vatrpg

[vatrpg]

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.

[vatrpg]

Clyde Caldwell

[vatrpg]

"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

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[vatrpg]

(hits you with my laughing skull)

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I bet having ur statue ritually fed felt good as fuck if you were a mesopotamian statue god

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haven't been to a mooseheads game in person for over a year and apparently they made some changes to the arena.... the main one being a gigantic moose bust that flashes red eyes and shoots smoke out it's nose when we score

[vatrpg]

Reading sports headlines while pretending sports doesn't exist suggests a fascinating world of magic and whimsy.

[vatrpg]

The pivot in style and fundamental goal I've undertaken for writing modules has already paid off SIGNIFICANTLY. It's so much easier and fun for me. Very excited to get into playtesting for this, though that'll be in the far future at my rate. BATTLE LAW will hopefully be a wonderful introduction to the world of Vat, while also being very good for playtesting my systems i've made. With that being said, I'm getting back into the groove of drawing! I haven't been doing much creative work whatsoever over the past month or so as I've been doing holiday stuff with my family, but I'm finally getting back into it. The below picture is the first thing I've done recently, a Battle Lawyer of the YYY - AKA - a subject of the module I'm working on. It has also been one of the first few things I've done working off of references, and man those things really do wonders, huh? I have a folder of like 700 of the things, why haven't I been using them?

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therapy is such a scam. all you need to do is buy a 5'6 zweihänder and swing it around your home now and then to feel better. been doing it for years and im the very picture of good mental health

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Fish and War are the two most common things to mong.

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So, still working on Vat. I am just not good at social media, lol. I reblog a lot, I retweet a lot, but writing my own posts? No matter the format I don't often treat social media that way. Probably going to have to learn for Vat if I want to get anywhere in the long run, but making such connections is difficult for me. So, since I last talked... I have a rough draft of a full political map for Bor! I'll definitely edit it a bit, tighten up the borders and whatnot, as I start figuring out actual relationships between individual nations and their neighbors. Nonetheless, it feels great to no longer have any empty space on the map.

The mechanics book has also been added to, as I have written out stealth more in-depth for both player characters and NPCs. I've also been working on how to treat the map, reading other games for inspiration. Overall, much of the writing I've done over the holidays has been for the Handler's Guide and the first playtest module. I've also been getting ideas down for a more combat-heavy playtest module to write alongside Big Trouble in Little Hurg, but I have yet to actually begin writing it. All i know is that it will explore bloodsports! Wooo! Bloodsports!

[vatrpg]

The mutants are back