#RPGs

[jedigloomy]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The dead shouldn't have such good stuff on them, then.

[anim-ttrpgs]

History (Optional) Skill from Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.

Optional Skills always have to be +1 or more. If the investigator doesn't have the optional Skill, but tries to do something that would require it, then they use the most relevant Skill that they do have, but with a -3 penalty to it.

[sohkrates]

The Fuck Funko Indie Bundle

So recently a company hired by Funko Pop issued a bogus report to the company that keeps itch.io online, and got the site taken down for a few hours.

It was a bunch of bullshit involving corporate overreach, AI, and a gut check for everyone who makes their living selling things on itch.io, including indie TTRPG creators like me and my friends.

So I put together a bundle with some other indie TTRPG makers to raise some money to help us start 2025 on the right foot. Every purchase is split evenly between us, and goes toward things that let us keep filling the world with art.

Give some money to some indies, spread the word, leave positive ratings and comments, and make living easier for people who make beautiful thoughtful art.

[msunitedstatesjames]

I've touched on this in a couple of other semi-related posts before, but I find it hilarious and I appreciate how much Johanna Hezenkoss thinks Emmrich is the protagonist of Veilguard. Like, this woman could not give less of a fuck about Rook. She almost always refers to Rook only by their relationship to Emmrich. She refers to Rook as "one of Volkarin's hangers-on," "that impudent whelp following [Emmrich] around," "Volkarin's companion," and as Emmrich's "paramour." None of these imply that she thinks Rook has much agency. Instead, she acts like Rook is just helplessly following Emmrich around like a puppy, helping him complete tasks (which I guess is partly true).

If Rook romances Emmrich, Hezenkoss assumes that Emmrich seduced Rook and not the other way around, even though Emmrich is noticeably older than Rook and has hardly left the Necropolis in years. She's seemingly amazed by it, and yet it never once crosses her mind that Rook might have initiated the relationship (which is actually the case).

She also refers to Emmrich as the one who destroyed her construct, which is technically true, but she ignores the major assistance he had from Rook, another companion, and most notably Manfred. He couldn't have pulled it off without their help, and had in fact given up, but Hezenkoss acts like Emmrich was her sole opponent in that battle.

I've said before that part of the reason for this is that Hezenkoss seems to think of herself as the main villain of the story, so Emmrich must be the main hero. Hezenkoss says that some of the other big bads of Dragon Age, the Venatori, were nothing more to her than slightly useful and genuinely annoying. She clearly thinks herself above an entire organization of some of the most powerful mages in the world. And she sees Emmrich as pretty close to her in terms of raw power, since she almost invited him to her Vengeance Party but ultimately decided he was too much of a danger to her plans. She also states that she tried to get him to join her in the past, which I don't think she would do for anyone she considered to be less than her equal. Emmrich is genuinely the only person in the game she shows any respect for. Though she mocks his age and finds him to be too sentimental, too moral, and too fearful, she shows signs of agreeing with him on some topics, and she obviously respects his abilities if nothing else. No one else in the game acknowledges his frankly ridiculous knowledge and skill level (except Solas in the end) as much as Hezenkoss does.

And really, Emmrich does have main character energy. Though he does have some age and mortality related fears, dude is overflowing with confidence. When you first meet him, looking for a Fade expert, he has absolutely no problem telling you he's the best possible person for the job. Though he apparently hasn't left the Necropolis in years, he's totally down to join the team and go anywhere you want him to go. If you romance him, he is initially surprised, but he quickly turns into the smoothest dude around, and throughout the game you can hear him comment on some of his many relationships through the years. He's well-dressed, well-spoken, charismatic, highly educated, unfailingly kind, extremely powerful, and he's done so well for himself that Harding mistakes the son of a butcher and a cook for a member of the Nevarran nobility. No wonder Hezenkoss thinks he's the protagonist. The real protagonist is just out here winging it on guts and good luck alone.

[kalindashepard]

And of course there’s always GURPS, which is crunchy and has both a Wild West supplement and licensed Deadlands supplements. Or you could always go with Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu rules and their Down Darker Trails supplement. The Chaosium system is significantly less crunchy than most of the other suggestions, but I’ve always been of the opinion that less crunchy is better for horror games unless you’re really familiar with the rules. Few things break the immersion of a tense, well crafted horror scene more than suddenly having to spend several minutes looking for the damn grappling rules again.

Hi! I'm thinking to run a weird west game. I've tried Dogs in the Vineyard but found the narrative focus didn't have enough crunch. I've heard of Deadlands but my previous experience with a Savage World system was a bit shaky. I'm most familiar with 3.5e and 5e, Pathfinder 1e, and just picked up Lancer.

Please can you suggest any crunchy systems that would fit with weird west themes?

So, I can think of at least three crunchy western RPGs but I have not had a chance to play any of them and two of them are out of print. Also, I am uncertain how well they would adapt to a weird west setting, but here goes:

First up, the one that is in print: Aces & Eights is a Western RPG by Kenzer & Co. whose main claim to fame is that it is crunchy as all hell. Gunfighting consists of laying out a shot clock (a type of crosshair template) on top of an enemy silhouette and then an attack roll results in the shot itself moving into an appropriate spot based on the roll. It kinda sounds cool as hell but as stated I haven't had a chance to play it, and I'm not confident in how well it translates to the weird west genre.

Next up is Boot Hill. Now, I don't know a lot about Boot Hill, but I know that it is a crunchy and deadly wild west game published by TSR, and the AD&D 1e DMG actually has guidance on how to convert characters between the two games, so one option you would have would be to run Boot Hill and just convert supernatural stuff into it from AD&D 1e! This would probably be pretty bad, but I have to admit that it does sound kind of fun.

Third option, and this one is also sadly out of print, would be Outlaw baybeee!!!! Outlaw is actually a setting for Rolemaster/Spacemaster 2e that adapts the extremely crunchy system full of lovely stupid tables into the wild west. Outlaw is pretty much just Rolemaster in the wild west and it even gives a bit of advice on how to run a western campaign with fantastic elements. Not a lot of advice, mind, but you could literally just smash spell users from Rolemaster into Outlaw and be done with it.

Anyway, that's all I can offer, sadly. I'm unfortunately not very knowledgeable of western or weird west games.

[bharv]

I literally can’t get over this humble bundle just one of these games is worth that value and more?? These games are some of the best RPGs of all time and some incredibly new releases!! I own over half but I’m tempted to repurchase just to get the rest!!!

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[lawfulgoodness]

Shoutout to the Elder Millennial at the table next to me at the gaming bar, whose barbarian just charged into battle shouting "LEEEEROYYYY JENKINS!!!!"

and then had to stop and sheepishly explain a World of Warcraft meme to his genZ GM.

[bodhrancomedy]

Here me out - turn-based (J)RPGs like Dragon Quest need to start adding into their party roster:

- Old women

- butch lesbians

- skimpily dressed men vs sensibly clad women

- more animals

- small boy children

- middle aged women

- fat women

- horses (yes, covered under animals, but I want to have my horse a playable member and drop-kick enemies)

- ambassadors (whadda mean you’re sending members of the royal family? You have diplomats, that’s what they’re for)

- old thieves

- redeemed(ish) female villains

[fort-of-novelty]

I'm bored of elemental giants. Use environmental giants instead.

Environmental Giants all start out the same, but their bodies take up the features of the place they live in. They become a reflection of their domain.

Giant takes up residence in the cliffs of dover? Not a stone giant. No, that's specifically The Giant of Dover. Its body is made of chalk. It can create dust clouds of chalk with its breath, its shoulders are padded with tufts of short grasses and blackberry bushes.

Giant takes up residence in the ruins of a highway during an apocalypse? That's the I-95 Giant. It has rebar spines along its back, skin of pavement and concrete, and wears wrecked cars as armor.

And to make this idea more dynamic, the giant's form changes as the ecosystem changes. A river gets diverted away from a Giant's domain? Then the Giant dries up along with its land. Now the Giant has an incentive to protect its dominion, and a weakness that its enemies can exploit.

[sprintingowl]

Deadball

Deadball Second Edition is a platinum bestseller on DrivethruRPG. This means it's in the top 2% of all products on the site. Its back cover has an endorsement from Sports Illustrated Kids.

It's also not an rpg I'd heard about until I discovered all of these facts one after another.

I was raised in a profoundly anti-sports household. My father would say stuff like "sports is for people who can't think" and "there's no point in exercising, everything in your body goes away eventually." So I didn't learn really any of the rules of the more popular American sports until I was in my mid twenties, and I've been to two ballgames in my life. I appreciate the enthusiasm that people have for sports, but it's in the same way that I appreciate anyone talking about their specific fandom.

One of the things that struck me reading Deadball was its sense of reverence for the sport. Its language isn't flowery. It's plain and technical and smart. But its love for baseball radiates off of the pages. Not like a blind adoration. But like when a dog sits with you on the porch.

For folks familiar with indie rpgs, there's a tone throughout the book that feels OSR. Deadball doesn't claim to be a precise simulation or a baseball wargame or anything like that---instead it lays out a bunch of rules and then encourages you to treat them like a recipe, adjusting to your taste. And it does this *while* being a detailed simulation that skirts the line of wargaming, which is an extremely OSR thing to do.

For folks not familiar with baseball, Deadball starts off assuming you know nothing and it explains the core rules of the sport before trying to pin dice and mechanics onto anything. It also explains baseball notation (which I was not able to decipher) and it uses this notation to track a play-by-play report of each game. Following this is an example of play and---in a move I think more rpgs should steal from---it has you play out a few rounds of this example of play. Again, this is all before it's really had a section explaining its rules.

In terms of characters and stats, Deadball is a detailed game. You can play modern or early 1900s baseball, and players can be of any gender on the same team, so there's a sort of alt history flavor to the whole experience, but there's also an intricate dice roll for every at bat and a full list of complex baseball feats that any character can have alongside their normal baseball stats. Plus there's a full table for oddities (things not normally covered by the rules of baseball, such as a raccoon straying onto the field and attacking a pitcher,) and a whole fatigue system for pitchers that contributes a strong sense of momentum to the game.

Deadball is also as much about franchises as it is about individual games, and you can also scout players, trade players, track injuries, track aging, appoint managers of different temperaments, rest pitchers in between games, etc.

For fans of specific athletes, Deadball includes rules for creating players, for playing in different eras, for adapting historical greats into one massively achronological superteam, and for playing through two different campaigns---one in a 2020s that wasn't and one in the 1910s.

There's also thankfully a simplified single roll you can use to abstract an entire game, allowing you to speed through seasons and potentially take a franchise far into the future. Finances and concession sales and things like that aren't tracked, but Deadball has already had a few expansions and a second edition, so this might be its next frontier.

Overall, my takeaway from Deadball is that it's a heck of a game. It's a remarkably detailed single or multiplayer simulation that I think might work really well for play-by-post (you could get a few friends to form a league and have a whole discord about it,) and it could certainly be used to generate some Blaseball if you start tweaking the rules as you play and never stop.

It's also an interesting read from a purely rpg design perspective. Deadball recognizes that its rules have the potential to be a little overbearing and so it puts in lots of little checks against that. It also keeps its more complex systems from sprawling out of control by trying to pack as much information as possible into a single dice roll.

For someone like me who has zero background in baseball, I don't think I'd properly play Deadball unless I had a bunch of friends who were into it and I could ride along with that enthusiasm. However as a designer I like the book a lot, and I'm putting it on my shelf of rpgs that have been formative for me, alongside Into The Odd, Monsterhearts, Mausritter, and Transit.

[biowareproblems]

N7 Day is going to hit a bit differently this year, most of us won't even be out of DA:TV's character creator by then

[anim-ttrpgs]

hi

i'm not going to get into it in your inbox but i've been dealing with some worsening chronic pain this year and the way eureka goes about this stuff (both grievous wounds/literally and monsters/metaphorically) is nice to read. thanks

all the snoops are sooooo cute. i was going to try and name a favorite here but i genuinely can't i love them all. what delightful little creatures

Thank you! Chronic pain is one of the things that I myself suffer from too, since (topically) my medical insurance refused to cover any treatment besides some X-rays and two chiropracty sessions after I got hit by a car going about 60mph. I’m very lucky that I can still walk and even do some martial arts when what’s left of my upper back allows.

One of the reasons that the Grievous Wound mechanic in Eureka is the way it is is because I wanted to represent how humans are both very fragile and very resilient. An injury much less severe than what i went through can make a person’s body never quite as strong/fast/coordinated as it used to be, but also most things in life do not necessitate a person to be at the very peak of their physical potential, not even investigating mysteries.

Also thank you about the snoops! There are some I like more than others, but I really can’t pick a favorite either.

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.

[90sfantasyanimestuff]

From a 1995 mail-in magazinze RPG. Source.

[notsogreatdion]

✶ INTERACTIVE FICTION RECS 3.0 ✶

✶ Mind Blind - @mindblindbard (wip)

✶ God-cursed - @wings-of-ink (wip)

✶ Aquarii - @aquarii-if (wip)

✶ Slaughter squad - @harlequinoccult (wip)

✶ Summer of Love - @summeroflove-if (wip)

✶ The Second Sight: Death Reckoning - @spoiledblogif (wip)

✶ Speaker - @speakergame (wip)

✶ Defiled Hearts: The Barbarian - @defiledheartsblog (wip)

✶ Shepherds of Haven - @shepherds-of-haven (wip)

✶ Apartment 502 - @apt502-if (wip)

✶ Grey Swan I - Birds of a Rose - @reinekes-fox (wip)

✶ In the Cards - @inthecards (wip)

✶ Bad Witch + au demo - @badwitch-if (wip)

✶ Saturnine - @satur9-if (wip)

✶ Prismatic - @prismaticif (wip)

⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣ ✶

VN'S

✶ LyteLove (wip)

✶ Touchstarved (wip)

✶ Cupid Chatroom (wip)

✶ Adopt a Boyfriend

✶ seekL

✶ my friend is a ghost (super short but super cute)

⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣ ✶

if recs 1.0 & if recs 2.0 & new projects recs