#about tabletop role playing games

[dice-wizard]

Hello everyone looking for a new fantasy tabletop game!

You can buy Exalted Essence now.

What's Exalted you ask?

Exalted is an epic fantasy TTRPG where players play the titular Exalted - humans elevated to superhuman/demigod status - in a wild and unique setting that draws inspiration from the ancient world rather than medieval Europe. Creation (the setting) draws key inspirations from the entire world. If you're used to having to make yourself visible on your own in other fantasy, there's probably some representation in Exalted.

It has explicit queer and trans themes about finding your people, creating your own identity, and having the power to punch back at the people who hate you. This isn't incidental. The writing staff is queer as hell. You can hear me break this down more here.

Curious to learn all you can? Well you can get a detailed overview of the entire game on the podcast Systematic Understanding of Everything hosted by myself, @presidentofbirds and @phillycuriosity

If I'm used to D&D 5e why should I pick this up?

Well, I presume if you're reading this post you're already interested in trying something new, so:

The entire game in one book. Exalted: Essence is self contained, character types, equipment, enemies and all!

An exciting style of fantasy that's different than classic D&D but like, textually gay, and very easy to have scenes like ballroom fights, epic galas, and touching homoerotic healing scenes - no house rules required.

But also, tactical depth and combat you can really sink your teeth into if fighting monsters and villains is your bag.

An excuse to use all your d10s at once

Character building and advancement mechanics designed to be familiar to a 5e audience. Characters "level up" based on story beats, and have Advantages, which are functionally similar to class and race features.

A world welcoming to most heroic archetypes, so it's easy to convert your favorite OC.

Extremely kissable dragons, demons, gods, elementals, ghosts, faeries, and unnamed ancient horrors

I'm a fan of a previous edition, what's Essence got for me?

Design focused on alleviating some of the previous versions' missteps

Virtues are back, baby

2e fans will find it an improvement from second edition's mechanical strengths - it's pretty easy to convert all your favorite 2e Charms to XS.

Streamlined versions of familiar rules to make it painless to introduce new friends to the game we love.

The Cliff's notes on Ex3's new Exalt types.

Did I mention it's all of Exalted in one book?

How does it play?

d10 dice pool looking for 7,8,9 as successes. 10s count as two successes, which can lead to explosive, heroic outcomes

Combat system designed to keep all players engaged the entire time - even characters who aren't focused on fighting at all.

Combat also narrows the gap between experienced and new players and players who want to win at RPGs and players who just wanna vibe so GMs aren't tearing their hair out trying to balance encounters.

Social system designed to resolve in a single roll so you can be immersed in role play and not interrupt it with constant rolling - without sacrificing a variety of social approaches

"Ventures" system for characters working on long term projects from traveling across the world to crafting magical wonders to building communities without forcing this to be "downtime" activity

Characters have access to Charms - exception-based special powers that make them extremely good at whatever they focus on.

It's easily my favorite game (and the project I developed that I'm the proudest of), so I'm excited for everyone to try it out.

[l0cal-cryptidd]

I make these little mood boards my my and my party's D&D characters and figured I'd share :)

(I claim none of these images as my own, they're just from pinterest. This is just for fun.)

This homebrew campaign took place in a land called Arcadia. The group was affectionately called "Kylar Verinius, and Others". It was the first full campaign we saw through to the end and it holds a special place in my heart :)

1 | Minerva "Minnie" Grace Honeyhill | Lightfoot halfling, life cleric in service to Cyrollalee | Guardian of the Eternal Knowledge

2 | Narzar Drak | Githzerai, kensei monk

3 | Ketari | Tiefling, druid of the circle of the land | Ambassador to the Feywild

4 | Kylar Verinius | High elf, hexblade warlock, Storm sorcerer | Wielder of Dayrend

5 | Stilte Van De Maan | Tabaxi, shadow monk, knowledge cleric in service to Selûne | Master of the Jadeshoe Grove Monastery

6 | Smasherino | Stout halfling, berserker barbarian

7 | Raven | Shadar-Kai, ranger | Champion of the Raven Queen

8 | Mixim Nozzleflog | Rock gnome, armorer artificer | Beloved NPC and resident Wiki

[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.

[kitaurita]

I think I’ve made a fully comprehensive guide on handling dnd modules published by Wizards of the Coast that portray real-life issues badly

Did WotC write a character who’s from a “foreign land,” practicing “black magic” who has dark skin and a turban? WRONG. in your campaign they’re a sewer-abiding rat-loving magic user with a strong Bostonian/NYC accent

Did WotC write a character who’s a nomad known for thieving with a Romani accent? WRONG. Boston/NYC accented street urchin

Did WotC write about a race of beings that are enslaved? WRONG. pissed off and exhausted minimum wage worker with strong Bostonian/NYC accent

[livvyofthelake]

ethel’s going steady with ben….. that’s actually really sweet good for them 🥺

[ultimateinferno]

I know I made it as a DM when I can say random bullshit about my PCs and their player will just give me a thumbs up or a simple "Yeah." Like hell yeah, I know you. I know your story. I planned it. You're just a pawn in my little game and you would drive like initial D while operating the waffle iron that's sitting shotgun with your other hand at 3am on a December morning and burn yourself four times while doing it.

[thedailydungeonmaster]

The Myths of the Satanic Panic: A Hard Time for D&D Players

Dear Readers, in the annals of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) history, there exists a chapter that remains etched in the collective memory of players and enthusiasts alike—the era of the Satanic Panic. This dark period, spanning the 1980s and early 1990s, saw D&D come under intense scrutiny and condemnation from various quarters of society. Accusations of promoting Satanism, encouraging occult…

[prokopetz]

In recent posts I've complained that a lot of tabletop RPGs which toss around the term "fiction first" don't actually understand what it means, and I've been asked to expand on that complaint. So:

In my experience, there are two ways that game texts which want to position themselves as "fiction first" trip themselves up, one obvious and one subtle.

The first and more obvious pitfall is treating "fiction first" as an abstract ideology. They're using "fiction first" as a synonym for "story over rules" in a way that calls back to the role-playing-versus-roll-playing discourse of the early 2000s. The trouble is, now as then, nobody can usefully explain what "story over rules" actually entails. At best, they land on a definition of "fiction first" that talks about the GM's right to ignore the rules to better serve the story, which is no kind of definition at all – it's just putting a funny hat on the Rule Zero fallacy and trying to pass it off as some sort of totalising ideology of play.

A more useful way of defining "fiction first" play is to think of it not in terms of whether you engage with the rules at all, but in terms of when they're invoked: specifically, as a question of order of operations.

Suppose, for example, that you're playing Dungeons & Dragons, and you pick up the dice and say "I attack the dragon". Some critics would claim that no actual narrative has been established – that this is simply a bare invocation of game mechanics – but in fact we can infer a great deal: your character is going to approach the dragon, navigating any inclement terrain which lies between them, and attempt to kill the dragon using the weapon they're holding in their hand. The rules are so tightly bound to a particular set of narrative circumstances that simply invoking those rules lets us work backwards to determine what the context and stakes must be for that invocation of the rules to be sensical; this, broadly speaking, is what "rules first" looks like.

Conversely, let's say that your game of Dungeons & Dragons has confronted you with a pit blocking your path, and you want to make an Athletics check to cross it. At this point the GM is probably going to stop you and say, hold up, tell us what that looks like. Are you trying to jump across it? Are you trying to climb down one wall of the pit and up the other? Are you trying to tie a rope to the halfling and toss them to the other side? In other words, before you can pick up the dice, you need to have a little sidebar with the GM to hash out what the narrative context is, and to negotiate what can be achieved and what's at stake if you mess it up; this, broadly, is what "fiction first" looks like.

At this point I know some people are thinking "wait, hold on – both of those examples were from Dungeons & Dragons; are you saying that Dungeons & Dragons is both a rules-first game and a fiction-first game?" And yeah, I am. That's the second, more subtle place where game texts that talk about "fiction first" go astray: they talk about it as though being "fiction first" or "rules first" is something which is inherent to game systems as a whole.

This is not in fact true: being "fiction first" or "rules first" is something which describes particular invocations of the rules. In practice, only very simple games spend all of their time in one mode or the other; most will switch back and forth at need. Generally, most "traditional" RPGs (i.e., the direct descendants of Dungeons & Dragons and its various imitators) tend to operate in rules-first mode in combat and fiction-first mode out of it, though this is a simplification – when and how such mode-switching occurs can be quite complex.

Like any other design pattern, "fiction first" mechanics are a tool that's well suited for some jobs, and ill suited for others. Sometimes your rules are fine-grained enough that having an explicit negotiation and stakes-setting phase would just be adding extra steps. Sometimes you're using the outputs of the rules a narrative prompt, and having to pin the context down ahead of time would defeat the purpose. Fortunately, you don't have to commit yourself to one approach or the other; as long as your text is clear about how you're assuming a given set of rules toys will be used, you can switch modes as need dictates. However, you're not going to be capable of that kind of transparency if you're thinking in terms of "this a Fiction First™ game".

(Incidentally, this is why it can be hard to talk about "fiction first" with OSR fans if you're being dogmatic about fiction-first framing being an immutable feature of particular games. Since traditional RPGs tend to observe the above-described rules-first-in-combat, fiction-first-out-of-combat division, and OSR games tend to treat actually getting into a fight as a strategic failure state, a lot of OSR games spend most of their time in fiction-first mode. If you go up to an OSR fan and insist that D&D-style games can never be fiction-first, then attempt to define "fiction first" for them and proceed to describe how they usually play, they'll quite justifiably conclude that you have your head up your ass!)

[fishing-lesbian-catgirl]

I occasionally see people complain that stereotypes of trans women even in our own online communities are often about us being nerdy shut ins, and how they say that’s unfair and inaccurate. But besides the obvious selection bias that in online spaces people who are shut ins that spend most of their time online are going to be more prevalent than those who spend less time online, I feel like it takes a bit of willful ignorance to pretend that nerdy shut ins don’t make up a very large portion of transgender women for very material reasons. Most of the transgender women I know have a few things in common:

We grew up uncomfortable with our bodies

We spent most of our lives prior to transitioning feeling like something is very wrong and feeling like we don’t fit in with most of society

We frequently fantasized about a life that could be different

Again there is a very real amount of selection bias in this because basically every trans woman I know is also mentally ill and spends most of her time online. But again I feel that the material reality of being a person who feels uncomfortable with themselves, feels like they don’t belong, and often fantasizes about a life where they didn’t have those problems very much would cause said person to gravitate towards being nerdy and/or a shut in. And that is intensified if you consider the statistically higher percentage of trans women that are autistic (the autism-transgender connection is a whole different topic but there is a statistically significant overlap). To a person like that, video games, tabletop role playing, and online communities where you can present yourself how you’d like are all very attractive things. And if so many of us gravitated to those things before transitioning, existing in this world that is so deeply cruel and unaccepting of trans women only pushes us further into using those as our outlets.

I won’t pretend to have any statistical or other knowledge to make sweeping statements about that making up the majority of us or anything, and I also recognize there is selection bias inherent to this discussion and that my view is limited as an American white woman. But I will say that I don’t think it should be necessarily surprising or disappointing to anyone that online communities of transgender women tend to focus on talking about the types of transgender women that make up the majority of those communities: the ones who spend more time online

[vexwerewolf]

The thing is, D&D is not a game.

I know that sounds insane, but hear me out: D&D is not a game, it is a games console. You don't actually "play D&D." You play "Dragon Heist" or "Tomb of Annihilation" or "Ghosts of Saltmarsh" or "your GM's homebrew campaign" or "the plot of Critical Role Season 1 reconstructed from memory" on D&D.

For quite a long while now - possibly literal decades - D&D hasn't even been the best games console, but it's been "the one everyone knows about" and "the one my friends have" and in fact it's "the one whose name is almost synonymous with the entire medium of TTRPGs," like how "Nintendo" or "Playstation" could just mean "games console" to people who didn't understand games consoles. They might not have heard of a "tabletop roleplaying game," but most people have heard of "Dungeons & Dragons."

For this extended metaphor, D&D is Nintendo back in the 90s, or Playstation in the 2000s. Sometimes you say "oh let's go to my house and play Nintendo" or "c'mon dude I wanna play Playstation" but you're not actually playing Nintendo or Playstation, you're playing Resident Evil or Super Mario Bros or Jurassic Park or Metal Gear Solid or whatever on a Nintendo or a Playstation.

Now, this metaphor is going to get even more tortured, but remember how when the PS2 and the original X-Box came out, they used a standardised DVD format, but the Nintendo console in that generation, the Gamecube, used discs but they were this proprietary tiny little disc format that they had control over? That essentially meant that it was really difficult to make third party titles for the Gamecube that did literally anything that Nintendo didn't want them to do, and also essentially gave Nintendo an even greater ability to skim money off the top of any sales?

So that must've seemed like a smart business decision in their heads. But the PS2 and the X-Box used DVDs. This was a standardized format which gave Microsoft and Sony way less control over who made games for their consoles, but that actually turned out to be a good thing for gaming, because it meant that the breadth of games that you could play on their consoles was massively increased even if some of them were games Microsoft and Sony didn't really approve of. (Also it's worth nothing that the PS2 and the X-Box could just play DVDs, which meant if your household was on a budget, you didn't need a separate DVD player - your games console could do it for you! This was actually a huge selling point!)

What Wizards are currently trying to do now is kinda-sorta the equivalent of Sony suddenly announcing that the PS5 will only accept a proprietary cartridge format they hold the patent on, will control the content of and charge money for the construction of. This possibly seems like it could be a moneymaker in your head because you hold market dominance (apparently the PS5 has 30 million units shipped compared to X-Box Series X 20 million units) and so many people make games for your console, but what it actually means is game devs and publishers will abandon your product. If it takes so much more work, the scope of what they're allowed to do is so much more limited and they're going to make less money off of it, they just won't bother. They'll go make games for the X-Box or PC instead.

To use another computer metaphor, D&D is Windows - it might not be the best system but it's the system most people are familiar with and so it gets the most stuff made for it, but there's is an upper limit on the bullshit people will take before they decide fuck it and get an Apple or learn how Linux works.

TTRPG systems are a weird product because you're not selling people a game, you're selling people a method to play a game. All the actual games are created by the community - even prewritten campaigns needs to be executed via a game master. Trying to skim money off the community will mean they'll eventually give up on you.

[dinoberrypress]

Little Wolves is crowdfunding NOW!

It's finally here, y'all! The crowdfunding campaign for our tabletop RPG of folk tales, fae queens, and werewolves is live on Backerkit~

Support our work here!

From the award-winning publisher behind Motel Spooky-Nine, You’re In Space And Everything’s Fucked, Dinocar and more, Little Wolves is a tabletop role-playing game about adventuring through a realm of folk & fae as shapeshifting werewolves.

In Little Wolves, you’ll craft real-world paper masks that represent their characters, modifying them over the course of their adventures to reflect the marks their experiences leave on them while transforming between your Wolf and Mortal forms!

The crowdfunding campaign aims to bring the game’s vivid world to life in an 8.5” x 8.5” full-color perfect bound book loaded with gorgeous art from a team of 4 artists accompanying setting & mechanics from award-winning designers Julie-Anne Muñoz and Nevyn Holmes. 

The crowdfunding campaign launches May 14th, running through June 11th, 12pm US Central with an initial funding goal of $19,500 USD with plenty of stretch goals to unlock for more art, more content, and even an expansion!

Making masks & shifting forms

In your Wolf form, you have access to the benefits of your beastly Attributes, can sing magical Spellsongs, and can resist harm with your Resolve. In your Mortal form, you'll switch your Attributes, Spellsongs, and Resolve out for strong, flexible Mortal Powers that can turn the tide of any situation they're used in. Through character advancement, you can strengthen yourself as you see fit. Perhaps you favor one form over the other, or you may switch between them frequently. The choice is yours.

The Enchanted Forest

As you explore this dense forest you'll meet the powerful and mysterious Queens and aid them, and their courts, through all manner of quests and favors. As a werewolf, you're uniquely gifted in traversing the forest, capable of making it to every edge of the woods, meaning that only you can learn its deepest secrets.

✨ A free demo/quickstart for Little Wolves is available to download and play, get it here! ✨

[theresattrpgforthat]

Hello!! Do you know any TTRPGs surrounding translation or languages? 😊 (thanks for all your work btw!!!)

THEME: Language / Translation Games

Hello friend! As someone who studied linguistics in university, I absolutely love talking about all of the funky things languages do! I hope these recommendations tickle your fancy!

Dialect, by Thorny Games.

Dialect is a game about an isolated community, their language, and what it means for that language to be lost. In this game, you’ll tell the story of the Isolation by building their language. New words will come from the fundamental aspects of the community: who they are, what they believe in, and how they respond to a changing world.

Dialect uses a deck of cards to help minimize the amount of choices you have to make in character creation, by dealing three cards to each player and having the players choose one from just those three. You track the change of your language over a series of turns, using prompts to help you navigate the conversations that arise in your community as the world around them changes.

Dialect has been very highly regarded as a game that really delivers on the experience that it promises. The grief that accompanies language death really shines through this game, so if you want to combine the wonder of creation with the pain of losing something so integral to your sense of being, this is the game for you.

Tiny Frog Wizards, by @prokopetz

You have mastered the secret arts of sorcery

The very primordial energies of creation and destruction are yours to wield as you will.

You are two inches tall.

Tiny Frog Wizards is a game about tiny frogs, wielding magic using the power of words. When you want to do something magical, you will roll somewhere between 1-3 dice, and use the values of your rolled dice to determine how the range, magnitude, and control of your magic.

What’s important in terms of this game recommendation is the Control aspect, because how well you are able to wield your magic depends on how many words you are able to use to make things happen! It’s a lot easier to use a spell with precision if you have enough words to detail where you want a magical pen to write, or what you want to throw a tiny magic missile at. Not enough words? Then the GM has license to cause some humorous side effects, or, if you roll poorly enough, cause your spells to really go off the rails.

If you like games where you need to choose your words carefully, Tiny Frog Wizards is worth checking out - especially since it’s in free playtest!

Xenolanguage, by Thorny Games.

Xenolanguage is a tabletop role-playing game about first contact with alien life, messy human relationships and what happens when they mix together.  At its core, you explore your pivotal relationships with others on the mission as you uncover meaning in an alien language. The game gives a nod to soulful sci-fi media like Arrival, Story of Your Life and Contact, but tells its own story. It’s a game for 2-4 players in 3-4 hours.

In Xenolangauge, you play as a group of people bound together through a shared past with unsettled questions. Your task is to understand why the aliens have come and what they are trying to tell us. You will soon discover the key to understanding lies in your memories together.

This is definitely an in-person game, as it is meant to come with a modular channeling board that will provide you with alien symbols that you will use to help you interpret messages. This is more than a game about language, it’s about relationship, shared memories, and connection.

Xenolanguage was kickstarted at the beginning of this year, but you can check out the above link to pre-order the game if this sounds interesting to you!

Star-Spawned, by Penguin King Games.

One unearthly night, a ray of colourless light descended from the stars, and under its warping radiance, creatures unlike any the world has ever seen were born. They do not know the world, and they do not know themselves. Unfortunately for the world, they're quick learners!

Star-Spawned is a GMless, oneshot-oriented tabletop RPG in which you don't know what your own traits do when play begins. The names of each group's stats are randomly generated using morpheme chaining, and characters are created while having absolutely no idea what they mean; figuring that out forms the greater part of play.

Star-Spawned is more about self discovery than it is about language, but the use of morpheme-chaining in character creation is intriguing to me. You will randomly roll three pieces of a word, and then chain them together to create a unique Facet, available to the players as stats. These Facets don’t have a meaning when the game begins - you need to play to find out what they mean. If you like playing around with semantics - the meaning of words - this might be a game for you.

Degenerate Semantics, by Mikael Andersson.

Degenerate Semantics is a role-playing game for 1-5 players and one Game Master (GM). The players will each portray a character who live in Emmaloopen's poverty-stricken lower city. They are young, wild, ambitious, and independent. This way of life is threatened by other factions, and the players will need to have their characters work together to survive and thrive.

In the process of playing the game, the players and GM will define and flesh out a language called Bandethal. A collection of street terms and slang, Bandethal is used both as a way to talk openly about illicit activities without alerting authorities and to establish street cred. The terms are liberally mixed in with plain English, or when the language is mature enough, can be used entirely on its own. The characters' success is in large part based on how proficiently the players wield the language.

A friend of mine ran this game for me three or four years ago, and it’s been sitting in the back of my head ever since. Degenerate Semantics was created for a Game Chef competition in 2014, and has remained in the same state since then. I don’t think there’s any more work being done on it, but the game is there for anyone who wants to give it a go - and while there’s a setting that comes with the game, that setting is highly flexible, depending on what your group is interested in. Our group decided to use a lot of gardening metaphors, and undertook a plant-based heist as our act of rebellion! If you want a game about the power that language can give a tightly-knit group, this is the game for you.

I've Also Recommended...

DROWWORD, by Ursidice.

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played DETECT OR DIE ?

By Ben Klug

I'm just going to let the game's blurb on itch speak for itself:

A tabletop RPG of neo-noir empiricism, unstable detectives, and total ego death & resurrection. Inspired by science fiction stories of memory and detection like Blade Runner (1982) and Disco Elysium (2019), Detect or Die places the players as the various inner voices of the Detective, collectively embodying the fractured psyche of an amnesiac protagonist attempting to solve the Case. One player takes on the role of the World, laying out the setting and mystery for the rest, using a bespoke variation of the Powered by the Apocalypse game engine influenced by Blades in the Dark and Bluebeard's Bride. The rest play Personality Components, the fragments of the Detective's Ego who combine investigative competencies with erratic coping mechanisms, trading off control and emotional stamina to make it through the Case to the ultimate revelations - about the World and about the Detective.

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

Wanderhome

"You should play an obligate sexual cannibal in Wanderhome I think it'd be funny" - Jay Dragon, developer of Wanderhome

Touchstones:  Ghibli films

Genre: Cozy game, Adventure

What is this game?:  Wanderhome is a game about playing small critters travelling, to where? who knows, its the journey that counts, not the destination

How's the gameplay?: Wanderhome functions on the Belong outside Belonging framework, which functions in a push/pull of Tokens, Tokens allow you to take negative plot beats in return for later having positive plot beats! there's also playbooks that specify what you can spend tokens on and how you gain them. Wanderhome is a very simple game, this is because it lacks a GM! storytelling is done entirely collaboratively, it works shockingly well, especially with such a simple setting and premise!

What's the setting (If any) like?: Wanderhome's setting places the players in a pastoral landscape ravaged by a prior war. The world is healing, the people are hurt, and things are getting weird. The setting has some extra lore, like the Little Gods, in effect "God" is a very strange concept in the world of Wanderhome, being a collection of tiny deities that make up the world, rather than one or 10 centralizing figures. The setting of wanderhome is a large draw of the game, and I'll leave the rest for you to find out. Oh also, the players are all small furry critters, and the usual roles of cattle and other things are replaced by very large bugs, this is the big aesthetic draw of the game.

What's the tone?: Wanderhome's is a world where things got very dire a while back, but things are getting better, people are healing, gradually, and the horrors of the past are being reconciled with. It's a setting largely about healing and improving  

Session length: Wanderhome lends itself to shorter, 1-2 hour long games

Number of Players: 2-6 are all fully possible, however, in my opinion, 3-5 is preferable 

Malleability: Wanderhome's mechanics are faaaairly generic and can be modded into many other things, even if the setting is a large draw and part of the game. This is a game I'd honestly recommend mostly sticking to the default setting, though, just because it's so interesting

Resources: Wanderhome has a ton of extra fan playbooks, some extra official playbooks, though its lacking on group sheets (That I could find) and other useful things, its a very simple game, though, its not like you require a lot

Wanderhome asks the question, "What if Ghibli-inspired games took more than surface level aesthetic inspirations?" and runs with it to create one of the tightest and most interesting experiences currently in the space, it's a wonderful game made all the better by one of the most beautiful books i've ever seen

[dailyadventureprompts]

Alright, guess it’s time to address the apocalyptic legal elephant in the room:

For those who might not know, WotC plans were leaked to “update” the OGL in what is basically a scorched earth policy with regards to 3rd party material/creators in the hopes of cutting out the competition and forcing people to use their new products. 

As someone who lived through the 4th edition/pathfinder schism, the situation is laughably similar:  D&D is flourishing more than it ever has (thanks primarily to the OGL) but the execs at Hasbro want more of the money spent on the hobby to wind up in their pockets. Oblivious to the fact that the opensource nature of the game is what draws people to it,  they task the design team with creating a proprietary virtual tabletop through which they can sell d&d content without having to worry about books or pdfs being pirated. This rightfully outrages the fandom and burns every scrap of good will they had towards WotC, resulting in a dead edition that’s maligned years afterword as folks hop to the newer, easier game system. 

The thing that’s different this time is that the d&d playerbase has grown exponentially since the days of the first OGL, with 5th edition being the easiest version of the game to run/pick up and so many resources online, there’s almost no barrier to entry besides finding a stable/accommodating group.   Hell, with the explosive popularity of liveplay series you don’t even need to be actively playing in order to be in the fandom.  All of these people are networked together in a fandom hivemind spread across twitter/reddit/youtube and WotC just made an enemy of every single one of them with its shameless and destructive cashgrab.  No streamer or 3rd party publisher wants to give Hasbro 25% of their revenue, to say nothing of having their project “cancelled” if WotC sees it as a threat to any of their current projects ( see the huge number of spelljammer materials published after the company dropped the ball). 

It took about two years after the announcement of 4th edition for Paizo to come out with pathfinder, and I have no doubt the OGL leak kickstarted every major 3rd party publisher brainstorming some legally distinct version of the 5e ruleset. In the coming months I expect to see a number of these surrogate systems floating around the internet in much the same way that the onednd playtest content, but spurred on with the added “fuck you Hasbro” energy. After that, it’s only a matter of time till one of the big streamers picks up one of these systems and popularizes it, not wanting to pay the 25%tithe to WotC. Personally my money’s on Critical Role: they were one of the major factors in popularizing 5th edition and they’ve got the fandom pull to legitimize any claimant to the throne. 

To step away from playing oracle for a bit, I’d like to finish up this post by dunking on WotC:  

*ahem*

HOW FUCKING DUMB TO YOU HAVE TO BE TO TURN YOUR ENTIRE CUSTOMER BASE AGAINST YOU IN ONE NIGHT? This is some new coke/Reynolds pamphlet/invading Russia in winter levels of shooting yourself in the foot. Wizards was on shaky ground to begin with given that they’re coming off a series of notably disappointing products AND trying to launch a new edition/virtual tabletop/battlepass system, but to follow that up with a retroactive rules change that lets them outright steal from or shut down creators? It’s laughable.  Maybe, MAYBE they could have made this work if they were knocking it out of the park with new releases every year and cultivating a base of diehard WotC loyalists, but the fact of the matter is that aside from the brand name, the hobby has largely passed them by. Everything that Wizards does, from player options to settings to monsters to rules modules, someone else does better because they’re willing to take risks and put in the effort. Aside from the elegant simplicity of 5e’s base system, I can count maybe two pieces of actual game design (piety from Theros, ship combat from Saltmash) that I consider usable at my table, which is SAYING SOMETHING considering we’re nearing the end of the game’s ten year golden age. 

I know we’ll weather this storm, we always have, and regardless of what happens I still know my friends and I will enjoy gathering around the table and slinging dice even though we might not be playing “dungeons and dragons” in a couple years time.  I’ll keep my eye on the horizon, and let you know where I find safe harbour.

[eyepool]

Tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) are popular hobbies that may offer specific social benefits for autistic people. This study investigated the ability of TTRPGs to provide a safe space where autistic adults could develop relationships with other autistic adults while engaging in character and world-building. A group of eight autistic adults were split into two groups and taken through a short-form online Dungeons and Dragons campaign over 6 weeks run by one of the researchers. The researcher then led a series of individual semi-structured interviews discussing how participants felt interacting in and out of the TTRPG. Several key themes were identified as important aspects of why autistic people could benefit from such an environment. Analysis showed that while real-life interactions could be challenging, in TTRPG play, they felt they experienced significantly fewer struggles. Results suggested that TTRPGs can provide a safe space environment where autistic adults can engage in productive social interactions with like-minded individuals. It also may allow autistic participants to experience ‘bleed’ or the ability to take on a new character that changes the way they feel about themselves outside of the game. Future directions for this work are discussed.

—Atherton, Sage, Cross. “A critical hit: Dungeons and Dragons as a buff for autistic people”, Autism (2024)