Captain Fischer's Weird Wanderings @capitaofischer - Tumblr Blog

Introducing my Stuff (First Post on this Hellsite)

Hello comrades, I'm Marco Fischer and I'm an independent TTRPG author. Check out the links!

🇧🇷 Olá camaradas, eu sou o Marco Fischer e sou um autor independente de RPG de mesa. Deem uma olhada nos links!

Settings & Modules Journey Under the Rock: An adventure module for low level characters in fantasy games | Old-School Revival (OSR) Drekavac's Decadent Delights: A supplement describing 18 strange items carried by a mysterious creature, created for the Appx. N Jam - 2025 | OSE System (or other OSR) As Garras do Dragão de Pedra / The Stone Dragon Claws: (Available in both Portuguese and English) A song waits to be discovered at the crystal claws of a lost colossus, buried under the rocky wasteland. An RPG adventure for Forgotten Ballad | Melodia Perdida.

Tables & Generators (all in both Portuguese and English) Ghost Ships / Navios Fantasmas: A frightening sailor story generator for fantasy settings Evil Cultists / Cultistas Malignos: An apocalyptic cult generator for fantasy settings Dread Pirates / Piratas Infames: A pirate crew generator for fantasy settings Bad Bandits / Bandidos Terríveis: A bandit gang generator for fantasy settings

I'm on itch.io as capitaofischer!

🇧🇷 Só em Português A Caverna do Crato: Uma aventura pré-histórica para Mausritter, feita para a RequeiJam 2024. Jornada Sob a Rocha: Um local de aventura para personagens de nível baixo em jogos de fantasia | Old-School Revival (OSR)

#indie ttrpg #ttrpg #ttrpg community #ttrpg design #ttrpg dev #osrs #mausritter #old school essentials

dungeonofthedragon

You've probably heard about RPG Trader over the past few. It's a new tabletop webstore that launched yesterday after a week or so of early access for developers to add their games.

Lots of smaller devs like myself and @takataapui have already set up shop- but if you're on the fence about checking it out, might I entice you with some of the larger titles?

The first and second editions of Cairn are both available at RPG Trader- in print as well as digital! If you go with the physical edition, you should absolutely grab one of these cool little notebooks while you're there.

Gila RPGS is there with Nova, Dragon Slayers, Wyrm and more!

You can grab Court of Blades! Court intrigue, forged in the dark? Yes please!

Plus plenty of modules and expansions for popular games like D&D, Draw Steel, Mausritter, Daggerheart, Pathfinder and Mothership!

jonnywaistcoat

The Bad Year is live!!!

So, me and Sash have been working on a little TTRPG project for a while - a collection of 52 (well, techincally 53) one-page Horror investigation adventures that go one-a-week for a whole year!

And the Kickstarter for it is now live!

It's legitmately really really cool and you can play it with any horror investigation TTRPG (including one that may rhyme with Conte Mook's Agnus Marchives RPG), so please do go check it out!

Oh, and if you want a closer look - check out the preview version!

prokopetz

you've spoken at length about problems with D&D5e re: the disconnect between the game hasbro says that it is vs the game that it actually is, and have made it clear that such discussions aren't about the weaknesses of D&D5e itself as a game. I do suspect that you have some thoughts on that though, and I'd be interested to hear them. there are plenty of thinkpieces from others already, but I'd like to hear yours specifically, if you're interested.

A big part of the reason I don't talk a lot about Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition as a system is because it's been my experience that, as indie RPG designers, there's a constant temptation to treat a game's culture of play as something which emerges purely from its published text. It'd be super convenient if that were the case: if the ultimate source of the problem is bad game design, then it can be fixed with better game design. In practice, this framing leads people to prattle on about how playing trad RPGs causes brain damage while overlooking the rather more obvious economic incentives for why D&D's culture of play is the way it is.

All that in mind, I tend to look at it the other way 'round: the main problems with D&D5E as a system stem from a shared set of circumstances with its culture of play. Hasbro wants to market 5E as a universal entry-level game, and to that end, they've given Wizards of the Coast a mandate to produce an "evergreen" D&D which appeals equally to fans of all past iterations of the game. This goal is of course both impossible and absurd, and the result is a game whose rules are put together based mostly on vibes, with greater weight given to whether any particular feature is deemed to reinforce D&D's brand identity than to how it actually operates in play, or to how it interacts with other features that have been included in the same fashion.

In the most extreme cases, this leads to a text which pretends to have features it does not in fact possess. For example, 5E wants to have the vibe of a game which cares deeply about logistical play, in order to attract players who like that sort of thing; however, it's also terrified of imposing entry barriers that might interfere with maximising the number of people playing D&D, so you end up with stuff like lengthy stats tables of functionally identical weapons, an economy that denominates prices of adventuring supplies to the hundredth of a gold piece and stops being relevant by level three if you're running the gameplay loop as written, and subsystems for carrying capacity and consumable resource tracking which ask you to do a lot of math for a mechanical impact so insubstantial that it doesn't materially affect said gameplay loop at all if you simply leave it out entirely.

Basically, it's a text that puts forth tremendous effort to obfuscate its own baked-in assumptions about how the game ought to be played, because it might hypothetically alienate someone who would otherwise have given Hasbro money if it ever expressed an opinion. I've talked in the past about how a lot of RPGs don't seem to understand how to engage in transparency about their own design goals, but Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition is one of the very few games I've encountered that demonstrates it perfectly understands how to engage in design goal transparency by consciously doing the exact opposite.

matheusgraef

Astrolabe of the Planes

Painting for Arelith

happy april's fool!

#tumblr snek

jaztice

so. uh. Extra Ordinary 2e is out

A TTRPG about kids with extraordinary powers on the run from danger in the ordinary world!

it's $15 and has a lot more content than 1e. also physical copies are on the way, i just sent the files to the printer this morning

yeah. uh. i'm in shock???

ginnie-darling

what is Elric of Melniboné if not a pinup boy for goths and metalheads

retrocatastrophy

quasi-normalcy

I'm going to be honest, I think that cyberpunk was probably pretty innovative when it started off in the 1980s but now it (and it's various "punk" spinoffs) just kind of linger over the science fiction genre like a miasma and it's time for someone to come up with something new.

dailyadventureprompts

Like a lot of breakaway scifi subgenres, cyberpunk asked questions about heavy social and political topics by taking the emerging technology of the day and dialing it up to 11, projecting a dystopian future where all of the (then) contemporary concerns had reached some impossible nightmare zenith:

Resource shortages driven by mass consumption

Urban decay brought about by austerity and the collapse of the American economy in response to globalization

Ultracomodification and alienation driven by unchecked capitalism

Increased corporate power subverting or even outright replacing governments

Information technology being used to reinforce state power, and subsequently take on it's own power outside of anyone's control.

Plus a million other things the genre grew to include

Problem is, the cyberpunk dystopia happened: We hit the upper limit of what dysfuncitonal economies and broken goverments and capitalist profiteering were able to exploit and it's all down hill from here as the value extraction systems cannibalize each other.

Cyberpunk has gone from being dystopian to being nostalgic, a retro throwback to the days when the cultural assumptions about personal agency in a world full of infinite growth were still somewhat possible. Yeah, the world was shitty, but you could still be an ultracool badass who smashed the system before going down in a blaze of glory.

Flash forward to the day and systems are smashing themselves (plus all of us, and the world in general) to pieces trying to siphon the last little slivers of market percentage into shareholder's pockets.

If you wanted to make a genre that was as topical for right now as cyberpunk was for it's time, I think there's two directions you could go..

Fantasy of Reform: Stories that are based around people's resonances to these massive systems breaking down and how to subvert/repair/overcome them. Society is worth saving, we just need to steward it through the birthpangs of latestage capitalist collapse. Shoutout to Cory Doctorow who's been writing in this protogenre since the bush administration.

Post Dystopian Absurdism: Turn the dial past 11, break it, show us what happens when the titans of industry not only go astray but collapse, decay, are left as nothing more than ozymandious style relics buried in the sand. It's a bitter hope, but showing people surviving and even thriving in a dead era or in its aftermath reassures us that life will go on, no matter the hurdles. I think of the Forever Winter game by fundog as my example for this, making a nightmarish world where the player can be kind, or perhaps even silly if given the chance.

theresattrpgforthat

There's A TTRPG For That!

Some ttrpgs I think might be worth exploring, if you're looking at sci-fi/fantasy genres about rebellion, reform and post-apocalypse:

Detente for the Ravenous, by A.A. Voigt: The Cold War if Henry Kissinger was the Pope. About colonized peoples organizing to bring down the Kaiju-as-metaphor for colonialist and capitalist attempts to consume the world around them, it feels heavily inspired by Heart, Babel, and F.I.S.T..

Rising Tide, by cosmicbeagle: A PARAGON playset about ecojustice pirates striking back against oil companies and other multi-conglomerates by destroying their assets while on the high seas.

Hunting Billionaires for Sport, by hexavexagon: A game where hunting billionaires is a legitimate practice that provides a media company with plenty of profits due to the popularity of live-streaming these hunts. You are some of those hunters, going up against everything those billionaires throw at you.

Apocalypse Roadtrip, by Mynar Lenahan: In a world overtaken by aliens, cryptids, kaiju, and secret government entities, your home has quickly fallen apart. Travel from place to place keeping each-other alive using whatever technology you can get your hands on.

Red Markets, by Hebanon Games: The zombie apocalypse happened and we just kind of... kept going. Try to make a living while on the wrong side of the economy by recovering proof that certain people died, so that your employers can claim the contents of their wills.

Sea Legs, by Jack Blair: The rich have left our climate apocalypse behind. We are left with a world where most cities have sunk beneath a rising ocean. You are a crew scavenging in order to keep your community alive, and sometimes fighting with others to get precious resources.

Many of the entries of Applied Hope: The Solarpunk & Utopias jam might also be up your alley, including Sunstained, by Mythworks, Green Skies, by SmallRedRobin13, and How to Ooze Charm into the Future, by Paul Czege.

thecollectibles

The Twisted Harlequin by Mikhail Golovin

wickedlovelyperfectlyimperf-blog

This is a picture from the Curiosity Rover on Mars showing Earth from the Perspective of Mars. You are literally looking at your home from the Perspective of another planet. Epic times indeed

blindtrip-blog

group photo everyone

cerulean-tmp

everyone

trencly

hey i look really good in this one

roversrovers

This is a computer-generated image. Scientist Louise Riofrio has taken credit for making it to illustrate a theoretical view from Mars on a specific day.

Here is a REAL photo the Curiosity rover took of Earth:

(x)

tenivan

A definition just materialized in my head.

There's been a lot of discussion among my friends recently about what it means for a tabletop roleplaying game to be "about" something, and whether it's possible to make a game that isn't about anything. (Personally, I take the stance that it's not possible, that all RPGs are about something, but we'll get to that.)

With any discussion like this, it's good to agree on a common definition, because otherwise it can get long and tedious if your definitions don't match. So, what does it mean for a TTRPG to be "about" something?

My definition is this: a TTRPG is about the activities that the player characters are expected to do during most sessions.

These activities don't have to appear in every session. Entire adventures can be structured around an alternate premise or activity, and in a long campaign, that may prove to be a nice change of pace. But the activities that are most mechanically rewarding for the PCs to do, and that have the most mechanical support, and that are the focus of most of the published modules or adventure-writing advice in the rulebooks, are what the game is about, even if they're not the only thing a game is capable of doing.

For example, Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition is a game about going into dangerous locations, fighting things and taking anything shiny. This is not the only thing that can be done in D&D4e; the game does have rules for things like social encounters and skill challenges, and you could spend a whole session or a whole story arc just doing those things, with the PCs never drawing a weapon. But most of the mechanics are about fighting and looting shiny magic items. Fighting and looting shiny magic items are what let the PCs get more powerful the fastest. Fighting and looting shiny magic items are what most of the published modules are written about, and what the adventure writing guidelines say to fill most of an adventure with, generally speaking. So fighting and looting shiny magic items are what the game is about.

The reason this matters is that there's a limit to how far you can stray from what the game is about, and for how long, before it starts to beg the question, why use this game system? That limit can be flexible depending on the game and the group, but any game will have certain things it struggles with. (That's why I say that every game is about something.) Any edition of D&D infamously struggles with solving mysteries. FATE struggles with gritty, highly lethal dungeon crawls. Lancer struggles with really anything outside the mech cockpit, but especially with tense social encounters and interpersonal dialogue. Blades in the Dark and its derivatives struggle with detailed, tactical combat. Etc.

As a soft rule, I think that a campaign should include more adventures that are at least loosely focused on the subject the game is about than adventures that aren't. If you're playing a one and done module, that module should probably be about what the game is about. In an extended campaign, some occasional diversions into other acitivities can break up the monotony of the game, but if you find yourself no longer interested in what the game is mechanically about, or even if you just want a lot more of something the game isn't about, it may save you a lot of frustration to look for a different system that is about what you're actually interested in.

imsobadatnicknames2

Rough test of a reconfigurable shifting dungeon thingy I'm experimenting with.

imsobadatnicknames2

I have two ideas for how this type of map could be used

1) As a prep tool to generate dungeons (just fold into a new configuration, redraw without the connections going off the edge, and you have a new dungeon map) Less versatile than geomorphs but still a lot of fun to use.

2) As an actual module map to be used in play for a shifting dungeon (would probably work best for systems like Mörk Borg where things are not always expected to make sense). This is probably the only way I've come up with to make the idea of "fucked up place where rooms shift randomly" seem like something that would actually be manageable in play.

michaeljpatrick

You can now pick up my 10-level Dungeon Crawl module at Drive-Thru RPG. Compatible with Old-School Essentials or any other game designed to be compatible with B/X

funlovingfuzzball

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/magpiegames/temeraire-the-roleplaying-game <- folks who have kickstarter accounts, would you by any chance be willing to follow this campaign for me? You don’t even have to back it, just following before it launches gives those of us who do back it some awesome stretch goals. The Temeraire series is my favorite series ever by a long shot, and I’m really hoping people would be willing to take a look.

And yes, you can play as a dragon 😁