#whitehack

[ostrichmonkey-games]

✨ and/or 📖?

✨ A game I wish more people were talking about.

While I've been working on Unnamed Furry Crime Game, I've been surveying the Forged in the Dark landscape for research, and finally got around to reading Copperhead County, and oh this game is so good. It's not a massive divergence from core FitD mechanics, but the stuff it touches on and remixes are so good. It's been wildly influential in how I've been reworking a lot of FitD tech.

One particular highlight is how Entanglements have been transformed into Troubles. Troubles are an umbrella for problems of all scale (personal, citywide, faction, etc), but are turned into clocks that key off of different "attributes" (like how much cash you have, trauma, wanted levels, etc). I cannot understate how good it is.

If anyone reading this is interested in FitD design, highly recommend Copperhead County!

📖 My favorite class or playbook from a game.

The Wise from Whitehack has been hugely influential in how I approach OSR/OSR-related design. Whitehack is, probably my favorite of the more "traditional" OSR games (and I hesitate to call it traditional really, there's a lot of cool stuff in there), and the Wise is my favorite of its core classes. The Wise is the "magic-user" archetype in many senses, but it is super flexible.

The gist is you come up with a "miracle" you can perform (exorcism, bombs, fire magic, really anything that's normally impossible) and when you want to do something related to that miracle, you pay a cost of HP to "cast" it. The cost can be negotiated based on constraints and situations bonuses and whatnot.

The Wise's miracle mechanic formed the backbone for Knacks in my own house-system I've been running Cess and Citadel with.

[magusmacabre]

SIGRID My newest WhiteHack/DnD/TTRPG character design! She was only slightly inspired by Skyrim (*cough* LOVE YOU UTHGERD *cough*), and I felt like drawing another buff woman again for obvious reasons. If you can't read my handwriting:

Viking King

Woman

Tanky/Warrior

Hates/Scared of magic

Doesn't say much

Fought for her title

Wears lots of fur >:3

GIGANTIC! (6'8 ft?)

Enjoy, idk how to write an outro for this one, so just imagine I disappear in a puff of smoke or something dawygdwayudw

[not-jack-daw]

new map, inspired by whitehack and roguelikes + red dead redemption and the rural american southwest

[foxypiquero]

Macro-Monstrosities of Whitehack pt.1

A brief preface: Whitehack is an indie TTRPG built off the original edition of The Most Popular Roleplaying Game(tm) but doesn't let that limit it. It's genre agnostic (to a point), incredibly simple, and incredibly powerful. I heavily recommend it if you want a light-weight rules system. This will deal with a singular aspect of the game.

Alright, hear me out: maybe using macro-characters could help make RPG mass-combat viable again (not a PIA). Think about it, that where the hobby started after all, and individual combat is just an intersquad fight. But what happens when you want to get bigger? Well we have macros and scale for one and we also have officers. So lets break it down.

The scale:

If you have your character at the head of a squad of ragtag followers it's probably just better to break down combat into phases (ex: declaration, magic, ranged, move, melee) but what happens when you have say: a platoon or company? We'll follow this wizards and muskets world just for variety.

The standard organizational level on the field should be a scale 0 macro, got it? Good. Why is it randomly generated? Reasons can be anywhere from officer competency, to disease, to how well they were first supplied. Congrats now all you have to do is adjust the scale of combat time and map scale and there you go, easy 1x1 army groups as macros.

But what about wizards and the wise? Now this is where things get weird. On the individual level, our little platoon is a 10x2 enemy that has 1 attack at turn that does 10d6 at say 150ft range. Think about some popular spells from other games, even some of those really big spells only really threaten half that group. For the wise to be using magic they should be their own battle group of wizards firing volleys or pooling their health together to upcast a mass sleep spell (and this is why an individual player may be small to bug size in the face of 100 angry fellas.)

Officers:

Now here's the tricky part. Officers aren't usually the best, they're either born into it or buy into it, for these guys roll a save after a crit to see if they fall in battle. But what about you? This is honestly up to the GM, at platoon level it might be a more powerful attack, maybe d6+2, at the company level? Not so much (￣ ￣|||) (yeah I know breaking this to players sucks.) PCs are assumed to fall or be captured last, if you want to be more deadly about it assume you can get downed by that lucky shot from earlier.

Troop quality is also dependent on level. A higher level unit is made of veterans and, at lower levels of organization at least, have more competent and wizened officers and NCOs. They should have a morale score or make a charisma or will save of some sort in case they meet a situation that calls for it like damage or mass illusions. Money at this level is handled in thousands so keep that in mind if a PC is fronting the cash for upgraded gear; 2000 cr just gives a platoon the muskets going by ROW.

Special Abilities:

This is where good judgement needs to be practiced. How does cavalry move? Can they do a passing attack? Can they do a split-move ranged attack? How do they get stuck in? Eventually you will get questions like this that the standard classes will no be able to cover and the GM will have to make a call. Whatever they decide here will be a new rule going forward so please workshop the rules first.

And that's it. :P Well not really, this is just humanoid v. humanoid and not Giants & Guard Regiments. Eventually something will get me to think at this scale again! So uh good luck with the rest of that till then!

Piqu signing off ∑d(°∀°d)

[art-from-ao]

I've been working on puppet designs for my Whitehack crew the past couple days!

From left to Right:

Live Oak: Wood Elf, STRONG Maria Herralto: Human, WISE Ezra Harlow: Human, WISE Jasper Stella: Half Elf, DEFT Runt: Centaur, DEFT

[thegaminggang]

[cyanomys]

I’m absolutely OBSESSED with Spire/Heart by Rowan Rook & Decard. The setting is gloriously weird and fucked up in a way that is just familiar enough to feel cathartic, but strange enough not to hit too close to home; it’s the perfect place to explore the darkest depths of people’s souls (sometimes literally in Heart) but also perfect for violent cathartic eat-the-rich romps. Even better, IMO, is the system that pumps blood through the whole thing. It’s heartbreakingly simple and elegant, and genuinely unique (not a D&D or pbta game etc.) It’s a resource management system, that is somehow still very storygamey, but unlike a lot of storygames the consequences are very defined. It hits a weird sort of balance between OSR and story game vibes IMO (especially Heart.)

I also have recently picked up Whitehack, but that might break the rules since it’s loosely compatible with other B/X D&D OSR content. I’m enjoying its blank simplicity; the way it merges narrative and OSR play (but a much heavier lean towards the OSR than say Heart,) and quite opposite my former example leaves almost everything up to the imagination. I have a D&D setting without a game….i started writing it years ago for 5e and then realized it was more gritty and grimy and unique than was appropriate for that game. Whitehack is a definitely contender.

Tell my some of your favorite tabletop rpgs lately! Weird ones, fun ones, ones that feel comfortable, satisfying, or exciting. The only rule is no pathfinder or D&D. I design games for a living. I'm aware of them. I want you to tell me something outside the behemoth.

[conversecompanion]

Writing fanfic of my ttrpg campaign and posting it on ao3 😔

[ostrichmonkey-games]

The Ostrichmonkey Hack

Hey, its out!

Behold, the Basic Rules iteration of my personal NSR/OSR ruleset.

This ruleset came to life when I needed something to run an Into the Cess & Citadel campaign, and decided to take a stab at cobbling something together. It ended up being a mix of different N/OSR conventions I liked, plus some other twists to fit my own personal preferences.

Fundamentally, its a "roll under your attribute" system, and should be broadly compatible with your favorite NSR/OSR/minimalist rulesets and adventures. Made with fantasy-adventure stuff in mind, but with some bending, could probably be made to work with other genres.

So let's get into what's inside.

This first release covers the Basic Rules;

Classless character creation

Rolling the dice

Items

Characters have no defined class, and are made up of a Knack and a Domain. Knacks cover any special abilities and skill you might have, and are activated by spending attribute points (and typically circumvent rolling the dice - spend the points and do the thing!). Knacks are specifically inspired by how Whitehack's Wise class casts "miracles". Domains are broad fields of knowledge and understanding.

Like I said, rolling the dice involves rolling under your attribute score, but there is also a way to apply full/mixed successes to a roll. These rules also cover things like combat. Enemies are immune to damage unless you can target a weakness, meaning that the bulk of combat is about trying to discover and exploit an enemy's weakness.

For the items section of the ruleset, I ended up adapting some of the mechanics I'm developing for Stampede Wasteland, specifically the abstracted resources and money. Gear is also one of the main ways you can change your stats by altering everything from HP to your attributes.

The long term plan for this ruleset is to continuously update and tinker with it, adding in extra subsystems, mechanics, and whatever else I feel is interesting at the time. There's no set schedule for this, so expect updates eventually and whenever.

Right now, you can pick up a text only version of the Basic Rules, which will always remain free (scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the demo files, including character sheet), and then the paid files will be getting the major updates.

First planned update is to finish up the Archetype rules to introduce a class system that can replace or be used alongside knacks. So look for that down the road.

Anyways, go check it out!

[themimicsvault]

TarotWeaver, a Tarot TTRPG

Take your fate into your own hands.

Back TarotWeaver on Kickstarter.

A year ago I had the pleasure of running into two incredible artists at Sonoma State University while taking a drawing class. At the time I was mulling over the idea of a tarot based roleplaying game, but knew that to do the project justice I would want to create a tarot deck for the game. I knew writing the game would already be a mountain of work, lo and behold Arie and Sara had reimagined the major arcana for their final project.

It felt like fate had put us in each other’s path at that moment.

Over the following year we collaborated to create a unique game taking inspiration from Over the Garden Wall, Adventure Time, Cairn, Into the Odd, Whitehack, Everway, and the OSR. While Arie and Sara worked tirelessly to create 78 amazing images in their reimagining of the Rider-Waite deck, I set out to create a lightweight and fun game.

I had two design sensibilities going into the project. The game could only use tarot cards for all of its mechanics. Something that turned out far easier said than done. The second was the entirety of the rules and an introductory adventure had to fit into 48 3.5”x5.5” pages. With some napkin math that meant only 720 square inches of space to write. For comparison, Mausritter has roughly 960 square inches of printable space at 24 5.5”x8.5”.

It’s difficult to pin down how excited I am for this project to come to life and hope to share it all with you soon.

Cheers and happy holidays.

[hifi-walkman]

This is a great in depth analysis of the OSR scene, if someone had the time and resources to do this with all of RPG gaming, I think it would be incredibly useful.

Marcia B, creator of Fantastic Medieval Campaigns, had made a very interesting analysis of how various OSR games take from different ruleset, grouping them into several clusters - Faithful to TSR-Era D&D, Influenced by Modern D&D, Hacks of the Black Hack, Into the Odd and Knave and an interesting group Old-School Baroque.

As last few days I have been talking about rpgs with @thedungeonguy and @prokopetz, thought of sharing it as a thanks for very inspiring insights and ideas.

[indiepressrevolution]

Now at IPR: The Electrum Archive - Issues 01 & 02

“On Orn the pauper dreams of a liquid, black as starless night. The power of gods, distilled into midnight ink.”

The Electrum Archive is a science-fantasy RPG zine series inspired by the worlds of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Dark Sun and Ultraviolet Grasslands. It uses simple core rules inspired by other OSR games like Cairn, Mausritter and Whitehack to quickly get you started playing.

https://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/The-Electrum-Archive-Issue-01-Print-PDF.html

https://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/The-Electrum-Archive-Issue-02-Print-PDF.html

[olitheworm]

I cannot contain him any longer. He has breached his home colony's cavern and is out and about. --🦠✨️

Here is Doctor Slime, my table top dice rolling game character (Whitehack system). He is an amoeboid. Do not be fooled by his name, he is only distantly related to slimes. And do not think for a second that his magic is what makes him a doctor... no. He heals with the power of 11 intelligence and an advantage roll to bind your wounds when you get knocked out. His magic is highly corrosive and upsetting. Chaotic even.

This is not the last you'll see of him or.. his backstory because I cannot stop developing it.

[sunflowers666]

ok im gonna read whitehack

[mycoins]

i command you to tell us of your ideas. i really like your art btw

i'm always working on tabletop design ideas lol. i love playing pretend with homies.

the thing i've been inspired by recently is the idea of wanting to create a dungeon crawler that is neither a slog to play like simulationist computer game in tabletop form OR oversimplified jank-free game with no identity. i've been reading a ton of osr recently (specifically whitehack go check out whitehack) and doing dice math (which is boring and stupid) but necessary

thematically i'm really fixated on dark low fantasy currently, stories of occultists and fucked up people doing weird shit for reasons they don't understand. reading chambers and poe and thinking "that should be something people play around with together"