#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.

[devsgames]

Games For Gaza Bundle!

Bombing: A Graffiti Sandbox, Runt TTRPG, and Lofty Quest are all included in the #GamesForGaza bundle!

Please consider picking it up to consider picking it up to support Medical Aid for Palestinians.

$10 for 256 titles including TTRPGs and digital games!

[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!

[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

[damsels-n-dice]

TTRPG GAME JAMS

in my "find and join every obviously ttrpg-focused game jam on itch.io" era this week, so i figured i'd share the jams that i have joined which are either ongoing or coming up soon! so that any of my fellow creators or TTRPG fans can check out what ends up in them 👀

Troika Dungeon Jam!

will eventually become a free collection of dungeon encounters for Troika! it's not a game i know a lot about but it looks cool, and i enjoy both dungeons in TTRPGs and setting myself unrealistic workloads.

Tiny Library Jam #6

also on the list of things i happen to enjoy: making up settings with no other context, and things that are tiny! this jam does come with a licensing agreement and such, though, so be warned of that ig.

Minimalist TTRPG Jam #3

one day i will participate in a minimalist TTRPG jam. i swear. a great way to release a game if you don't have the time or talents to add fancy formatting & art into the game design. (see: yours truly).

The Adventure Calendar - 2024

the goal to release something TTRPG-related every day of december will... probably be too much for me, but a man can dream. this will definitely be a fun motivator for creativity, though!

Winter Horrorland TTRPG Jam

a jam by a creator whose previous jam, the Queertober jam, created one of my best games! massive shout out to them for that. plus i love writing horror, and i don't do it enough, so... christmas horror game?

Shitpost TTRPG Jam

it's a game for shitpost-inspired TTRPGs, what more can i say?

[drac-kool-aid]

I like how in these past two entries Dracula is just There In the Background.

He's a flying bat, maybe a bird, he's that figure on the seat over there in the distance with the glowing red eyes. This is so different from how he menaced Jonathan (where he was the creepy old man that is Actively Keeping Me Prisoner yet still wants to have nightly chats) or the Demeter crew (where he understand the Nothing is Scarier trope and generally keeps out of sight till the end).

This time, he's just chillaxing in the background because we've had those two instances of different flavors of horror, and now we are thoroughly terrified of him, so just seeing him in the background is enough.

And this kind of tickles me in a weird way because I do so love when you can see the danger. It may not be actively menacing you. In fact, it may be moving away from you. Honestly, you don't even know if it has noticed you, and it's still TERRIFYING.

Like, sure, the idea that the monster is watching you and you not realizing it is scary, but sometimes you watching the monster is worse.

[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.

[gudgurkan]

Witch

This is probably the final sticker design for my cute rpg classes stickers! I *might* make another one but then I'll have them printed ✨

Process video:

[weaselle]

i really like the lock picking in Skyrim because it's an actual skill that i, the player, have gotten good at.

like, i have never put a single perk point into the lockpicking tree, but i can pick any lock in the game in ten picks or less because i have a system that i developed into a practiced skill i use on all the locks.

That may sound like a useless or broken game dynamic, but it's one of my favorite things in the game actually -- the locks in Skyrim are built a certain way, and i, as a player, have developed the skill to pick them based on experience, practice, and the development of a process.

i actually wish more things in more RPGs were like that.

[troythecatfish]

[legendaryvermin]

I've been thinking about the different kinds of difficulty in video games (and games generally), as well how to control how difficult situations are with the tools available. here are some categories of difficulty that I've identified: Execution Difficulty

Execution Difficulty is a measure that applies exclusively to the "thumbskill" involved in performing the actions needed to succeed. How tight is the timing involved? How many mistakes can a player make before they reach a fail state?

Strategic/Puzzle Difficulty

Strategic and Puzzle difficulty are tied to challenges where you have many options for how to execute, but not all executions provide equal resultant success. There might be more than one "right" answer (which marks the difference between a puzzle and a strategic situation, to me), but if there are, some answers are better, some tactics more effective, than others.

Commitment Difficulty

If you were inclined to be poetic about it, you might call this the "ironman factor". Commitment difficulty is about how long your choices can affect you, and how easy or hard it is either mitigate the effects of mistakes, or redo a scenario entirely. How long do I have to wait before making another attempt? How many attempts do I get? How quickly are my choices locked in? How much time do I have to decide?

Social Difficulty

Not all games have a social element, but any that do can introduce social difficulty. This isn't strictly about player actions that can harm another player's resources or goals, though it does cover that; it also encompasses clarity of communication, efficiency of team coordination and shared executional responsibility. How much do I have to rely on other players behavior to succeed? Do I need to communicate asymmetric information? what tools do I have to communicate with potential allies, enemies, or actors unknown?

This isn't a complete list, but it's my first foray into identifying where challenge lies in games. I think there is also measurable difficulty when it comes to navigation, but I'm not sure where to categorize it helpfully.

Anyway, if anyone has any thoughts about this I'd love to hear them.

[unhingeddnd]

[mjhartwork]

The comprehensive field guide to draconic corpse management: Dragonfall

Have you ever wanted to play a tabletop roleplaying game dealing with all the nitty-gritty gristly bits of the medical, ecological, economical, and political effects of a dead dragon?

Well, I do NOT have the handbook for you! I made this up for my Illustration class's final!