#ttrpg things

[unlawfulgames]

Made stamps with my kiddo today!

[gallows-into-oblivion]

i'm still fucking thinking about the TTRPG session that ended 8 hours ago

in the past 2 sessions the party has made LEAPS and BOUNDS in terms of inter-party dynamics and intimacy

it's so good i love it so much

and ALSO we ended on a devastating cliffhanger that made me want to rip my teeth out one by one

if Oz Ssulik dies, man, Alistair Ashcholl is gonna be so fucking broken...

[chromaglitchgaming]

Generators For When Your Party Can’t Stop Looting Things

Have you ever run into the issue of your players defeating an enemy, and wanting to loot the body? Do your rogues enjoy pick-pocketing? Do players expect random creatures to drop random items, like cheese wheels, because of that one very popular RPG I can’t name-drop because of copyrights?

If you answered yes to any of these, then I have the resource for you. Generators For When Your Party Can’t Stop Looting Things include several system-agnostic tables full of useful and not-so-useful items that you can use in any TTRPG setting.

What you’ll need:

A D100 and D20 or a digital random number generator.

If you downloaded the FREE DEMO VERSION of this zine (PDF name: “Generators For When Your Party Can’t Stop Looting Things DEMO VERSION”) you will have access to a sample of items from each table. If you need more items, you can get the PURCHASABLE VERSION of this zine (PDF name: “Generators For When Your Party Can’t Stop Looting Things”) on itch! 

The FREE DEMO VERSION of this zine includes:

A 20-item table of “Pocket Sized Items”

A 20-item table of “Medium Sized Items”

A 10-item table of “Items Creatures May Carry”

The PURCHASABLE VERSION of this zine includes:

A 100-item table of “Pocket Sized Items”

A 50-item table of “Medium Sized Items”

A 20-item table of “Items Creatures May Carry”

[aquadestinyswriting]

That incorrect quote comic of

Merri/ Elo: Do you you ever think before you speak? Felix: I have never thought about anything ever - Fuck you

Just walloped me in the chest 🤣️

Mostly with memories of Felix's (tl;dr) "You should worship Elo because she's like a living saint or something" and my ever alarmed "No! No! Cuthbert's sake, stop talking!"

Absolutely cackling 🤣️ 🤣️ 🤣️

Oh absolutely 🤣🤣🤣. The number of times Felix dropped Elowyn in it is hilarious to remember, even if both our characters wanted to quietly murder him at the time.

[cloaksandcapes]

From the perspective Game Master and TTRPG Player, there's a very fine line in collaborative storytelling where the whole "It's what my character would do..." is a very frowned upon and often a RED FLAGGED statement.

We ALL do what our character would do, but the difference is when that statement is thier reasoning. That's when the "You control what your character does!" becomes relevant.

Sir Bob the Goblin Slayer slays goblins on sight because a Goblin killed his family. So when Ted the Goblin (and player) joins the party, he attacks on sight.

He has motive and it's what's his character would do.

But Ted is dead now. And a table is probably in shambles telling Bob he's an asshole.

You know what else the character could do?

Bob looks on in confusion...how is everyone okay with this? Why aren't we killing this Goblin on sight? They're...an adventurer too? A hero? Certainly not...what makes this one different? Had Bob maybe made a mistake in thinking all Goblins are alike?

You get to make the choice to make interesting decisions on behalf of your character. While some may come more easily and natural, and while the idea of our characters and stories creating thier own path is poetic and beautiful...it need not be a piece of advice you always follow.

A code set in stone is breakable. Make sure you learn to bend it when necessary.

"you're the writer, you control how the story goes" no not really. i wrote the first sentence and then my characters said "WE WILL TAKE IT FROM HERE" and promptly swerved into an electrical fence.

[filibusterfrog]

types of wizards :)

[meltykarasu]

Failures In Worldbuilding

Rather than my usual post I’d like to celebrate a little; I run a little tabletop group online and we recently completed our third campaign with myself as DM/GM — this one taking place in the Star Wars universe and acting as a strange mix of The Mandalorian-inspired bounty hunting coupled with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead-ing through the background of the Star Wars films (a device I liberally cribbed from the very funny Tag and Bink comics they did in the early-to-mid-2000’s). We grappled with friends and foes and the esoteric systems of West End Games’s d6 system and the honestly janky Roll20 sheet I had to edit myself after a style update busted the fanmade one we were using.

Starting in a couple weeks, we’re going to be playing Dungeons & Dragons again in a setting I’ve been building for some time. I’m not going to discuss it a ton because, well, some of my players do follow this blog, and I’d rather not tip my hand before the first session. I’d rather talk about my earlier settings right now. 

The second campaign I did was a contemporary setting inspired heavily by Sailor Moon and Persona 4 and etc, etc. Admittedly, I think that Dungeons and Dragons was a poor choice for this and if I had to do it again I would find something more rules-lite, like FATE Accelerated. I think that the plot setup, however, made me really flex my muscles in world and especially character building, because the PCs were stuck in the same town for the entire thing and ran into the same characters repeatedly, including one of my favorite villains: a talking skeleton named Commandant Bones, who once introduced himself by declaring, “Prepare for trouble! And make it single! Because it’s just me.”

I think that my first campaign, though, is what I want to talk about, because a lot of my ambitions for it and the failures to meet them are part of what led me back to D&D after spending fourteen or so months immersed in Star Wars. (The other part, by the way, was Berserk, The Witcher, and D&D: Honor Among Thieves getting me back into fantasy as a genre.)

Long story short, I had neat worldbuilding ideas going into the first campaign and I want to talk about how a couple of them failed to manifest properly. None of these are going into my new setting as a result of the differing focus/foundational worldbuilding, so if you ARE one of my players, feel free to read this through.

Idea One: Couriers

Do you know what Death Stranding and Fallout: New Vegas have in common? No, it’s not the inexplicable celebrity cameos, although we can all love Matthew Perry saying “What in the goddamn?” No, it’s couriers. In both you play as couriers thrust into something greater after a delivery gone wrong, which is an idea I really liked as a plot setup. 

So I had this idea that the couriers were the adventurers of the setting, and that the players were couriers, and there were these isolated settlements they were meant to travel to, but I think that I jumped the gun too soon on giving the players a vehicle. They never really got to experience trekking through the wilds of the very imaginatively named Home Continent (I also have an issue with naming things, but we don’t need to get into that right now.)

I also never gave them the option to have another courier job beyond the initial plot one. I think this would have allowed them to grow a cash base and run a business (very Acquisitions Incorporated, whose book does have rules on business forming that I would use if I were to run this style of game). I think it would have been better for that. Players like having ownership over A Thing they they get to fill out and make stronger.

Third, and maybe most importantly, they never encountered another courier. I think that this, too, would have helped make this job feel more important. During this latest Star Wars campaign, I had them run into other bounty hunters — big names like Boba Fett and Bossk, along with original small names like Wolfram Aphra and Molly Ringworld. They had professional, preexisting notions and relationships with these characters, which makes the profession feel alive — important if you want to convey that this is an important job that more than just your PCs do.

Idea Two: Barter

I also had the idea that things were primarily barter-based: you did not get paid in coins, but in things: items or favors. This immediately fell out of the worldbuilding a couple sessions in when I realized that I had not told the players and the wizard attempted to pay for an inn room with gold pieces. Yikes! 

Basically: reinforce these fundamental ideas if they do not mesh with what is established in materials like rulebooks, etc. This should be a bullet point on your lore doc or something you state in session zero.

Idea Three: The Silos

I’m going to admit that I’ve never seen the show, but I read the premise of Turn A Gundam and knew I wanted it to be part of this campaign: the idea that fantastical advanced technology had been buried, and the world turned ever on until someone discovered it and caused an arms race of unearthing progressively more destructive technology. 

I just don’t think I communicated this enough! I had all these grand story ideas but I think that they weren’t well-exposited or depicted. We didn’t even go to an excavation site! How foolish of me!

Going Forward

James Cameron and Stan Winston, on the DVD commentary for Aliens, discussed how everything that they’d done for that film had, in effect, become R&D for The Abyss and Terminator 2 — everything you do is research and development for your next project. I think that this is an important mentality to have in the creation of art. 

After I had what I perceived as a failure of a campaign, where it felt like maybe a third of my ideas for the setting and plot went anywhere, I sat down and I experimented. I set an entire campaign in and around a single town. I think this worked well because there were locations there that kept getting revisited — the school, the local shrine, the main characters’ houses, their usual haunts. They formed a more effective bond with the setting and NPCs because they couldn’t gallivant around the world on an airship. 

On the opposite end, I let my players roam relatively free in our Star Wars campaign. They had open choices on where to take the story, what they wanted to do each week (generally from a short list of adventures). Revisiting the bar after a hard job or dropping by the Merchant after a firefight to restock or taking the ship in for repairs and upgrades meant more when it was a choice the players made.

I still had things go wrong (which, hopefully, my players did not notice too much) but I think that my skills are much more sharpened for another crack at this. I’ll let you know how it goes. 

[keystrokecascade]

character idea: girl mecha pilot who gets dysphoria from being human and spends as much time neural-linked into the mech as possible because that body feels more like her than the flesh does.

mechs are expensive so maybe the only way she can possibly get regular access to one is to put herself in debt to a mercenary corps, running disposable missions until she can pay her junk-tier mech off.

sleeping in her mech to spend as little time out of it until she starts dreaming of static. wearing long sleeves to try and stop herself from picking at the squishy human flesh on her arms. it doesnt work.

maybe neural-links are dangerous for the feedback they provide to the pilot, with few risking to install them. maybe they dont usually provide sensation, but she disables the safety measures because its the only way she can feel alive.

[heybiji]

over a decade ago. they are divorced by the time the story starts

[alphaori]

Being into indie ttrpgs on Tumblr is a very funny experience because while you're ambiently considering designing a little game about idk, gremlins growing cabbages or whatever there are people who built this hobby from the ground up with 15 award winning published games and three podcasts and a knighthood from a small European monarchy just doing their thing on the same platform. Imagine this was the case for any other hobby. You go to shoot some hoops behind your house and LeBron James is just there

[unlawfulgames]

Our book is now available for public purchase y’all! Check it out if you like goats, troll unions, troika, haunted living cairns, swarms of tiny Boschian ne’er-do-wells another other such lovely shenanigans! Not to mention cobblestone magic, weirdly pastoral liminality, fighting capitalists, Look’n Fer Meaning, and eternal travel down an endless road.

[yeehawpim]

Beedle & Goodfellow

Goodfellow is a warforged barbarian dnd character I want to use if I ever get to play someday. Figured I'd draw his backstory even if I never do 😊

[ardentinwoe]

Surely The Time Has Come

[filibusterfrog]

dorfs

[heybiji]

His hand hovers over the hilt of his dagger...

Dandelion was about to kill an enemy drow who was tied down and defenseless, but hearing his party member's voice caught his attention first. Dande's also in a bit of a confused haze, having cast a new spell by accident (Hunger of Hadar) that plunged the enemies and himself into a freezing, eldritch darkness full of whispers, acid tongues, and the grazing of teeth, which reminded him a lot of being home. He may have thought it was his mother...

[antikris-t]

Be honest with me how many Lancer fans are on this hellsite