#Tabletop Talk

[anim-ttrpgs]

Another A.N.I.M. Interview!

Another A.N.I.M. interview! This one was actually recorded back in March, and it’s my first-ever audio interview, so I apologize for my public speaking skills lol

The major takeaway I think from this interview is that when you spend money on a rulebook and/or adventure module, the burden should not fall on you to make the experience good. You should be able to rely on the rulebook to do a huge chunk of, if not most, of the work in a session. The rulebook should be providing a sturdy platform for the GM and players to stand on while they build their story, and ideally provide hammers, nails, screws, glue, paint, wood, scaffolding, cement, etc. for them to work with, and an adventure module should provide a structure at least half-built for them to work from, instead of making them put effort into just treading water while they also have to do all the other work.

If “listening for local rumors” is something a PC could feasibly do in an RPG, the rulebook should come with at least a DC to determine how difficult that is, so that the GM doesn’t have to make up a DC on the fly, then also determine what success or failure means on the fly.

Less than 3 days left to back our kickstarter for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy! Crowdfunding ends at 2:00 PM CST on Friday May 10th!

If you want to try before you buy, you can download a free demo of the prerelease version from our website or our itch.io page!

If you’re interested in a more updated and improved version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy than the free demo you got from our website, subscribe to our Patreon where we frequently roll our new updates for the prerelease version!

You can also support us on Ko-fi, or by checking out our merchandise!

Join our TTRPG Book Club At the time of writng this, Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is the current game being played in the book club, and anyone who wants to participate in discussion, but can’t afford to make a contribution, will be given the most updated prerelease version for free! Plus it’s just a great place to discuss and play new TTRPGs you might not be able to otherwise!

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.

[wispy-candyshop]

Scenario for most to least likely: run a tabletop RPG. Bonus points for which game they'd run

I have actually run 2 of my current characters in a few DnD sessions.

Patchi, 100% why she doesnt like clowns and will give a horrified look if someone asks her to go to a circus. She became a vigilantly sidekick.

Raija, 85% why she doesnt like vampires and 100% why she loses her beloved longsword later. She got fucked up by Strahd well an equivalent to him.

Technically Loku too but more NPC to help with the story.

unfortunately I'm not familiar with the games besides Strahd.

sooo more to least: Raija, Patchi, Loku, Khal

update update: I forgot I did do a one off with Khal, very short lived cuz life.

[liltaireissocute]

[PERC'ILDAN]

What are they doing? Option A: they are getting ready to play TTRPG; option B: they are actively assembling an Ikea table.

I picked secret third option

[mothhuuny]

im working on a cult of the lamb ttrpg!

this is my first time building a ttrpg from the ground up, but so far its been a very smooth process! so far, i have all of the base game buildings, weapons and curses down, as well as all of the follower traits!

currently im working on the relics, character creation, and other small things. im leaving combat for later, since it kind of scares me at the moment, lol. ill post more updates in the future, and yes, once it's finished, i'll be posting the doc publicly for anyone to use!

[alicesoinions]

concept: Vampire hack where the playable clans are Vampire, Dracula, and Those Feratu

[tumblmon]

Cassette Beasts unofficial card game master folder is here!

Very excited to share this game with you all and I hope you have fun!

[extrajigs]

I love the designs of the Styraphants so much, can I have permission to use them in my d&d campaign? :D

Dude HECK YES!!! As long as I get an update on the shenanigans!

[nuclearanomaly]

The gm has used emotionally impactful taunt. It's super effective.

[kiiwipops]

who are you, but a mockery of your own legacy?

.

a three-headed dragon-bat god design i made a while back as the villain for a collaborative roleplay! lore summary below, for anyone curious

LACHESIS. God of Grief, Nightmares, and Paralysis.

Formerly known as Lachesis LXV, Soothsaying Head of the fallen Phantom God, Atrophy.

Lachesis pronouns: he/it

Atrophy pronouns: They/It (as a collective entity)

Collectively known as Atrophy, this beast and Its three heads was the phantom god of law, dreams, and wisdom. Each of Atrophy’s heads represented the past, present, and future, and together, They fueled the reincarnation cycle that stopped true death from touching the phantom plane.

That is, until a dimensional tear happened, killing the past and present heads. Now the head that was once the phantoms’ future, Lachesis, lives all on his lonesome, haunting the ruins of a land that was once Its.

This fallen god antagonizes the protagonists of Homebound by dragging them through omen-like nightmares and permanently twisting the forms of those he deems useful… or a threat.

[newvegascowboy]

Ive decided im not going to be gentle about what i think of trump voters and a girl asked me if i would judge someone for having a different opinion than me and i said yes and she was like "that's shitty of you" like hmm difference of opinion =/= stripping away minority rights

[agbpaints]

Classic Battletech today! IlClan era Scorpion Empire vs Rasalhague Dominion. I learned a valuable lesson today- the Mastodon is a fucking cracked mech. Streak LRMs are a nutty gun and reinforced structure is a nutty bit of tech. I parked the mech in the back line at the start of the game and it pumped out 35-70 damage each turn, only punishing me with any heat whatsoever when it was ripping fucking four and a half *tons* of armor off an enemy mech on a given turn. It cost me damn near 4000 bv and I think it was worth every penny because it pretty much won the game on its lonesome.

I also brought a Kontio (funny but difficult to evaluate because it lost its supercharger early and once my opponent realized what it would do unchecked they bunched most of their forces up to avoid getting picked off) and a Mad Dog mk IV A (kinda clunky weapons loadout but solid mid-long range game that was consistently relevant and my opponent whuppsied a couple of cluster shots into it that got eaten by the ferro-lam armor) as other ilClan era goodies I had not previously tried. Overall victory for Rasalgaue Dominion but part of that was my opponent brought a ton of close range brawlers that I was just picking off with my skimmers and big chungus fire support

[padawan-historian]

as black folk, womenfolk, and queer folk put on their Sunday best and ankh up their respectability politics for kamala harris I look around this lovecraft country of ours where blackness is policed, queerness is criminalized, reconstruction is collapsing (for a third time) and people think replacing a colonizer with a cop is an improvement.

the sun is setting on this empire, but doesn't mean white supremacy and fascism are going anywhere.

[xie-lians-cooking]

You roll low!? You roll a nat one!? Dice jail! Dice jail for 1,000 years!

[alicesoinions]

so a thing about the "5e can do anything" mantra is. any tabletop RPG can do anything; but every RPG is also designed for a specific experience.

you can pick any rpg book and hack its rules away into whatever sort of adventure you want; but the result probably won't be as good as if you used a game properly designed for that

and there's this weirdly common sort of thinking that views D&D as completely moldable, and you can change or remove rules as you see fit, but the rules of other RPGs are set in stone, and one little thing you don't like is grounds for ignoring the entire system

for whatever you want to do, there's probably a good system for it - but also, any RPG can be altered if it's not quite what you're looking for

[saltpillarlicker]

one of my few issues with delta green is that it encourages characters who are feds and cops and such and of course it comes with the territory of being conspiracy fiction i think but yknow as a queer person i personally feel egh on the idea of like playing such a figure and i feel like that might be the case for others.

so i think it would be cooler if you were smaller scale not necessarily small town but like you're a girl on the street or a friendly neighborhood dad or some other down to earth figure with a mundane job who moonlights as like essentially a supernatural hunter. like somewhere between delta green and hunter: the vigil. is it as realistic as cops and feds? no prolly not, and delta green's grounded realism is a big strength of it. but i find it much more compelling. maybe worth experimenting with for a one-shot or something.

[willknightauthor]

Wraith: The Best Game That Never Was

It occurred to me that even among RPG nerds Wraith is more obscure, and that makes me sad. Like people know it existed, but even at the time it was an also-ran. Among insiders at White Wolf it was a darling, but it never took off, so they stopped its line half way through. Even in high school I had to buy the books used online.

Wraith is one of the most original and compelling approaches to the afterlife I've seen in any medium, but especially in an RPG. In many games ghosts feature as NPCs, but rarely do you get to play as them, and even more rarely in an interesting way that centers the subjective experience of being dead.

The first thing that grabbed me was the art, all faded gray-scale, scratchy, often grotesque and surreal. The cover is striking: stark gray bound in chains. All far bleaker and genuinely scarier than anything else put out by White Wolf. Turns out the art matched the vibe of the setting very well, because the ultimate conceit of Wraith is that if the living knew what the afterlife is really like, we'd all be even more terrified to die.

Wraiths are a violation of the laws of nature. Biological life is already an improbable struggle against entropy, but the continued existence of consciousness after death? An absolute affront to the universe. Reality wants you gone, but you can't be killed. That contradiction manifests as Oblivion: non-existence as a visible, active force; the Freudian death drive become physics. And it goes all the way down into your very thoughts.

The afterlife is a world of ideals, not materials. Your well-integrated mind shatters into pieces when you die, and your "physical" form is a manifestation of it. Your Jungian shadow-self, once an unconscious and abstract thing, becomes a real, tangible person living inside you. All your vices, your self-loathing, your misanthropy, your death drive, become a voice in your ear: your best friend and worst enemy, helping and tricking you, constantly trying to gain control.

But you can't be killed. You're already dead. Instead of death, you just decay, further and further towards becoming your shadow. Eventually all that's left is a nightmare of who you used to be, existing only to torment others and drag them down together into nothingness. The world is full of these monsters, the things that go bump in the night and terrify both the living and the dead.

But that's literally the tip of the iceberg. The thin layer of shadow reality is nothing compared to the much larger expanse of the Tempest: a cosmic plane of dream and nightmare, right on the edge of Oblivion. The deep underworld is Lovecraftian Mad Max: an infinite shifting desert of eternal night filled with screaming storms, incomprehensible monsters, and forbidden knowledge. Pockmarking it are islands of stability upon which societies are built--dysfunctional city-states desperately attempting to project power into a world constantly trying to swallow them.

However, if no-one can die, then every awful political trend and tyrant remains forever. And they all have a huge head start on you establishing political power. Their society is a veneer of modern industrial capitalism, layered on top of mercantile guilds, layered on top of feudal lords, layered on top of a Roman imperial bureaucracy, all built on the back of one ancient wraith: the ferryman Charon.

But the Emperor has been missing for a long time, and the bureaucracy is so massive and old that it's rotting in on itself. Who knows how many are secretly succumbing to their own shadows? Their attempts to rule the rest of the underworld are always tenuous, like the last days of Roman Britain. It's a world eternally mid-apocalypse.

The problem with a world of thought and feeling is: how do you make things? What do you make them with? Sometimes the ghosts of physical objects make their way through, and they're mined like whale fall. Undoubtedly the Twin Towers were a huge boon to the dead, probably the site of an entire city.

But it's not enough. Wraiths are still people. They want clothing, and furniture, and buildings, and machines, and tools, and money. Where does all that come from? The only thing left that wraiths can touch: other people. Wraith society is built on a form of slavery more exploitative and horrifying than anything that's ever existed among the living. Slaves are valued not for their labor primarily, but for their use as raw materials.

The vulnerable newly dead are captured, dragged back to the capital, and molded in workshops and factories into goods for the upper classes. They claim it wipes out consciousness, and thus the finished product isn't suffering. If anything it's a mercy! To release them from the torment of the afterlife! And prevent them from becoming monsters! But when it's quiet, if you listen closely, some report you can hear it all whispering.

The bleak alienness of this afterlife to any human religion breaks the minds of many when they first realize they're dead. Some go into denial. Some reject their old religion. Some invent new religious explanations. And some try to twist their old beliefs into a shape that conforms.

The underworld is full of cults. Cults promising escape from the underworld. Cults claiming they know where heaven and hell are. (At best just projections of the collective beliefs of the living into the underworld.) Cults who claim they're building heaven and hell themselves. (These sorts of "afterlife lands" sometimes become tourist attractions.) But Oblivion is Oblivion. If you could describe its structure logically you would be contradicting its very essence. There is only decay.

Most people don't go to the shadowlands when they die. Where do they go? No-one knows. What happens when you're swallowed by Oblivion? No-one knows. Is there a God? No-one knows.

Just like when you were alive, you don't know what comes next, or why you're here. It's not real death, it's something in between. But maybe real death is just nothingness. Better not to risk it, then... even if that means clinging to the sands of Hell under the yoke of an eternal slave-aristocracy.

Maybe if you can figure out why you're here, you'll find a way out.