#the ground itself

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played THE GROUND ITSELF ?

By Everest Pipkin

A GM-less narrative game for 2-5 players about what happens in a single place across time, scope ranging from days to thousands of years. It's played with a deck of cards, a six sided die and a coin

[fiovske]

Do you have any recs for other non-DnD game systems? I've only ever played 5e, and I'm a little intimidated to get into other systems, but I also want to branch out and get away from WOTC's bullshit.

Sure thing! I am also including a link to the itch.io pages since that's where i get most of these games!

Blades In The Dark: i'm mentioning this first bc the rules are very easy to grasp and if you're looking for a setting that has a touch of ghosts and steampunk, this game is the perfect gateway to that! it's the best for a heist i have found and the game mechanics and names are so soo sick here's just a slice from their itch.io page:

personally i find the setting and the stress mechanic very cool, because it takes into account the mental toil that an action can have and i find games with inbuilt consequence mechanics very compelling! it introduced the concept of clocks to me and i am obsessed.

a) adjacent to Blades, are all Forged In The Dark Games which are third-party blades games, and the most notable of them is Scum and Villiany which is space-western setting and also my favorite and if you're looking to play a game in the breadth of star-wars like interplanetary politics and everything, i highly recommend this game! b) if you're looking for a Blades game with mechanics to suit something more royalty-adjacent, with court-politics and agendas and masquerade parties and all, like say d20's court of fey and flowers vibe then i recommend Court Of Blades! I havent gotten around to playing this yet but it looks really promising and i soo badly want to play a game in this setting!

2. The Ground Itself : this is a world-building game. focused on one single place over time and how it changes and how it's people change, the events of this game can be spaced out from a week to several millennia depending on the rolls of ur dice or your choices! i have found that this game serves very well as say, a session zero game also, for setting up a place before you play in it, and not only a very fun session of making a place together for your party to play in, but also not leaving all the work to the gm! so it's a win win situation!

tbh, all games by everest pipkin are very good! i wanna get my hands on world ending game as well bc it is a game about giving your campaign, your world-building and your characters the perfect send-off.

3. Wanderhome : if you're looking for something ghibli-esque (this is the closest i can come to defining this game thru popular media) then i highly recommend wanderhome! it's got a very cozy pastoral vibe to it and the art is really beautiful and you get to pick from a range of animal-folk to play as it's very cool!

also honorable mentions,

a) Sleepaway is a game by the same creator in which ur a camp counsellor to a bunch of misfits and horror stories around campfires ensue! b) Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast which is an upcoming game which you can still back and it looks really interesting so i'd recommend checking it out as well!

4. Lancer: this game has mechs it has space-battles and you get to be a pilot in a future set years in the future and a thousand directions to take ur campaign in! he relationship between pilot and mech is smth that can be so personal.....

i wanna play lancer sometime it has very cool mech designs and it has very much piqued my interest, if i find ppl who wanna play lancer w me im 🏃🏃!

5. Heart The City Beneath : honestly, one of my fave settings of all time, it has strong horror components so mind the cws! but the classes and the game mechanics are very intuitive and overall it helps you not only build a character that feels natural and organic, but since this is a horror setting, things do not have happy endings... however it will ensure that your characters have a well-built journey whose ends will be terrifying and magnificent.

I got introduced to the fallout mechanic through this game and oooo how i love it, it's the perfect blend of your actions have consequences + every consequence is interesting and will affect your character deeply and emotionally, which is <33

this list got too long so i will just mention some more here:

the quiet year (very good map-making game, for before the frost shepherds arrive in winter.)

beam saber (forged in the dark game that deserves its on mention! austin ramsey's games i highly recommend!)

thirsty sword lesbians (ecactly what it says on the tin, i wanna check this game out also)

lotr's one ring rpg (this one is the closest substitute to classic d&d bc lets be real. tolkien is where d&d got it's shit from. and i have heard good things abt this game even tho i've never had the chance to play it)

mothership rpg (space horror whose build mechanics are very easy and user-friendly and i've had a LOT of fun with this!)

orbital (one very beautifully written rpg about life in space and it's only 32 pages but well-worth the time, highly recommend)

that's all i can give off the top of my head, i might've missed a few but these are strong standouts, so i hope u find at least one to your liking!

[indiepressrevolution]

Now at IPR: The Ground Itself

The Ground Itself is a one-session storytelling game for 2-5 players, played with a coin, a six-sided die, and a deck of cards.

Focusing on place- one specific place, chosen by the group - The Ground Itself unfolds over radically disparate time periods that may range from 4 days to 18,000 years. By casting wildly into time, it considers how places both change and remember themselves. Fundamentally, The Ground Itself is about the echoes and traces we leave for others after we are gone.

https://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/The-Ground-Itself-Print-PDF.html

[aoifereal]

Very excited to be playing the ground itself in run up to a monsterhearts campaign two extremely fun games that will link together so well. Pumped innit

[literarywizard]

We're Finally Starting Heart: The City Beneath Next Session

This is the last time I'm going to write about preparing to play Heart: The City Beneath. Next time I write about it, I'll have finally played it and I cannot contain how excited I am to finally be playing a non Pathfinder/D&D game. I can't wait.

We finally finished The Ground Itself. Our final ten showed up as our second draw and then, as we wrapped up the game, I moved us into talking about what our first session of Heart: The City Beneath would look like. I checked in with my players, asked about some thematic stuff, and then pushed us into talking about characters and how to tie all the excellent worldbuilding we’d done to the systems…

[wheelie-butch]

due to scheduling I couldn't get my whole monsterhearts group together for a worldbuilding session but I really wanted to play The Ground Itself to set up the town so what we're actually doing is I'm playing the game in 3 segments instead of the usual 4 and doing each segment with one person individually. I'm letting them know what happened in the last one and the time skips are several decades so hopefully it can work out okay. I'm not sure it'll be quite as good as being all together would be but I think it's going to be the best compromise we can manage. Did the first one today, excited to see how it turns out :)

[theoldkyokodied]

Daywoman. Fighter of the Nightwoman!! (more genderbend screenshot redraws + an outfit design for charlie's and denise's short-lived glam rock band + guest appearance of THE duster. Because i love that thing.)

[drawnfamiliarfaces]

Big clockwork fan here. I'm begging you. Make him hot. Pretty please!?!?!?!

boo wdym?? WDYM BOO HE IS ALREADY HOT

but also like lol thanks for thinking that i could/somehow managed to draw CW hot, i guess???

here have some doodles of him haha

i dunno what is it about him, but nowadays thinking about CW activates some sort of sleeper agent desire to actually try and draw him attractive

i think it stems from early days on DA during dp era and seeing people draw him cool and thinking i wanna do that but also having no ability to do that whatsoever lol

but now i somewhat can ;) so thats nice

[beatriceportinari]

[video description: a striped blue dice is thrown and becomes transparent as it reaches and rolls on the ground. a dark blue octopus is slowly revealed inside. the environments are decorated with motifs inspired by cretan murals.]

Trapped in a dice for quite a while, the cretan octopus contents itself by influencing the throws

[mayasaura]

I don't really know where this lands on the scale of basic to hot take, but I don't see the locked tomb as a very overtly political series. Like yeah, it has a lot of subtext you can interpret politically, obviously, if that's your jam. but to me, the series has always been an intimate exploration of existing as a badly uncomfortable and isolated person. there are a lot of different reasons people in the series are fucked up, but the important thing to me is that they are. and that they're being witnessed. To me it's a love letter to all the deeply fucked up people out there (esp the deeply fucked up lesbians) saying "you exist, and someone sees you"

Edit: Since apparently people are linking to this post to interpret and argue with it indirectly, let me clarify. I don't mean the story is apolitical. I mean that as I see the story unfolding, the central narrative is focused on the characters, and the heart of the narrative is human connection and character exploration. Of course there are political themes being explored—I've posted a lot about them myself—but that exploration is about asking a lot of questions I don't expect the series to necessarily answer.

Tamsyn Muir doesn't have the answer to colonialism. She does have the answer as to what will happen to two mentally unwell painfully lonely girls I suspect we've all grown quite attached to.

[canisalbus]

So regarding the fake names, and how it could be bittersweet for machete to have to give up his real name for the sake of anonymity and safety, I had this funny little thought that the entire church genuinely forgot his name from calling him machete for so long. So when they hear about his death, or hear his real name they just go “who?” In response. If he was ostracized as long as he was I doubt any of the enemies he had actually bothered to learn his real name, kind of another massively ironic twist of fate where the very thing that they could use to find him and they never actually bothered to consider it.

And now the question (if that’s okay, I know a suggestion for way to explain why he still is named what he is can be a little rude) Where would they go? Would they head north to where Germany or France currently sits? South/East towards the balkans? Even further north to the anglo-saxons island? I imagine they would need to find a place where the Catholic Church can’t find them easily.

I don't know how plausible it would be for people to completely forget his proper name, but I can't deny liking the idea of him being able to shed the Machete persona and attempting to revert back to his kinder and more sensible self. From the time before his work filed his personality into a set of sharp edges.

Truthfully, I'm not entirely sure, I haven't thought that far. Trying to settle in a protestant country would be distressing, since Machete dedicated so much of his life to counter-reformation causes.

[swervenation]

Obsessed with the implications. Girl if I'm right here and you're over there then WHO'S DRIVING THE ULTRA MAGNUS!!

[blaiddraws]

dragon based on the theoretical Lockheed CL-1201. giant cryptid in the sky

[yoosung-ah]

a brief summary of Mystic Messenger (OG edition) x

[swan2swan]

Rewatching the original Livewire episode of 90s Superman last week and rewatching the premiere of My Adventures With Superman a few days later really put something into perspective...

The new one is much, much better.

Granted, Lori Petty's voice is iconic, and her character has a ton of charisma...but boy, is she wasted in that. Her character's just mean and arrogant and selfish...which isn't terrible, it's very relevant, especially today, but it wears off pretty quickly. And I know they never gave her a character arc later on in the show; I think the most she does is team up with Parasite once and then cross over to fight Batgirl and Supergirl. Comparing her to other villains like Volcanica and Metallo really puts a stamp on just how much of a Monster of the Week she was.

But that's not even the problem.

The problem is that she's created when lightning strikes a pole and Superman pulls her out of the way to save her...inadvertently channeling the lightning through him and giving her lightning powers. I don't know if anyone realizes that Superman created Livewire, but they certainly don't acknowledge it or make it a plot point. Clark drops her off at the hospital and washes his hands of the matter. The rest of the episode is just him working to take her in.

There's no anger from Leslie that he's turned her into something (but she's excited for it, anyway, so that's also not an issue), or resolution from Clark to fix her. There are several story options, but...no. They just fight. And I get it. It was the nineties. You needed weekly villains, something the kids could come home from school, tune in, and just see some colorful, flashy action going on.

My Adventures With Superman has Leslie bring the lightning powers on herself. Superman saves her from exploding as the alien tech goes out of control, and when he frees her, he gently lays her down on a step....and then, when his back is turned, she's spirited away and kidnapped to a holding facility. He doesn't ignore her: she's taken from him.

Then she breaks out, joins the Kill-Superman squad, breaks out of prison, becomes a mercenary...she's not exactly going through Major Character Arcs, but she's Living.

Or. Trying to.

The point is, the new Livewire brings more to both her own character and Superman's character. Clark isn't callously abandoning her to the prison system; he keeps trying to keep her in line when she shows up, and just keeps focusing on protecting people.

IT'S HEALTHIER FOR BOTH OF THEM.

[literarywizard]

Going Off The Rails After Adding Trains

I wouldn't have guessed that a collaborative storytelling game could feel like it's gone off the rails, but this one certainly has. I'm just wowed by the work my players are doing and too excited to play in this space to be patient for our next session.

I genuinely did not think that I’d ever look at a game of The Ground Itself that I’m using as a means of doing collaborative worldbuilding for a different game and think “this has clearly gone off the rails,” but that’s what I’ve found myself doing as I review the notes from my Sunday group’s latest session. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, mind you, just something that has gone far beyond all…