GenCon is fast approaching and I am vibrating with excitement for the chance to drop the most complete and refined version of Magic Assholes (to date) on people in a couple weeks.
Along with preparing a new one-shot adventure and improving on another that I ran at GenCon several years ago, I've overhauled the character sheet and managed to squeeze almost all of the rules and character creation info into a double-sided quick ref sheet, so I can on-board a three 6-person tables as quickly as possible during the con.
Squeezing this much information into 2 sheets was not easy. Fortunately, I've been getting some practice making things like this from running a monthly RPG Club for my library. These short rules summaries have been helpful for teaching new systems, but I also find that going through a RPG book with the intent to write and condense as many of the rules as you think you need to play onto as few sheets as possible, really helps you cement most of that ruleset in my head. I recommend trying it.
Even though I wasn't aiming to every rule on one sheet, I did manage to get all of the most important stuff on there. I can, and will, say a lot more about all of these rules, but this is practically the whole game. You could take the character sheet and the overview pages, grab some decks of cards, and make a whole crew of characters then start playing today, if you wanted. You might need some ideas for how to handle ships and NPCs, but this is the most important stuff.
Full text after the break if you want to read in non-image format.
Any feedback or comments or questions are welcome. And if you do try running this game for your friends, TELL ME! I wanna hear about your space adventures.
MAGIC ASSHOLES in SPACE
What Is It?
A card-based, rules lite-ish Space Fantasy RPG where you can make nearly any kind of character you want to play, with a simple point system, and then collaboratively build out a whole universe to cause trouble in.
Every player will have their own deck of playing cards, 54 count (including Jokers) instead of dice. Instead of rolling, players Flip a number of cards from their decks.
How Do I Play?
CORE MECHANIC - Skill Flips - To resolve actions, combat, and more, you add the Ranks of an Attribute, a Skill, and any applicable Talents (Magic and Traits) and Gear. Then Flip and Reveal up to that many cards off the top of your deck of cards. Any Face Cards (K, Q, J) or Aces are Successes. Your Successes are compared against a Difficulty Level (set by the GM) or against an enemy’s Opposing Flip. Meet or beat that number and you successfully do the thing! More Successes means better outcomes, more damage, etc.
TRAITS - These modify your Flips by turning number cards and suits into Successes under specific circumstances.
JOKERS - When drawn, these add unintended consequences and twists to whatever your character was attempting to do. Does not mean that you failed… unless you got 0 Successes.
FATIGUE - When you draw your last card while resolving any action, you take 1 Fatigue Damage and must resolve things with the cards you have already revealed. Afterwards, you shuffle your entire deck and gain 1 Luck Point. Manage your cards carefully.
HOLD & FOLD - At any point during a Skill Flip you can choose to HOLD, and stop flipping cards, resolving with what you have revealed, or FOLD and declare the action a failure, no matter what you have revealed, describe how and why it goes wrong, and take 1 Luck Point.
LUCK POINTS - A meta-currency for bending the odds in your character’s favor.
Gain 1 LP when you draw your last card and have to reshuffle your deck, the GM reshuffle their deck, you Fold on a Skill Flip, or when a Trait applies to and negatively impacts a Flip.
All other players at the table may spend Luck Points to aid another character at any time
COMBAT - Battles are played out narratively, instead of using grids and minis, but resolved with many Opposed Skill Flips. Using Zipper Initiative where the players go, then the enemies, and back, each side choosing who gets to act until every character has acted once, each character taking one action per turn. Typically any attacks will be met with an opposed defensive action from the target. Both sides make their Flips and then compare Successes. If the Attacker wins, the difference between their flips becomes the damage dealt, otherwise the Defender negates the attack. (4 Successes to Attack vs 2 to Defend = 2 damage)
You are allowed to take one action that requires a Skill flip per turn, but also allowed to perform a number of small, unchallenging actions, like talking, grabbing an item, moving unopposed.
All Damage is Damage - Hurt feelings reduce HP the same as a punch to the face. If the Flip is Successful against an appropriate defense attempt, they take damage. What happens to a character when they hit 0 HP or lower is decided by what kind of damage took them out.
All Things Can Be Combat - Any conflict where two sides are trying to best each other can be handled like combat, like a dance battle or a debate. The rules are the same, but the Skills used change, and a temporary alternate HP pool may be used with two appropriate Attributes.
CARD ETIQUETTE - Shuffle your cards at the start of the game and have another player cut your deck at least once. After that, do not shuffle or rearrange your cards until you have emptied your deck or the GM says you can. Don’t go looking through your discard pile either.
EXPERIENCE - The XP Tracks in the corner of the Attributes, Skills, and Talents sections are there to track character growth. You fill the stars as you earn XP. Once full, you gain +1 Rank to a Stat in that section, and then clear the Track.
Character Creation
(1 point = 1 Rank – All Character Creation Points are tied to their sections and must be spent at creation)
NAME - What is your character’s name? Or perhaps an alias or title. This is often the hardest part.
Examples: Rusty Patina, Churt, Plinky Pete Bonsai, Black Hole Betty, Silica Gel
CONCEPT - Sum up your character in a few words. Easiest way is “Descriptor + Species + Occupation”
HIT POINTS - { HP = BODY + SPIRIT } - How much damage, and stress your character can endure.
LUCKY NUMBER - Select a number between 1 and 3 digits long. (Aces count as 1, 10 counts as 0)
When matching num. Cards are revealed during one of your Flips, spend 1 LP and gain Successes equal to the number of digits in your Lucky Number. – Ex: Lucky Number 456, 3 digits, 3 successes
SKILLS - The various learned and practiced competencies your character has gained throughout their life and career as some kind of space-faring troublemaker they happen to be.
{25 Pts} - All Skills start at Rank 0. The bottom slots are for Write-Ins. If the Skills don’t cover the kind of expertise you want your character to have, discuss a Write-In with the GM.
TALENTS - An umbrella category for any noteworthy features and abilities your character has.
{6 Pts - Magic and Traits} - You can forgo either one entirely, if you wanted. But not both.
MAGIC - Arcane Control, Sufficiently Advanced Technology™, Ancient Martial Arts, and/or other Natural Alien Powers. What it is, where it comes from, and how it works is up to you to decide.
Each type of Magic is associated with one Card Suit (♥ ♦ ♣ ♠) of your choosing. When using it as part of a Flip, the rules change so only cards of that Suit count as Successes.
Any Faces or Aces from other suits do not count, but Traits still do, if they apply in some way. Count a matching Suit with an applicable Trait on it as 2 Successes.
TRAITS - Your character’s most noteworthy positive and negative abilities or qualities.
Turning parts of Concept into a set of Traits is the easiest way to come up with ideas. Species and Profession have a large influence on your character’s actions, for instance.
You gain one card per Trait that applies to an action. If the Trait is positive, its matching number counts as Successes. If negative, its number remove Successes, but you gain 1 Luck Point
Examples: Enormous, Party Machine, Senile, Master Swordsman, Obscenely Strong, Vampire
INVENTORY -- Weapons, armor, tools, Augments, stuff, and anything your character has on or in them.
{7 points Gear and Wealth} - Starting equipment. Acquire stuff and increase your wealth as you play.
GEAR - Stuff of any kind good enough to improve your odds of Success. Note what it is under the name column, and what it does in the description column.
WEALTH - An abstract representation of cash and resources. Gets added to purchase-related Flips. Successful Flips don’t change your Wealth, failed ones reduce Wealth Ranks.
MISC ITEMS - Miscellanea and less important things your character has on them that don’t grant a bonus. May still be useful, though.
I went so overboard on this design that it makes me want to go back and redraw the rest of the crew. They've all gone through some shit and we've been playing for over a year, so maybe it's time?
Cassie switched out a few limbs. Lex lost a bunch of panels, exposing more of her synth body. And Stockpot is totally unharmed. He was born flawless and perfect.
I finished up the MAIS Deckbox project and handed each of them off to my various players/playtesters/closest friends and even did a little video call where we opened out mystery decks from Art of Play and it was great
There's a few things I want to change and tweak with the model, but I'm so happy with how they came out in such a short time. They're extremely holdable objects and once they're worn in a bit, the lid has a very satisfying feeling when the magnets pull it into place.
When I get around to that, I'll post the files on thingiverse or somewhere so people can print their own if they want.
Heyo! I'm in the scary process of thinking about publishing my first ever game and I was wondering what your journey was like? Do you recommend Itch or Ko-fi? Where does one even begin???
Oh my gosh. This is such a good and complicated question... I'm not an expert here, so take what I'm saying with my limited experience in mind, please. Let's dive in.
Up front, I'll tell you that I almost never recommend Kofi. I'll explain why at the end.
Step 1: Examine your goals
What are you hoping to accomplish by publishing this game? Do you want to...
See what the process is like and learn?
Make money?
Share something you think is cool?
Your goal might be something else, or it might be a combination of these. That's ok, but do decide which is the most important. The most important goal should guide the rest of your decision-making process.
No matter which goal you have, you'll have to write your game first. Lately, I recommend Notion.so for that. It's a free, always-online word processor. It has a bit of a learning curve compared to Google Docs, but you can export files as HTML or PDF, and exporting in HTML is a killer feature (more on why later).
Whatever you do, DON'T WRITE IN A DESIGN PROGRAM. Don't write your game in InDesign or Affinity! Bad! No!
Ok, so you have your game written or at least a draft of it. What next? Well, that depends on your goals.
🏫You want to see what the process is like and learn...
If you are completely new, I recommend a low-stakes approach. It's sort of a release as you go option.
Write your game in a word-processing program.
Check it for spelling and grammatical errors.
Upload to Itch.
Have a term like one of these in the title: Alpha, Beta, Preview, Draft, or Ashcan. (Ashcan is a TTRPG term for unfinished, but it can be confusing for newcomers to the hobby, so I resist using it.)
Make it pay what you want or free.
Congrats. You've published your game. You may have told a few people about it, but mostly this was for you. Now you have a better sense of how Itch works too, and you can start experimenting with your page.
But what's next for your game?
Join a community and see if you can find interest for it. (Twitter is a good start, but finding a Discord group focused on game development would be better.)
Offer to run it online for people for free.
Be ready for crickets.
Offer to playtest others' games. See if anyone else is up for trading games.
At this stage, you're more focused on joining the community. You're taking in what others are doing. You're looking at Itch pages, layout, how people talk about their games, how people write about their games, and how people talk about everyone else's games.
We learn language by immersion. That's what this process is.
You can of course start doing these things before you publish your game, but things might click better after you've hit publish.
Once your game is published. You can continue to refine it, edit it, move it from alpha to beta, move it from draft to final, move it from final to remaster, and so on for as long as you want. Itch provides a great development log section for you to track changes.
💸You want to make money...
Oh no.
I have some news for you.
You're probably not going to make much if any money. It takes money to make money, and that's especially true in self-published TTRPGs.
So if you want to get attention and interest, you'll have to spend a lot somewhere.
Time
If you want to try to make money, be prepared to spend a lot of time in project land. All of your time is now your project. When you're not working on your project, you're writing ads or pitching it to people. When you're not doing that, you're performing health needs and day-job stuff. But otherwise, all of your free time is now in project land.
Art
There are games that sell without art. But even if they don't have at in the traditional sense (characters, monsters, landscapes), they're likely stylized professionally. Plus, there are likely nice visuals or a show-stopping cover that's posted everywhere.
Identity recognition is important, and you'll get nowhere without a visually interesting/unique cover.
You can find a lot of free resources around, such as Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay
Editing and Playtesting too
If you want to make money, you need a good editor. You need to read through your game several times and have others read through your game several times. You're looking for spelling and grammar errors, sure, but you're also looking for readability issues, overall organization issues, structural issues, etc. etc. etc. There should be going through several stages of this.
Furthermore, you should be testing the rules and mechanics over and over, too. You should be asking if they add up to make sense with what you're trying to capture with the game. Honestly, editing and playtesting is its own whole separate post, probably. And likely better written by someone else.
Why is it so important here? If you want to make money, word of mouth is going to be your biggest seller. To get people to talk about your game after buying it, you have to have a polished product. If this is your first game, it's even more important that it's as good as you can make it.
Ads
This goes into the Time section a bit because you might not have to pay for ads, but you're going to have to talk about your project all the time. You need to be in Facebook groups, on reddit, on tiktok, on twitter, on tumblr, etc.
If you don't want to be in all those places, but you still want to make money, you need to pitch your game to people who are in those places to talk about it. Some of these people may even want money to talk about your game. They're more likely to talk about your game if you have visuals too.
Don't lie about your game. Don't say your game is something that it isn't. Don't overpromise. People will remember, they'll tell their friends, and they'll leave bad reviews. People are far more likely to leave negative remarks than good ones, especially if you charged them money.
Last thoughts on making money
There are outliers, games that do great without all of this, but you're going to have a tough time convincing people to give you money if you're not going the extra steps to deliver what you believe to be great experiences.
And after all of that, you may not break even. Or it may take months to years.
🎲You want to share something you think is cool
Then do it. Skip all the stuff above. Seriously. Share the thing wherever it's easiest.
Hopefully whatever you made is for you. Sure, it'd be nice if others looked at it, but you should be proud of what you made regardless. Just post it. Never stop talking about it. Like two years from now, still be posting about it somewhere. You made a thing and should be very proud. It's hard to make a thing.
Kofi
I'm against Kofi for many reasons. I wrote about it in a Patreon post recently, so I'll just paste that section here:
Some folks really swear by Kofi, and I'm happy it works for them. In the future, I'll only use Kofi for commissions. A big issue I have with Kofi is that it lacks privacy if you don't have a business paypal account. Anyone who bought my product What Crooked Roots though Kofi had access to my personal address and my legal name. Plus, I have theirs. When you have 100+ transactions go through in a day, that's pretty scary to think about. The cost of my private information was only a $1 PWYW product. YIKES.
Kofi doesn't have discoverability.
Folks don't go to Kofi looking for something. They go because they know what they want is there. Itch and DriveThruRPG have their own audiences that browse for fun, and while they take a cut of the sales, they also protect my privacy. I make quite a few passive sales on DTRPG without mentioning my product. Kofi dropped dead when I stopped talking about it.
Kofi doesn't have a review system.
I made quite a few sales on Kofi, and none of those folks have anywhere they can leave feedback as far as I'm aware.
Kofi doesn't have analytics.
Most tracking has to be done manually, and it's nearly impossible to generate a clean report compared to DTRPG.
Other thoughts
Please don't release a game in PDF format at in standard letter size. It's hard to read on desktop and mobile devices. The reason I recommend notion is that you can export your file as HTML when the text is locked in. You can even add images to Notion. Once you have the HTML file, you can convert that to an Epub using Calibre (another free and easy-to-use program).
It's not perfect, but an Epub is a lot easier to use than a PDF, and you don't have to worry about learning layout... At least not right away.
Final notes
My journey was a strange one, and I had a leg up for several reasons:
I used to work in publishing, so I have a basic knowledge of layout and editing.
I have a master's degree in professional writing, which includes technical writing training.
I illustrate my own work, which gives me unique visuals that match my games. (I use an iPad Pro and Procreate for this.)
I work from home, and when it's slow, my day-job doesn't mind if I work on personal projects.
I'm in a privileged position. While it may seem like I sort of sprang up out of nowhere in TTRPGs, I've been in the writing world for over 10 years. The transition wasn't extremely easy, but I also wasn't starting from nothing.
managed to draw @mr-geargrinder’s suggestion like, a week later
My magic assholes OC, Mildred, in her penultimate, space CIA psyop killing machine form.
(her ultimate form is when she’s 135 years old)
Before I dig into things for the game itself, some acknowledging my biggest inspiration, and a little storytelling.
The reason Magic Assholes in Space exists at all is because of a TTRPG called Space Kings, and the Pretend Friends podcast, run by Kevin Cole, creator of Space Kings and many other very cool games and maker of many cool podcasts! Space Kings is notable for it's card-based core resolution mechanic, and it's improvisational storytelling. Very influential, to say the least.
Back in 2018, my weekly game nights were a kind of in shambles. Scheduling problems and general burnout had killed several attempts at getting a consistent campaign going. We were both just too tired and switching systems, spending the time reinvesting in a new setting, only for the game to fall apart after a couple sessions was getting badly demoralizing.
So I had this stupid idea that combined my desire to play something with a tone like Space Kings, my ever-present itch to design a TTRPG, and a handful of ideas I'd piled up. Back in 2018, Space Kings wasn't out yet, (it is now! Go check it out!) but I still wanted to use that inspiration and I wanted to turn the act of designing the game into a group activity. Trying to dump a whole-ass setting on the table before the game started was a thing I'd also burned out on and not something I wanted to waste the energy on, so I adopted a more improv and collaborative approach for that, also.
I initially played with the idea of mixing and matching sets of dice, but the allure of Space King's "Faces and Aces" card mechanic just sounded too fun and I started getting this little voice in the back of my head that kept saying, "Why the hell not?" The whole idea might not even last or go for more than a single session, so I thought it was better to just take this chance and try it! At least it would be a chance to scratch that itch.
Why the hell not? would later become a sort of mantra for this whole thing.
I knew I wanted to do something with space as the setting, but with magic as a prominent element. The title "Magic Assholes in Space" came to me almost instantly and I don't think I could ever come up with something better and I really wouldn't want to either. It perfectly captures everything I wanted this game to be. After 2 weeks of lazily jotting down ideas and slapping together a character sheet in google docs, we jumped into our first playtest session and hit the ground running.
The first playtest session had a couple hiccups, but it worked! Some things needed tweaking, but that was fine! The players escaped the belly of a space dragon, fought a cosmic snail knight, assembled a new ship out of two ships, and installed a mythical V8 engine into it so they could escape the dark space between galaxies! It was awesome!
We had several players come and go, but the playtest turned into a year-long campaign that ended up being supremely memorable. Hands down the best experience I've ever had running any TTRPG in my life. Even with there being no rulebook and some big changes being made week to week, running and playing was a breeze in a way that none of my previous campaigns had ever been.
Now, in the intro post, I said I started in 2019 (since edited), and that made no sense for a particular reason. MAiS was actually started in 2018. My memory is just awful. This is mostly important because the first playtest that ran for over a year was put on pause in February 2020, which ended up being about a month before covid lockdowns started. For obvious reasons, things kinda went on indefinite pause. We had talked about returning to our storyline with the same characters and seeing where the story went after the crew decided that they'd fucked up too much in one galaxy and it was about time to go check out another one, but the opportunity just never really came around again.
Since then, development has slowed, but some big strides were made. We did a couple one-shots run by other players. There were the GenCon games in 2021, the short-lived Hypermall game in 2022, and the currently paused online game in 2023. There's talk of starting something new, but we're still in the very, very early pre-game phases on that.
I kept telling myself I'd keep working on it, but my desire to work on the game is seemingly proportional to the amount of time I spend running it. So, one of the things I hoped to accomplish by tumblr'ing stuff about MAiS is that it would both motivate me to do more work, give me excuses to talk with people about it, and allow me to trick my brain into staying in gamedev mode long enough to finish some kind of, at minimum, zine-like share-able version of the ruleset.
And here we are now! Space Kings is out and I can say that my game definitely shares its DNA, but also that it is distinctly divergent in its design philosophy. I hope this post gets some people to check it out, but I also hope people stick around to see what I've got going on with MAiS because I personally believe it's got a lot of cool things going for it.
my SCR-UB figurine is finally finished! this is the first time i've done post-processing on a 3d print of this scale with this many parts. painting and assembly took so much time and focus but it was 100% worth it.
I’ve been on-and-off working on a TTRPG called Magic Assholes in Space since 2018. I’ll talk about that more in some other post, once I have something I can easily share and show to people.
Anywho, I recently introduced a few friends to the game in an online format, and after talking about it for a while and giving them some very vague guidelines about the game being a sorta space-y make-it-up-as-you-go game, they made:
✨ A retired, senile wizard banker who believes he is on a simulated vacation adventure and everyone around him are just very professional actors.
✨ A nun to an uncaring god who works for a multi-level marketing scheme to sell energy drinks.
✨ A Chronomancer with a powerful Hat who is shunted randomly through time and space, Quantum Leap style, so he reappears as a different age each time.
✨ A gnome with whimsical gnome magic.
And there’s at least one more coming, maybe two. So this is only going to get more ridiculous as we go.
Scheduling issues put this game on hiatus for the last few months, but it went to some very strange places.
They escaped an exploding space station, scammed an alien ambassador at a gas station, obtained a set of five "Honda Civic-SL Combiner Class" Lemur mechs/space cars, nearly wrecked them immediately trying to rob a supply convoy, visited Space Denny's and got into a gnome tussle, almost blasted one of their friends out an airlock in an attempt to cool down his drink, went to a robot planet to get their Lemur Mechs repaired and got one impounded because of bad parking, got into a brawl at the junk yard, accidentally entered the Robot Bloodsports Tournament, waged war on a McTacoKing Warship, then destroyed that ship by burrowing inside it and tearing it apart from the inside out...
If we ever pick up this storyline again, I have no idea where it will go from there.
Magic Assholes in Space is a TTRPG that I ( @mr-geargrinder ) have been working on-and-off since late 2018 and it's something I intend to get to a playable, shareable state at some point during this year.
The elevator pitch for MAiS goes like this: It's a Space Fantasy TTRPG where each player uses a deck of playing cards instead of dice and make ridiculous characters that get into shenanigans in space. The overall style of MAiS leans into collaborative storytelling and world building and "play to find out" improvisational principles.
There's only 3 guiding themes for MAiS: Magic, Assholes, and Space.
Magic for the supernatural powers wielded by and against the player characters, but also an element the setting, where nothing is strictly off the table and you can get away with adding in very stupid things, because magic.
Assholes, the stars of the game, not explicitly heroes or villains, but they are usually running away or towards problems they may or may not have caused. PCs in MAiS rarely make ideal choices.
Space, the setting which gives us spaceships, aliens, exotic planets, grungy space stations, robots, and travelling the stars!
Right now the only way to play it is if I'm running things since the rulebook is in my head. That works fine for me, because I love running it, but not so great for anyone else who wants to play without me (rude). So I need to at least get everything jotted down and not just in a series of jumbled, unfinished word files.
I'll be posting more about MAiS's development, my art, and some stories from my playtests. There's a lot more to the game than just this, of course, but I wanted to get an introduction on there first, and then worry about gathering my thoughts to discuss mechanics and other stuff later.
Hope you're interested in some stupid space bullshit!
