rqgender]

Today's gender is too busy smoking cigarettes and kissing girls.

[savevsfacemelt]

Post-game Musings - Heart

Back in December, when talking about Scum & Villainy, I said that I was also running a slightly intermittent game of Heart.

Well, 'slightly' became 'very', and 'intermittent' became 'sporadic', and faced with the campaign continuing to not happen for the next few months, I decided last week to pull the plug. It's a bummer, but that's how 90% of RPG campaigns end - not with a bang, or even a whimper, but the nagging whine of incompatible schedules and commitments slowly grinding into each other just below the waterline.

...but what the heck is Heart, anyway?

--

Heart's great: This game? This game fuckin' rules. It throws wonderfully evocative classes (Wizards made of bees! Train paladins! Debt priests! The Crow, from the movie The Crow!) into a nightmare world of meat dungeons, subterranean moons, gangster druids, blooddrenched angels, electronic hells and interdimensional subways. The art's great, the writing's great, the setting's crammed full of evocative ideas, and the system... reads slightly better than it plays, and the exploration subsystem needs clearer explanations for how to make it work at the table, but it's still pretty bloody good. If the opportunity comes up to run/play Heart again, I'll do it in a, well, heartbeat.

Meaty beaty big and bouncy: The strongest element of Heart are beats, which are the core of both its experience system and its approach to GMing. At the end of a session, each player picks two beats - events, consequences or choices - that they would like to happen (or at least start happening) to their character. These range from the minor ('kick someone off a roof') to the major (''convert an important NPC to your cause') to the extreme ('take final revenge upon your secret master'), and the character gets a corresponding minor/major/extreme power-up when the beat is fulfilled. The GM's job is then to set up all those beats in the next session - and that's how you design scenarios and sessions. No maps, no scripts, no big plans, but a focus on giving the players what they want while building on what came before.

Planning is my heroin: I, of course, fucked that up immediately. Not by pre-planning a big story arc or dropping in railroad tracks, but by getting caught up in the coolness of every character. I wanted to see where they would end up, which meant I started getting ideas about where they'd end up, which meant I planned (rough) arcs for each character and dropped hints and foreshadowing and plot threads for players to follow those arcs. And my ideas are good! The players seemed to like them! But they're my ideas, and I struggle to put my ideas to one side even when a game pushes the players' ideas to the forefront, or to let myself take a reactive GMing role rather than actively driving things. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle - me riffing on player inputs, the players riffing on mine, everyone being happy - and maybe that's how the game would have turned out in the end, who knows.

Everyone's busy again: Look, I'm not saying pandemic lockdowns were a good thing, but at least they meant everyone was home, bored and desperate for online interaction on a Thursday night. It was a good time for gaming - I think I was running 4 games a fortnight (via Zoom) at one point. But that's over now, and folks have a lot of things on their plates again, and I'm back to competing with things like jobs and children and sex for attention again, and I tend to lose those competitions.

Am I advocating for another pandemic? Yes No. But sigh.

--

What else is happening in gaming land?

I tried to get a Lancer campaign off the ground, but I have a limited number of friends interested in a tactical-combat-focused RPG, and most of them were busy, so I'm putting that off until autumn.

I've just started running facilitating guiding a Wanderhome game, and it's got lots of promise, but it's a challenge in some ways. A game with no conflict, no plot and little-to-no external drama? Just vibes? That's not my strong suit - but then again, it's been a long time since I had to learn new gaming skills, so I’m into it.

And I should (fingers crossed) be running a one-shot, maybe even a 3-shot, of Achtung! Cthulhu next month. That'll be fun.

Nothing is more fun than shooting Nazis.