The trope: Each part of the slain dragon is valuable. You carve it up to make magic armour, spell components, or potions.
The inversion: Each part of the dragon is uniquely hazardous if allowed to decay. Slaying the dragon is only the first half of the adventure.
You need to find just the right ways to dispose of the various bones, skin and innards. All while contending with the inaccuracies of ancient lore and individual dragon variation.
Burying the heart poisons the groundwater for fifty leagues around.
Burning the skin clouds the sky for decades.
Leaving the ribs exposed brings down a curse on the slayer's descendants.
The flesh spawns millions of basilisks as it decomposes.
The lungs keep extruding smog. The blood gives you blisters. Rainclouds flee from the claws. The tendons spread pestilence.
Paying an unlikely company of heroes to deal with the dragon is cheap compared to paying a competent group of specialists to deal with the aftermath.
My favourite Shakespeare scene? Probably when Voltemand and Cornelius sing the song to teach young Prince Hamlet how to sustain himself on grubs and beetles
Wallace Wunkle's Tragedy Factory has come to itch.io and RPG Trader!
In this creative solo TTRPG, you're one of the lucky children invited to take a trip through the disquieting Mr Wunkle's bizarre morality play wait I mean miraculous flying factory.
Paper copies only available through RPG Trader or DriveThruRPG; PDF copies on all three sites.
(a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) wyrmlings, (e) merdragons, (f) fabulous ones, (g) hungry ones, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance
I've noticed that some dice possess a sort of spiritual onomatopoeia.
◎ The d8 is mistaken for a different dice one eighth of the time
◎ The d4 deals d4 piercing damage when stepped upon
◎ The d10 has a 0 on 10% of its faces, reflecting in microcosm how its sibling d100 has a 0 on 100% of its faces
◎ The d6 is easy to remember, like "six"
If you were around the tabletop games hobby 20 years ago, you probably remember the infamous game-that-never-was, Tuatara Deliquescence. One of those early forays into crowdfunding in the pre-Kickstarter years, the project was notorious for its initial success and rapid collapse.
Tuatara Deliquescence flared out after developer Laura Khang vanished in mysterious circumstances, taking her work with her.
But! This year I stumbled upon a staggering 63 pages of lost Tuatara Deliquescence development material, from character power cards to magazine covers! I have cleaned it up and digitised it here, with my commentary: https://periapt-games.itch.io/tuatara-deliquescence
What was Tuatara Deliquescence?
Laura Khang intertwined physics and metaphysics in a game that asked "how do we know things?", "what does it mean to be perfect?", and "what is the nature of infinity?"
The game was philosophically transgressive, railing against the inevitable formation of a cosmos-wide sapience. Per Khang:
It is the fate of all things to become an interconnected consciousness of impossible scope. Your role as malefactors is to assail this destiny with every weapon you can find.
Tuatara Deliquescence was completely unlike Khang's previous game, 15 Hours In The Oort Cloud With Ferdinand Magellan. The new project was inscrutable, complicated, and incredibly broad in scope.
Tuatara Deliquescence was going to have twelve stats: Antagonism, Congruence, Curiosity, Enormity, Extensity, Imaginability, Incipience, Inevitability, Precedence, Selfhood, Standard Model Complexity, and Understanding.
Characters had powers like "Nihilogony", "Reverse Entropy", "Demystify", and "Become Imperfect".
The scope, metatextual nature, and dubious heroism of Tuatara Deliquescence is said to have inspired a laundry list of modern TTRPGs: Everything from The House Of Leaves RPG to Triangle Agency to every Homestuck time-travelling fan game ever made.
We finally have more information about this lost classic
With the rediscovery of a trove of early Tuatara Deliquescence material, we can get some insight into:
Laura Khang's innovative "Floorcrawl" gameplay structure, which depended on hybrid game/real-world values like Carpet Friction and Tile Hardness
What it means if "the cosmos has devoured its progeny", and exactly how inevitable that is
Things that could happen in the game, like "drinking the quantum foam" or accidentally "breaking euphonia"
Character powers that let you Understand The Scope Of Infinity, Reopen Loopholes, Diffract Reality, or Gain Omnipotence
Character creation mechanics like entrenchment and immurement
The community's fixation on things like the 1970s children's boardgame Hunt the Quark, Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, and the Tumblr joke about "Two-atara Deliquescence"
"Tuatara Deliquescence", what does that mean
The game's title is certainly curious. You will often hear it said that it comes from Dorothy Parker’s list of the English language’s most phonaesthetic short phrases (fourth after ‘halcyon jonquil’, ‘darling syllabub’, and ‘mellifluous hush’). This is not actually true.
The old image macro featuring a puzzled Patrick Troughton tipping out a grey liquid from a metallic prop mug, titled ‘Reconstituted Dalek Essence’, is likely a coincidence, too.
We simply don't know.
Check it out even if you've never heard of Tuatara Deliquescence
This is a weird game that has left a weird legacy. You can get the Tuatara Deliquescence ephemera on itch.io, RPG trader, or DriveThruRPG:
Newly uncovered ephemera from the infamous game-that-never-was!
Newly uncovered ephemera from the infamous game-that-never-was!
Disclaimer: This is an experimental art project made for the You Cannot Play This TTRPG Jam. In the space of all possible worlds, Tuatara Deliquescence surely existed and you could play it. In this world, it did not. You cannot play it.
Concept of Mierva! Really love how her outfit and colours came out! Mierva is an arcanist and is very elegant / put-together. I don’t have too much for her yet in terms of lore so if anyone has any suggestions that would be awesome!
Alternative TTRPG development history. Instead of Braunstein and Blackmoor, the first games were entirely focused on characters growing and then climbing giant beanstalks to steal various magical livestock from ogres.
The early supplements, with their controversial branching-out into various other fairytales.
The stats revolve around climbing, trickery, and horticulture, and become iconic defaults for most modern video games.
The typical character roles: "Bean Exchanger", "Lookout", "Poulterer", "Jack of all Trades".
Inadvisable tabletop RPG jam premise #137: Game jam where each entry consists solely of paratextual discussion of the mechanics of a hypothetical or invented RPG; examples include an errata document, a developer Q&A, or a forum thread debating the correct interpretation of a particular rule.
