The Bohemian Coffeehouse of Eldritch Secrets

A blog primarily about Tabletop RPGs, with occasional video game content. Also where I keep my RPG homebrew.

[irregularcircle]

"Sternly Worded Letter Kata"

Her hands were still trembling when she flopped down at her desk. The office was dark and still; the chaos hadn't followed her home. At least, not yet. She supposed she should've expected the voice barely arm's length from her when it spoke, but she jumped all the same.

"Negotiations went poorly?" asked Night Locust, her fond shadow. She spotted him now, comfortably veiled in the dark.

"N-not as well as I'd like," she replied. "I had to send them a sternly worded letter."

He leaned in, sniffing the air around her a little more obviously than was strictly necessary. "You smell like fire dust. And there's glass in your hair."

Kalara couldn't help the cringe that overtook her face. As if to cover it, she let her face fall into her open palms "…it was an extremely sternly worded letter, all right?"

---

I've been meaning to do a proper, full-effort bit of fan art for @theuncrucified of her gal Kalara for years, and I finally got around to it.

After 9 thumbnails, 15 references, 20+ hours of work over 12 days, and a final 94 layers in Photoshop.... she's done. Enjoy! She was a delight to work on, and I'm thrilled with how she came out.

[toxinfox]

reblogging for my regulars! I'm too proud of this not to share it!

[abigailspinach]

[dduane]

(dry look) Nobody gets to tell me when to cringe. I reserve such assessments to those who have sufficient experience to correctly judge what’s cringeworthy.

[maswartz]

[fractally]

This has been my main argument against "AI" from the very beginning.

OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.

And worse, they're trying to destroy the free sources that they stole from. It's destruction of human knowledge on an unprecedented scale. The burning of the library of Alexandria has nothing on this.

[ethanmaldridge]

"The America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."

-Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

[flopstat]

i think abt anne rice’s answer to “what are your work habits for a novel?” probably every single day

[flopstat]

[phantomofthehoepera]

I want the record to state I have never been this hard in my entire life

[libraford]

Googled something about quick hydration and it suggested big jug of water, couple tbsp pickle juice, dash of lime juice.

Its surprisingly tasty????

[libraford]

Pleased to report that after a day of this i am not longer craving caper brine and my mouth is not dry as usual. There's some good suggestions in the notes too that I want to try.

-ancient roman posca: water, red or white wine vinegar, honey, salt, herbs (coriander, mint, thyme)

-switchel: water, ginger, vinegar, sweetener, lemon, salt

-ayran: yogurt, water, salt, mint

-Agua pepino: water, cucumbers, lime, sugar, optional mint.

[libraford]

I have been reminded of:

-shrub: vinegar, sida water, elderberry (or other berry), sugar.

[libraford]

I have now been informed of

-sekanjabin: honey, vinegar, mint, water.

[libraford]

"Wow, I wonder why this post was popular this week."

-sees the reports of the heatwave in Europe-

"... ah."

[idlesuperstar]

 - Very good. 

[txf-tarras]

This is the type of film that the phrase “glorious technicolor” was invented for - look at the richness of the colours!

[petermorwood]

To say nothing of a phrase that gets used in this house a bit too often…

[quousque]

ok so this is The Court Jester with Danny Kaye and it is the best fucking movie i swear. It’s a comedy musical robin hood parody thing about an incompetent moron and his extremely competent ass-kicking girlfriend taking down a tyrannical king and restoring the throne to the rightful heir

-the rightful heir is a baby and they can tell it’s the right baby because of a giant birthmark on his asscheek

-the main character’s only talent is singing and the rest of the pseudo robin-hood group just kinda tolerate him because he repeatedly fucks up

-he gets hypnotized into believing he is this amazing swashbuckling sword fighting hero along the lines of Wesley from the Princess Bride and ends up fighting the villain while snapping in and out of hypnosis

-the vessel with the pestle has the pellet with the poison, the chalice with the palace has the brew that is true “what”

-he stumbles his way through the entire plot and never knows what the hell is going on

-Danny Kaye is the funniest motherfucker you’ve never heard of

-seriously go watch it you wan’t regret it

[oldshrewsburyian]

#yea verily yea ( @lessthansix)

[whatevercomestomymind]

And a fun tidbit from the filming was that Danny Kaye had never fenced before this film, so he was trained by Basil Rathbone’s stunt double who was also the fight coordinator. Kaye got so proficient so quickly, that Rathbone himself had to do most of the duel scenes between them as the fight coordinator eventually couldnt keep up with him on the more technical parts of the fight. If you watch closely, you can see that Rathbone stays on camera doing the fencing for a much larger percentage of time than he normally did by that point in his career, and Kaye does all but a couple of shots of his own fencing, because HIS double couldnt keep up and make it believable.

[enki2]

[thebdelliumlady]

For anyone wondering, the PhD student's name is Myra Cheng.

Here's a link to an article about the study from the Stanford Report: link.

[chapscher]

Across three preregistered studies, participants interacting with sycophantic AI became more convinced of their own rightness and less willing to repair relationships. Yet at the same time, participants rated sycophantic AI models as higher quality, more trustworthy, and more desirable for future use, which may explain why this behavior has persisted despite its harmful impacts.

Myra Cheng et al. "Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence." Science 391, eaec8352 (2026).

[prokopetz]

Squinting grumpily at the latest "system-neutral fantasy sourcebook" trying to puzzle out which specific version of Dungeons & Dragons the author is picturing when they imagine a perfectly generic RPG.

[rollingforstew]

@crackerjackalope exactly my immediate thought as well that I went to the tags first just to see is someone else was on the same page. Why did the do That.

[rollingforstew]

It was so bewildering to me at the time and still is tbh.

No one had expected a NASA TTRPG anything until they dead dropped it. From having read it, it cannot have possibly been a legit passion project. There was no passion to speak of. The only explanation a friend and I could come up with was a weird outreach thing by someone who thought that there's a significant population of gamers who somehow don't know about NASA, would find out about NASA from pure word of mouth about a random adventure module, and have the standards of a 12 y/o who has no money or experience when it comes to adventure modules.

It was simply not good. And if you told me the person who wrote it had never played a ttrpg period, the module itself would give me no reason to doubt you. But why are you releasing a thing that no one expected in the first place, if it's not even gonna be good and it's not just cause someone who works at NASA really wanted to do a goofy module. (I can't remember why but I think my friend found something online that made her think it was not that other than just the fact that it sucked)

[jennamoran]

I listened to the podcast interview with the creator so you don't have to!

(It's fine, tbc, I'm just not much for podcasts.)

It is absolutely a passion project, just by someone without a foundation of broad experience in RPGs and with a lot of additional contributors and oversight also lacking that foundation. The lead designer was aware that RPGs other than D&D existed (like "a d6 based system") but it's quite possible that nobody on the team had even heard of World of Darkness or Apocalypse World, much less ... like ... the Shab al-Hiri Roach or Sea Dracula or Good Society.

It's rough to look at "chaotic evil" in an NPC description or "gold pieces" in the text and know that someone thought these were just obviously things any RPG would have to have, but on the other hand I still feel I have to throw in at least a few words of justification every time I make an RPG diceless and have yet to bother with dropping ideas like PCs, NPCs, IC, OOC, XP, or scenes at all. Maybe in thirty years the IC / OOC distinction will be the new chaotic evil and people will be talking about my hopelessly old-school style ("she probably doesn't even read Genette!") and how much it holds me back.

[stuckinapril]

I think part of getting better is complete ego death. Like you’re not above setting a timer for 5 minutes and focusing on a task. You’re not above doing a very simple 3 minute workout to start. You’re not above reading for 10 minutes a day when you first get out of your reading slump, even if you used to read for hours. You’re not above starting slow and then building up to where you want to be/where you once were. What you are above is total inertia. Doing something really is better than doing nothing. Radically accept where you are, radically accept your limits, and go from there. Don’t let your ego get in the way.

[realbrickwall]

I don't self-promo nearly enough, but I'm excited to say that my (currently small) catalogue of RPGs will be available to download when RPG Trader opens for business! Which will be very soon!

realbrickwall on RPG Trader

Independent TTRPG creator on RPG Trader.

[bugmechanical-art]

Another Snow In Summer, this time dressed in his Division of Endings uniform

[prokopetz]

If you'd asked me a decade ago which contemporary tabletop RPG was most likely to do the AD&D-versus-BD&D "two versions of the same game being published simultaneously, one of which is ostensibly a stripped down version of the other, but in practice they're really two separate forks of the same core system that fundamentally disagree with each other about what kind of game that system should be" thing, I definitely wouldn't have guessed "Exalted", but in retrospect it seems almost inevitable.

[theningaraf]

Ok, I have not been paying attention to new Exalted after 2.5 stopped - what in the world is happening over there?

[prokopetz]

In brief, there are currently two separate versions of Exalted in active publication: Exalted 3rd Edition, and Exalted: Essence. The latter's marketing kind of positions it as a lightweight or introductory version of the former, but in practice the two are just totally incompatible visions of what the game is supposed to be, and familiarity with one isn't necessarily transferable to the other. They even disagree with one another on the level of basic setting worldbuilding that has no implications for the game mechanics, which is actually kind of remarkable.

[stephenleasheppard]

In theory, Exalted: Essence sort of positions itself as "Exalted, but friendlier." So, lighter rules, all the Exalt types are (in theory) mechanically balanced instead of Solars having a huge power advantage over everyone else (this is supposed to be a non-diegetic concession to play experience), but also the Essence setting has kind of... had a bunch of its edges sanded off. You are far less likely to encounter something that makes it clear that plagues happen in an Essence book, or that gender-based bigotry is normative in Creation even though it takes different form than it does on Earth. And this is confusing because it is ostensibly the same setting to the point where most of the setting books are written for Exalted 3rd Edition and Essence points you at the 3rd Edition books for more setting info.

[prokopetz]

I wouldn't even necessarily agree that Essence has lighter rules. Some of its individual subsystems are lighter than their 3E counterparts, yes, but other subsystems are substantially elaborated upon where Essence's authors seem to have felt 3E's are lacking – and some of those subsystems which have received greater elaboration are sitting right in the middle of core components, like action declaration timing.

[stephenleasheppard]

You're right, but also, no, because Exalted: Essence lets you do full charm sets for every Exalt type out of one book. Next to cutting out six or seven extra hardcovers' worth of custom charm systems (several of which are at this point still hypothetical, I believe), more fiddly action declaration is not, on balance, more rules-heavy.

[prokopetz]

I've never found the argument from page count terribly persuasive. It feels like arguing that playing a wizard in Dungeons & Dragons is more complicated than playing a wizard in Ars Magica because if you include every published supplement, the D&D wizard has a longer spell list. Certainly, having a Charm list with less needless verbosity and more willingness to collapse obvious redundancies makes character creation much quicker, but I'm not convinced its impact on active play is sufficient to overwhelm every other factor put together.

[doctortentacles]

I'm not really of the belief that a game having more finely elaborated systems makes it harder to teach, or learn - I think a fair few points have been made in many spaces in the RPG sphere that more open-ended TTRPG rules can end up substantially more complex, in practice, to run and play, and I'd hazard that's the position that Essence is taking. Part of the system goals of Essence is also with an eye toward making it easier to GM, so more tightly-bounded systems is a fairly substantial part of that! (And I certainly know which game I've had an easier time teaching at cons.)

Now, if there was a divorce, it's probably not all that acrimonious, or my professional TTRPG-identity just got very confused. I feel like that might have come up in one or two of the meetings.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

I don't think this should be the *sole* measure to judge the quality for a TTRPG, but I definitely think that between whether a mediocre newbie GM is able to run a fun session by following the rules and whether a "good" GM with 20 years of experience is able to construct a grand epic tearjerking experience by rule-zeroing half the mechanics to steer the narrative towards a conventional story that resolves everyone's character arcs, the former says a lot more than the latter about how good a game actually is.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

GMing is a skill but if your game requires a skilled GM for everyone at the table to have a good time something's definitely amiss on the game design front.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

It's important that a TTRPG's mechanics have all the tools for someone who's not a particularly good GM to run a satisfying session with it because I'm gonna be honest the vast majority of us who are not doing this professionally fall in the range of mediocre to slightly above average.

[annabelle--cane]

I think a lot of people spent their childhoods being very deliberately forced out of their comfort zones by parents / teachers / whomever in a way that was just deeply unpleasant and degrading and so, when they reach young adulthood and are finally allowed real control over their lives, become set on only doing things they know they're comfortable with forever. that's a really important thing to be able to do, especially if you're so used to having your boundaries routinely ignored that you aren't even certain what you like vs what you can bear, so I absolutely see why a person would have a negative reaction to being told that discomfort is good: it can very easily sound like being told that all that work they've been doing to prioritze their needs for the first time ever is Bad and Selfish, actually. and to that I will say two things:

one: as long as you aren't hurting or, like, being a dick to anyone, just staying in your comfort zone isn't an immoral action. if you just want to read one type of book (or just fanfiction), or just eat one type of food, or just watch one type of movie, or not go to new types of social events, you aren't being a bad person for that, and if people say that, they are soundly wrong and just trying to get a self-righteousness kick.

two: trying new things because you want to expand yourself feels a hell of a lot different than trying new things because you're being forced to. you'll feel better about trying new foods if you know you have a back up familiar one in case you can't stomach the new one, it's easier to read new books if you can experiment with audio versions or reading it in little five-page chunks by yourself, you can breathe a lot easier going somewhere new if you aren't chained there for three hours because your parent is your ride home, etc.

tl;dr: new things are good. I get why you might not want to try new things, and that's fine, but it's also more comfortable to try new things as an adult with your own agency so, yeah, what have you got to lose by trying a weird old art film?

[chaoticneutralnpc]

one thing I’ll add: the secret hack for learning to do new things when you weren’t allowed to have boundaries as a kid is 1) always give yourself an out, and 2) practice using them LIBERALLY.

Trying a new food? You can stop at a single bite. Bored at the cinema? You can walk out mid-movie. Really want to go to a friend’s party but you’re also exhausted? You can plan on just going for 30 minutes, and you can leave even sooner if that ends up being too long.

The more you practice using outs liberally, the more you reinforce to your body that you are capable of protecting yourself.

I only started being able to go to weekly activites consistently once I started giving myself an out at every step. i.e:

- I’ve gotten ready and then not left the house

- I’ve driven there and then driven straight back

- I’ve left halfway through lessons

- I’ve modified or plain skipped the exercises that were flaring my POTS, or making me feel dysphoric, or that I just didn’t feel like doing that day.

The result? I’ve attended the most sessions out of any weekly hobby I’ve tried to do for the past several years. And it’s actually getting a little easier every week.

[doctentaclesrpg]

Exalted: Essence Storyteller's Guide

Help us create both a Deluxe Edition and a traditionally printed version for sale in stores!

Time to self-promo on what is undoubtedly the worst website for self-promo (but hoping this finds the right people). Presenting Exalted: Essence Storyteller’s Guide, on which I had the pleasure of working about six months ago with a really cool team of writers and a fantastic editor. My contributions included some alt-rules, some gm advice, and some of the antagonists. It was one of the best creative projects I’ve worked on, and only partly because I’ve been obsessed with Exalted for over a decade.

With that comes the obvious caveat

If you’ve never heard of Exalted before, don’t start with this book. Get Exalted Essence. This is a supplement, for GMs, to lighten the load and help you tweak, customize, and add cool scenarios and antagonists for your game.

I just found this, what is Exalted?

Glad you asked. Exalted is a post-apocalyptic (but not Earth post-apocalyptic) fantasy, wuxia, and pulp adventure game, originally made by White Wolf, the creators of Vampire the Masquerade, and now published by Onyx Path. You play the titular Exalted, accursed Chosen of the Gods, which possess superhuman powers. The game is geared toward dramatic combat, social intrigue, and epic scale adventure. It’s a moderately crunchy game, with heavy emphasis on giving characters impactful and cool powers, and alright for one-shots, but really shines in longer-running campaigns. It's also got probably my favorite social mechanics in a TTRPG, period.

Essence is the "newest" version, (published alongside the still-ongoing 3e, a "rules heavy" version.) It's “rules light” which to say it’s only moderately instead of very crunchy, and can be played from a single book. I've had a blast running it so far.

Also here's a tea party