I'm movin different

Halo and big robots and such. Lead Game Designer at @chasmgamesco so check us out (:

[birdiehasart]

I See You.

[contemptible-scoundrel]

[wrinkly old man squinting at an ipad and adjusting his reading glasses voice] what's this- "pomni?" from an amazing digital circus? strange little critter, that one. not without its merits, I'm sure

[seat-safety-switch]

Have any of your kids become machinists lately? The signs can be subtle, but they're there. Every day, thousands of children become obsessed with precisely fabricating intricate mechanical parts. Only some of them become productive members of society, like hot rod builders or railway clock engineers. Virtually all of them are lost to constructing scale-model steam engines. Concerned parents are watching for the following signs.

Police know that the first sign of affiliation into a new gang is a change in the subject's vocabulary. New words. Unfamiliar names. Did little Johnny never mention the words "locating datum" before he suddenly blurted it out by accident one night at dinner? It may be time to have a conversation with his teacher, to find out more about who he spends his time with at school. If you can get to it early enough, you can nip it in the bud.

In a similar vein, it's important to figure out where all their money is going. Kids who get hooked on the machinist lifestyle will often buy ridiculous things in order to "prove" their affiliation with the gang. One mother of two in Rhode Island came home to find a bunch of strange metallic cylinders on her doorstep, shipped overnight from FedEx to her youngest child. Round stock. She thought it was "just a phase." Her child is doing time in a federal penitentiary, after getting all fucked up on DYKEM markers and stabbing an engineer for submitting an insufficiently dimensioned drawing.

Last, an obsession with precision is often your last chance to have a talk with a wayward child. Are things in your house suddenly becoming rigidly aligned to an invisible grid system? Are you noticing things becoming burnished or otherwise polished, that weren't before? A trusted adult's timely intervention when your kid is micrometering a piece of sheet metal found in the alley may be all that is saving your kid from a lifetime of obsessing over thousandths.

With your vigilance and hard work, we can keep children from growing up to become machinists. Nobody's dream for their child should involve "estate sale full of hundreds of thousands of useless brackets."

[argumate]

hmm so orcas don't eat humans in the wild because each group typically specialises (via cultural transmission between generations) in hunting specific forms of prey and are quite reticent about experimentation, which makes sense given the risks and the enormous energy demands these creatures have; however that raises the possibility of an orca finding a popular beach and coming up with repeatable tactics for human hunting in the future, like it would be a mistake to assume that they're never going to eat people.

[birdiehasart]

Lamp? No -- Stars!

[cryptotheism]

ct my friend im moving soon whats the scariest painting i can put in the bathroom

Francis Bacon portrait of Innocent X

[thestrawberryfool]

It's easy to stay motivated to get outside and go places when Guillermo del Toro is walking behind you, pushing you forward with his psychic powers.

[seat-safety-switch]

Recently, my city has been complaining about their bus lanes not being respected by members of the public. Normally, this would be a job for the police, but they've all been on paid vacation the last couple of years. The big brains on City Council proposed some kind of fancy-ass foreign-made surveillance camera on the front of the buses, to read the plates of the fiends who would block a bus, but I have another proposal. Some might call it less of a proposal and more of a beautiful dream.

On the idyllic afternoon where my policies are put into action, I switch my right turn signal on a little bit too early, and in return a woman named Neci who has never seen the outside of a Soviet work prison for more than 30 minutes takes my wing mirror off with a subsonic 50-calibre warning shot from a mile away. Her dream when released is to one day visit Subway.

Up the block, a pair of teenaged child soldiers made mostly of knives who were hardwired from birth by various French ex-governmental assassination rings have disabled a Cayenne by putting $6500 of tank killer rounds through the engine block, and pull out the driver to receive her ticket.

Behind me, I hear the distinct sounds of an Uber Eats driver doing a hit and run on a parallel-parked M35A2. In response, he receives 30,000 rounds per minute of Phalanx caseless hot loads from the nearby traffic calming emplacement.

A little girl rides her single-speed Huffy up the bike lane and meekly rings her bell at a Ford Escape blocking the crosswalk. It barely has a chance to get back into gear, before an extended-magazine Uzi comes out of the Hello Kitty basket on the front.

An absolute bear of a man comes off the sidewalk and pulls in the shattered husks of each car, leaving whatever he can easily slop out of the driver's seat in the middle of the road for the crows. The child soldiers take pot shots at him from their sidearms the whole time, and cackle about composting. It is their private joke.

A bus tootles happily through this warzone, delivering people to their destination only about fifteen minutes late.

[fenceposted]

I mix up my regular gummy worms with BEYOND RAW LIT ORIGIN worms. My heart explodes Mortal Kombatstyle in the middle of my next tabletop session, forever altering the trajectory of my players' lives. Another win for big worm

[silverdreamdancer]

Whilst granular mechanics are very much out of fashion these days, I am surprised at how bad any sort of sanity system is compared to other mechanics, considering how important a role it plays in horror games particularly.

I feel that Call of Cthulhu particularly fails to capture anything that makes its antagonists terrifying in the sanity mechanics and it usually just manifests as a penalty for interacting with otherworldly creatures.

Alien does a fear mechanic that's similar to sanity but with a strong short term panic focus.

The only system I know that seems to have made a real effort in innovating here is Unknown Armies.

However I might be out of the loop. Are there any systems with nuanced sanity mechanics?

[fenceposted]

Halcyon by @chasmgamesco (and me) uses a system called Bleed to track how your character loses their mind as an effect of being a mech pilot. It uses both roleplay hooks and mechanical progression tracks and it's produced some great moments in my campaigns (:

[pansy2025]

goo goo dolls if they were in dune: and i don’t want the worm to see me

[tpwrtrmnky]

How to modify D&D 5E to play just about anything

Go to a game store

Navigate to the dungeons and dragons section

Turn your head approximately five degrees either to the left or to the right

The books on these shelves are also tabletop roleplaying games. Many of them already have exactly what you're not getting from D&D 5E

[tpwrtrmnky]

In online stores, simply uncheck the "Brand: Dungeons and Dragons" box instead of turning your head approximately five degrees

[tpwrtrmnky]

You may find that some of these games don't have rules for hitting things with swords.

This is because rules for hitting things with swords actually aren't mandatory if the game is about something else. The game system for your "courtly intrigue in space" campaign might actually have no need for melee combat at all.

[anim-ttrpgs]

Huge A.N.I.M. Patreon Discount Running Until June 30th 2026

Get more from The Agency of Narrative Intrigue and Mystery Patreon on Patreon

Patreon is empowering a new generation of creators. Support and engage with artists and creators as they live out their passions!

I am mostly on vacation this month and not expecting A.N.I.M. to make a lot of money because of that since I won’t be hitting the marketing as hard, but I and other members are not in immediate financial danger so instead of pushing an income quota and stressing about it while also not doing much to make sure it is fulfilled, I’m just introducing a big patreon discount. The way patreon does this is a bit wonky but if you’re a free member/not a member and you go to the patreon page right now and hit “upgrade” you should see some manner of discount on your first month between 50% and 89%(89%-off was the lowest it would let me go).

Anything Top Secret or above gets you access to all the most updated versions of all our projects every month, and is a consistent and reliable way to support us if you want to see us keep doing what we’re doing.

[dogpuppy]

this guy is really talented at making the worst music I’ve ever heard

[cryptotheism]

They closed down the La Brea tar pits bc they found a dinosaur ideology preserved in tar.

[fenceposted]

Here's the site link to get NIGHTWIND RPG for free if you saw my earlier post and don't want to deal with patreon. If you like lightweight GMless games and atmospheric evenings with good friends, check it out and let me know what you think!

[fenceposted]

NIGHTWIND RPG | writingwithwill

NIGHTWIND RPG by writingwithwill on Patreon. Join writingwithwill's community for exclusive content and updates.

New free TTRPG drop!

NIGHTWIND RPG is a GM-less oneshot game for 3-5 people. It's an experiment into how much "atmosphere" can be created purely by the rules text of a game, and I think it turned out pretty cool. The PDF is free on my new Patreon because the site I usually use with @chasmgamesco is being weird. Check the game out! I had a lot of fun writing it and the first playtest made people cry. I'm excited to hear reviews.

Note: as with any tabletop game, you will have the best experience playing NIGHTWIND with people who can take something seriously.