#and then you translate that into a ttrpg

[millenniumbreak]

Haven't got through the realis episodes yet but just that the text is meant to be a game written in setting from a single and biased perspective, and Austin saying he'd be interested in doing further stuff from another in-setting perspective.

I am now captivated by the possibility (or impossibility) of Bug Realis. Explicitly how would you rewrite Realis if you were trying to play it as a bug, or even a swarm of bugs, who live under an imperialist state?

Hypercollaborative storytelling? Crowd play? The stronger your sentence the more people have to say it- and the saying of it allows them to change it mid sentence? This is nothing but I'm having fun here.

It's like how you get communist or capitalist rewrites of board games, but the ideology presented is "it's sick as hell to be a ginormous insect and/or multiple large bugs."

[allthatyouknow]

What dose it mean to be a psychic? can it be trained or are you just born like that?

Excellent question! So basically it's just kinda like this

Hope that helps! Thanks for writing in.

[idoltimeyokai]

"RWARRRRRR MERRYYY CHRISTMASSS EVERYONEEE!!!

VERDEN HERE TO SAY I HOPE YOU HAVE/HAD A GREAT CHRISTMASS AND A HAPPY NEW YEARS

*Ahem* in all seriousness tho Merry Christmas to everyone inside and outside of PriPara!

Recently i got invited to perform for a Christmas live with @happyheartstar-blog and @virgoidolland. It was really really fun! Rolled a Nat20 on that fun for sure! I did my best not to get distracted by all the shiny gold, tho it was so hard to doooooo, i persevered tho! Yayy for me!

I personally dont have any big plans for Christmas inside or outside of PriPara myself, but i know I'll be having a good cozy Christmas with my dorm mates!

Annnyyywayyys ive rambled on for long enough, go enjoy your Christmas and make some good memories!" - Verden Komo [The Dragon of PriPara]

And in all seriousness from me, Octo, the actual peson behind this blog, i want to say Merry Christmas, Happy New Year's, and thanks for the warm reception so far from me joining and taking in part of this fandom!

Im posting this day of Christmas eve so technically its not Christmas yet but eh who cares.

Anyways, have a merry seasons greasons everyone!

[lost-in-yahargul]

Might have made a friend due to the huge ass bloodborne embroidery on the back of my jacket, today truly is a win for little old me <3

[fruitnoot]

Scars

[sunbeargames]

As a semi-professional homebrewer, the best advice I can give to get better at homebrewing is to live through a global pandemic just as you were getting into TTRPGs, then use homebrewing as a method of escapism during quarantine and to satisfy your fixation with the game while you don't have a group, so that your understanding of TTRPGs becomes inseparable from tinkering with rules.

[totallynotagentphilcoulson]

So uh, helps if I actually post stuff doesn’t it?

Here’s my D&D PC, I joined an ongoing session run by a coworker of mine and @moveslikebucky’s, it’s been ongoing for about a quarter of a year and they joined a couple sessions before I got over getting in my own head. Saffi’s a Fighter/Ranger, pretty blatantly inspired by pulpy adventure archaeologists/treasure hunters. And yes I used one of HF’s weird scifi guns to stand in for a hand crossbow cuz I wanted something a bit more like the OSS’s Little John crossbow than the actual hand crossbows, it makes sense in the context of the setting given that it’s, like, a homebrew dieselpunkish take on Forgotten Realms instead of Forgotten Realms proper.

I have some more dicking around on HF designs to post, about half of which are actually a year and a half old but never got added to my long reblog chain so I’m slapping those on a separate post.

[aeris-blue]

Happy Holidays ^^ Drew the Mountain Movers crew as Gingerbread Cookies to celebrate ^^

[emapmaker]

I barely ever do this and only keep these thoughts for me but the Tal'Dorei Reborn translation in Italian is on drivethru now

and boy that synopsis is either badly translated or badly written from the get go cuz the wording is SO CLUNKY

[lordplavis]

The journey has been rough. The bureaucracy to get a visa, the customs agents and the constant checkpoints and ‘random’ searches. Now though you’ve finally reached the village you grew up in. Not much has changed even though you haven’t been here since before the War. Even the old Pub is the still mostly the same except for the soldiers of course. You sit down and drink your whine enjoying the sunset and watching people going about their lives outside. You see a young woman approaching the pub. Your eye is caught by her fiery red hair and almost scandalously boyish attire but you remind yourself that people dressing like this has become more common even here out on the countryside. You return your attention back to the inside greeting an old neighbor of yours. You were just about to ask how things have been for them since you left when your view is filled by the woman you have seen before. She is smaller than you thought wearing a half decent suit a camera and a leather bag hung around her neck. She smiles at you asking you where you are from a what you are doing in the village. You answer her, and she nods while rummaging through her bag and pulling out a piece of paper and putting it In front of you saying “you seam alright maybe this will interest you” before continuing on to another table with two other people. Still a bit confused you take a look at the first page of what appears to be a small cheaply printed newspaper…

[lepospondyl]

glowworm cave stratum

If atlus won’t give us EOVI then we have to make it ourselves. In the rbs put your ideas for plots, new classes, labyrinth concepts, and more!! Have fun or smth idk

[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.

[sprintingowl]

Picaresque Roman

I'm a fan of the Japanese ttrpg design scene. My first non-DnD game was Golden Sky Stories, and I really click with the prevalence of d6s and oneshot-oriented play.

However, my ability to speak/read Japanese is so immensely bad that it changed the trajectory of my life, so I generally have to keep my fingers crossed and hope for translations of the systems I'm excited about.

Hence, when Picaresque Roman came out in English, I scooped up a copy as fast as I could.

Picaresque Roman: A Requiem For Rogues is a competitive pvp tabletop rpg. Probably the closest equivalent to it is werewolf/mafia, but it's not that exactly.

The broad premise is that you're criminals in a hidden city and you're working together in an uneasy truce to take down a big juicy target. All of you are ultimately in it for yourselves, and one of you is a traitor---however there's no mechanic that lets you kill other characters.

Instead, you can gather information (everyone has info cards, which include things like their traitor status), forge truces (or force truces), and shake down each other (or the target) for cash or victory points.

It's a full-fledged rpg, with classes and skills and an action economy, but everything happens in little vignettes. You pick an action, you roll or talk, and that's your turn for the cycle.

It's tightly designed enough that you could play Picaresque Roman without any roleplaying at all and it would still be fun, or you could put a bit of flourish on every action you take and play out quick scenes when you make a truce or rob your target.

I think this might be one of those games where all it really needs is a box and a board and it'd cruise right past people's hesitation around roleplaying and become as popular as Gloomhaven. As is, I think it's a *good* rpg for introducing other people to rpgs, especially if they already vibe with gangster dramas, Guy Ritchie movies, the Yakuza series, or stuff like Black Lagoon or Akudama Drive.

[anim-ttrpgs]

i didnt realize eureka was an urban fantasy rpg for a while and i was getting really confused as to why this noir game had vampires in it before i figured it out

I guess a lot of times we do just call it “Eureka” instead of the full title “Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy”..

This is also giving me an excuse to talk about “noir” and “neo-noir.” But let me preface that by saying that trying to very strictly and definitively sort things neatly into genres is often a fool’s errand, not because the whole concept of genre is useless, it’s just that it’s necessarily a bit loose and subjective. And also noir is a film genre not a TTRPG genre so there’s a bit of translation weirdness in even saying that.

Noir is actually a very specific and kinda narrows genre, which Eureka can do, but not one that it does effortlessly. Eureka is much more firmly and deliberately in the “neo-noir” genre. Neo-noir is, well, kind of Noir 2, Noir Expanded. Neo-noir is often described as more modern films which are inspired by the original genre of noir, taking those noir themes of gritty grounded storytelling, crime, morally grey protagonists, and unjust societal systems, and applying them a bit more broadly and sometimes to more fantastical scenarios. Blade Runner is often cited as a great example of a neo-noir film.

That’s where I feel Eureka falls. It doesn’t inherently deal with morally grey protagonists, but it often will, even if the player didn’t set out to make their PC morally grey it can often just happen because of the gritty groundedness of Eureka’s setting and mechanics and the inherent interaction with the aforementioned unjust societal systems. Neither noir nor neo-noir necessitate that the protagonist be a detective or even investigating anything, but even if they aren’t a detective, they often are investigating something and that leads them to morally grey situations and the seedy criminal underbelly of society propped up by unjust societal systems. Eureka is like that. Because it’s such a toolbox game and also a TTRPG, you could technically play a Eureka campaign without brushing up against any of those elements, but the way the mechanics are set up, the gameplay will always be steering you gently towards at least one of those noir-like themes.

[honouredsnakeprincess]

A while ago I had this idea for a ttrpg set in a world sort of superficially similar to the very early 19th century of our world, except that the first industrial revolution was ushered in by the development of the ability to standardize parts of the human mind into Methods, which are sort of archived records of a person's skill that can be transferred to other minds using a specialized set of tools, so a gifted fencer can have his proficiency copied and given to his students, a master carpenter can have all his underlings working with his exact level of aptitude, and so on.

Methods didn't necessarily confer the physical ability to use them, mind you. The aforementioned fencing method wouldn't be very useful unless you were already reasonably fit and had a sword or similar implement on hand to use. A method can contain exercise techniques to get into shape, but it won't physically change your body.

Furthermore, methods often contain minor quirks of the person from whom the method is originally derived; a translation method might cause you to speak with an accent, a shooting method might make you hold your pistol in your left hand, regardless of what your dominant hand normally is, and so on.

Needless to say, though, this has dramatically altered social norms and the economy of the world; guilds are struggling to hang on as methods are leaked and circulated of techniques they previously kept a monopoly on the teaching of, popular uprisings become increasingly dangerous as common people can gain the instincts and knowledge of years of military training in mere days, and linguistic methods have allowed for an ease of translation never before seen.

The default adventure for this system was going to be about hunting down a serial killer among high society, which is eventually revealed to be a group of duelists who have taken to using a method to improve their fencing skills (and which has, unbeknownst to them, made them unable to let a slight go unavenged.)

I still think this is a solid premise, and I think it could be fun to have methods represented as cards explaining the unlocked skill and any additional quirks they might have, which can be traded between players and NPCs. Someday I will return to this project.

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Here is a list of all the games i played in 2024

Agon

One of my favorite games, gm'd it for a local con. It's basically the Odyssey, but told in a fast & furious fashion

Argyropée

French only, a optimistic renaissance fantasy game where i enjoy the universe, the worldbuilding decision, but the system could be better

City of Mist

A noir urban fantasy game, of misteries and myths, stories mixing with regular life.

Donjon & Cie

french only for now. Instead of playing the adventurers, instead your characters are the monsters of the Dungeon, in reality the biggest business in the land. Dongeons meet the office. Will be "translated" ( more of a 2nd edition) by the Merry Mushmen as Dungeon Inc.

Eureka investigative urban fantasy

What it says in the title. It's good, it's great, it's what i will use to run cthulhu modules in the future

Exquisite Biome

Occuped some long train rides this year. A solo game where you create little ( or big) creatures in the environment you made up.

Feathered adventures

It's ducktales without the branding. A diceless and possibly gmless game that plays like Scrooge McDuck comics

FIST

I think I traumatized my fellow players with my character. It's great

Knight an avalon rpg

A french game translated in english ( the books are coming). King Arthur in mecha armor fighting against horrors that threatens humanity in the 2030s. One of the most played because we're playing the epic (yes, epic, not campaign).

Lalaland of the dead

French only. Being in the right discords, sometimes, you can play with the authors themselves. A zombie apocalypse game that is also a musical. Sing for more dice.

Magie de minuit

French Only. A gmless tarot game of witches fighting darkness within and out.

Mausritter

Play as little mice, it's totally not terrifying.

Meanwhile in the subway

The game is not a book, it's a subway map

Mothership

The worst rolls possible at creation. Yet the character survived.

Naheulbeuk

French only. The ttrpg parody that is often played at the club when we just need a quick one shot, a silly session.

Nova

The sun exploded ( or did it ? some revelations of the designer on the bird app says it was eaten actually), so get your power suits out. My players managed to be the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

pasion de las pasiones

A demo session with the french translator. Now sitting nicely on a shelf.

Rune

Elden ring as a solo game

The Dark Eye

In germany they created this to avoid playing D&D. I am wary of games that ask me to successfully roll a d20 3 times for each roll. (yes you do roll 3d20 for most things)

The Thunder perfect mind

In development, a game created by Tanya Floaker during NaGaDemon that I playtested. A gmless game of gnostic gothic punk where you play as undeads.

Triangle agency

It's on most list of games of the year for a good reason. Also be careful when reading it or you will get too many demerits and lose access to the Frozen Yogurt Room.

Troika

Used to be my cursed game. The one I would propose but something always happened and couldn't play. Finally I have played it. (But the curse transfered...)

Vaesen

Occult mysteries based on Nordic mythology.

Wilderfeast

Monster hunter meets Dungeon Meshi. I love cooking monsters.

World Wide Wrestling

The new cursed game. Did a first session for a group ( for a mini campaign). That was in August and was supposed to last 1-2 months.............this was the only session