#tatterpigs

[hopefulrefrain]

Love and hate are just two sides of obsession.

Toxic Sword Lesbians fight their shared enemies when they’re not fighting each other. They know they shouldn’t say something hurtful or give in to escape over responsibility, but they do. They lash out over disagreements on ideals and on expectations. They give in to their worst self-destructive impulses. And then they pick themselves up off the ground and go help their loved ones, because that’s the right thing to do.

Toxic Sword Lesbians is a game for telling stories about the most awful women you can make up to love, which is to say: it's a hack for telling spicier, more emotionally fraught stories in Thirsty Sword Lesbians. In it, you'll find the following tools for Making Her (Your Character) Worse:

Tailored GM and player agendas for running the game

Updated core moves

New Sex and Intimacy moves for each playbook

New relationship questions and GM moves for each playbook

More evil Truths of Heart and Blade

Recommended TSL-official settings and scenarios for running Toxic Sword Lesbians

Four new settings that highlight the fraught nature of many aspects of queer identity

Custom mechanics for experiencing body horror, monstrous hunger, and being put through an isekai timeloop

[xxxdragonfucker69xxx]

Four musicians. Thirteen dice. One final, desperate shot at immortality.

LAST TRAIN TO BREMEN: A Tragedy for a Doomed Quartet, by @arcnoise , now available on itch

LAST TRAIN TO BREMEN uses snappy mechanics based on Liar's Dice to deliver a grim tale of secrets, backstabbing, and betrayal.

Build your band, flee your cursed contract, and reflect together on all the choices that led you down this sorry path.

[geostatonary]

There is another world, you see. Right next door to our own

If you go up ...

If you go up, and you run the roofs like the rats do, you'll find the roofs getting closer and closer until eventually they merge; until you can’t see the houses any longer beneath them. If you keep going from there, you’ll discover whole landscapes that have been hiding above us: strange fairylands, magic gardens, inexplicable towers; all manner of wonders.

There’s this whole world of magic, and to get there, you just go up, over, and on for a bit.

... regrettably it is the demesne of the Mysteries.

This is Jenna Moran's newest game, using a derivative of Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting's system with some new twists and the introduction of new oracle technologies about going on adventures with rats and fighting terrible and numinous god-monsters, the Mysteries!

Oracle technologies?

You're rolling dice, you're drawing cards, you're assembling scrabble tiles to address your problems. All the classics.

But isn't Chuubo's and all that a whole big family of games I'd need to learn first?

No worries! While The Far Roofs is a Chuubo's spinoff, it's written to be standalone and playable without any knowledge of the setting- in fact, it's written such that many games can be set in your normal life, like a sort of portal fantasy situation full of cool rats

Tell me about the cool rats

The Fortitude Rats are rats that gained gained intelligence and grew to be two or so feet tall when they stood upright (which they can do). They're a bright and passionate people, and they make it their business to fight with the Mysteries, numinous monsters and gods that exist on the Far Roofs. Everyone sets out with a group of rats, who in this game are described with various archetypes, like some sort of commedia dell'ratte

Will I get to sit with my feelings as I look out over windswept familiar-yet-alien roof vistas before going to fight a terror that's haunting my life, but also maybe that I've fallen in love with?

Oh You Know It

[cetaceanhandiwork]

Six years after a cosmic ray entered my brain and gave me the idea for this, I've finally gotten it edited and formatted into a nice, polished one page (front and back) TTRPG.

The game's premise is that, three years ago, a mad scientist invented an improbable T-cell injection that lets people permanently change their shape. A person can come up with any biologically valid form (and quite a few biologically invalid ones), and with just one needle-poke and a weekend of bed rest, make that hypothetical body their own.

But the game's thesis is that it's not enough, on its own, to magically become your "ideal self". Like a teenager going through puberty, one must still take the necessary time and awkward effort to grow into that self – figuring out how to be that person, and how that person fits into the world around them.

You can download it for free on itch.io, or at this direct link.

[iamthelowercase]

What I'm hearing here is PvP Mad Libs meets something like Gone To Hell.

Gremlin brain also suggests that there should be a hack of 🔄🐦 that plays with this. It offers no suggestions on how to make that work other than over text chat, however.

Proposal for a truly adversarial tabletop RPG:

The numeric values of the traits on your character sheet are pre-filled, if applicable but the actual names of your traits are not: they're left blank, indicating only what part of speech – noun, verb or adjective – should occupy that slot.

The game includes 20–30 different character sheet designs, each of which has a different assortment of open slots, presented in a different order and layout, so what kind of slot is being filled can't be predicted from its part of speech unless you know which sheet someone is holding. The slots on each sheet are numbered.

Character creation begins with each player drawing a random character sheet design; the group then goes around the table taking turns calling out the part(s) of speech of their character sheet's lowest-numbered empty slot. Each other player calls out a word satisfying those criteria, and the active player must choose one of them to write down in that slot.

Attempt to play the resulting characters.

A basic mockup of a character sheet might look like this (though in practice they should be much more needlessly complicated):

Information

Species: (1) ________ [noun] Profession: (2–3) ________ ________ [noun + verb ending in -er] Alignment: (4) ________ [adjective]

Skills

(5) ________ [verb] Rating: 4 (6) ________ [verb] Rating: 3 (7) ________ [verb] Rating: 2 (8) ________ [verb] Rating: 1

Known Spells

(9–10) ________ ________ [verb ending in -ing + noun] (11–12) ________ of ________ [noun + verb ending in -ing] (13–14) ________ ________ [adjective + noun]

(Note that the traits presented here should not be taken as normative, so not all character sheet variants will have slots for "Alignment", or "Known Spells", or even "Skills", and other sheets may have traits not seen here.)

[acaciaeocene]

Fundamentally, trying to "solve" a roleplaying game is a fool's errand. There's nothing stopping the GM from throwing an arbitrary amount of Save Or Die at a character and waiting for the natural 1, or whatever the mechanical equivalent is. The reason they don't do that is because it's a hostile and boring play experience. Therefore, non-GM players should reciprocate and also not cause a hostile and boring play experience.

[unseenphil]

So yeah I'm a sucker

Because I went ahead and pre-ordered the FF14 TTRPG beginner box because why -wouldn't- I invoke two of my special interests at once. And it doesn't seem to be a straight 5E hack unlike a lot of other licensed games, so there's a chance it'll be interesting.

[merge-conflict]

Thinking about doing the job I do now but in the cyberpunk universe, and how if I had to work in VR all day I'd spend all my free time working on a time machine to go back and kill von Neumann with a bag of hammers.

[xxxdragonfucker69xxx]

in some ways i think beach episode is my best game; shoutout to aaron for seeing it so clearly

My latest video is on @xxxdragonfucker69xxx 's "Beach Episode!" I love the idea of a game whose sole purpose is character development, and I think Zhu frames this using touchstones similar to "cozy games," but ends up achieving a more profound result.

Transcript here.

[morkaischosen]

ruined by the realisation the emotionally unwell templar I play in a weekly tatterpig is just my vision of what it looks like when an entire religious order is founded on the conviction that it's their personal and collective responsibility to stop God from having a reason to empty the Bean Jar.

[jdragsky]

🌈 for wanderhome; 🌧️ 🌼 for sleepaway; 🌩️ for yazeba's b&b? (i love wanderhome and sleepaway so much, they really shifted how i think about tatterpig narrative and mechanics integration, cannot wait to get a copy of yazeba's soon)

🌈: Favorite Class In Wanderhome

my favorite changes with the seasons but right now it's the Ragamuffin! i like how they've got some really intense protagonist-y picklists but don't have to lean into it, and can get into some more abstract questions around belief and death.

🌧️ Something Melancholy From Sleepaway:

🌼 Something Beautiful From Sleepaway

(both are from the litlte marginalia on the sides of the book, some of my favorite little poems I wrote for the game)

🌩️ Something spooky from Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast

this is from oen of my favorite passages in yazeba's (and also one of the last things we wrote, so new that in the current PDF release it hasnt been edited, and the version i'm showing is from the upcoming pdf update) that's about how hey kid got to the b&b

[hopefulrefrain]

Ok I guess I should promo this here too. Anyway some years ago (like. five? six? that seems unreal at this point) I published a tabletop rpg setting called Thousand Cousins, about the legacy of elves driven from their homeland ages ago.

I've been wanting to add more content to it for a long time! And the long-awaited hour is here. It's got mechanics! It's got name tables! It's got short fiction! It's going to have even more things (layout, illustration, campaign seeds) because I'm itchfunding it!

The beta edition is available ✨now✨

[xxxdragonfucker69xxx]

Some months ago, I signed a dark pact.

Ten Thousand Days For the Sword is not yet fully ready for release. But this preview of 10kDays is playable, contains outlines of anything that isn't there yet, and causes me to not suffer a terrible fate.

Password is sword. Good luck.

[heedra]

i think i do a pretty good job avoiding too much character bleed in tabletop and i really have never played a character i would consider to be an insert of myself but god i still think if i told a therapist like, the top 3 tatterpig characters ive played that i consider the most directly based off of some deep personal catharsis they'd have a field day with it lmao

[hypokeimena]

i bought dice and im so excited to have dice even though i'm only playing tatterpigs via discord with a working roller bot. so like. ok

[fortooate]

TYRANNOCLEAVE THE UNGRATEFUL

“Listen now: we have nothing but time, so I shall not rush. The first violence I commit to you is to tell you my story. You will know before you die: My mother died when she bore me, hooked to tubes and deadlife machines. Your men had her bear me with the assistance of an exo: a machine massaged her heart, currents forced her muscles to work, a black box strapped to her chest forced breath into her lungs. All of this because you knew. You knew at that point the only protest we had was to die and deny you new bodies.

So you took me from her and I never knew her again and in the care of your stone-matrons I learned how to tear worlds to pieces. I learned the lash, and the pick, and how to read the earth you had me kill.

“When I was ten, I learned that I must take these pills to survive. That I was born riddled with cancers that you would never take from me – too expensive. The recovery process too long. And your quarterly profits could never slip, as it would mean ruin for your name.

“Look at me. You are why we are hideous. Your propaganda paints us as beasts – but it is your hand that shapes our flesh. It is your word that scars our skin and bids cancer grow thick in our bodies. In the names of manna and your house, you ruin millions.

Millions. There are millions of us and countless more. This is your unbecoming. Your death, below your feet. Every inch of every palace and ship and grand city you build, you build on our backs, with our labor, at the cost of our lives. It began in the mines, but it will not end there: your Baronies are as riddled with us as my body is with metastasis.

Yes, weep now. For your perfect face. Your perfect worlds. Your perfect dominion.

Do you know that I did not know what the sky was until the Ungratefuls found me? Liberation means this: not simply seeing the sky, but knowing that there is such a thing as land without stone above you. And then knowing that there are those who put you there. I always thought – we were always taught this – that we were damned and penitent. That we had transgressed against Lordgod’s perfect kingdom and must mine in penance.

How wrong I was! It was not a divine prescript that doomed us to labor, but you and others like you. How surmountable the problem became then.

“This is the Ungratefuls’ gift to me. This is their gift to the rest of us – the waste, the offal of your courts and palaces. This is why even your machines fight alongside us. Because you never taught us there could be a thing like the sky. Because you thought that we would never learn.

Goodbye, grand baron. Your house burns, your coffers have been emptied, your monuments have been torn down. Your line – your sons and daughters – hang from the balconies of your own palace.

We learned, grand baron. We learned how to hope, and who to hate.

Lancer (Core Rulebook), p. 421-422