Indie Press Revolution (IPR) is a network of creator-publishers devoted to bringing you the latest innovations in tabletop roleplaying and story games.
Welcome to the Indie Press Revolution tumblr page!
If you’re not already familiar with us, we’re a distributor of small-press roleplaying games. We’ve currently got over 600 different TTRPGs for sale on our website, https://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/home.php.
We work on a consignment basis with our publishers, which means a percentage of each sale goes directly back to the creators of the game. If you’re interested in selling through us, or would just like to see the exact breakdown of percentages, you can check out our Potential Publisher FAQ.
Obviously, we’re new to tumblr, creating an account as part of the wave currently leaving twitter. Luckily for us, our social media manager Nicholas is not! He’s the one who will be running this blog, you can also find him over @omophagic-beast.
You can follow us for updates on whats new in stock or back in stock at IPR, as well as convention news and just general indie TTRPG talk!
Oh and one last thing, for avoidance of doubt: IPR supports trans rights and BIMPOC creators and gamers. Fascists, Nazis, and TERFs can all fuck right off.
Before fantasy became popular, even before modern fantasy existed, its ecological niche was filled by the now forgotten genre of sword and planet. Glorious stories of adventures of John Carter and Dejah Thoris, of Flash Gordon and Doctor Zarkov and many other heroes and heroines occupied the minds of our geeky predecessors. This game is a revivalist attempt to bring this genre to modern roleplayers.
Blade and Raygun is a minimalist game suitable for solo and co-op play, with only 2d6 required.
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Whoh, what a year it was! Anyway, I am back with the second edition of Blade and Raygun!
The tumblr-exclusive changelog:
Complete system overhaul - now it works on the foundations of World of Dungeons, but is heavily modified. For example, your character can take only 2 blows before collapsing, but you don't start weak - you start as a hardened veteran of adventuring.
Changed how psionics work - from rare gift to a universal ability, but a weak one.
Added procedures for tests (that are structured like moves) and missions. There are way too many ways to play the game to systematize them, but the most common missions are dungeon delving, investigations and heists.
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On top of the game itself, you will get a whole setting. Agkoyui (specifically North-Eastern Hamme) is a world inspired by (mostly) Asian cultures, but the sources of inspiration are made completely alien. The setting document also includes a rehearsal of how some of the monsters are used by people of the world.
hello i’ve been reading eurekas rules and im trying to get friends to play it! if i was going to make a psych shawn spencer type who is pretending to be psychic, would the poseur trait work? or is that more for specifically nonhuman characters? (other traits would be visual calculus and just one more thing). thank you!
My Clutch character in a game ran with some good friends. This is Konrad, a squalid german man-at-arms from 1482 who was killed in a battle somewhere in England. Resurrected by unstable magic in the Smithsonian basement in the Heartland, Konrad now ventures into a world he no longer understands, forever alienated, grieving the life he once had, shackled by his own repressed mind. Inside him is an emptiness, one his mind seems to actively reject pondering. Perhaps a side effect of being a reanimated corpse.
Huge A.N.I.M. Patreon Discount Running Until June 30th 2026
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.
TTRPG: Fellowship 2nd edition
Creator: @teratopixel on bluesky, tumblr and instagram(not as active there but you can find me there as well), https://artfight.net/~Teratopixel
Character's Artfight Page: https://artfight.net/character/6716147.ofelia
Fun Facts:
1. She's loosely based on Brazilian werewolves, and can transform into a pig-dog monster. Her Curse is not the source of her transformations, but it makes them more problematic and harder to control.
2. She is not on her first adventure. About 30 years ago, she fought against the former evil overlord who threatened her world; now, she fights alongside a new generation of heroes (and a former enemy) against the new evil overlord who is quickly rising to power.
3. Ofélia actually "died" once, in game; however, due to some multiverse shenanigans she came back to life. She is now missing an eye, and got several new scars. The art piece I sent with this is from before that happened.
Character Sheet Clipping:
Ofélia's cursed hunger has lead to more than a few dramatic moments and conversations with her Fellowship. A few times, however, it has been played for comedy, such as one time when the party needed to get rid of some magical objects and she volunteered to eat them. (It worked)
[If you'd like to have your indie ttrpg character featured leading up to Artfight, please complete this form ]
Someone requested this so here it is: the rattiest rat tank in Flying Circus. Suggestions are always welcome and in fact encouraged. I make these more often when I have people riding my ass about them.
Hailing from the North, Daniel is a trapper and fur trader. The life of such is hard work and dangerous. After the Rifts the snow storms and blizzards got worse, as did the animals. Massive Beavers and Porcupines now roaming the frozen planes. But those down South in both Megan Cities will pay top billing for authentic fur for their coats, bags, and hats. Though if Daniel had to meet any of the people who wore the fur of what he hunted, he'd probably shoot them.
Daniel's philosophy is that of balance, a druid at heart. Even if he lacks the skill for magic. Everything he kills he uses all parts of, eating the meat and trading the bones to those who wish to turn them into fertilizer.
When Mormon missionaries came up, he saw them hunt deer for sport. Leaving most of the animal to rot. So he killed them. The Mormons then sent their Hounds after him. So he had to flee, where he happened upon two young adults, both of whom also had a grudge against the people of Deseret.
So, let's talk about "The Extraordinarily Horrible Children of Raven's Hollow". This game started with me thinking about an RPG that played out like Edward Gorey's The Gashlycrumb Tinies. Which is to say, each player would effectively get a single turn in which they played out a single panel vignette about their character.
It rapidly evolved to be a bit more than that. You see, it plays like a card game. Each round of play is a bit like this Lenore comic, "Leap Frog" creating a vignette that frequently results in the demise of either one of the PC children or NPC adults. The whole game is just one long Series of Unfortunate Events, if you catch my meaning.
The goal of the game is to be the last child standing but like all my games that's a bit of misdirection as it's almost impossible to achieve that with any kind of intention or purpose. In fact, the fastest way to lose is by trying to win or rather to win too directly.
You see, "The Extraordinarily Horrible Children of Raven's Hollow", like all my games, is a meditation on crime and punishment. While the children are the subject of the story, they aren't the narrative's true protagonists. That would be The Ravens.
You see once a child player is "eliminated" they take on a new role: A Raven. The children can only be vicious to each other or the adults. There are, after all, extraordinarily horrible children. Ravens, on the other hand, have vast sweeping abilities to shape the flow of the narrative and the outcome of the game. That's why you can't intentionally win a game of Raven's Hollow. No single child has the power to decide that. The collective actions of the Ravens decide that.
Most people know the collective noun for crows is "murder", less know that the collective noun for ravens is "unkindness" or "conspiracy." And that's what The Ravens in this game are: an unkind conspiracy passing judgement on the horrible children.
The way to win a Raven's Hollow game is to get The Ravens on your side. You know, the characters played by the people you just spent the rest of the game trying to eliminate. That's why playing too viciously will just cost you the game faster.
By the way, it's not enough to JUST be the last child standing. You also have face the mob of angry adults who have slowly been catching on that something isn't right with the children of Raven's Hollow. It's a very delicate balance of:
Murdering your fellow children.
Murdering the adults.
Not earning the ire of The Ravens while doing the above.
Only players who can do all three win games of Raven's Hollow. Who can be the most Deniably Horrible Child of Raven's Hollow? The rest get sent to the orphanage.
While writing lore for Delve, our dungeon-fantasy setting called for a variety of races, and I wanted eleven of them for a pointless random-table reason. I thought I'd fill them out with some bug-people!
Then I had to figure out what they're like, and I really like where they ended up.
The short glib version is idol yuri fanboy wasps who don't have gender so they invented dubstep as a replacement for it. The long version is:
APPEARANCE & HOME
Someone who's never seen a vespine before might be frightened and mistake them for a monster. They're insects: hard carapaces, jointed limbs, wiggling mandibles, and huge but inexpressive eyes. They stand at least a whole head taller than the average human, but not any wider, giving them a proportionally lanky appearance. And their segmented body plan and typical color schemes vividly resemble ants, or more frequently wasps or hornets. Oddly enough though, they still only have the same two arms and two legs you'll find anywhere else in the world. (It's anyone's guess as to why.)
An ordinary vespine is just as polite and agreeable as any human in person, of course. They speak the same language, albeit in their own dialect. And though they lack clear facial expressions to make themselves understood, they're just as instinctively expressive by their body language, which is dramatically active nearly all the time as a matter of course. But this tendency toward dance and pantomime can make mammalian folk mistake them as hysterical or even sarcastic sometimes. The way a vespine talks with their whole body will remind a sheltered human of masked figures on theater stages more than it does human conversation.
Vespines are seldom seen outside the hivelands in interior Altara: an exotic environment of salt marshes and fungal forests that outsiders find as alien as they find the vespines themselves, but locals call it cozy and pastoral.
Most vespines are drones, and gather in hives around a single queen, who is mother to every drone in the hive. The queen stands significantly taller than her drones, has four arms instead of two, and lives two or three times as long as a drone does. Some queens may have only a few dozen drones in their hive, while others can have hundreds! And so vespine villages and cities usually consist of more than one hive living side by side.
Life in a vespine town is friendly and communal, and resembles mammal life in many of its amenities and creature comforts... but it's also cramped. The drones live the way they're naturally comfortable: sleeping shoulder to shoulder, gathering and lining up body to body, and generally coexisting without a concept of personal space. This is the one thing almost any vespine has to learn to adjust to when traveling abroad: strangers will take offense if you sit down at their dinner table and gently crowd in until you're fully flush together with them.
THE QUEEN & THE DRONES
Vespine drones do not mindlessly obey every command of their queen day in and day out. They're free thinking individuals just like you, with their own desires and goals. But they are still naturally eusocial creatures. And just as a mammal mother can't help but love and protect her child, a typical drone can't help but love and adore his queen.
Queens can only reproduce by coupling with other queens, which usually leaves both partners pregnant, and queens tend to bond in flighty and mercurial relationships that can shift often, breaking up or making up or changing partners from month to month, in a romantic saga that drones gossip on avidly. Drones cannot reproduce at all, and make up a vast majority of the vespine population. It varies how interested a drone is in romantic relationships of his own, if at all.
This doesn't make for an easy translation from the human construct of gender. Drones nearly always go by he/him in language, and queens nearly always by she/her, but this is a mere grammatical distinction to them. As for actual manhood or womanhood, the vespine understanding of the concepts is academic, superficial, and very loose. If you try to explain to a hiveland vespine that it takes more than putting on a dress to "be a woman," or grooming a moustache to "be a man," they might suspect you're just trying to confuse them with your exotic and complicated mammal traditions.
This hive system also makes for much larger family units than you may be used to, so the notion of family is a little different for vespines. Drone siblings feel a kinship to one another that's more communal than domestic, and dote on their queen less personally, and more like the revered local royalty that her name implies. It's normal for drones to hang on news about their queen's life and interests, and to jump at the chance to have a few minutes of conversation with her or even hold her hand- something a typical queen usually greatly enjoys indulging, as she has her own fond affection for her drones as a whole.
You might compare this to the secondhand social adoration between a local musical celebrity and her fans. And this would be appropriate, since all queens are expected to be just that: musicians.
MUSIC & A VESPINE'S SOUND
Vespine culture and identity revolves heavily around music.
This is both an understatement and an oversimplification.
Music in all forms and genres is the driving mainstream artform in vespine society, and the center of many vespine holidays, festivals, and ceremonies. The integration of energetic magic into musical instruments is usually credited to vespines. They're usually the ones who invented, refined, and popularized various magically amplified and altered instruments as well as entire genres of music born by them. And the making of music is so common that any drone is expected to play at least one instrument recreationally, if not with professional skill then at least enough to play some staple songs of his own personal genre, otherwise called his "sound."
For a vespine, your sound is not merely your favorite genre or style of music. It's a way of playing and listening that resonates with you on a viscerally personal level. A kind of music that feels like it expresses something essential and impossible to articulate with words in your own heart, your own identity. In other words, sound is the vespine experience that's most often equated to the human experience of gender! A given sound comes with certain cultural and aesthetic expectations, certain normative ways of thinking and behaving, and while none of these associations are seen as hard rules in themselves, an individual vespine can't help but be defined by what ways they conform to or defy the identity of their sound.
Its normal for a vespine to enjoy and be a fan of many genres, or even play many genres. But traditionally a vespine drone is expected to have one and only one sound that's their own. Further, a drone's sound is expected to be one of his queen's sounds. Queens aren't like drones: a queen is expected to have multiple sounds, from just two to half a dozen, and she's expected to play music in each of these sounds at a high artistic level. A queen's performances at holidays and festivals is important! It's what inspires her drones, connects them to her, and guides them to know themselves as they know her.
These aren't ingrained biological imperatives, of course. Very few social norms are. There are cases of a drone claiming a sound outside his queen's repertoire, or claiming multiple sounds, or claiming none. And the response this gets can vary wildly from hive to hive. What's more, there are some particularly new genres of music that more traditionalist hives don't consider valid sounds at all. Only a few generations ago, the advent of amplified instruments sparked an explosion of new genres, new sounds, revolution, and controversy. As well as radical ideas that all sound is socially constructed and arbitrary, that the feelings are real but only form as a response to existing art and culture.
There is no consensus. Vespine society is not a monolith, and if you asked ten vespines to write a list of the valid sounds that exist they might all agree on most of it, but they'd never be able to settle on the final controversial edge cases.
HUSKS
Every breed of folk in the world has their own particular monsters and ghouls. Humans have moon-maddened werewolves. The rabbit-like kith have their antlered and red-eyed jacks. The aquatic mer have their louse-mouthed cutters. And vespines have husks.
A vespine is an insect, with a hard exoskeleton rather than interior bones. So as a vespine's insides rot away, the hollow shell can sometimes retain its lifelike appearance. The emptiness inside can be made into a vessel of necromantic magic, an animated void, and the resulting creature is a husk.
Husks are especially unsettling for how closely they resemble normal people- at least at a glance. From a distance it may look like an ordinary vespine. But as you get closer you'll see the unsteady whipping movements of its limbs like a floppy marionette. The whisper of air through its joints. And the dark gaping pits into its hollow head, where its eyes belong. Husks fall into the uncanny valley to any observer, but other vespines find them especially upsetting to behold. This probably isn't surprising: a badly taxidermied fox is creepy. A badly taxidermied human would probably make you want to leave the room.
Adventurers and ghoul hunters that dispatch husks remark on how unnervingly light they are for their size. Hard blows send them flying, and they can use it to their own advantage for sudden sprints or long springing leaps. This makes a frightening paradox: a husk is terribly dangerous up close. But from a distance, you might not recognize the danger at all until it's too late.
Wow, two posts in a week! Don't expect this often, lol. After coming back from UK Games Expo two weeks ago, I was super refreshed and inspi
The third and final WIP of my upcoming solo RPG A Witch's Pilgrimage is now available to paying members on Patreon! Join at $3/month for access to the draft and a sample of the layout!
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