All The Cool Kids Are Doing It

Side blog dedicated to RPG ideas. (Main blog is @waltzing-with-my-inner-geek) They/he pronouns please!

[shiftythrifting]

I don’t even know what to say

QC, Canada

[michaelnothing]

I do...

REST IN PEACE GRANNIE NASTY.

[probablywhateverrpgideas]

@probablyfunrpgideas undead hag, perhaps?

[drawing-prompt-s]

Wild card

[mangos-draws]

Be careful around wild cards! Just like any wild creature they can be really dangerous!

[drawing-prompt-s]

I saw this and started cackling. Just the thought of waving a wild ace card off like it's an even more bloodthirsty version of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park is just hilarious.

Thank you so much for this!! Look at this dude!! Both the little guy waving him off with the torch and then additionally the way the card looks is soo good as well.

I am so glad that you found this prompt, and even more that you decided you were going to share it with us all!! Thank you again!! I love it and I know others will too!

[thecreaturecodex]

Desert Beeple

Image © @bowelfly, accessed at his tumblr here

[For the neural network monsters, I asked some of my friends who are artists if they would design an illustration based on the names. Which turned this into a game of creature telephone. I’m very pleased with how things turned out.]

Desert Beeple CR 6 N Magical Beast This ebony beetle is larger than a camel. Its face is an open cone, like a megaphone, and it gives a cacophonous call.

The caravans and nomads of the desert dread hearing an eerie, atonal honking drifting over the vast expanse, as that indicates that the desert beeple is abroad. A desert beeple is a giant insect of faint intelligence, and its song distracts and confuses those that hear it. Desert beeples are voracious and wandering omnivores, and they happily prey upon the stores carried by merchants and the merchants alike. The jaws of a desert beeple are small and contained within its horn-like musical mouthparts, so unlike many monstrous beetles a desert beeple cannot bite. They instead reduce food to a thick paste by crushing it, and then siphon it into their mouths.

Desert beeples are frequently solitary, as they require plenty of food, but in good conditions they can gather in small social groups, serenading each other with their beeping cries. Oases are particularly tempting targets to desert beeple clusters, and many merchant groups will pay highly to rout these monsters from a conveniently located oasis. A desert beeple stands four feet tall at the shoulder, grows to eight feet long and weighs more than a thousand pounds.

Keep reading

[thecreaturecodex]

Thanks to @bowelfly expanding out into stickers, I now have a sticker of this design! I love it!

[bowelfly]

get your very own beeple here!

[torchlake]

I’m running a DnD campaign with my siblings and mom, who are all big MythBusters fans, so obviously I made Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage NPCs. Adam is a human and Jamie (JAM13) is a robot. Adam claims to have built JAM13, and is not satisfied with his inability to emote properly, but is very satisfied with his walrus-like facial hair. JAM13, however, claims to have grown Adam from a test tube and named him after the biblical figure, and says he is “clearly a very primitive approximation of a human being.” Insight checks on who is lying are useless because both of them fully believe they’re telling the truth.

[the-weaver-of-worlds]

You’re doing the Gods’ work my dude

[charnel-grounds]

Georges Méliès' concept art for Le voyage dans la lune, 1902

[randomencounters]

Encounter: Moon Monster

[ink-the-artist]

weird dragons

Keep reading

[probablywhateverrpgideas]

One-page RPG where you are a hapless worker at a magical zoo trying to recapture some exhibits that escaped. It’s bad enough when normal lions and monkeys get out, but considering these lions breathe fire and these monkeys teleport you should really ask for hazard pay.

[strawberry-crocodile]

you CAN just cobble together whatever you want on the scaffolding of DnD 5e, but if you do so, you are asking your DM to do the work designing that game (typically with only experience with one other game, 5e). You can run an RP-heavy game thats 80% combat rules, 15% exploration, and 5% social rules, but you are asking every player to be a collaborative improv performer with no scaffolding.

if it really works for you, I'm not gonna tell you you can't do it, but if some of this stuff is hard or stressful or a chore... maybe try something else?

[illegalbootjeggingoperation]

“try something else” as in…not an RPG? I don’t understand how you get away from improv and homebrew if you’re gonna play an RPG

[strawberry-crocodile]

you'll notice the words "with no scaffolding" following "improv". this is in fact part of the sentance.

also... yes you can play RPGs without homebrew. most groups may do a few house rules to smooth things over, but when I hear "homebrew" I think of woeking on new rules, new classes, new content that you need to run, say, a Space campaign in 5e.

[thydungeongal]

Also like taking "try something else" to mean "try something that is not an RPG" is very indicative of having a very narrow understanding of the medium. There are games besides D&D. Some of them actually have systemic support for parts of the experience that D&D has little support for. While it's possible to run a D&D game that focuses on social interaction it means ignoring the parts of the game that the rules actually support while, as you said, having to basically do game design on the fly as you make up new systems where those don't exist.

[dailyadventureprompts]

What's funny is that d&d started as a kitbash of a bunch of other games, both in terms of mechanics and also the play patterns. It was very much a "we know what sort of experience we're trying to create, lets use everything at hand to try and make that happen" sort of feeling. It's an attitude way closer to the game-brained indie rules hack micro game space of today than it is to the colossal IP that it would eventually become.

50 years of industry dominance later and most of the playerbase is trapped in the WotC walled garden paying out the nose for the privilege of trying to make applejuice out of oranges.

At some point our primordial soup of creative design is going to spit up another massive hit system that people will play for decades only to end up trying to use to play out scenarios ill suited for its mechanics.

[glasscatowl]

An approach I find useful when choosing the system you want to play is being aware what shape you want the story to be. D&D is an adventure story: you go different places, you encounter things to fight, you discover things, you fight a big bad. Lots of things can be adventure stories: fantasy, pirates, superheroes, sci-fi, etc. But not all stories in those genres are adventure stories. If your spacefaring sci-fi is 'go to a planet, encounter aliens, fight other aliens, get hints about greater mystery', of course "You can't play a sci-fi game in 5E" sounds ludicrous. But if your spacefaring sci-fi game is based on discovering planets, intergalactic politics, or the interpersonal dynamics of people of a long haul spaceship, you are going to look at someone who says "just use 5E" like they're grown a second head.

This is true of many other games too: the standard setting of Blades in the Dark is gaslamp fantasy, but it is structurally a heist game. You could reskin it to be a modern-day heist game, or a high-tech scifi heist game, or a medieval fantasy heist game, and it would probably work better than existing games with those settings but mechanics designed for completely different story types. Likewise, Monster of the Week is episodic, designed to be like a TV show with a new big problem each week but ongoing subplots and a final episode Bad Guy: the 'monsters' could be fantasy creatures, demonic entities, robotic creations, supervillains, mobsters — as long as it fits the shape of the game. If you wanted an early-seasons-Smallville vibe, MOTW would do you better than Mutants and Masterminds or Masks, despite those being explicitly about superheroes.

I love homebrewing stuff, and there are some fantastic supplements for different RPGs made by independent artists for different settings, but whatever your go-to system is, it might not always be the shape of story you want. Learning another system could open up the game to what you really want to do.

(Also if you do want an adventure story of the 5E type? Do sail the high seas for WOTC stuff and save your hard earned cash for places not owned by Hasbro. They've almost certainly already laid off the original writers/artists anyway.)

[strawberry-crocodile]

If your spacefaring sci-fi is 'go to a planet, encounter aliens, fight other aliens, get hints about greater mystery', of course "You can't play a sci-fi game in 5E" sounds ludicrous.

okay but also DnD assumes that the party is going to have access to a Wizard (someone who can cast spells from learning), a Cleric class (someone who gains power from a God- you need gods!) and comes with a complete lack of rules for things like space combat, armor, tanks, or laser guns.

You CAN cut out the elements of stuff like Gods and Wizards and Dargonborn and TIeflings, and you CAN homebrew mechanics for tanks and laser guns and walkers, but that is a LOT of work and is going to remove a lot of 5e's identity, and at some point maybe you should just pick up one of the dozen plus d20 Scifi systems.

That's part of what this whole post is about- the insistence on chopping and screwing on top of 5e rather than just taking a few sessions to learn a new system means you're still doing work- you're still learning new rules as a player, and as a DM you're doing large-scale game design the likes of which people get paid for, all just to avoid reading a book by a professional who probably has better ideas about how to make a d20 scifi game work than you.

TO BE CLEAR i do agree with the statement that game systems tell a whole lot more about the kind of story you're telling than they do the trappings, but systems generally DO come with trappings, and changing that is work! Work that's probably been done better by someone else!

[probablyfunrpgideas]

Idea: a series of Call of Cthulhu adventures where the PCs encounter the violent aftermath and found-footage style evidence of summoning rituals. It seems that the government tried to cover up and study the eldritch activity, but their laboratory was similarly overwhelmed by creatures beyond our comprehension, which they couldn’t contain.

One such creature - one of many - is a frighteningly intelligent shapeshifter, and it seems to understand human culture fairly well despite having a language and mindset that appears to revolve around texture. It hunts by ambush, using static electricity to grab its prey with impossible force and then absorbing fluids and nutrients through its skin. Currently, its goals include gaining access to more important places and shapes, so it can learn and feed more easily. It also wishes to eliminate anyone who might recognize its existence and similarity to the classic D&D Mimic.

What other old-school monsters could be truly frightening in the right context? Aboleths are pretty eldritch already, but I think there’s some good mileage in the Xill, which hops between dimensions and puts its terrible eggs inside of people, Alien-style. Or what about finding a lab full of headless bodies, victims and hosts of the vicious Vargouille?

[probablywhateverrpgideas]

Two words: displacer beasts.

[bramblepatch]

It's very funny to me that the stereotypical gelatinous cube is bright fucking green when the monster itself is almost perfectly transparent. Like its gimmick is that it's a monster that imitates an empty 10x10 hallway. How many people have fallen victim to gelatinous cubes because they "know" that the ooze is bright green and so don't bother to check the suspiciously clean corridor in front of them.

[thepioden]

The cube is green because oh my god do you know how hard it is to draw a perfectly transparent cube? Especially in isolation, like in the monster manual? Even if you put debris in, it reads as "floating skull ft. helium sword." Awful. Absolutely wretched.

[bramblepatch]

I'm picturing it appearing in in-universe bestiaries with a little caption like *specimen dyed for visibility.

Dungeon naturalists sneaking up on a cube with a bucket of green dye so they can see it well enough to study it.

[thepioden]

Classifying your Slimes and Oozes by Gram staining them

[nailsofvecna]

I think this is my favourite spell I’ve ever written. I’m not sorry.

[prokopetz]

Standard fantasy RPG pantheon, except:

each god is also the patron of one of the setting's local city-states, and each city-state espouses their own version of the pantheon's org chart that positions their patron as King or Queen of the Gods. The gods themselves decline to weigh in on who's correct.

the god of war died in a bizarre trebuchet accident several decades previously; a coalition of other gods have been playing Weekend at Bernie's with their priesthood ever since, doing their best to answer their prayers with variable plausibility and success.

there are two separate gods of knowledge with two separate, non-overlapping cults. Each god's cult is apparently unaware of the other's existence. There's nothing obviously supernatural about this separation; they just never seem to bump into each other.

the supreme god of the Nice Pantheon of Goodness and Light and the supreme god of the Icky Pantheon of Evil and Darkness are clearly the same guy wearing two different hats. Most NPCs react to having this pointed out as though it's obviously absurd.

the obligatory Squiddy Alien Gods From Beyond The Stars are treated as just another branch of the pantheon alongside the usual faux-Greek deities. Nobody thinks it's at all odd that the god of thunder's sworn blood-sibling is a shapeless cloud of blazing eyes.

[brewerssupplies]

I am rather fond of the character archetype of the stranger from another time, so let's have some of that! Hope you enjoy!

[PDF]

[probablyfunrpgideas]

Doylist explanation: The fighter class keeps getting more unique powers in each edition in a feeble attempt to keep it interesting and effective compared to spellcasters, who are always getting new cool spells.

Watsonian explanation: The balance of the universe is shifting. Warriors who once fought with mortal might are now delivering 9 strikes within the span of six seconds, and shrugging off wounds that would have killed a similar swordsman twenty years ago. The time draws near for Ragnarok, and the gods of war are bending physics and magic alike to prepare their chosen champions.

[probablywhateverrpgideas]

Living up to your URL, I see :D

[brewerssupplies]

As vain as they can be, sometimes a beholder dreams of a life not spent in their lair. A life where they don’t have to be fearful of everything, and from those dreams come the Beheld! A race of beholderkin which travel the world in ways their creator could not.

I got a little bit inspired by the Spelljammer trailer that came out recently and made this in like two hours. Also this race uses the new rules introduced for races. Hope you enjoy!

[PDF]

[thechekhov]

Tired of your players killing all your monsters? Set this on them. Bonus points if you make the tiny mosquito tone buzz every time one of them rolls juuuust below the required Perception DC. 

I don’t know why I made this

[that-house]

Making a shitty one-page RPG called Oh Shit It’s the Killer. The premise is simple: you’re a high schooler spending the weekend in the woods with your besties. The Killer is there also. He is trying to the Kill you

[that-house]

I say shitty not to demean the quality of my work but because it’s less an exercise in good game design and more an attempt to induce paranoid internal conflict that turns into murder (in game of course). It has like three mechanics and one of them actively encourages you to murder the other PCs

[that-house]

Great news!

It’s done

I put like three braincells into this, so if there’s anything about it that outright sucks, uh. Sorry not sorry, L + ratio + let’s use the 1-page restriction as an excuse for any unfun mechanics

[that-house]

“What if there was a game about being a genre-savvy slasher protagonist murdering their way to the role of Final Girl?”

“Sounds cool when exactly does the PvP start”

“character creation”