#or maybe GURPS

[doctorofrestoration]

If I had a nickel for every time today I saw someone call PBtA a perfect system, I'd have 2 nickels. That's not a lot buts it's weird that it happened twice.

THINGS I AM UNREASONABLY ANNOYED ABOUT BY GAME SYSTEM

D&D: Please put a disclaimer that you are not a universal system. Every time I see someone try to do a political mystery game in D&D, I take 3d10 psychic damage and have to make a death saving throw.

Pathfinder: Look. If i wanted to play a game about fighting Cthulhu there is an extremely famous game specifically designed around doing that. Literally no-one is ever going to say "Wow, I want to play a Cthulhu themed game! Time to stat up a musical halfling from a magical fantasy land!".

Chronicles Of Darkness: Just admit no-one uses any of your rules. You have Social Door Rules and Integrity Conditions and Corruption Levels and I bet at most 50% of COD players could tell me which of those I made up. Just admit people aren't dressing up as Alucard The Bringer Of Shadows because they want to sit down and do calculus.

World Of Darkness: You know that old guy who's still doing his job even though he is way too old to do it any more, but he's now an institution so you can't get rid of him? Like that. The 90s called and they want literally everything about this back.

Call Of Cthulhu: I appreciate the commitment to authenticity, but maybe stop hiring actual disgraced mental asylum directors from the 1920s to design your sanity system?

GURPS: Look. Look. Listen. We both know that you just want to write history textbooks. These are history textbooks with a few stat blocks begrudgingly put in. If you just give me a book on early Chinese history I will read it and go "ah, very interesting!". You don't need to put in a list of character choices. We're all nerds. We'll read them. Live your best life.

Powered By The Apocalypse: I actually can't think of anything wrong with PBTA. That's not a bit, this is literally the perfect system. Take notes everyone else.

Mutants and Masterminds/Heroes System: Your systems have probably the most customizable character creation in the world and you both just make reskins of the Justice League over and over again. Maybe we only need one "thinly veiled copyrighted characters" setting? You can fight over it once you decipher your combat mechanics.

FATE: Ok I won't lie, I have no idea how the fuck FATE works. I have read the rules repeatedly and played three games and I still have no idea what invoking an aspect means. I don't know why. I grasped the rules of fucking Nobilis but this one just psychologically eludes me. This is more a problem with me I guess, but I'm still annoyed.

Warhammer 40k: Have you considered spending less on avocado toast? Then you might be able to afford to charge less for things?

Exalted: Apart from the lore, the setting, the mechanics, the metaplot, the character creation and the dodgy narrative implications, I can't think of anything to improve here.

[owlbear33]

so yeah, Dresden Files werewolves, there're at least 4 different types and I'm thinking about how you would handle that in a ttrpg

and like sure you could handwave a lot of it, but you know what I'm like

I want a decently granular (point costed) monster creation tool, and a similarly granular (point costed) power and magic item creation tool

so you can build up your werewolf form stats, reduce the cost by adding weaknesses, limitations on how you can enter the werewolf form, and how much control you have over your werewolf form, so you know how much XP/CP(character points) you need to spend to get that

the three/four different Dresden Files werewolves will have differences in all three of those categories the Alphas get a lot of control and can activate not quite at will, but have maybe the least powerful wolf form, the hexenwolves have better wolf forms, but have less control, and their transformation is tied to a magic belt (can be taken away), the Loup-garou has the beefiest werewolf form, it auto activates on a full moon and otherwise can't be used, the person inflicted with the curse has no control over the wolf form (and is probably treating this way of being a werewolf as a flaw)

there's probably a GURPS book for this isn't there

[swxrdie]

I should use this Tumblr more to write down the dumb ideas that've been sticking with me for a while, so... here we go!

Dramatical Murder (DMMD), but it's a tabletop campaign and the people who play Aoba and the main love interests have no idea what DMMD is (they can name the characters and give them personalities based on their appearance alone). The people who do know what DMMD is play the NPCs, and try to guide the main players through the plot while sticking closely to canon events as much as possible.

...With that in mind, it's going to be chaotic and practically not DMMD as a result, but I'd love to just see how it'd all go. I'm a newbie GM, I've GMed a short SPELL: The RPG one-shot, am currently running a Rings & Running Shoes short campaign, and am currently also learning to run the Jojo's Bizarre Tabletop system. The things I would do to make this dumb idea work LMAO!

(As a player, I've been playing in 2 D&D campaigns that have been going for more than a year, so also take that what you will.)

[orion-disease]

ok mx. my wife is 30 feet tall and we fuck [have never held hands]

[euronymous4e]

I'm begging you to play a better game.

The fact that there are D&D 5e players who don’t know how the rules work is so absurd to me. Like, they’ve had the basic rules up for free since before the rulebooks were even in stores, so even not having the rulebook is no excuse. At that point you’re doing it on purpose.

[white-weasel]

Realizing I could just run a GURPS campaign that’s set up with the same rules as the nonary game and it could feasibly work

[vintagerpg]

I kind of expected a stronger connection between tech magic and Cyberworld (1994) when I set this week up, but alas, we leave magic behind now. Cyberworld is a generic sourcebook for a near future dystopian roleplaying experience.  GURPS sourcebooks tend to aim for the generic (it’s right there in the name!), and I guess this one does too, but it winds up being a pretty unique flavor of cyberpunk.

The basic premise is pretty familiar. The year is 204X, and everything is fucked. The hows of that are honestly a little less important than the how-nots. For instance, as I mentioned already, the world is not magically fucked, as in Shadowrun. It isn’t even fucked up to the degree of Cyberpunk. It’s funny, because Mike Pondsmith has always said his world was inspired by lots of stuff, but not William Gibson’s work, but Gibson is so enmeshed in the indicators of cyberpunk that when I’m reading Pondsmith’s stuff it seems like a sort of dubious claim. But then I read this and all of a sudden, I can see how much more out-there Cyberpunk is, with its telepathic tanks and whatnot. Cyberworld is a little bit more fucked than Gibson’s Sprawl and maybe a little less fucked up than Underground. The corporations and the government and the cartels all feel like gangs, there’s plenty of plausible tech and violence, but everything feels grounded. You can see our contemporary world underneath the chrome, still. It’s cool.

Cool cover by Keith Parkinson, with maybe the earliest anticipation of 21st century alt-models I’ve seen in genre art. Dan Smith handles the interiors entirely and gives the proceedings a nicely unified look. 

[tiredfoxtf]

GURPS stands for Generic Universal Role-Playing System, which is basically what it's says on the tin. It's a tabletop RPG system which you can play with your friends.

People really overestimate how complex gurps is as a system. There's only 3 types of rolls and one of them is totally optional. Most of the math is either already done For You or it's written on your character sheet. And you do not need anything more than 3 6 sideded dice to play the game.

[txttletale]

TBQH most of popular "alternatives" to D&D are either Pathfinder or both very different and rules heavy. Like maybe if you directly ask someone who knows things you would get proper recommendations (I sure as hell know systems that allow me to do fantasy better, both very different and D&D-but-simpler), but not simply from osmosis. From osmosis you would know GURPS, World of Darkness, Dark Heresy, Savage Worlds, and a bunch of PbtA games, and half of that is more complicated than D&D and most also more setting-specific.

(Yeah there is probably a PbtA game for everything but like you still have to find specific games)

i cannot imagine any possible metric by which 'd&d' or 'pathfinder' are games that aren't insanely, overwhelmingly, rules-heavy and setting-specific

[least-evil-resident]

medieval resident evil au where Umbrella is a cabal of dark mages trying to unlock the secrets to lichdom and go mad learning secrets from the undead eldritch horror outside of space and time

Chris and Jill are Knights in service of the Order of Stars, Leon is a beginning town guard, Ada is still a spy, honestly not much is different

If you give them ttrpg character sheets then it's even more fun

Would guns be wands, badass Crossbows, or straight up magic, or different based on the game? They could also just be guns but that wouldn't be nearly as interesting.

Consider pistol=dagger, rifle=longsword, shotgun=axe? Grenades could be hand bombs or magic.

Or pistol=hand crossbow, rifle=light crossbow, shotgun is either special bolt or a spell

Beneath the cobblestone streets of raccoon city, where gaslamps and auto-carriages ramble, is the lair of an evil sect of mages developing spells in secret to transform humans into beasts

Could be very bloodborne-esque. Lots of fire and brimstone. Maybe STARS are more like paladins, and the bsaa is an order of Templar type organization.

If we go dnd 5e rules, Chris is a fighter for sure, Jill is like a rogue I guess? Leon could go either. It could be fun to make Claire like a sorcerer since she gets the grenade launcher

In later games I think Chris definitely fits either paladin or barbarian, where Leon goes for more rogue/maybe ranger vibes. Jill seems more rogue+fighter but magic rogue is cool, maybe artificer. Claire would be sorcerer multiclass I think. Keep any mages low powered that way.

Sherry in 6 is maybe warlock or aasimar instead of Cleric? Blood hunter would be cool. Rebecca starts as a Cleric in 0 for sure. For a low magic setting where research and Rituals are matched by quick, small combat spells, how high of a DC do you think enemies would go?

Of course, in a classless system like gurps or all flesh, this would be a lot less restrictive. What would be the best system for resident evil normally? What would be the best one for its fantasy au?

Wesker very much fits the low-fantasy vampire theme. He has a reflection and can step in he sunlight but wow it hurts his eyes. Chris rolls a 20 to punch a boulder to death.

Leon has the lucky feat or 20 in dex or something to pull off his stunts. Chris also gets Charisma as a leader for the bsaa, so paladin is up his alley. Leon's secret service requires more rogue skills, but his time in operation javier trains his skills as a Ranger under Krauser maybe?

Jill and Claire both get grenade launchers, but Jill is more Rogue with her lockpicking so it makes sense for them to switch level ups later on as claire learns more professional skills for rogue training.

Barry definitely hits fighter/barbarian with his heavy weapons. Jake is maybe more monk/barbarian but with something like a dhampir ancestry feature? Sheva is maybe rogue/fighter or paladin fighter since thats when chris starts taking paladin levels. Billy has to be rogue/fighter I think, or maybe fighter/rogue, if he even gets a second class. It would almost make sense for him to be pure rogue and rebecca be cure cleric, since she retires to become a researcher and hes never heard from again. Helena is I guess just plain rogue, hinting at her role in 6, while Leon has his ranger levels. Piers is more rogue/Ranger (or fighter archer). A lot of the one off teammates just don't get super interesting classes as a consequence of their limited appearance. Carlos... Fighter? Just fighter is fine.

Now, the problem here is that each game starts off with little to no equipment for various reasons. In the case of our spell casters like claire and jill, we can't just de-level them between adventures in the resident evil campaign. But we could give them more limited access to spell components to match the resource management of survival horror.

This is more complicated outside of dnd 5e, where a game like All Flesh Must Be Eaten has very different spellcasting rules, so you'd need to stray from a low-magic to a straight low-fantasy setting. Alchemist tools and one use spell scrolls replace your grenades and spell casting maybe? That's the issue you'd run into with treating the setting as one campaign instead of each game as an individual campaign though.

The easiest one to do is RE8. It's literally the same. Ethan starts 7 as a human Commoner, takes levels in artificer as the game goes on, since that one introduced crafting, and comes back very subtly as a human variant with a few new levels in fighter from chris' tutoring. Hey that means we can give Hiesenburg an artificer friend! Class buddies ♡ hiesenburg is probably artificer/sorcerer, giving him charisma and intelligence. Dimetrescu is maybe barbarian if she even gets class levels.

I don't think we can justifiably say Rose is a variant human, I think she gets her own custom ancestry features for this. Sorcerer also feels better than Druid for her, but a couple levels in - you guessed it, rogue! Cover her gun and Stealth skills. You get a lot or rogues and fighters in low powered/low fantasy settings, who knew lol

[thydungeongal]

Hi, same anon obsessed with morality.

Okay, I admit that my ask was a bit too emotional because non-evil original roleplaying games exist even in sword and sorcery style (World of Dungeons and Oracle are some I would recommend), and existence of Gondal setting testifies that it's not a male thing in any way.

However, my probably naive concern goes a little further - I don't play D&D, but I use it for monsters and settings. It's hard to invent absolutely everything from a scratch, you know? But this leads to an ethical concern I have - doing this is still feeding into D&D hegemony and embracing Gygax's and Arneson's rotten legacy (though I am starting to think that Gygax was a lesser evil, holy fuck). And let's not fool ourselves here - derivative games like Pathfinder or Knave are still their legacy (though maybe Cairn isn't, I am not sure).

So like, what are options of games that are generic fantasy that have a lot of monsters and settings to steal and that are also both not "D&D but different" and aren't objectively evil?

I know literally a handful of candidates, so I am asking your followers to share. And no, Warhammer isn't such game.

What I remember is:

Fantasy Age is not without a sin, but it's presented as "you can depict these demi-humans as equal people or you can be a hitler, it's up to you", so progress I guess?

Jackals is built on OpenQuest and is pretty generic if you exclude it being about bronze age, but I remember some potentially creepy details of how it treats demi-humans

Blue Rose looks the most morally fine, but it's not exactly generic

Lightmaster is ugh, because it doesn't have inherently evil demi-humans, but it has inherently different demi-humans who are always savages, so it's a thin ice (though otherwise it's a blast)

D6 Fantasy doesn't really have monsters in core book, but there are probably third-party bestiaries that may even not be vile

GURPS does have bestiaries of fantasy creatures, but I don't know anything about their morality

IDK about rolemaster, but you said that it's not good.

So like, which extremely ethical non-OSR heartbreaker that was published ever am I missing? Should I look into Das Schwarze Auge, or does it suck the same way?

Ultimately I think you're thinking about this too much to your own detriment. It's good to be aware of the fact that lots of (especially older) fantasy stuff does carry some fucked up expectations and approach it with a critical eye so you don't end up replicating it, but if you become single-minded in your pursuit of the perfect, unproblematic fantasy RPG you're not only setting yourself up for disappointment but also denying yourself a lot of stuff that's good but flawed.

Anyway, not a game but a supplement for OSR games, but Skerples' Monster Overhaul is pretty good in this regard and does this via simply accepting the revolutionary paradigm of "orcs are just some guys."

Another game out of the left field, Chivalry & Sorcery is really surprising in this regard, because it's the sort of game that gives off vibes of being written by "the presence of women in a medieval setting is extremely inaccurate" types, but the authors actually make a point of saying that player enjoyment and comfort should always take precedence over adherence to historicity when it comes to issues like players wanting to play women or queer characters. But it's in its treatment of orcs and trolls (and as far as I've understood, dwarves and elves too, but I haven't read that supplement yet) where it gets really cooking. Chivalry & Sorcery is a game written by medieval history nerds and they wanted their game's worldbuilding to adhere to a medieval European paradigm. So when it came to adding orcs into the game the authors asked "how would orcs fit into the worldview of a medieval Christian?"

The answer is that just as medieval Christian philosophers mused that if cynocephali or those guys who only had one big foot were to exist then surely they must be just some guys, orcs would also have to be just some guys. This means that they would be human in terms of having been created by God and tracing descent to Adam and Eve and also could receive the eucharist and be saved.

Anyway, all of which is to say that the middle ages were woke,

[theresattrpgforthat]

hello! i was wondering if theres any ttrpgs set in/inspired by Terry Pratchett's Discworld? thanks :)

THEME: Discworld

I love the Discworld books and I'm very glad you asked this question. I have three resources for you!

A One In A Million Chance At Adventure, by Jocher Symbolic Systems.

This is a game where you play the roles of, often unwilling, sometimes zealous, pawns in the cosmic octarine coloured narrative. Your character is not necessarily a "hero" per se, instead one could possibly see it as being important to the story. Characters like yourself do have a knack for not dying as often as a common mortal (or undead if that has been your unfortune).

With this follows that you'll naturally have a higher chance of actually, possibly, doing some heroic deeds, just by sheer mathematical logic. Unless, of course, you are the type of adventurer who'd prefer a cup of hot tea and soft slippers and a reliable day job.

That does severely reduce the odds of let's say beheading a mythical beast of ill repute or befriending the immodest wood nymphs of Howondaland*.

*if your day job happens to be for example a tax collector this is not true, this and similar careers have shown to increase the risk of leaving the disc rather early.  ** only rumoured, no one who has gone looking for them has ever returned.

This is a free, fan-made d10-based game written in the style of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, footnotes and all. The characters you build are expected to be flawed in some way - they have vices that can cause problems for them and plenty of skills (or spells) to help them get out of trouble.

A One in A Million Chance At Adventure has plenty of supplements to support the game, including an introductory adventure: The Murder of Dominick Kolchak, and a character supplement: The A-M Professions Character Build Guides.

Discworld Roleplaying Game, by Steve Jackson Games.

There's a lot of unusual stuff on the Disc, but don't worry about getting lost – game author Phil Masters has crafted a roadmap to Pratchett-inspired storytelling.

Visit settings like the most dubious city in the multiverse, Ankh-Morpork. Intervene in the cultural interactions of trolls and dwarves (but watch out for flying axes). Campaign for goblin rights. Flee from an angry Swamp Dragon (two feet of mindless fury and high-explosive digestion). Even find out why the second-greatest lover on the Disc needs a stepladder.

And remember, the world is round. And also flat.

This is the official roleplaying game published by Steve Jackson Games, the creators of Munchkin and GURPS - which means that this game also uses the GURPS system. Characters are pretty in-depth and require some time to put together - and that means the the core rulebook is a pretty hefty read. If you like big games with heavy modularity and a lot to chew on, maybe this game is for you!

If you want to try the game out and need a little help, there’s a GURPS Character sheet app available to help you put characters together, and Chris Normand is an avid enthusiast with many videos providing advice on how to get a grip on the system.

The Kleptomancer’s Crypt, by Max Kāmmerer.

The Kleptomancer’s Crypt is an adventure for Troika!, but is easily adapted to other systems. It mostly consists of tables to help you generate a variable adventure. Improvisation and interpretation by the GM required. 

A client hired you to break into the Kleptomancer’s Crypt and so you did. Now you need to get out of the place. The Kleptomancer is a government official tasked with redistributing the wealth by stealing from the rich and keeping what they stole for themselves. Okay, that last part isn’t in the official job description. The Crypt is filled with all kinds of strange things and rooms and people, really. You might for example encounter pipe smoking sloths, boardgame playing plants, ever expanding spheres or the Kleptomancer’s apprentice. The place is dangerous, so you prepared by cutting a deal with death, preventing you from dying while you are in the Crypt.

To be clear, this is not a full game. It is simply an adventure for one.

The eclectic tone of Troika fits Discworld so well that I’m not at all surprised that there is an adventure made for it. If you have experience with Troika, or even with other OSR games, you might want to check this one out.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Were you always super passionate about ttrpgs or is this a recent hobbie of yours?

I've been into the hobby with a fluctuating degree of passion for a little over half my life, but me becoming part of the little sphere of indie ttrpg posters on this website that discuss like questions of game design and how games and systems are opinionated is a relatively recent development.

I got into ttrpgs in like 2012 or 2013 when my dad found some printed out scans of the d&d 3.5e core books on sale at the flea market and got them for me because he knew I was into like fantasy and stuff. This wasn't my first contact with ttrpgs (the first time was when I was like 9 or 10 and I came accross the Middle-Earth Role Playing books online but I really didn't understand them lol), but it was the first time it made me actively want to play them. But after a few months of unsuccessfully trying to convince my school friends to let me GM for them my interest waned. I didn't get to GM for real until a couple years later when I was in college, and I absolutely fell in love.

I was a bit of a "you don't need any other rpgs, you can do ANYTHING in D&D!!!1!1!!" dork for a couple years, although I wasn't really... insistent about it the way a lot of D&D fans are, it was just an opinion I passively held because without any examples to go off off, I couldn't imagine any possibilities for how things could be differently, so I couldn't imagine other RPGs being THAT different from reskinned D&D.

I was passively aware of the existence of other systems (I could name Vampire The Masquerade off the top of my head if you asked me for examples of other RPGs but I had never read it) and I even tried to learn a few but it never stuck. I was really into isometric CRPGs so I tried to learn GURPS after finding out that the system from the classic Fallout games was originally based on it, and I bounced hard, and I tried to learn Shadowrun after getting into the Shadowrun CRPGs and bounced SUPER hard.

I would occasionally post or reblog posts about D&D but it wasn't a big or significant part of my blog tbh.

The event that made me start to get into non-D&D games was the Bundle For Racial Justice And Equality on itch.io a few years ago. Through it I got Troika and Mausritter and Cthulhu Deep Green, the first two of which were the first non D&D games to really Grab Me, and the latter of which personally isn't the type of game I'm into but it definitely opened my eyes to how radically different things could be in an RPG.

And of course... starry-eyed little me trying to show other people these cool new games I'd found only to get slapped in the face was eventually what radicalized me into being a D&D fan culture hater. A particular experience that REALLY stuck with me was when I excitedly recommended mausritter to someone wanting to run a Redwall-like campaign and got called classist because "maybe you do, but most people don't have $150 to drop on a new set of core books every time they want to run a campaign set in a different setting". For recommending a game with a single rulebook you can get for free.

Anyway eventually becoming an ardent D&D fandom hater made me start posting more about tabletops on this blog bc now it was something I cared about more, but it still wasn't one of the main things I posted about, until one of those posts broke containment and ended getting me a big wave of mutuals with the same interest in tabletops as a medium, which was around 2022 I think. So that's when passionately posting about ttrpgs became a regular part of this blog.

[themissinglynx]

*Appears*

Okay so saw the TTRPG post and as someone who kind of want to get into it, are their any of them that allows you to play as animals and/ or mythological creatures, but isn't DND or Pathfinder? Preferably with the D20 system.

Thank you in advance, and sorry for yeeting this ask at you-

I am not immersed in to the world of TTRPG gaming, so I haven't played any of these games myself save for one. Listed in alphabetical order and linked to where you can find the rules, here we go:

Bunnies and Burrows

Watership Down, but a tabletop RPG. It uses the GURPS system, which my TTRPG buddy says is a solid system to use. It's fairly old, but I bet there's a charm to that :D

Maustritter

This is one of the games I know the least about, but my friend says it has very solid rules. Its digital rulebook is pay-as-you-want, but getting a physical book does have a pricetag. I do hope to obtain the materials for this game when I have a more expendable income!

Pokerole: Mystery Dungeon Module

This counts in my book. Even if you're only here for Mystery Dungeon, you'd still need the base module for understanding the rules. It uses a success-fail system with a ton of d6s, and is in sore need of an upgrade since it was built for the first edition of Pokerole and hasn't been updated. The lovely folks in the Discord server are willing to help!

Watch an unfinished Pokerole Mystery Dungeon campaign here

Root: the Roleplaying Game

If you've never heard of Root the board game, it's an asymmetrical war game where your faction of woodland critters fight for control of the forest (in most cases). One of the vanilla factions you may play as is the vagabond, a lone wanderer who's kinda just trying to get by on their own means. They're my favorite role to play as!

This TTRPG lets the players play as vagabonds, but I don't know much of anything beyond that. It's also one of the few games I know that's still actively in circulation and has one of the steeper price tags attached to attaining the core rules of the game, so maybe pass on this one if it's too much to ask for.

Warriors Adventure Game

The only one of these I've actually played and hoooo boy does it need some fixin' up before it's functional. There's no element of randomness, and when discussing it with my buddy, we thought we'd implement something like Pokerole's success-fail system. Initiative doesn't exist, which can be easily remedied by peering over another game's shoulder and copying their homework. I personally went as far as to change the Strength, Intelligence, Spirit stats to Body, Mind, Heart, Soul stats, and remixing the skills to condense all the sensing skills into a single Perception skill among other things, but there is just far too much broken stuff WAG has that needs to be duct taped together by any prospective game master.

Also if you want to play the pre-written adventures for this, they're present in the backs of older copies of books in the Omen of the Stars arc and Battles of the Clans.

That's all the games I know off the top of my head, but do know a lot of TTRPGs (DnD and Pathfinder included) often have beastmen as playable options for characters!

[elbiotipo]

I think it would be fun to write a setting where military titles have the same meaning as noble titles of peerage. Maybe a space empire or an ISOT. Hereditary Captain of planet Pernambuco....

(marshall=prince/grand duke

General=duke

Coronel=margrave

Major=count

Captain=viscount

Lieutenant=baron

Sargent=landed knight without a title)

I mean, what is the POINT of noble titles if they don't confer the military rank (or viceversa)

There was something really interesting I read in an RPG manual long ago, bear with me. In GURPS Traveller: Interstellar Wars, the humans from the United Nations of Earth face against another empire of humans, the Vilani Empire, which is like a hundred times more populated and ancient than Earth.

Anyways, lots of really interesting stuff happens, but eventually in the last war, the UN has a superior technological advantage and manages to conquer the empire (there's lots of Alexander the Great metaphors here) and to administer such a vast territory, it tries to cooperate with local administration, taking local titles and such, and sometimes military with ranks as low as ensign (the lowest officer rank possible) are put in charge of entire planets at least as ceremonial feudal rulers.

(I know what you're thinking, but this is portrayed with a lot more nuance in the RPG, this eventually becomes the Second Imperium from Traveller, which falls very quickly and later gives way to the Third Imperium after a long age of collapse)

But it does get me thinking. Feudalism was a very complex system, but it essentially emerged from the fall of the Roman "state", such as it was, to be replaced by essentially familial and military ties. What would that look like in a fictional setting in modern times, for example, after the fall of major modern states where control falls to military strongmen (not only likely, this has happened, that's why warlord is a word) but also things get to a point where this system is formalized, as it was with feudalism.

[duckduckbear]

“Well, I better go. Everyone seems to be gone.” They announced to the only other person in the room.

“Thanks for coming it…*Hig* was good to see you. I didn’t know you weren’t *burp* drinking anymore, I wouldn’t have gotten so *urp* drunk. “

“No problem, It was good seeing ya. I had fun. Maybe I’ll stop by in a few weeks and we can hang and watch a movie?”

“Sure!”

Next week

“Hey, how are ya?”

“Oh, hey *burp* I wasn’t expecting ya. I’m a little drunk, hope that’s like, ok?”

“No problem, It doesn’t bother me, I’ve been in control a while.”

*stumbles* “I’m gonna get another few beers, be right back”

*Puts two beers down on the coffee table*

*Slurring a bit* “Go ahead and have that other beer *gurp*. I’m full. One beer won’t knock you off the wagon”

Just the one.

(Well…)

*crack* *sip*

TO BE CONTINUED