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.
He killed his yonger brother in cold blood because he was jealous of him. There is in no way anything funny about this. No hesitation just poped a rock over his turned head, droped his body over the edged and tried to lie to god about what he did. FUCK YALL CRAZIES!!!
i hate those posts that are like “hes tall, handsome, funny… i didnt say a name but he popped into your head didnt he ? :)” like no? he didnt. who the fuck is he
On the small soggy wet archipelago that makes up the modern day united kingdom, sunny days are a rare phenomenon. As such, the peoples of england cherish each and every one, even going so far as to write songs about them in their local music. With sunlight in such high demand, to block it deliberately is nigh unthinkable, hence their cultural confusion at the invention of the parasol.
endlessly frustrating that whenever anyone is like 'i wish i could complain about X without people trying to give me unsolicited advice' swarms of people are always like 'clearly you have not heard *my* unsolicited advice!' and it's always like yes I have. Didn't help.
Bringing this back to say if you see a post where someone is explicitly like 'i am just venting and not seeking advice' and you respond 'i know you don't want advice but-' I am blasting you with my orbital laser.
tumblr is so funny within my mutual circle ppl will be like cannibalism as a metaphor for sex is honestly so overdone 🙄 like it’s not even transgressive anymore it’s just vanilla atp 🙄 and then you go a little too far outside that circle and people are trigger tagging memes about infidelity
me, to my roommates: cnc is vanilla, practically everyone i've ever fucked has been into cnc. incest is also just something that everyone is into, it's basically the #1 porn search category. i'm a little embarrassed about how normal my kinks are, since the weirdest shit i'm into is basically knifeplay and bloodplay and intox...
after 2 years working outdoors all day i finally got stung by an onion for the first time yesterday and i wasnt even doing anything there wasnt even a nest nearby
got my girlfriend into chuck tingle’s horror and we both bought a different book of his to the pool which summoned a bear who came over and was like MY MAN CHUCK TINGLE before diving into the pool
“The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster. I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?”
— Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg commenting on how weird gendered defaults in entertainment are, and why we should think twice about them. Excerpted from this longer original post.
(via 360degreesasthecrowflies)
Vermin's Fetid Pit @legendaryvermin - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
