vatrpg

[vatrpg]

Maps. Battlemaps. Floorhammer. Flat? You know, Vat, uses a wargaming map. Terrain and all that. Anyways, I'm learning how important this important element is by way of playtesting! Mainly, because the current campaign I'm running isn't going nearly as heavy into it as I'd like, and I'm seeing how that makes things less fun. Part of that is the VTT I'm doing this through- Tabletop Sim- being a bit finicky on that front. I'm still learning how things function in it. Working on the next (and technically first!) module, I think this will fix things by virtue of... everything around it. Megacity time! Like Gotham but somehow even worse! It'll give me a lot of room to experiment with making multi-layered TTS maps and also just maps in general. Also, last session, we got into the first ACTUAL combat! Sure, I ran a combat ages ago, but I consider this one the first official one. It was a lot of fun! Things went well, learned a lot. There was several points where it could really have gone either way, but the party won in the end with no losses on the Party's end- but there was a WHOLE lot of damage. Space fungus broke containment on their orbital station!

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Bor & Queerness

So, I am definitively a cis guy. He/Him all the way. I briefly experimented with He/They, but... it didn't really do it for me. I'm fine with people using They for me, but that's more out of a "this is just how english grammar works" way instead of a "this is directly tied to my identity" way. I mean, I am still queer, I'm pan as fuck, but. I'm on the lower end of the spectrum, in a way. I have privileges others do not. That was all just a bit of background before I get into the meat and potatoes of this post. I am ingrained into a lot of LGBTQ+ communities and I myself am that, but also I'm certifiably not trans. I'm Dude As Fuck. On the planetoid of Bor, in the setting of Foramen, represented in the mechanics of Vat, the queer identity isn't really... queer. Now, I mean this as that it is accepted as a normal and commonplace thing. When people switch bodies all the time and replacing organs is seen as a normal fact of life, it's incredibly normal to just... fully become another thing completely biologically. No hormones required. Being something outside the idea the gender binary is seen as a bit more weird in certain more traditional parts of the world, but it's certainly not looked down upon. Some cultures do, however, hold strongly to ideas of gender roles, and it is expected that transitioning from one to the other means that you now have to follow the norms of the gender you now are. Sexuality can legit be pretty much whatever and still be considered fine in Foramen. You can grow people in vats. People sometimes look like animals. There's a whole group of wizards who are half-dead. It's Fine. Whatever. I have thought about all of this, because all of this will inevitably come up in play with the circles I traverse. I won't say Vat is a Queer Game, because it fundamentally isn't. I put thought into the queer experience within the setting because it's a fun thing to worldbuild, not that it has any real bearing on the mechanics of the game itself. In my eyes, this sort of discussion is another level of getting into the mindset of completely alien cultures and how they think and act.

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Exiting my closed door cultivation (doing so much anatomy practice without really showing anybody outside of discord or close friends) to show the fruits of my labor. I feel so much better about my shit now. Though I’ll also definitely have to learn how to use colored pencils properly and not… this…

A scene from Bor! Nowhere special depicting nobody in particular. Just a fellow on his travels, encountering a bit of a conundrum.

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One of the more relevant pre-Vat TTRPG experiments was the idea of creating a TTRPG where players control the nameless goon entourage of superheros and supervillains. I love my pulp fantasy, my sword and sorcery, my early sci-fi: this would eventually manifest into Vat's world of Foramen. BUT. I'm also big into capeshit. Mainly outside if the main universes, but I'm coming around. Just caught up with DC's "Absolute Batman" and that is INCREDIBLE, and I'm waiting with bated breath for "Absolute Martian Manhunter". So, I've been doing some thinking. For the far-future, of course. I'll inevitably want to take a break from working on Foramen, if only just to recuperate my juices. I'm thinking of doing an in-universe game, using Vat's system, of doing capeshit. Become the goons, you know? This post is just idle thought, of course. But it's still a thought, and one I've been bouncing around my head for awhile now.

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So, yesterday I ran my first actual session of Vat, if you don't count character creation. It was a lot of fun! I learned a bit about what I need to do better as a Handler, but my players had a lot of fun. It's exciting! I'm excited! I don't really have anything else to comment on today, but playtests seem to be going well thus far, which is all that's important.

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[vatrpg]

I RETURN

I was out of town up until yesterday, gone for around 12 days total. Most of that was joining my mom in helping my sister move into her new place. It was VERY stressful (both on my mind and my body) and since my laptop started smoking a few weeks before we left (lol) I wasn't able to work on really anything related to Vat or the world of Foramen while I was gone. I did a lot of drawing and met some cool people though! It was also the first time in my life where when I got back I was actually TIRED of eating out, and craved something homemade. I understand my dad better now I think. Due to it all I wasn't hosting 2 sessions of the playtest campaign, which I do think sucks a lot. But! We move ever forward. I haven't gotten quite into the proper swing of things yet now that I'm back, but it'll happen. It'll happen. Still settling in.

Well, that's the progress for now. Keep safe out there, fellas. World's moving quickly in unknown directions.

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I study TTRPGs, right. I also study wargames. I sort of have to, for me to be able to proudly call me a TTRPG dev. This means I've read a lot of good. I've also read a lot of bad! And I try to understand why these things are good, or bad, or just ok. Part of that is seeing the developer's intentions behind reasons for things being the way they are. In my own game, I'm adding segments of me, maybe not justifying, but explaining my thought processes behind why I wrote things to be the way they are. Doing this has also made me more deeply think about Vat's intended play style. Vat isn't universal, in any sense of the word. It's heavily tied to its setting, for one thing. For another, players play groups of characters, not just one. That automatically brings a significantly different style and tone to the table than what most people would be used to in the modern scene. I give plenty of tools to the players and handlers, and it's ultimately up to them to figure out how they want to do things. But the specific tools given flavor the end result, right? I don't have an extremely central and pivotal and narrow play style and genre in mind for Vat. It's really just... this game is meant for this world, to explore this world. The elements surrounding genre are more attached to the world. Idk. I'm just thinking, you know? Vat can contain multitudes. I think I lost the point of what I was trying to say. Study games, folks. Especially games you play. Think about why you enjoy things. System mastery is cool.

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Alright we’ve all seen and been unsettled by fin whales breaching and minke whales breaching. Now may I present: Bryde’s Whale

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Wow, it turns out making NPCs is a lot of fun when they're actual characters and not generic archetypes you try to make to fill a conceptual bestiary! Btw I'm probably not going to make a bestiary, but I WILL do my absolute damndest to make the process of crafting an NPC as easy as possible. Anyways, crafting guys for the first campaign. I Here's some character tokens! Specifically tokens i'm using that aren't using other people's art, because I don't know how I'd go about sourcing that and sourcing things is something I'd want to do.

Here we have an Etruscan parade helmet serving as the image of an artificial intelligence's automatons, and Arnold Schwarzenegger in a photo-shoot as... I think Mister Freeze, serving as a mythological giant. Vat ideally uses miniatures, but tokens are a good enough substitute for purposes of tabletop sim. I'm not going through all that effort to make a 3d model, something I don't know how to do, for this. Instead we get tokens the size of miniature bases.

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We're cooking with gas. I had a much larger idea of doing multiple combat playtests, to really stress multiple systems in that overarching dealio. I uh. Got bored after the first one, and saw some annoying hangups with how I structured it. Learning my system doesn't translate well to one-shots, I don't think. Smaller campaigns definitely, but there's a bit too many moving parts to translate well to a single one-shot. But now... we're doing something completely different. I'm beginning a playtest campaign! Right now I have only a little written. Mainly just an overview for the benefit of my potential players. But I think the premise and everything involved will really help me stress test the system in a manner that is actually enjoyable to me as the Handler. I'm putting my players on a space station that sucks and making them deal with things that also suck. It's going to be great. We love super hell bureaucracies forcing you to deal with the horrors for a paycheck. Overall, outside of writing the campaign (which I basically just started putting on paper today), I've been writing. Writing and writing and writing. Mainly making an official lore overview document so people can actually get a larger grasp on the setting. Also drawing, though not really anything worthy of posting to this blog. Just me practicing anatomy, really. It's like building a model but also not at all!

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forward my shambling soldiers and slay without thinking. let blood flow into every crevice of this rotten land

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yesterday I had my first combat playtest! It was, as all first playtests are, INCREDIBLY USEFUL. It shed a lot of light on things I need to change in the rules to make the combat systems the way I want them, and also shed a lot of light on things I need to do as a game master to make combat play out the way I want it to. I’ve already made many adjustments to the document due to the feedback my players gave me as well as things I noticed, but there’s still plenty of work to do.

One thing that I’m especially happy about is that this combat playtest showed me some mechanical niches I can fill with items that I either didn’t notice or completely forgot about! I have actual direction now for writing more items. Which is good.

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I just went through recent posts and didn't realize how many of them were vatposting... so here's a Normal Post! With the pivot in module writing, playtesting is coming much sooner than I thought! I have made a fairly basic enemy grouping, the Wormrot Warriors, and they are statted out and ready for stress testing in combat. All I REALLY need to do now is set up a basic Battle Law arena in Tabletop Sim and port everything over, and that will legitimately be all! Just need to get a group of players ready and with their teams rolled up, and then we'll be golden! The Wormrot Warriors are right now really simple, only having items equipped that are directly used for combat. I don't think that's going to be the norm for actual campaign play, I want NPCs to also have more rp-focused items equipped just like players, but right now for combat playtesting that's not strictly needed. Last but certainly not least, another pivot regarding the world at large. It's not anything major, more taking the foundation I've been building and extrapolating that to it's logical extreme. The giant corpse that forms the world? Actually just a giant curled up corpse in form. Gravity and oceans and whatnot will basically be shrink wrapped to the form. It's also the only fucked up planet in the system, the rest are normal. This brings plenty of opportunities for things to Get Even Weirder, which is great. I've already had a lot of fucked up biomes planned out like mold fields and meat forests so.

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Clyde Caldwell

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"St. George and the Pterodactyl" by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, 1873, to illustrate his theory that legends of dragons may have been inspired by encounters with living pterosaurs

https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/anh.2023.0866

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Mangled corpse of cave man 8000 years old grasping primitive samsung phone discovered in croatian bog soil