A D&D 5E actual play with new episodess every Tuesday! Yes to good people trying their best, adventure, horror, mystery, fun & frogs, no to Nazis or TERFs. We are also an interview show!
Seems like a great time to introduce ourselves officially!
We're an actual play D&D 5E podcast who love the game and each other.
Our weekly show spotlights our table's chemistry, friendship and creativity with tight editing and high quality audio.
Check us out if you like:
-Character-driven story
-Colorful characters
-Collaborative worldbuilding
-Horrific monsters
-Cute monsters
-HQ audio
-Too many frogs
We also release our in-depth, conversational TTRPG interview show Reckless A-Talk once a month, featuring some of our favorite folks in the space.
Catch us wherever you listen to podcasts, including YouTube!
I'm heading into the final hours of my first Kickstarter, The Wicked Forever King Hungers and it's been a blast. It's been far more successful than I imagined and I can't wait to finish it up and get it to backers.
The above art is an interpretation of the king by the supremely talented HodagRPG and was a stretch goal that was unlocked. In fact, it was one of the top stretchs goal that I never thought we'd get and it happened in something like 12 hours after launch!
If you'd like to check it out, it's a rules light game based on Lasers and Feelings featuring a group of doomed Heretics who oppose an all powerful Forever King.
With the stretch goals met it'll probably clock in at about 6 or 8 pages, so it's a bit of a stretch to call it a one page ttrpg. Still, the main rules are on about two pages. The rest is lots of great background lore, adventure hooks, and vibes.
Tiny Frog Wizards playtest draft 0.3 is up. This is a major revision, re-working how spell parameters operate, introducing the concept of uncontrolled spells (and providing buckets of random tables to inspire their effects!), and replacing Paths of Power and Power Dice with a more spellcasting-centric – and, hopefully, easier to use – alternative.
It isn't quite where I wanted version 0.3 to be, but I've conveniently just suffered a hand injury which will require me to take a break from any major writing for the next few days, which I've chosen to interpret as the universe telling me to stop tinkering with it and get it in front of some other sets of eyes already.
You can find the latest draft at the link above, and the changelog under the cut. As always, comments, criticisms, and bizarre rants are welcome!
Changelog – Playtest Version 0.3
Note: All page numbers refer to the PDF vesion.
Two new interior illustrations by @amphibianaday.
Updated Credits & Acknowledgements (p. 3) to reflect reader-contributed random table entries.
Added a first pass at a glossary (p. 7).
Added a step-by-step outline of Tiny Frog Creation (p. 10).
Reworked Paths of Power and Power Dice into Preparation Dice and Foci (p. 12).
Parameters which are not assigned a die when making a casting roll (p. 20) now receive a default value of zero rather than 1.
Reworked parameter descriptions (p. 21) to allow for zero values.
Added rules for uncontrolled spells (p. 22) (i.e., spells with a Control value of zero).
Added explicit discussion of Potency (p. 23).
Rules for partial parameters (p. 23) updated to clarify that using less than a parameter's full value does not reduce the spell's Potency; added discussion of parameters for uncontrolled spells (above).
Clarified that spells which have gone haywire due to disruption (p. 25) no longer count against the number of spells you're currently concentrating no.
Reworked examples of direct opposition (p. 26).
Moved Recovery (p. 36) from a subsection of Misfortune to its own separate section, and addressed Preparation Dice (above) as well as Misfortune slots.
Added preliminary discussion and examples of Non-Player Characters (p. 37).
Updated Playing Without a GM (p. 39) to offer suggestions on how to incorporate the Supplementary Tables appendix (below).
Added notes on how to handle uncontrolled spells (above) to all nine Arcana writeups (p. 42).
Updated Alteration (p. 44) to use language consistent with other Arcana when discussing mundane actions with effective Potency ratings.
Updated Animation (p. 45) and Domination (p. 47) with discussion of open-ended commands like “obey me”.
Reworked discussion of what qualifies as a “phenomenon” in sidebar following Evocation (p. 48).
Clarified that Imprecations (p. 49) may not compel ongoing actions and slightly reworked how durations for spells of this Arcanum work.
Tightened up wording of Simulation (p. 50).
Updated optional rules for cantrips (p. 52) to reflect changes to how unrolled parameters work.
Additional examples of cooperative magic (p. 53).
Initial version of Supplementary Tables appendix (p. 58).
i don’t think people who haven’t read Animorphs understand that Animorphs is the quintessential “childhood trauma in a sff setting” narrative. but people need to understand. because at its core, past the simplified synopsis (six kids gain the power to turn into animals so they can fight the aliens that are infiltrating Earth by sneaking into people’s brains!), Animorphs is a war story. it’s not a story about a war that just so happens to star children–it’s about child soldiers. Applegate and her co-authors made a choice to refuse to dress it up as “kid superheroes save the day!” because they wanted that message to sink in.
it’s hard to really convey this fact about the series with any number of words because you really need to read it yourself, you need to experience the crumbling of naivete and slow erosion of morality and steady piling up of casualties over ~1.4 million words. but… between the moments of levity, goofiness, and genuine fun (which the series is full of! they’re welcome breaks from the many grimmer scenes) the message of the cost of war, the way it destroys children, is always present. it’s sobering.
even outside the war context, it’s all the little things: symptoms of PTSD like rachel’s increasing aggression / jake’s listlessness and depression / everyone’s hypervigilance and self loathing; the hopeless of knowing as a child that no one is coming to save us; that moment in #19 where marco is desperately trying to lift the team’s spirits by Using Humor To Cope but every joke falls flat; the repeated scenes of different animorphs mourning the people they used to be and the world they can never return to; i could go on and on–it’s all of these things that are emblematic of childhood trauma in general. try as i might, i can’t think of any other series that does what Animorphs does with extended narratives of trauma, period. that’s why i’m nuts about these books. that’s why i think everyone needs to read them.
