#silk & dagger ttrpg

[anim-ttrpgs]

You know how there's IRL movies where the protagonist is some lame loser dude who ends up paired up in a crazy situation with a badass woman with years of experience in [crazy situation] and she trains him and he's way better than her in half the time and is the only one who can defeat the bad guy and also she swoons and falls in love with him and becomes a submissive wife. The Drow from Silk & Dagger would make those movies with the sexes reversed.

[mc-cookies]

Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG casts Drow (as they're portrayed in a lot of Forgotten Realms media) as a society of fucked up, comically over the top warrior women with deeply repressed insecurities and extreme superiority complexes. It is very good at portraying these types of women! One media example of this genre of woman is Queen, from Deltarune, and as an exercise to test the robustness of S&D's character creation, I tried to recreate her. It took me all of 15 minutes to create a very accurate and mechanically supported version of her, and most of that time was just me thinking about how to transplant her into S&D's setting.

In particular, the character creation process means that this Drow would be very likely to lounge around on her throne, laugh at people condescendingly, hang around with other people who she shows off to, unpredictably succeed or fail at certain tasks, and do silly bullshit that makes real-world audiences laugh. Any fan of Deltarune will tell you that that is a reasonably good description of how Queen acts throughout most of Chapter 2, and it was effortless to put together in S&D.

Character creation in this game is very easy, and on the Drow mistress side of things, it's very good at creating weird, domineering, hilariously over the top women. Check out the Traits I gave her (listed below the cut) to get a sense of what this game does!

Authoritative Idleness: This Drow gains a +1 Contextual Bonus to any Interpersonal Roll (besides Social Cues) if the Skill check is made while they are the only one in the chamber who is sitting or otherwise lounging casually, such as with her legs crossed, or laying on her side propped up at the hip. She gains an additional +1 Contextual bonus if she is on her throne, and/or an additional +1 bonus if whoever she is speaking to is at a lower elevation.

Laughtracker: This character gains 1 Favor Point every time their actions or dialogue result in at least one player laughing out loud,[1] to a maximum of 1 time per Scene. [1. Sidebar] Meaning players in the real world, not any of the characters in the game world. If any spectators who are not directly participating laugh, that counts too. [Favor, in Silk & Dagger, is a metacurrency that can be exchanged for Boons, which grant advantages on future rolls.]

Noblewoman's Laugh: Up to once per Scene, when this Drow gets a haughty laugh in,[1] partially covering her mouth with her hand, she gains a +1 Contextual bonus to all Interpersonal rolls until the next time she loses Reputation or the end of the Scene. [1. Sidebar] This has to be a situation where it makes any sense for her to be doing a haughty laugh. [Reputation, in Silk & Dagger, is a stat representing how much a Drow is respected, loved, and/or feared by her peers. A PC's Reputation reaching 0 is the main fail state of the game.]

Showboater: This Drow thrives on showing off. Add a +1 Contextual bonus to any Skill roll this Drow makes as long as two or more people are watching her. However, she takes a -1 penalty to all rolls when nobody is watching.

Unpredictable: All rolls for this Drow must be made with a 1D12 instead of the usual 2D6. If using a Boon, add an extra D12 instead of an extra D6 and only count the highest die. [If you're unfamiliar with how probability works with multiple dice, this essentially makes extreme results more likely. With 2d6, the range of roll values is from 2 to 12, but values closer to 6 and 7 are most likely, which in S&D means that Partial Successes are more common. Using 1d12 means that every value from 1 to 12 is equally likely, so the character is more likely to get unexpected full successes or failures.]

[faeriedaez]

Something I really appreciate about @anim-ttrpgs's upcoming Silk & Dagger is that it is in my opinion very approachable when compared to similar games. Which, if you’ve READ Silk and Dagger you might be cocking your head at that claim, because I will admit. Silk and Dagger is unique - it has some mechanics that are doing things I legitimately don’t think I’ve ever seen any other TTRPG do.

But let me explain what I mean. I have, in the past, tried to get into games that, for example, place you as like a British aristocrat or whatever. But these sorts of games - they ASSUME you already kinda know the social norms and stereotypes of Regency Era Gentry. 

…Which like. I don’t. 

But, the conceit of Silk & Dagger promises the very same thing that made those other games attractive to me. It places the player into the restrictive and ridiculous norms of a highly stratified society. BUT since it's a brand new set of fantasy norms, the book EXPLAINS them to you. Making it a far more approachable example of this kind of play because you're not expected to already know the ins and outs of an existing society at a specific point in history. Not only that, the game FULLY mechanicalizes the norms and stratifications in a way none of the other games could. (After all, if they DID I wouldn’t have felt the need to already know them, right?)

Anyways, as far as I know Silk & Dagger is getting an Ashcan release in a month or so, but if all this sounds intriguing to you here’s the patreon. For just a five dollar entry fee, you’ll get the game at its latest states, (AND likewise for the OTHER genre defining masterclass of game design ANIM created, the hot and upcoming Eureka - bbbbut this isn’t about her.) and believe me when I say the team NEEDS the money. 

[chaospyromancy]

A Squad of Drow is now available!

Many of you are already familiar with @anim-ttrpgs's Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG but if you're not, it's about playing a beautiful woman who has something wrong with her. Well, there's other stuff in there like dark comedy, caves, and clever social commentary, but the insane women bit is what I care about. I made character design zine for it using the manual's tables to generate many women who have something wrong with them, and it's available on itchi.io at the beautiful price of whatever you want. Check it out!!

[thydungeongal]

Reading the playtest version of @anim-ttrpgs' Silk & Dagger (an RPG about dark elves navigating a society built on extremely byzantine rules of etiquette) the first thing that stuck out to me was the codification of, essentially, a co-GM in the rules: with one player basically having the role of making sure the characters are acting according to these rules of etiquette and deducting points for breaches of etiquette. And the player is rewarded for doing this, because the player acting in the "spider goddess" role accrues Favor which turns into Boons when enough of it is accumulated, and the player gets to transfer any Boons gained while acting in this role to their character the next time they play.

It's a really cool way of using mechanics and incentives to reinforce the theme: the game is about a society that really hinges on its bizarre social contract and people constantly scrutinizing each other's behavior. The system itself is hostile, so it makes sense for the game to incentivize really scrutinizing the characters.

It also makes me think of how few games actually account for rotating player roles in their mechanics. I have seen many games promote the idea of rotating player roles, but with very little incentive for doing so: the main incentive usually presented is "the GM should get to take a break every once in a while." The idea of rewarding a player acting in a somewhat GM-like role is pretty remarkable, because it's very rarely done. I have heard of some Japanese tabletop RPGs giving incentives for rotating GMs, but the idea of rewarding the player actually facilitating the game beyond the intrinsic reward of it being enjoyable is still quite rare.

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to seeing more of this. It's already inspired a few ideas that I might want to plug into my World's Best Dungeon Game (a weird mishmash of ideas borrowed from other games that represent the ideal, platonic form of the coolest dungeon game I could ever want). They're gearing up for an alpha release on itch.io March 10th, so look forward to that (and while you're at it go check out Eureka and the funny hedgehog game from these folks)

[starcrossed-loserz]

hey so uhh. I honestly don’t know what to open this post with but I do, unironically, recommend eureka! investigative urban fantasy to everyone, I’ve read thru the rule book, I’m in both servers and I must say. It’s worth it. It’s worth paying for. Everyone in the servers are lovely, I’ve made new friends (well I’d count them as friends anyway), and you can play ttrpgs (including eureka!) with said people! look. I can’t force you to buy eureka! or silk & dagger, but if you want to give your money to a small indie ttrpg who’s creators deserve the money (more than multibillion corporations)! Id seriously recommend it. I’m not super well-versed in ttrpgs, but eureka! is easy enough for me to understand while still allowing for complex characters and the like! Another fun thing is a bunch of new modules will be coming out for eureka! soon as well.

So please, if you’re considering supporting. Do it

plus, if you join the book club, I’ll always be down to chat :]

[thepleasuregoblin]

I think one of the funniest responses I see to Silk & Dagger by @anim-ttrpgs is stuff akin to "is this just someone's fetish?" Like yeah. Ed Greenwood's, and some other people at TSR probably. Seriously though, how do you know about drow as a concept without being aware of the whole "evil femdom society" bit they have going on?

[anim-ttrpgs]

I wish it were part of my job to reblog hot goth elves on tumblr

You have no idea how stressful this is.

[anim-ttrpgs]

Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG

(thumbnail art by @chaospyromancy)

Drow: Intensely matriarchal, tunnel-dwelling, scantily-clad warriors obsessed with an evil spider goddess. Why would anyone with access to magic and resources live in tunnels and fight half-naked? Enter: Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG.

These dark elves have a long and sordid history, but now they live in a network of tightly constraining social rules, entangling them like a useless servant in the webs of a domesticated spider. Every Drow is the matriarch of a household of servants, and together (and apart), they must navigate the edicts of the Spider Goddess and keep up the Reputation that keeps them safe against other Drow.

Asymmetric Gameplay 

Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG features two distinct player-character classes, and two distinct game master roles.

Players either take the role of a brutal mistress whom everything she says goes, whether she understands what she’s talking about or not, and whose position of dominance is maintained by the respect of her peers, respect that hinges on how brutal and controlling she is to her subordinates; or an array of pathetic servants who are helpless without their mistress’s “leadership,” (and maybe even be more so with it).

In addition to the standard game master role, the one who sets up the scenario and runs the NPCs, there is a secondary game master role, that of the Spider Goddess, representing the social scrutiny weighing down on every caste of this strict, ruthless society. Silk & Dagger encourages rotation of players in and out of these roles, rewarding them with points that can be spent to give their own PCs an edge next time they play a PC.

Satire and Deconstruction 

Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG takes many of the established trappings of “dark elves” and asks “what kind of society and environment would actually produce individuals like this?” This question is the springboard off which the satire launches, and lands uncomfortably close to home.

Comedy 

Taking inspiration from games like Paranoia, Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG presents a situation where survival often hinges on working together, but social pressures, class divides, and constant scrutiny encourage player-characters to do anything but, resulting in a sitcom-esque comedy-of-errors in a grimdark, lightless world.

[anim-ttrpgs]

The hardest part isn’t convincing people that our approach to playing TTRPGs is the best one ever, that isn’t even what we're trying to do. The hardest part is convincing people that any distinct deliberate approachs even exists at all, and that individual TTRPGs will play better if approached with the approach that they were designed to be approached with.

[faeriedaez]

me crawling away from Dungeon Crawlers that bend over backwards to make your player character's feel like "the good guys" and into the loving arms of @anim-ttrpgs Eureka and Silk&Dagger

[anim-ttrpgs]

This happened to a friend of mine so I'm warning everyone, no matter how fashionable or sexy a (Silk&Dagger) Drow looks, do not tell her she is “serving”!

[anim-ttrpgs]

Silk & Dagger & Disability

So, obviously, the main thing Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG is about is capitalism and slavery through indirect means, but people really resonate with the disability readings of my work, so here’s this.

So, unlike Eureka, Silk & Dagger is technically a class-based RPG, but it only has two classes, Mistress and Servant, which is the joke. (It’s literally their socio-economic classes.)

It also has two races, elf and man, A.K.A. humans.

“Race” is not normally something I default to when writing RPGs, but in this case it’s a matter of the inspiration and source material that Silk & Dagger is parodying. The thing is, though, that still isn’t really what Silk & Dagger is about. It’s about class and forced labor, and the way that these two “races” map onto that is not really applicable to how that works in the real world. That’s one of the reasons that Silk & Dagger doesn’t have a whole roster of “races,” it would make people even more likely to try and read it as a racism allegory when it’s not.

So, there’s the dark elves that live in the underground caves. Dark elves can see in the dark, have sensitive ears that move and that ear movement is part of their language, and they don’t sleep, among other things.

You, reading this, are probably a human so you know that humans can’t see in the dark, can’t really move their ears, and do need to sleep regularly.

While dark elves are actually still not particularly well-suited for life in these caves, nor the society they live in, their innate abilities make them much more suited to it than humans.

The people in charge of division of labor in this society pretty much all happen to be dark elves, who have obviously never been humans and never will be, and have an interest in their underlings working as much and as hard as possible. So when they get servants who can’t see, can’t hear, and can’t communicate as well as a normal person, and these servants try to say they also need to take more time off than a normal person, you can probably see where I’m going here. The response is that humans are dumb, lazy, ungrateful, parasitic, worthless, etc.. Many Drow don’t even think “sleep” is real, they think it’s something humans are making up to get out of work.

These humans are people who would be able to thrive somewhere else, in some other situation, but they’re not in that situation, they’re in another situation that the Drow forced them to be in. They have no choice but to do a job their body is not good at, do it worse than everybody else because of this, and be considered dumb, lazy, and a liar the whole time.

I’m sure many of you reading this will find this situation familiar.

Oh and also the little candles that humans need to see in pitch black caves are constantly blamed for the buildup of carbon dioxide in the enclosed cave systems by Drow who burn coal to heat their bathtubs.

[anim-ttrpgs]

The maid and princess side of tumblr has got to check out Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG.

[anim-ttrpgs]

Death Bed is our upcoming third major game after Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy and Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG.

It’s inspired by Dark Souls and inspired by the fact that the official Dark Souls TTRPG is a shitty D&D5e hack.

It’s an old-school dungeon crawler that began with the goal of just translating Dark Souls’s predictable, relatively slow-paced, and stamina-management-focused combat into (fun) turn-based TTRPG form, and has now unfurled into a whole lot more. It’s very much “about” Christianity and being “dead” in a post-apocalyptic Late Middle Ages.

Parties of undead PCs set out on dangerous expeditions from the safety of their little shanty village into the desolate wastelands and decaying castles of the old world overrun with mindless hollow soldiers who nevertheless still guard their posts and patrol the roads, attacking anyone they see as intruders and invaders. They do this to keep their minds sharp, and to bring back “treasures,” in a world where a chess board with all the pieces, a picture bible, or a musical instrument hold more value than a glistening golden crown.

Dying to any of those gruesome dangers is not the end of a Death Bed PC (they died once already or they wouldn’t be here). Instead what they have to worry about is their own progression towards hollowness, which is advanced significantly by death, but also despair and idleness, yet staved off and reversed by morale-boosting experiences, meeting new people, setting and accomplishing goals, and improving the quality of life at their new home.

This game takes much more after the dungeon crawling of AD&D than that of D&D3e and onwards. Fighting monsters is just one role for PCs to take in the party, not the only thing they do. Lots of PCs will be non-combatants providing scouting, moral support, logistics support, utility, etc.. Also they’ll have to do all this while navigating strict medieval gender and social caste roles.

This game is currently in pre-alpha but you can read the PDF on our patreon, or in either of our discord servers.

The pre-alpha version will come out on our itchio after it’s been playtested at least once, after which I will be working to bring it to alpha stage to make it suitable for running actual multi-session campaigns with character progression.

What exactly is the death bed ttrpg?

And they pass the rock to @anim-ttrpgs

[anim-ttrpgs]

Okay so Silk & Dagger seems to be selling pretty well and it has definitely breached markets that Eureka has not which is awesome, I know this because I have been getting tumblr asks about it from people who have never read Eureka.

At the time of writing this, March 12th 2025, we have made $605 total and still need to make about $1,050 in income this month to stay alive, so here's hoping we can make that in the next 20 days or so. If you can lend us your financial support, please do so, and if you can't, you can still help a ton by reblogging our posts, talking about us, and downloading our games.

We have a ko-fi and patreon too.