#sandypuggames

[leafie-draws]

concept art of She Who Eats for HELLPIERCERS 🔥

[literalcatpod]

This Month on the Literal Cat Podcast (08.2024)

WAKE UP GUYS! IT'S AUGUST! I know the poster says two, but you might notice we've got three bits on the feed for you this month!

On August 7, @theresattrpgforthat joined us to make a cat who has a double life as the mayor of a small town in Alaska and as an anomalous event investigator in External Containment Bureau by Mythic Gazetteer!

Then, on August 21, we bring you a... Cat veterinarian? A Veterinarian cat? How did that get here? In Monster Care Squad by @sandypuggames!

But that's not all! You might have already noticed, but today, on the public feed, we dropped the first half of our bonus Actual Play one-shot episode, Herding Cats, where we attempted to mash up four different PBTA games with the help of ChaosKingJameson (from twitch), @elfgirlcraftworks, and @el-ahrairahthefakeghost!

Also, Part 2 has just gone up on the Patron feed for Badger Knight and Badger Royal-tier patrons!

[transplanarrpg]

still not over the very sweet, very wintry arc one interlude we did with Stellaluna to kick off the next leg of CHAOS’ Journey! this story couldn’t have been possible without the sponsorship support from @sandypuggames — MONSTER CARE SQUAD LOVERS UNITE!

if you wanna see our very gay, very trans take on Ald-Amura, then check out the interlude wherever you pod your casts ❄️✨

[raul-volp2]

HELLPIERCERS KICKSTARTER LAUNCHING TODAY!!

Some art I made for the HELLPIERCERS tabletop rpg that is launching today March 9 on Kickstarter!!! =D https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sandypuggames/hellpiercers-tactical-harrowing-action

[txttletale]

I’m not too sure who to ask. My partner and I use to do supplement stuff for ttrpgs but we were booted off of our main platform (Twitter) due to a glitch. Is there a better place we should be posting our stuff? We’ve been missing the community quite a bit Q^Q

the TTRPG space on twitter has absolutely gone to the dogs but unfortunately i get the sense that most people have migrated mostly to private discords. there are some cool TTRPG people on here -- @sandypuggames, @jdragsky, @austinramsaygames, off the top of my head -- but it feels like increasingly there's not really a designated public square for TTRPG stuff since twitter started going downhill i'm afraid

[amina-asceric]

Hello! We've made a character maker based on our upcoming supernatural mystery visual novel, Other Monsters: A to Zed.

* For personal and non-commercial use.

* Don’t edit or claim as your own.

* Please tag us!

We are:

* DoviDoes: https://twitter.com/DoviDoes

* awhekate: https://twitter.com/awhekate

We've included t-shirts shouting out some of our favorite creators, so check them out too:

* Sandy Pug Games: https://twitter.com/SandyPugGames

* San Jenaro Co-Op's Short Games Digest: https://san-jenaro-co-op.itch.io/

* Reaching Out, a novel by Filamena Young: https://machineage.itch.io/reaching-out

* #iHunt, the Tabletop RPG by Olivia Hill and Filamena Young: https://ihunt.fun/

* Abysmii: https://www.youtube.com/user/Abysmii

* Creative Horror Podcasts: http://creativehorror.com/

* Terrace Neighbors: https://www.terraceneighbors.com/

* SoberDwarf: https://www.youtube.com/c/SoberDwarf

* RPG Pals Club: http://www.rpgpals.club/

* JurnisPlays: https://www.twitch.tv/jurnisplays

6.9.2023

Bye Tokkis 🐰🐇

[parker-d-bloodrose]

I just finished my first run of “The Exquisite Corpse in Maggots’ Keep” and I gotta say, @sandypuggames knocked it outta the park with this gamebook. 10/10 no notes. I won’t spoil anything but it is worth getting your hands on immediately, not just for the gorgeous artwork by @jnbutlerart but also for the writing by the team. It’s equal parts meditative and HILARIOUS.

[dukerin0]

Vicious Princes Mechanics: VIOLENCE

This is the second in a series of mechanical discussions about my TTRPG, The Devil City & Its 77 Vicious Princes. Today I want to tackle VIOLENCE.

There's just something about games--digital and physical--that compel designers toward scenarios and rules about poking holes in people. I leave the psychological underpinnings to smarter and more qualified people.

Of course it's crucial to note here there are plenty of TTRPGs that downplay or eschew violence--The Quiet Year is a personal fave, and if you haven't checked out Monster Care Squad by @sandypuggames you owe it to yourself.

Unfortunately, The 77 Princes of Zarkany are ambitious, rapacious, and generally dickheads. When you've built a city on a mountain of stabbed backs, you need rules for when the daggers come out.

Vicious Princes doesn't really do universal mechanics. I find this especially appropriate for Violence. It should feel a lot different: scarier, less controllable, a place where your quick wits falter. The traits that help you wonderfully outside of combat suddenly stop applying. You had a plan; now you are getting punched in the face. You know what they say.

Excuse your way past Fau La Spada and follow me into Keep Reading Land.

There are a few schools of thought on combat design in TTRPGs that have it--you can look up "combat as sport" versus "combat as war" if you want to see debate dating back to the stone age.

Generally speaking, I'm not the biggest fan of most implementations of tabletop combat that involve a great deal of tactics and mechanical heft. I find that if it lasts past about 5 minutes, I'm bored and want to get back to the juicy stuff w(hich is to say: going weird new places, meeting weird new people, and having conversations with spooky undertones). This is just a preference thing. It's why--despite Lancer being objectively dope in almost every way--I never really play it.

When designing combat in Vicious Princes, I had these goals in mind.

It should be fast. Ideally, you can finish the actual fight in less time than the saber-rattling and threats which led up to it. This is partially about the preference above and partially about the game's cadence--I want much of the table time in DC77VP to be spent scheming and sexily exchanging veiled threats.

It should be decisive. Often the combat mode is where a lot of really meaningful decisions come into play--both in how you built your character and what their actions are. For the stereotypical railroaded D&D campaign, in fact, it's one of the only places where agency really is open-ended. I want to make sure that's not lost in this implementation; but in going with the fast bullet, I've tried to front- and backload the decision-making process. The decision about whether to fight is the most consequential one, followed by how to initiate the fight, and finally how to get out of the fight. The actual clash of steel is where the chaos gremlins known as dice come in, and take the decisions out of our hands.

It should be dangerous. I want combat to be the last resort. Injury comes swiftly and easily, recovery is difficult, and death is a distinct possibility for even the most powerful Prince. Everyone should be white-knuckling it when the weapons are drawn. This is because violence sucks.

Most of the time in DC77VP there's a way to weasel your way out of a situation; Princes are good at that. Violence is the exception. You can't bribe a bullet.

Here's how I approached it:

Let me walk you through my reasonings.

The Dice: are d4s, because they are sharp like little swords.

Equipment: is used by certain traits and by the GM in figuring out whether to assign or penalize dice--it is otherwise not taken into account. There are no weapon tables or armor ratings, and a hit is a hit; doesn't matter if it comes from a handaxe or a halberd. I love differentiating between a bec-de-corbin and a bill, don't get it twisted, but this is a sacrifice made in the name of scope.

Targeting: is the simplest and most frictionless way I could think to do it. This is basically the only tactical decision you make during the actual rounds of combat. It used to be that the two sides just built their own dice pools and threw them all at once, but that made things a little too one-sided; at a certain point your party could be sure they were safe.

The Resolution: is a single, simultaneous roll. Everyone is stabbing everyone at basically the same time, and it's only clear what's happened in the aftermath. Specializing in Violence will give you more d4s to throw, but even if you have a Knight who's all violence all the time, they can be dropped to the dust in the space of a single unlucky round.

The Consequences: are severe. Your average character can be hit once before they drop, and once they do, there's a 75% chance that they never get up. A well-trained character can soak a blow or two, and medical attention gives bleeding-out characters a better chance at survival. But even if you absorb the hit or survive your downing, you are now wounded, a nasty condition that prevents your character from taking part in any meaningful action for three whole in-game days, during which their absence will be keenly felt by your House.

Once the dust clears on round 1, the shape of the fight is basically clear, and nasty, sometimes irreversible things have happened to important people. The next big decision both sides must make is whether they're reckless enough to throw again for round 2.

OK, that's it for Violence. I hope it made sense, and if you want to talk to me about it more I'd love to hear you over on the DC77VP Discord. Next time I'll talk to you all about Magic (oooooooh!!!).

[prokopetz]

@0player replied:

Sorry for being dense, but could you elaborate on "central gag"/the kind of game you're parodying? The mechanics of the game haven't otherwise stricken me as terribly abstruse, so I don't get what kind of joke that would be following up on.

It's not necessary to have prior experience with indie RPGs about killing God as a genre to play Eat God, but nearly everything it's doing in the way of genre parody is going to fly over your head unless you have a fairly extensive acquaintance with them. I'd suggest starting with stuff like @makapatag's Gubat Banwa or @sandypuggames' Hellpiercers; they're not the most accessible reads if you're a novice to tactical RPGs, but they have good presence on Tumblr and active support communities, so it's easy to get help. OSR god-kicking games like Let Us Build a Tower may be also be a useful touchstone, to a lesser extent – and the fact that mentioning Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition didn't mean anything to you other than "abstruse mechanics" suggests you might benefit from rustling up a (perfectly legitimate) PDF of the D&D4E Player's Handbook in order to better understand how the previously cited titles are building on its foundation, too.

Of course, to really carry Eat God's central gag to its logical-yet-absurd conclusion and make it fully an example of the kind of indie game it's parodying, I'd need to add an optional tactical combat minigame that's just blatantly cribbing from Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. The trouble is that doing a proper job of it would really want separate mix-and-match ability trees for each individual Form, something like how mutation templating works in Gamma World 7th Edition, and writing up 180+ special moves for the sake of an elaborate shitpost is a bit much even for me.

[leafie-draws]

some spooky guys for HELLPIERCERS 🔥

[literalcatpod]

55. Making a Veterinarian From Another World in Monster Care Squad

Ald-Amura is a majestic land with vast deserts and mystical, majestic creatures referred to as Monsters. You play as someone who helps to take care of the monsters when they have health issues. Welcome Wolf the Cat to the land of Monster Care Squad, by @sandypuggames!

Follow the show online: https://badgertrove.com/literalcatpod/ 

Follow Joel Holland: https://jholland.start.page/

Follow Avalon: https://twitter.com/AvalonAlchemist

We’ve got a Patreon now! https://www.patreon.com/BadgerTrove 

Download the character sheets: https://bit.ly/literalcatpod 

Join our Discord! https://badgertrove.com/discord/

Cover art, midroll theme, and Intro/Outro music made by Joel Holland

Thanks for listening! We’ll Cat-ch you later!

[basiliskonline]

@sandypuggames replied to your post “friends, just as a heads up. You might see me like...”:

@sandypuggames i queued up like 30 posts about garbage today. i'll do it again tomorrow. its like nonstop posting

​Ha! Yeah! I almost exclusively queue because it also just makes the experience better for everyone (okay people like me xD). I’ve already had a few twitter mutuals i havent been able to follow because  they just shotgun out 40 rbs in 5 minutes and thats a completely different experience than on, say, twitter, because posts are so much bigger on tumblr.

Everything gets tagged and goes into the queue, or goes into Drafts to be tagged and queued later.

[basiliskonline]

@sandypuggames

[phynali]

My friend is a queer indigenous artist and creator who makes cool indie ttrpg games you can download 😍😍😍

My friend's roof caved in from snow 😭😩😩

My friend's company is selling a bundle of their games for super cheap to help raise money to cover the repairs 💪🔨💪 (and for another one of their creators in need of mutual aid)

If y'all are interested in ttrpg or helping out an indie creator, you know what to do 👆👆👆👆👆

(you can pay as little as like 5 or 10 for a bundle of games which is honestly just super good value?? Up to 32 different ttrpg sets for $20, with options to pay extra if you're like me and wanna help out with roof repairs during this trying time 🔨🔨🔨)

[ostrichmonkey-games]

RPG Highlights: Praeuro

I signed up to do the @SandyPugGames #SPGAwards Exchange, and I was given Praeuro by @delethiel. To talk about it shortly, I very much like it. To talk about it more long-ly, here we go... 

The basic premise of the game is; you play as a priest of a forgotten flame-god, armed with strange magic and a donkey companion, exploring a forgotten, icy world in order to support and build up a central commune back home. 

Tonally, it really reminds me of my favorite aspects of games like Dark Souls or Hollow Knight; you are here, in a world that begs to be explored. The setting is presented in the descriptions/skills/abilities rather than a big lore dump. 

Which I find to be instantly compelling. I want to know more, but there is also so much space to explore as a player/gm.

The game uses fudge die, but in a way that is familiar if you’ve played pbta/fitd games. The barrier to entry in this game is very low, and the wealth of character options to make revisiting the world an easy choice as well. 

I really adore character creation. Its a mixture of familiar mechanics that that make grasping them easy, but presented with its own unique twists. Familiar, but also solidly having its own identity. 

Lapis in particular, is such an interesting facet of your character. Lapides are tokens to “dead and ghost-gods” (which aside: deeply love anything that includes dead gods) and you can call on its power at the cost of Warmth - an important “meta-currency” that impacts how moves work. 

Lapides are tied directly into each priest’s donkey companion as well. You can shunt the loss of Warmth to your donkey at the cost of its disposition, and the donkeys can safely carry the Lapides. 

Warmth, mentioned prev., is an aspect of each priest and donkey. When you have Warmth, you use a certain subset of moves/results, and when you lose Warmth - becoming Cold - you use different sets. Gaining/bringing Warmth ties back to your character’s abilities/skills/lore and motivations. Warmth can act as a character flag and help you drive your story. 

You want Warmth, but the options/results for being Cold are tempting - they seem to create interesting situations and complications.

The cycle of playing Praeuro revolves around embarking on Expeditions and Work within the Commune. 

Expeditions are the journeys and adventures of your characters, and have specific elements to follow that make crafting them straightforward. The elements tie back into learning about world-aspects (icy Calamities and threats) and into the Commune building (such as ways to accomplish more Work). 

(there’s also a flowchart example of play, and, i love flowcharts)

Also! Included in the “play” section is an extended written example of play - which really helps you understand how these different moving parts all fit together. 

The Commune acts as a sort of central hub and base for your characters. Through expeditions and other aspects, you can work to improve the aspects of the Commune and the lives of the people who live there. 

The nature of the Commune shifts through play, as different factions/blocks move toward their objectives during downtime. It really helps portray a lived-in, and still living, world. 

Aside from the content of the game (which I hope I’ve convinced you is great), included in the download are very handy reference/character sheets and a super convenient character keeper. 

Praeuro presents a unique and compelling world that you not only want to explore, but you want to help grow the community your characters work with and are a part of. I very much would like to play it. 

And lastly, link to the game! Buy it!

[allegro-designs]

Kickstarter is NOW LIVE as of October 1st!

It is the 1950s, but not as you know it.

In Small Town USA, a Dragon is asking the cute Orc Jock to prom. The nerdy Undead has been practicing their magic all month in preparation for the big show, and an Elf has just finished tuning up their hot rod, in time for the big race.

And somewhere in the town, their best friend was just murdered.

Americana is a new TTRPG by Sandy Pug Games set in a radically inclusive, magical 1950s. Players build their own incredible town, populate it with gangs and hangouts, then investigate the murder of their best friend in a collaborative, collective storytelling system designed to place narrative and relationships front and center.

Do you like Tabletop RPGs? Murder Mysteries? The 50s aesthetic but explicitly without the baked-in institutional racism that most 50s-themed media likes to handwave as “that’s just how it was?” Then BOY HOWDY does Sandy Pug Games have a game for you! 

I’m doing a lot of the art for this awesome game and I’m super excited that it’s finally announced because Oooh man it’s been hard sitting on the content for this one. Please check it out! The KS deadline is November 1st, 10AM EST.

If you’re interested in following along with the game and playtest reviews, you can find @SandyPugGames on Twitter, as well as me at @AndiSupreme where I’ll be posting more WIPs, finished art, and doodles as we go. Also feel free to check out the Americana-inspired audio drama “Tom’s Dead” pilot episode to get a taste for the atmosphere of the game!

And just in case hyperlinks aren’t friendly with your device, here’s the link to the Kickstarter page one last time! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1901207515/americana-1