#ttrpg video game

[honourablejester]

I’m realising as I browse around that I really love lore when it comes to ttrpgs, games and game worlds. And by that I don’t mean I like to obsessively learn lists of dates and wars, and the names of leaders of factions, I mean …

I like learning weird, juicy details about the worlds of games. I like finding little nuggets that say things about the set-up and culture and assumptions of the world. I like finding fragments of ideas to hang whole story and character concepts off.

I love that in D&D 5e’s Spelljammer, the Astral Sea is full of the corpses of dead gods that you can fully sail up to in your ship. Just. Floating out there. Waiting for you to rock up to them.

I love that in Sunless Sea, the king of the drowned is the way he is because he fell in love with an eldritch sea urchin from space, and successfully married it. His niece is an angry sentient floating mountain whose mother is a goddess-mountain and whose father is a face-stealing humanoid abomination. This is fine and normal.

I love that in Starfinder, there are mysterious bubble cities in the surface of the sun that the church of the sun goddess discovered and cheerfully occupied despite having no idea who the hell built them or for what purpose.

I love that in Dishonored, the entire industrial revolution that has built the empire we’re in the midst of saving or destroying was built on the properties of whale oil harvested from eldritch tentacled whales that live half in the oceans and half in an eldritch void personified in the form of a weird-ass black-eyed shit-stirrer of a deity who was formed from a murdered and sacrificed child. And this is largely a background detail.

I love in the Elder Scrolls that the dwarves up and fucking vanished, as a race, at some point in history and absolutely nobody has any clue what happened to them or where they went, but their technology is so insane that ideas like ‘they time-travelled’ or ‘they erased themselves from existence’ are absolutely on the table.

I love that in Numenera, so many incredibly advanced civilisations have risen and fallen on this world that it’s absolutely littered with bonkers science fiction artefacts that have caused the current medieval-esque society built over top of them to develop in bizarre ways, and also you can find a mysterious artefact that absolutely baffles and delights your character, but that you the player will fully recognise as a slightly-more-advanced thermos flask.

I love that in Fallout, an irradiated post-nuclear apolocalypic hellscape, there’s a cult that worships the god of radiation as they have come to understand it, and they are mysteriously immune to radiation with absolutely no explanation whatsoever. They’re not ghouls, the usual result of fatally irradiated humans with some resistance, they’re perfectly normal humans who can somehow just tank rads all damn day. It could be a mutation, but Lovecraftian gods apparently do also fully exist in this setting, so it’s also possible that maybe they were on to something with this Atom thing.

I love that in Heart The City Beneath, there’s a mass transit train system that they tried to hook up to the eldritch beating god-thing buried under the city so that they could metaphysically chain the stations together more easily, which went horrifically and metaphysically wrong in entirely predictable fashion, and now there’s a whole order of train-knights who have to keep people safe from the extradimensional weirdness magnet the network has become.

That, and all the fantastic little details you can stumble across. There’s a biotech augmentation in Starfinder called an angler’s light that gives you a little angler-fish bioluminescent antenna on your forehead, and it was developed by asteroid miners who needed light but also both hands free for work. In Dishonored there’s a festival that everyone pretends is outside of time so nothing you do during it can be held against you. There’s a god of snuffed candles mentioned in a single line from Heart The City Beneath who has pacifist cannibal priests, and that is literally all the information you get on him.

While things like the history and geography and timeline of a world do also fascinate me, I’m not really here to memorise stuff like that. I’m here to find weird little nuggets of information and worldbuilding and delight in them. Give me funerary customs and weird myths and oddly specific circumstances and baffling little objects and absolutely bonkers cosmological implications. Give me the corpses of dead gods, and aesthetic movements with highly specific backstories, and bureaucratic fuck-ups of titanic scale, and mysterious things that seem to break all other rules of your setting with absolutely no explanation because people in-universe have no fucking clue how they work either. Why are the Children of Atom immune to radiation without ghoulifying? Not a clue, but Confessor Cromwell has been cheerfully standing in that irradiated pond that kills the player character with about 10 minutes of exposure for the last year and he’s still absolutely fine.

I just. I really love lore. I like my settings to have some meat in them, some juicy details to dig into, some inexplicable elements to have fun trying to explain. Particularly that last bit. I feel like a lot of people when building worlds feel like the rules have to be absolute and everything has to have an explanation, but nah. Putting some weird shit in makes everything immediately feel bigger, more real, because we don’t have even half an idea of how our world truly works, there’s always something we just don’t fully understand yet, and you can put that in a fictional world too. Some mysteries, some contradictions, some randomness, some weirdness. There’s a line, obviously, this depends on execution, but a little bit of mystery really does help.

Lore is awesome. And weird lore is even more so. Heh.

[mistershoestied]

i'm just so passionate about nontraditional paladins

paladins of atypical gods. a paladin of the god of storms whose divine smite is a literal bolt of lightning from the heavens. a paladin of one of the gods of death who seems scary but just wants the dead to receive justice and comfort.

a paladin of one of the "darker" gods who sees themselves as responsible for those that other paladins wouldn't protect— those who are lost, those who maybe aren't innocent but who deserve compassion all the same.

hell, there's a god of thieves (and theyre chaotic neutral)! what does a paladin of the god of thieves look like— how do you have a stalwart defender of a group defined by its secrecy and fluidity? what are they defending— the right of thieves to exist? the value of individual moral codes over societal laws? the honor code of thieves? maybe they strike down "false" thieves, those in it for greed with no respect for the art of theft or the standards respected by other thieves.

and then there's oathbreaker paladins. i just think there are so many more interesting reasons to break an oath than "i didn't want to be good and help people anymore."

give me an oathbreaker paladin whose god commanded them to do something against their morals. who is now branded as a traitor to their god when really it's their god who betrayed them.

give me an oath of vengeance paladin who is tired, not as angry as they once were, and sick of bloodshed. who breaks their oath by sparing an enemy.

give me a paladin whose oath is noble but who is frustrated with the moral absolutism of it. who is sick of their power being dangled over their head, able to be taken away at the slightest mistake. a disciple of ilmater who has been told too many times to bear the suffering of others and for once wants to be cared for. a disciple of the god of fate, sick of being told that theirs and others' suffering is inevitable and unchangeable.

i don't know man just. nontraditional paladins.

[dragonkid11]

Lancer Tactics, by Olive Perry, is an unofficial still in development mech tactic video game conversion of Lancer TTRPG by Massif Press, a simulationist game designed to let one play out Lancer against computer controlled opponents.

[theresattrpgforthat]

There's a new rpg channel out on Youtube, and I'm falling in love with it fast.

Cozy RPG Reviews is a Youtube channel that looks to be focusing on solo and GM-less games. The creator has just two videos out at the time I'm writing this, but I already adore the calming music and their quiet, gentle voice that guides you through both play and concept.

[unpuffedreese]

"NO VOCAL INTERFACE DETECTED. UNABLE TO COMPLETE TASK.

I DON’T WANT TO DIE.”

Sinner V1 art commissioned to the bestie @bluarlequinno for a Limbus TTRPG campaign I’m running.

[stranded-ziggy]

Astarion || Baldur's Gate 3

Consider supporting me if you like my artwork! Ko-fi INPRNT

[roguesbazaar]

Process for Sewing the Dragon Guide’s Dice Bag! A little chaotic as I was still figuring out how to handle the camera while sewing. You can find more of my work at the Rogue's Bazaar on etsy!

[cyanomys]

Hey TTRPG nerds

Anybody got recommendations for indie ttrpg youtubers? I'm looking for content that is broadly not D&D-specific, and not actual plays. So, video essays/reviews of games, how-to-plays, GMing/playing advice, game design, etc.

[swtechspecs]

Core Galaxy Systems Dynamic-Class Light Freighter

Source: Starships of the Galaxy, Saga Edition (Wizards of the Coast, 2007)

[sapphic-dice]

I will now alienate my followers who like Deltarune with the simple fact that I never plan to play it or Undertale.

Hehehehehe

But in truth. It’s honestly just not the type of game im into. *shrugs* rather play hollow knight, Skyrim, Warframe, or pokemon. And even then I mostly just play TTRPGs, I’m not really into video games.

I don’t understand Deltarune. But maybe I’ll watch a playthrough one day. The art looks good.

[legendaryvermin]

Game designers, I need to know the answer to this question, so please share far and wide:

[ordheist]

hey!! I’m in a tight spot with bills atm so I need to take on a few commissions. I’m running discounted rates for all tiers

fully rendered and coloured characters are now £100, basic symmetrical bodyplan charas are £70, and quick black and white sketches are £50

these rates are temporary so DM me if you want in!

thank you x

[ultharequinox]

If you think you’re a bit too crazy about project moon. Just know I’m doing an essay referencing project Moon for my English college class.

It has 8 paragraphs.

Paragraph 2 is just explaining the game.

Paragraph 3 is explaining abnormalities.

Paragraph three is already 1/4th of my word count requirement alone (2,000 total)

I’m. I’m not even done.

Guys I’m cooked