#agon rpg

[noughticalcrossings]

AGON

Our silly little characters going through world-ending trauma at the hands of our DM, for growth.

Kyla and Obstacles, my boy Lacedaemonius, Ophelia, and my most beloved elevated NPC Thessia whose weapon of choice is the smelling salts

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played AGON ?

By John Harper & Sean Nittner

The 300th poll, wow

Agon is a game of ancient Greek legend, where players take on the roles of intrepid heroes sailing home after a great war. Inspired in equal parts by Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and recent adventure serials like Xena: Warrior Princess, Agon follows its protagonists as they sail from island to island, solving problems, helping locals, and slaying mythological monsters along the way.

The 2nd edition gave birth to the Paragon system.

[state-of-beeing]

The Mentor

"Let me worry about the fine print." Elias folded his hands into his lap, "I have to carry my weight around here, after all." Feren scoffed, though the look she shot Elias along with it was nothing but fond. “Come on, Elias. You talk about ‘carrying your weight’ as if we wouldn’t be dead in the water without you.”

So much time has passed since then, but she knows that the words became truer than ever.

[morrigan-sims]

Btw, if you ever see me post about a book/movie/game/ANYTHING, that is an open invitation to talk to me about it. Tell me your opinions, talk to me about your builds and characters for video games, scream at me about good or bad scenes in books, shows, or movies. (Or if there’s a book/movie/game/whatever that you think I’d like, TELL ME. Please give me recs.) There is nothing in the world I love more than talking about media of any kind (except for talking about my OCs but I know that’s a harder ask.)

Also, PLEASE tell me about your dnd characters. Make them in the sims and tag me in the post. Infodump and tag me. Infodump in my DMs. Ask for my Discord and message me there. I mean it. I am on my knees BEGGING for people to talk to me about not just things I love, but things YOU love.

Send me an ask (anon is ALWAYS on), a DM, ask for my Discord, anything. I swear on everything I hold dear that asks or DMs are never w bother. (/gen)

I’m always down to discuss plot, characters, mechanics, worldbuilding, any of it. TTRPGs/CRPGs and sci-fi/fantasy books + movies are the center of my wheelhouse, but honestly I just love having in-depth discussions about things. (Oh and I could (and have, much to my friends and family’s dismay) talk for HOURS about Black Sails.)

[rotshop]

better to reign in yuri than serve in yaoi or something who gaf

[ details / close ups under cut ]

[luna-wing-cns274]

< This is L3 Hachiko. Hey!

Alright, I’m going to be honest here: I find myself kind of hesitant to jump in and start posting on my own behalf.

See, there are things I want to talk about, but I’m not entirely sure what I’m not allowed to say.

I know I said that I don’t represent the brand, but I’ve been doing some reading up on company policy. Just to make sure I don’t overstep with the Constellar, you know? Turns out, SSC has a lot of regulations regarding employee Omninet use, 99% regarding how we depict the company’s products. Honestly, I had no idea. I really hadn’t considered what the policy was until I decided to hop onto the Omninet myself.

Normally, to avoid getting dinged, one just wouldn’t bring up any SSC products, simple enough. But the thing is, I am an SSC product. Virtually every object I interact with on a daily basis, realspace or simulated, is an SSC product. My siblings, too, are SSC products. Purely taking regs at face value, I don’t just represent the brand, I’m part of the brand, and so is my entire family. So, if I say something negative about myself or my squadmates, what happens? Am I going to get a call from NHR or something?

I’m sorry. I’m overthinking it. This is the first time I’ve done this, and I guess I’m just anxious about making a mistake and having it reflect poorly on myself and my siblings. There are tons of NHPs in service to SSC, and I’ve never heard of anybody actually getting in trouble over Omni use, unless it was something really, really flagrant. Besides, even if command were to object to something I say, I’m sure they’d just let me know, I’d take it down, and that’d be the end of it.

Let’s start simple. Maybe it’d be easier to talk about something I know well. Most of the people I see around are mech pilots; would a primer on the basics of space combat be interesting? >

[open-hearth-rpg]

#RPGaDay2024

RPG with well supported one-shots

AGON is, at the heart of it, nothing but one shots. Yes, the game functions as a campaign, with characters wearing through resources, gaining glory, and changing. But that’s the super-structure for one of the most interesting and exciting sets of single-session stories. 

The basic book includes a dozen strong and evocative adventures. Each is an island– with the premise of mythic heroes on an epic journey roll up to the unique story of that island in order to progress but more importantly gain glory through solving problems. Beyond the basic book there’s a huge number of stretch goal islands. 

That means, as a GM, you can find a solid-one shot with the kind of vibe you want to explore. Just going through those short adventures is a pleasure. They have clear objectives but they’re loose enough to allow for varied means of repairing damage and solving mysteries. The GM can find a more physical story, a tale of secrets revealed, or one of moral ambiguity. Reading through the islands and finding just the right one for my mood was one of the great pleasures of running AGON. 

The clean uniformity of the structure and presentation is super attractive. You know quickly what you need to scan for to figure out if this is a story you want to tell right now. If players have wishes about the kinds of songs they want sung about them, you can easily find an island to match. 

Add to that how open and creative the problem-solving can be. I love the abstraction of AGON and how much it gives room to make those single episode stories into a greater who

[volfoss]

Objectively my brain going hey 😁 you should replay Skyrim 😁 is not going to be a good thing for me (gets sooo motion sick and also did devote about 300 hours in like a year to it) but what if I was SILLAY:3

[antisocialxconstruct]

very late to the party on this one but i was thinking about the rpg morality stuff from a while back and i realized that despite the high ratio of 'good option' playthroughs i've seen like. a LOT of jokes from rpg players about quicksaving, murdering everyone in town, and then quickloading.

which is to say it makes me think it's less a matter of doing the 'good option' even in an environment without social consequences and moreso about seeing the fictional/diegetic consequences /as/ 'real' consequences and so feel the need to create a smaller, even less consequential environment to be comfortable doing Something Evil.

if that makes sense.

That does make sense! I feel like that really gets at the root of the divide that was being discussed around the original poll, and this kinda gives me a better way to conceptualize it than I ever came up with at the time.

Like you're saying, it seems like a lot of the "I would never be mean to video game characters" people treat roleplaying games not as a contained zero-consequences environment, but as a vehicle for a direct, personal experience. They would never hurt or kill or be cruel to someone in their day to day, so if the roleplay environment is for them, they're going to continue that standard of behavior. If they do want to do something unethical (or... comically and pointlessly evil lmao) just to see what happens, then first they have to further abstract the setting into something even less "real" than the core playthrough of the game. That "I'm going to come right back to this" quicksave firmly establishes anything you do afterward as Not Real, because you can wipe it all away immediately afterward by loading the save and it's like it never happened.

Basically, that "none of this actually counts" mindset is just how I approach the entire rpg experience 🤷‍♂️ my emotional investment goes as deep as what I believe my character is emotionally invested in, but none of it ever actually means anything to me, none of the Bad Things make me feel bad, because it's not real and it doesn't matter. And now that enough time has passed that I'm not in the clutches of a pointless RSD episode over it, I can say that I still find it really interesting and a little funny that that's apparently the drastically minority mindset at least here on tumblr fgdsgsd

[mapas-fantasticos]

Map of the land of Harmundia (the Twilight Realms) from Agone by Mathieu Gaborit.

[csphire]

Hopes and dreams I had for Dragon Age 4 that we so did not get.🙃😢

An actual RPG game. Not Nice Guy, Nice Funny Guy, and Nice but Stern Guy. Let us screw up and piss off our companions.

No more dialogue wheel selection bait and switches. "Nooo I didn't mean that. I did not think they would say that! That's not what I thought that choice meant. I meant-fuck! *sighs* ...I guess I'll have to reload." Or more accurately, "That was the mean option? Are you kidding me!"

Letting the player be an asshole. Sometimes, it's just cathartic to punch a character. People in customer service especially need this at the end of a shift. Putting this in games is a public service. We needed more of those kinds of moments beyond the bloody tutorial.

More of our previous choices having an actual impact in DA4. Like the Well of Sorrows I was so certain would bite an Inquisitor in the ass somehow in the future. Like Morrigan with Mythal in her could force the Inqusitor to hurt or even try to kill Solas. So I agonized over that choice. The same goes for who we left in the fade. Honestly, the three or so that carried over I did not see any impact on DAVG at all. Am I wrong?

Who we left in the fade showing up or we find their body. "Where's Hawke?" Yeah... where's Hawke BioWare? Get's Hawke's clothes instead. Well, that's... depressing.

The option to play as the Inquisitor trying to be low profile or as a nobody aka Rook. This way, everyone is happy, right? For a lot of us, the Inquisitor going toe to toe again with Solas was important.

By playing as the Inquisitor we would have had one sweet Dagna-created prostatic arm-not from Bianca because screw her. Also, depending on our class each one would be a little different. Oh, and that prosthetic would also be customizable just like Varric's crossbow and every other weapon in Dragon Age Inquisition. I really thought BioWare would jump to help feature an amputee in an empowering way. True we had Neve but it felt like more of an afterthought to give her a prosthetic that honestly looks uncomfortable as hell.

Open worlds to collect mats, and kill things to craft gear and weapons for our team only better. It would have given us time to breathe and enjoy the scenery. Plus I like doing that kind of tedious shit and if you don't, fine go buy that stuff I guess.

Vendors that will sell us the goods if we got the coin and none of that faction BS.

"Knife ear!" You think at least the venatori would be shouting that at my elf. Nope! I did not feel like my character's race mattered in this game. I don't think Solas over a decade really put the fear of the gods into the North. We all know isms and slavery are bad but putting those things in a game's world helps people realize why they're bad and can even help people feel what it's like to be on the receiving end of such abuses which can help create a thing called empathy.

Blood! Where is the blood? Why is my character not covered in dirt and the gore of their enemies? Don't like that, fair but what about an on-off feature in settings?

Enemies that send chills down my spine. Instead, the ogres and darkspawn made me bust out laughing. I cannot take them seriously, especially the ogres. I see them and think, "Derp a durr... oh I'm an ogre and soooo scardy... rawr."

Dagna... because she's adorable and if any dwarf deserves magic it's her. Or at least let her nerd out, study Lace and help her understand more about her new abilities.

Sandal Cameo at least. Also adorable aaand... ENCHANTMENT!

Our companions can get hurt. I'm starting to think they made them immortal because they knew some of us would let them get hurt on purpose. There are no feelings of concern at all for them going into combat now, no pick-up mechanics it leaves me feeling only more apathetic about them.

Quicker cooldowns on abilities instead of spamming the left mouse button all of the time. And more than two fucking abilities on my hot bar. BioWare... what were you thinking?

Three or more companions traveling with us instead of two. It was the gold standard all throughout the franchise. How are we supposed to get to know them all when limited to-oh right most of them have a personality as deep as a kiddy pool, never mind.

Companions with personalities and problems deeper than kiddy pools. That tension between Cassandra and Varric, Dorrian and Vivienne, Cole and Sera, and so forth was... chief's kiss.

Control of all THREE of our companions traveling with us in combat. Look, I'm a control freak who likes strategy. Combat for the series has always been centered on strategy, pausing, builds, and gear. Am I still bitter that they dropped us to two? ...Yes.

If playing as the Inquisitor you get the option to romance someone new. Especially let us have the option for Lavellan to move on from Solas.

Better-looking hands and body proportions. Why are the heads so damn big? And honestly the hands in failguard genuinely creep me the hell out with tucking the pinkies away all the time. It's weird! Strange hill to die on I know but they just make me cringe and die a little inside.

Romance scenes that would make Larian and BG3 fans blush. This game was always meant for adults. Adults have *gasp* SEX!

Solas not being a total red flag d-bag for killing our favorite dwarf! Run Lavellan Run! You're probably next. And if not him, Bianca is going for your eyes!

Solas being less of a manipulative antagonist twat and/or the player has the ability to be more diplomatic from the start with Solas to get his help. I feel like Solas' character development sorta backtracked by a lot.

Solas once again is a romance option but this time to EVERYONE! That and I wanted to see Lavellan and Solas finally get it on.

They finally let us romance Varric. Oh they did you so dirty, baby... *ugly crying*

A memorable soundtrack that sets off all the feels and is not stuff that's reused from the Inquisition.

Last but not least, where the fuck is our Golden Nug Bioware?

I might add more later, but feel free to add more and comment below!

[noughticalcrossings]

A Spartan warrior, nephew to the great king Tyndareus, finally on his way home after the fall of Troy, desperate to bring honour to his family’s name and win the heart of his true love…

Character design notes under the cut:

A new character for a new campaign, Agon this time, which I’ve never played before but I’m very excited to start. As usual I’ve gone overboard and spent far too many hours making a semi-accurate family tree for mythological characters and drawing armour.

The designs are copied from red figure pottery, with the scene on the breastplate stolen from a hydria of Perseus (my boy’s great grandfather) fleeing after slaying the gorgon Medusa, held in the British museum. The gorgon insignias on the pauldron are from an amphora of Athena by the Berlin Painter.

Both the swords are actually bronze, the silvery one is arsenical bronze and the dark one is black Corinthian bronze (hepatizon), as is his armour.

Ironically it is actually very resistant to losing its colour through scratches, so you could probably picture Lacedaemonius meticulously re-etching his armour after every battle lest the blackness overtake it, which I’m sure couldn’t be a metaphor for anything.

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played AGONE ?

By Mathieu Gaborit (a lot of his books became ttrpg), Sébastien Célerin, Stéphane Marsan and Frédéric Weil

A baroque medieval fantasy set in the Twilight Realms. the players characters, the Inspired cause they were blessed by the Muses, fight against The Masque who wants to plunge the world into perfidy and obscurantism. Poetry, sculpture, painting, dancing and music are actual types of magic.

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

I was listening to Confessions of a Rotten Girl while writing this, Romans were the original Fujoshis when you think about it

Genre: Swords and Sandals fantasy, Mythological Fantasy

Touchstones:Hades, Xena, Jason and the Argonauts

What is this game?: Agon is a Tabletop RPG focused around emulating roman mythology

How's the gameplay?: Agon uses the Paragon engine, meaning characters stats are assigned die instead of modifiers, characters also have "Name die", which add bonuses or banes depending on someone's epithets and names, for example if "Shadow-Wise Xentropa" is gonna sneak around, they roll not only their d8 of Craft and Reason, but also an extra D6 due to their epithet applying to the situation, characters can also call upon favors of the gods to further help, but this requires to be in good standing with the squabbling and petty deities, characters also accumulate GLORY which increases the power of their name, adding extra bonuses when Epithets apply

What's the setting (If any) like?: Agon is set in the world of ancient roman myth, but you could probably do any sword and sandals style setting you wish in the game

What's the tone?: Heroic! Characters are flawed like the heroes of old, but they're powerful, and they fight mighty beasts for glory

Session length: 4 hours or so is usually enough time

Number of Players: 4-6 players is a recommended amount

Malleability: Agon's core systems are purposely generic to be modded into other games, but the game by itself is fit mostly to Sword and Sandals campaigns

Resources: Agon has a printable character sheet but not much else

Agon is a great game with a setting often explored but not in the world of TTRPGs, check it out!

[ponett]

unfortunately the conversation about ff16's genre shift has become so completely consumed by arguments over whether or not it's "real final fantasy" that you're just not allowed to dislike it. you're not allowed to express even mild dissatisfaction over it becoming another big budget prestige playstation action game with a skill tree. the fact that mainline final fantasy is so varied is cited to shut down anyone who dislikes the direction they chose for 16 and call them fake fans. that or people pivot to pedantic genre definition shit like "well what does 'rpg' really MEAN, anyway? has ff ever REALLY been a true rpg??" it's agonizing. i am agonized

[theresattrpgforthat]

any ttrpgs for spooky dark boarding school stories? gotham academy, the boarding school: las cumbres, wednesday, that kinda thing?

THEME: Dark Boarding Schools

Hello there, at first I felt like this overlapped with all of my magic school recommendations, but once I did some digging, I realized that there's a lot of big differences! That also means that there was a good number of games I haven't recommended before, so I hope there's something here that fits what you're looking for.

Tangled Blessings, by Cassi Mothwin.

On the eve of your final exam at Brackroot Academy, what mysteries, secrets, dread, and drama will you recall from your last four years of schooling?

Tangled Blessings is a solo journaling or two-player RPG inspired by dark academia media, ghost stories, and graduate school. Featuring a wizarding college, wandering specters, assigned houses, curses, devils’ bargains and more supernatural flavor, Tangled Blessings blends horror and the fantastical to help players craft a story that spans their time at the academy — culminating in one final showdown against their rival.

If your favorite stories ever involved sneaking around an ancient building, uncovering dangerous secrets, studying in a dusty library, practicing spells on the lawn, or making perilous deals with creatures lurking in the darkness… This game is for you.

Tangled Blessings is a game about discovering the dark secrets hidden behind the allure of a secret magical world. You use a tarot deck to determine your character’s placement at the school, the nature of their rival, and the ghosts and creatures that will emerge throughout your years at the school. Each year is represented by a series of card draws, which will represent events that you have to decide how you respond to. If you play this game using the 2-player variant, each of you will play each-other’s rivals, comparing your results to see how the school year affects the both of you. The game culminates in a Final Exam that will determine whether you or or rival comes out on top.

St. Hornbeck, by belsaas.

Welcome to St. Hornbeck College/

Atop a small hill in the woods just outside the small town of Southfield, WI sits a College. Old, copper-rimmed limestone buildings huddle together against the harsh winters, while herds of students wander between them in search of wisdom, kinship and the occasional party. Soon, those herds of students will include you. There are two main reasons for enrolling at St. Hornbeck. Firstly, they have a leading program in the field you want to major in (yes, whatever you may choose). Secondly, there are only a handful of colleges that accept monster-teens in America…

This game relies on traditional teenage tropes to inform your character background, and leans fully into the allegory of monstrosity being a metaphor for young adulthood. Gameplay occurs over a series of scenes, marking various days in the calendar of the school year. In each scene, you can roll for or choose complications related to your monstrosity as a way to invite tension and obstacles for your characters to overcome. If you want to see something that’s a bit darker, you might want to check out this game’s inspiration, by snagging Midnight Oil from Jay Dragon’s Patreon.

Lost Years, by Summerwood Games.

The boarding school in this game is any boarding school, every boarding school. The walls are old stone or red brick, the dormitories are filled with young people going through the agonizing process of becoming themselves, classrooms retrofitted with ceiling tiles and modern lighting.

There are spaces of this school that belong only to us students, sacred rites performed in them that mean nothing to others and everything to us. We smoke cigarettes in the basement, make out in the tack room, make meaningful eye contact across the cricket pitch. I will tell you two truths and a lie: no one can take these years from us, none of us will be the same when we leave, no class will teach us more than we learn from one another. Can you see now which one is the lie? We couldn’t.

Lost Years is a Belonging Outside Belonging game set in a boarding school menaced by a mysterious force that threatens to empty the students of everything that makes them themselves. Meant for 3-5 players, it can be played as a one-shot but is most suited for multi-session play. 

Lost Years looks to be a game that focuses on the emotional highs and lows of being a teenager trying to survive in a strange environment away from the eyes of their parents - but still under the control of some form of authority. Your characters will fill the roles of various tropes from boarding school media, such as the Sporty One, or the Witchy One.

Because this game is BoB, the school itself will fill the foreground, with various locations such as the Attic and the Greenhouse being fleshed out by different players around the table. If you want a game that focuses on the themes of dark academia and how they affect the relationships of these students, you might want to check out Lost Years.

Never & More, by Small Stories.

NEVER & MORE is a quick-play roleplaying game and Edgar Allan Poe-inspired hack of John Harper's Lasers & Feelings.

You are the newest recruits of The Society of Ushers, an occult secret society. Your mission is to prove yourself to your superiors, master the rituals required to move up a rung, and learn how to talk to ravens. Your direct superior and teacher, the Belfry-Devil, has finally deemed you suitable to circulate by yourselves amongst greater society, trusting you to remain faithful to the Ushers in the face of attempted poaching, targeted seduction, and superior parties.

This isn’t necessarily a game about academia, but I think it carries similar elements of learning, dark secrets, and hierarchy. Lasers and Feelings games balance your characters between two qualities; in this case, you are torn between your desire for safety and your hunger for knowledge. You can play this as a one-shot or draw it out if you like, just keep in mind that these types of games usually don’t have resources for character advancement, so your characters won’t gain any new abilities - although whether or not they learn from their mistakes is up to you.

Precarious Prep, by Seaworks.

Welcome to Precarious Prep.

Something dark is going on at Precarious Preparatory School, and one detective - your GM - needs somebody on the inside. In the daytime you'll take classes, get to know the students and faculty, figure out who you can trust. The better you do in class, the faster you'll level up. At night you'll investigate the campus, search for clues, and unlock puzzles. Report your discoveries to the detective to gain points.

Instead of having 6 universal stats, Precarious Prep uses a curriculum - the stats your character takes on are determined by the course load you pick up each trimester. The better you do in classes, the more firepower you’ll have in your investigations. Classes can be fully relevant, partially relevant, or irrelevant to the checks you need to make throughout the game, so coordinate with your team and round out your education with a variety of skills.

Precarious Prep uses something called Discovery Points to indicate how close your students are to revealing what exactly is going on at this preparatory school. Your characters use the things they are learning in class to investigate the mystery, while trying to avoid generating enough suspicion to get them kicked out. Many of the rules strive to generate a number of different gambles that the players can take while trying to gather information - will you do something that increases your chances of success while also increasing your chances of getting expelled? Can you get enough information before the school year ends - or before one of you gets killed?

This game is still in open beta, which means it’s free, but also that it might still have some kinks that need to be worked out. The designer is very eager for feedback, so if you take a look at this game, you might be able to contribute to the final product!

I’d Also Recommend….

The Gardening Club, by Wizard of Ox.