Greetings internet wanderer! You can call me Vermin/Elvie and I'm a game designer, actual play streamer, and ttrpg cretin lurking around twitter, twitch, youtube and now tumblr!
I have work on itch.io that has everything from medium weight tactical RPGs, to lyric games, to goofy erotic larps. Most stuff is either free or pay what you can, and anything that has a set price point also has a barrel of Community Copies that refill whenever someone buys the game outright.
https://legendary-vermin.itch.io/
I'm also an AP streamer who shows up predominantly on Neon Lights Roleplay! I've been in everything from high-fantasy games, to Resident Evil style horror games, and you can find VODs of my work here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUYBnjyXT3Cp4KTnM1gqrVI4S9-k1FUhL
A couple of highlights:
Games Stuff
Alley-Oop!
Alley-Oop! is a game I wrote with my wife in 2019 that is based on the WNBA's trip into the Wubble, a recreation center that was closed to the public, allowing the players to play in relative safety in spite of the dangerous early days of the pandemic. It was also inspired by the rise of Blaseball and Marbula One, and the idea that we as humans are really good at taking totally random noise and creating exciting stories by giving otherwise meaningless objects their own personalities.
As such, the game isn't about simulating basketball as much as it is about commentating it, and then deciding who these players are based on how the dice fall. Oh, and those dice? They are your players! Yeah! The pink d4 is Ollie Orion, and she's in the running for rookie of the year! But it's been hard for her to concentrate because she recently had a break up with that orange d10 on the other team. Maybe after this round of basketball, you and your friends will RP a scene between the two of them, where they have to shoot a commercial together. Maybe their love will be reignited?????
Alley-Oop! is also one of only a couple of games I wrote that got a print run, and the book is Gorgeous!!
Æthernet
Far and away one of my most popular games, Æthernet asks the question "What if, in the far future when humanity travels the stars and the internet is immersive VR, someone accidentally opened a rift to another dimension in the internet, and turned the internet into a literal digital hellscape?" and follows that question up with "What if we had to do dungeon crawls there as part of the gig economy?"
Inspired by Doom (duh) and dozens of stories about the intersection of Magic and Technology, Æthernet is a small version of a game I want to make Very Large one day.
No Amount Of Armor: Ashcan Edition
I will probably talk about this game a ton here, but No Amount of Armor is my diet-tactics story-driven mecha RPG that takes you to the razor's edge of warfare. Mechanically, it sits between heavy tactical games like Lancer and fully story driven games like Firebrands, giving players the tools to embody characters that feel like they have a stake in the world, and build mechs that feel like they can throw a punch to level a building.
Right now, this game is still in development, and you are invited to give feedback and help shape the game's final form!
Actual Play Highlights
You can watch any of the shows I've been in on the youtube playlist above, but here are some finished Series that are digestible and fun!
Resident Evil: Catalyst
A game of The Company made for The Top Shelf in three parts! It follows a group of engineers, scientists and soldiers in the wake of an early break out of a combination of a G-Virus and Las Plagas. It ends in tragedy in one of the highest stakes conversations I've ever had the pleasure to participate in in TRPG.
Under Twilit Skies
Under Twilit Skies came together as a charity stream, and became so much more than that. At its core is the very real pain of living under state violence, and the need to fight back.
5 talented pilots fight against the empire that colonized, brutalized, killed and created them. 4 episodes of high octane, high drama mecha action in Armour Astir: Advent.
This cat strikes me as both fascinated by the sensation of the rain - the smell, sound, and feel of it - and completely mortified by the fact that it comes with being wet
Jill Collen Jefferson, the founder of JULIAN, explains what happens when a transgender woman’s death is ruled a suicide and a community call
This is grim and unsurprising but I’m heartened that there are people devoting themselves to bringing this horrific pattern to light. Lynchings never ended, and reports of suicides among Black transfems in particular should be cause for suspicion
This is what I was alluding to when I discussed that the volume of name changes you have to make as a trans person highlights the ridiculous amount of documentation attached to you.
Yoshimasa Ishibashi was inspired to create The Fuccons after seeing an advertisement where guests at a party had frozen facial expressions, recalling that they were “so fake they made [him] laugh.” Ishibashi opted to use mannequins because he did not want audiences to dismiss the series as a “TV parody” and because the series’ content would feel “too grotesque” if real actors were used. In addition, he did not want the actors’ personalities to influence how the characters were portrayed and wanted the characters to be “completely depersonalized.”
Recreating a retro family setting similar to Bewitched, Ishibashi sourced the mannequins from a friend’s warehouse, which originated from Yoshichu Mannequin. He picked fair-skinned, blue-eyed mannequins because the Japanese-looking mannequins had facial expressions that seemed too serious. Before filming, the mannequins would be styled by Ishibashi’s make-up and hairstylist teams while he chose the outfits himself. He claimed that working with mannequins was “weird at first” but later decided that they were “not all that different from live actors.”
Yoo I love the Fuccons! I’ve seen the whole thing, including the original shorts from Vermillion Pleasure Night before they spun it off. Which btw is the same show to give us gems like this:
I'm not even nearly as anti-LLM as most other leftists but part of approaching new technology is "hey let's think real critically about the application and scope of this so we can use it in ways that are worth it and don't cause mass scale societal damage" but the fact that it's being injected into fucking EVERYTHING makes any stance more cautious than "USE LLMS FOR EVERYTHING NOW AND FOREVER" so much more anti than the status quo that I don't even fucking want to add nuance
Like most of the problems people have with LLMs are the natural conclusion of decades of tech companies gaining monopolies, environmental regulations struggling to keep up with new technologies, and a growing semi-privatized surveillance state, as opposed to issues with LLMs themselves. There's a theoretical reality where LLMs are implemented in useful, responsible, and sustainable ways but that reality is so far removed from our current one that none of those points actually matters
ah. a nuanced story that allows for imperfect victims and portrays the confusing and contradictory nature of being human – particularly in a context that explores abuse, harassment and trauma. i wonder what people on the internet make of it... oh. oh no. oh no no no no no
(In reference to me saying the two outcomes are chainsaw man and homestuck)
No, no, those two form a dichotomy:
Chainsaw Man: vast majority of the fanbase seems wholly unaware of themes of abuse and trauma. Complains about “lack of character development” when the main character doesn’t go through a hero’s journey and become more perfectly realized as their ideal self and instead all the traumatizing events make them worse.
Homestuck: fanbase is hyper-critical of abused and traumatized characters. Complains about “lack of accountability”, referring to the fact that the character has not received a verbal dressing-down and been beaten to a pulp by their friends (something they believe would be the only proper catalyst for said character’s ’redemption’).
