Splashcat

She / They / but also kinda whatever it's complicated / superposition of quantum states / angel with a flaming sword / WILD LIGHT-class conceptual weapon / dancer on the other wind. Profit is inefficiency.

[200-word-rpgs]

200 Word RPGs 2025

Each November, some people try to write a novel. Others would prefer to do as little writing as possible. For those who wish to challenge their ability to not write, we offer this alternative: producing a complete, playable roleplaying game in two hundred words or fewer.

This is the submission thread for the 2025 event, running from November 1st, 2025 through November 30th, 2025. Submission guidelines can be found in this blog's pinned post, here.

[splashcat413]

Everything-Proof Shield

A game of countergambits and playground oneupsmanship for 1 Villain and 1+ Heroes.

Choose Villain HP. More = longer game.

Villain, describe how you're obnoxiously flaunting your power today.

Heroes take turns. On your turn, describe how you attack the Villain (e.g. disintegration ray, pie to face, legendary sword.) Villain explains why this pathetic attack obviously fails (e.g. disintegration-proof vest, elemental pie resistance, already swapped sword for fake) and rolls 1d6 for defense.

1 = Defense fails. 1+ Looming Threats other than defender exist: Villain, describe how a Looming Threat saves defender. It stops Looming. Otherwise: -2 HP, Escalate. 2-3 = Defense fails, -1 HP. 4-5 = Defense succeeds. 6 = Defense succeeds, Escalate.

Defense fails = attacking Hero reveals flaw in defense (e.g. vest protects itself but not wearer, pie actually tart, sword Villain swapped was also fake.)

Escalate = Villain introduces Threat (e.g. summon minions, destroy battlefield) with 1 HP. Normal Threats start Looming after 2 turns. Heroes can address Threats (e.g. defeat minions, repair battlefield) instead of attacking Villain using normal rules minus further Escalation.

At 1 HP, Villain introduces [# Heroes] Threats and becomes invincible while Threats remain.

At 0 HP, Villain is defeated. Heroes win.

200 words exactly, not counting the title. Okay to archive off-site.

To any of my followers who know what DTG stands for, know that this game would have had a title with that acronym if I could have thought of a good one.

[prokopetz]

I love action figures whose entire reason for existing is clearly "we ordered too much of a particular colour of plastic". When I was a kid I had a metallic gold Batman.

[splashcat413]

This is not quite the same as what you're describing but I've been reminded of how Bionicle has six (main) elements because that's how many different colors of the same piece LEGO's factories could easily produce in parallel at the time so they just took the four classical elements they were already considering and added two more.

[cryptotheism]

Where did the idea of a philosopher's stone that could turn metals into gold come from? I know a few things about alchemical theories of matter, the idea that metals are combinations of various properties/constituents (hot/cold/dry/moist, sophic sulfur/mercury) and that you could transmute them by changing the balance of these properties makes sense to me. And I've seen your metaphor about alchemists wanting to unbake a cake and rebake it differently. But I don't get where the stone comes in.

Great question!

The Philosophers stone is the key ingredient in Chrysopoea, gold-making. Throw some gold into a boiling pot of philosophers stone, the whole pot turns into gold.

Every recipie for the production of a philosophers stone seems to conceptualize it differently. The process is generally broken down into three or four stages, each of which has several steps.

I'm not a chemist, but from what I've read, the alchemists were probably distilling impure sources of mercury and sulphur, and produing some form of synthetic cinnabar. Which was then melted down, and used to make cinnabar-gold alloys that have the properties and appearance of gold. To people without the technology to understand the debasing of metals, this process would resemble making gold from scratch.

[splashcat413]

Thanks for the answer!

So if I'm following this right, the idea (usually, depending on which alchemist you ask) wasn't so much that exposing stuff to this stone would turn it into gold like you might get in a fantasy story, but more that it was a recipe for gold where the ingredients were "a little gold to get you started, maybe lead or something, philosopher's stone" with the stone being consumed like any other reagent? With the stone being made of basically the same stuff as gold and/or reacting with your base metal in a way that sort of rearranges it into gold.

[prokopetz]

Renegade human combat cyborg and their partner, the laboratory mouse that was experimented on to develop the human's upgrades. The mouse has tiny versions of all of the human's implants. The human doesn't have "I never asked for this" chrome angst, but the mouse does, which they regularly bring up to guilt-trip their companion. Each clearly thinks of the other as their sidekick.

[prokopetz]

(At one point the human is incapacitated and the mouse is obliged to "pilot" their body via smartlink to get them both out of a jam. The obvious Ratatouille joke is deftly avoided in favour of a brief Mobile Suit Gundam pastiche.)

[prokopetz]

One of the keystones of the myth of the universal tabletop RPG is the conflation of genre and milieu, citing the fact that a given system can be adapted to multiple settings as evidence that it's unopinionated about what kinds of stories it wants to produce.

When extended beyond putatively setting-agnostic systems, this conflation of genre and milieu can – and often does – lead to the misconception that if two non-setting-agnostic RPGs have roughly similar settings, or centre roughly similar types of player characters, then those two RPGs must be basically interchangeable.

It's from this thought process that you end up with posts like the one I bumped into this morning which, in response to the same proposed premise, proceeded to recommend both Bunnies & Burrows and Toon.

(For the unacquainted, the principal media touchstones for Toon are Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies, and to a lesser extent, The Tom and Jerry Show. Bunnies & Burrows, meanwhile, is an unofficial but more-or-less direct adaptation of Watership Down. These games will both let you play as talking cartoon rabbits, but in very different ways!)

[prokopetz]

Now I want to run a game about a bunch of Watership Down style rabbits encountering Bugs Bunny, played with exactly the same tenor as a bunch of Call of Cthulhu investigators encountering Nyarlathotep.

[dizzyhslightlyvoided]

I'd suggest flipping the script there with Nyarlathotep doing Bugs Bunny shit at CoC investigators, but I'm pretty sure that would just run into the "cartoon physics would be objectively terrifying in real life" thing

[prokopetz]

[cryptotheism]

You know where the word cocaine comes from? Its Quechua. Just the name of the damn plant. I think it was 1971, maybe 72. I dunno- 

Could you start at the beginning?

Huh? Yeah, sure. Course. Uhh. Lets see…

Take your time. 

Woof. Lets see…I started in uhhh, 72. Some tiny little bottle-rocket firm sweatin for talent, head broker was this big red fatass named Ron Spade, hell of a guy, but the place got bought out by Bear Stearns in 73 when the shit really hit the fan. It was a rough time to be on a trade floor. IRS just put out the whole hypnoeconomics thing. Half the big firms were runnin’ around with their hair on fire, the other half felt invincible. Every day was a party. Party party party. 

Was that your first interaction with hypnostimulants? 

I guess. Its funny. First guy to give me quori was a cop. 

You mean an agent of the FDA? 

No no, like an old fashioned NYPD beat cop. Met him in the bathroom at Pink during a bender. Moron was so faded he thought I was his informant. Just gave me a phial. 

And you tried it?

Not right away no. To be honest I thought it was kinda faggy. Sorry. Its just what I thought at the time. The shit was sparkly, you know? What kinda drug comes in phials? Shoulda known something was up. 

Would you say hypnostimulants were popular at the time? 

At the time? Depends what you mean by popular. People didn’t know about that shit yet. You heard stories, dudes shooting up in the woods upstate, gettin found with their eyeballs exploded. It was early days, ya know? But like, that didn’t happen. That was urban legends. You know who was actually fucking around with the early stuff? Accountants. 

Accountants?

Yeah, you know, the bookkeepers. See,  I’m really just a plumber. I move money from one pipe to another pipe. But instead of wrenches and sprockets or whatever, I use charm. Its pretty easy if you ask me. Imagine if you could just tell water where it already wanted to go. You’re water’s best pal. Nah. It was those nerds in the basement, the spreadsheet guys that figured out how to expense shit so the IRS couldn’t get ya. Those were the fuckers who really dove in. 

What got you using regularly? 

Same shit as everyone else. Makes the job easier. 

How so?

You can feel the money in their pocket. Its like, I dunno how to describe it. Its like…Its like, a turd sitting in a hammock. You can feel how the money bends everything around it. You can see it, smell it. You can hear it over the phone. You can’t ignore it. Shit is nuts. You take enough, and its like you can’t see anything else. Or. No. Its like…You see that you don’t need to see anything else. Money is everything. You’re money. I’m money. Its all just rivers of money flowing through everything. 

By 1973 you were a regular user yes?

Regular makes it sound normal. But yeah I know what you mean. “Regular user.”  76 was the sweet spot. The drugs were good, but the regulators hadn’t stepped up yet. You and some buddies could set up in a club bathroom with nothing but a blindfold and a pile. You ever seen a stock floor with a headfull of that fancy government shit? 

Would you like to discuss the raid? 

No. Not really. 

I understand you were the only one in a sub-emmanation state when Hypnoregulators arrived on the scene. 

I don't want to talk about it. 

Very well then, my associate will be happy to take you to prison as per the agreement you signed. 

Alright alright, Christ. 

Please. In your own words. 

From what I understand, you pulled spade outta bed. Got a confession and everything that morning. 9 fuckin AM, and 200 IRS agents come busting in the doors. I was in the bathroom seeing shit. It's marble lined, lots gold filigree. All that jazz. Special made. Listen. I'm serious about the stock floor shit. Whatever you guys have, it's different than what we had back then. I mean, the shit was still cut with cocaine. A stock floor wasn't a stock floor, it was like…

The raid, please. 

I'm getting to it! You gotta know this shit okay? I need you to understand what you goons fuckin wrecked. It was perfect okay? A garden of Eden . Ripe fruit. Everything just works. You don't have to worry about shit. You're a hunter, a killer, the great fuckin god pan, and the floor is your field of delights. It's like being a beating heart, like being struck by lightning. You can feel the sun in your pocket, and how it's all flowing through everything. And then you fucks showed up. 

It was cold. I felt it first. Like I just threw the biggest party, and mom and dad were coming home early. But you know what I saw? You know those Chinese dragon dancers? Or, lions, or whatever they are? You know how there's two guys in the costume? I saw a dragon, a beast with eyes like the sun, teeth dripping gold, a bunch of IRS suits holding its pelt on their shoulders like you carry your baby home. 

Your statement alluded to some additional information. 

Yeah…there was something else… I dunno how to describe it. The fuckin…eyes, like the sun. Thats how you feel when you're on this shit. You're seein’ gold. I looked into the dragons eyes, and it's like, it's like I saw me. Like I was the dragon, and I was looking at me. Or…no. I was the sun. I was looking at myself. It was like, in that moment I knew something. I learned something. 

What exactly is that?

I dunno. It doesn't fit into words. But like. You aren't regulating shit. 

I'm sorry? 

Yeah. All this shit. The dragon. The field. The dancers. It's all just the sun. 

[cryptotheism]

Was browsing the weirder side of Etsy and noticed a lot of haunted dolls for sale.

So I have to ask, what's the ethics of buying and selling haunted items?

If ghosts are legit, then that's like a form of slavery, right?

Imo if ghosts are real they're a form of pollution

[cryptotheism]

please elaborate on ghosts as pollution

If you leave a corpse in a river and it fucks up the river, that's pollution. If you leave a soul in a doll so it fucks up a house, that's pollution. Human waste product that requires proper ecological reintegration. Simple as.

[cryptotheism]

Wearing my emo belt

[cryptotheism]

theosophist centrism. all ideologies are corruptions of the one true root ideology and by taking a median stance on everything we can reach a higher plane of existence.

You just described Theosophy. That's the main analytical razor of Theosophy lol. If two things conflict, the Ancient Wisdom Tradition from which they stem must contain both positions.

If I think burgers are the best, and you think tacos are the best, the atlantean meal of choice was a lost dish that was both a burger and a taco.

[cryptotheism]

Did alchemists really think that vapours were a kind of spirit, or was it just a comparison?

Afaik it was just a term for a distillate, they weren't making an animist claim. They mean spirit as in the alcohol.

That said, hermetic literature DOES consider the human spirit to be vaporous in nature.

[deeper-ever-deeper]

are there any particular rigs or other tools used for something like megafauna hunting? Not necessarily combat/taking out a critter that's a danger to the area like the fighter jet dragons, but like, folks are gearing up to go bag a big critter for food/resources. Or would both of those scenarios be similar enough that there's not really any difference between the tools that would be used?

Megafauna hunting is a pretty important job under the Amber sky. Keeping any settlement or trade route safe will require regular tending by rangers.

Creatures can get quite large and extremely aggressive. Many also feature explosive healing factors that make them highly resistant to small arms and blades. The average modern combat rifle would struggle against Amber skies megafauna. They are not usually hunted for food given the effort involved.

However, oftentimes its not a question of actually killing the creature. These mega-organisms are often a keystone species that keeps herbivore populations in check. Most of the time, hunters just want to scare them away. The death of a mega-organism can risk ecological collapse.

Hunting rigs tend to be extremely light. They need to be quiet. So rather than focus on bulky armor, they go all in on speed and agility. If the turbo hog can crush a tank in one headbutt, why even bother with armor? A mech cant sneak up on anything.

If you actually need to kill a mega organism, hunting tools tend to be tranquilizer rounds and cutting tools that resemble oversized butchery implements. It's not uncommon for a town to retrofit a combine harvester, or a rototiller, into an absolutely fuck-off huge turkey carver.

You hunt in groups. Tire it out, trap it if you can, and cut off it's head before it heals.

[deeper-ever-deeper]

I have been playing with the concept of "Monsterism" as a biological paradigm.

Lets say there's a river valley. It is lush, forested, and surrounded on all sides by mountains. Within this valley is a population of wild boars.

Wildlife in AS can be extremely aggressive. Your population of boars are regularly harassed by what is essentially a dragon living in the nearby mountain range.

If you are old and successful enough as a mammal, instead of dying of old age, you undergo a significant hormonal change that makes you 10x larger and more resilient. You spend most of your time hibernating in a burrow. But every spring, all the mega-boars wake and fight to the death for dominance. The valley has a single megaboar.

The boar population comes in and checks in on your regularly. If you hibernate too long without a checkup, you wake up. There's probably some mega-predator threatening to destabilize the ecosystem. You find it, kill it, eat it, and go back to bed.

Given their imposing appearance and keystone role in the ecosystem, these ultra-fauna are often regarded as local dieties, referred to with monikers like "The God of the Mountain."

[cryptotheism]

'Oil of Vitriol' is such an funny name though like, a guy had a beaker of this stuff, spilt it, ate through his table, and he was like

'yep. that is one ANGRY liquid.'

Vitriol comes from the Latin vitrus, meaning glassy or glass like. Vitriol, also known as sulfuric acid, has a clear glasslike appearance, and is highly corrosive.

The emotion is named for the alchemical agent, not the other way around.

[cryptotheism]

Some pissed off Byzantine alchemist: "Alright dude, you know what the fuck you're acting like right now?"

[nateconnolly]

If you speak Japanese and clear this up for me, I will be grateful forever and ever and ever. As someone who does not speak Japanese, here's what I've been able to put together:

A shōbō-dan is a brigade of part-time government employees paid extremely low wages, so low that they're usually called "volunteers" in English. They're referred to as "firefighters," but some shōbō-dan focus more heavily on training for and responding to non-fire emergencies like floods, missing persons, or earthquakes. This is despite the fact that it literally translates to "fire brigade". A shōbō-shi is a member of a shōbō-dan, and literally translates to "firefighter".

Here's where I'm having trouble: what's the word for a full-time non-"volunteer" firefighter? Is it also shōbō-shi? And what's their version of a fire station?

It seems like all fire safety operations are supervised by an agency called FDMA or Shōbō-chō, which does not actually fight fires directly, but maintains equipment, enforces building codes, stuff like that. So I assumed Shōbō-chō just meant something like "non-combatant fire helper".

Except. The Tokyo Fire Department is called Tokyo Shōbōchō. They're not a shōbō-dan (although there are probably shōbō-dan in Tokyo). Does that mean Shōbō-chō is like... any full-time government agency dedicated to fire safety?

[A lot of the above is guesswork trying to patch things together from multiple newspapers, all of which have different translation philosophies, and sometimes use the same English words for radically different Japanese terms. Do not take anything I've said as fact.]

[nateconnolly]

[Image ID: Bernie Sanders with white text that says "I am once again asking the shōbō-chō question" /end ID]

[dorothylarouge]

US Presidents as Dril Tweets

George Washington: another day volunteering at the betsy ross museum. everyone keeps asking me if they can fuck the flag. buddy, they wont even let me fuck it

John Adams: "ah boo hoo hoo i want to post Foul comments to content leaders" Fat Chance, Dimwit. I will annihilate you under bulwark of the Law and God.

Thomas Jefferson: Q: If your post was proven by a counsil of wise men to be racist, or bullshit, would you bar it from the record? A: I do not delete my posts

James Madison: (sniffing a crumpled up one dollar bill i found on the floor of a dog kennel) ah.. thats greenbacks baby

James Monroe: for decades i have traversed the unforgiving mountains and rivers of south america, hoping to catch a glimpse of the fabled "ass downloader"

John Quincy Adams: "This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gender," i holler as i overturn my uncle's barbeque grill and turn the 4th of July into the 4th of Shit

Andrew Jackson: handing Faves over to my enemies is FRAUD !! base, contemptible FRAUD!

Martin Van Buren: Food $200

Data $150

Rent $800

Candles $3,600

Utility $150

someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying

William Henry Harrison: (spends all of 7 seconds skimming some blog posts) yep. just as i knew all along. having pnuamonia is good

John Tyler: fuck "jokes". everything i tweet is real. raw insight without the horse shit. no, i will NOT follow trolls. twitter dot com. i live for this

James K. Polk: thhere is no such thing as charisma, and art is fake. the only metrics by which we must determine the worth of a man are Strength and Wisdom

Zachary Taylor: the doctor reveals my blood pressure is 420 over 69. i hoot & holler outta the building while a bunch of losers tell me that im dying

Millard Fillmore: trying to heal..... please donate to my go fund me... $10 will make me less racist... $100 will make me extremely less racist...thank you...

Franklin Pierce: blocked. blocked. blocked. youre all blocked. none of you are free of sin

James Buchanan: #NationalGirlfriendDay please cherish your gal's.. in honor of us, the single Boys who must sacrifice all companionship to #CarryTheBrand...

Abraham Lincoln: unloading an entire belt of ammo at me with a minigun or some such device will now get you "Blocked"

Andrew Johnson: who the fuck is scraeming "LOG OFF" at my house. show yourself, coward. i will never log off

Ulysses S. Grant: i regret being tasked the emotional burden of maintaining the final bastion of morality and Nice manners in this endless ocean of human SHIT

Rutherford B. Hayes: using the toilet when i hear Our national anthem start to play. i do what i must. i stand tall in complete agony; as shit runs down my leg,

James A. Garfield: too much truth in such little time. feeling the heat cominh down to silence me... signing off........ for now

Chester A. Arthur: i WILL wise the fuck up. i WILL super charge my content for 2017. i WILL get blue check mark

Grover Cleveland: the way i see it, people who come on here and submit content that is not up to par, could possibly be considered the "Villains" of this site

Benjamin Harrison: i help every body, im not racist, i keep myself nice, and when i ask for a single re-tweet in return i am told to fuck off, fuck myself, etc

William McKinley: boy oh boy do i love purchasing large amounnts of Fool's Gold. wait a minute... fools gold fucking sucks. this stuff is no good..!! Fuck !!!

Theodore Roosevelt: IF THE ZOO BANS ME FOR HOLLERING AT THE ANIMALS I WILL FACE GOD AND WALK BACKWARDS INTO HELL

William H. Taft: ah.. the perfect Souffle! cant wait to dig in to t(*EVERY PIPE IN MY HOUSE EXPLODES AT THE SAME TIME, COVERING ME IN SHIT AND BOILING WATER*

Woodrow Wilson: the conflicted supersoldier stares over the horizon as he smokes a cigarette. "war is the most fucked up thing ever." he takes a sip of beer

Warren G. Harding: somebody please Bribe me

Calvin Coolidge: aggressively joyless oaf hhere. painfully obnoxious respect demander checkign in. extremely dim witted frowning man looking for pals

Herbert Hoover: it is really quite astonishing that I have yet to win The Lottery, given how good I am at selecting six numbers and saying them out loud

Franklin D. Roosevelt: ive never heard of this “europe” but it sounds like a big bunch of shit to me

Harry Truman: everybody wants to be the guy to write the tweet that solves racism once and for all because it would look good as hell on a resume

Dwight D. Eisenhower: my "F*&k It!! Let's Go Golfin" t-shirt maintains a tenacious stranglehold on my life. after 1,125 days of Golf my body is twisted, deformed

John F. Kennedy: when you do sutuff like... shoot my jaw clean off of my face with a sniper rifle, it mostly reflects poorly on your self

Lyndon B. Johnson: incredibly handsome , charismatic famous boy credited with ending income inequality after saying that slumlords should be called "dumblords"

Richard Nixon: i attribute the complete failure of my brand to the actions of detractors, oor my “trolls”, as it were, as well as my own constant fuckups

Gerald Ford: shutting computer down until the shitty moods & attitudes can fuck off., if you need me ill be on my other computer, sititng 60° to my right

Jimmy Carter: i warnned you all that bad things would happen if you kept letting your wives wear jeans. AND NOW LOOK! the damn gas prices are up again

Ronald Reagan: spend a lot of time thinking about how sometimes even war criminals can be heroes sometimes... Dont like it? Click the unfollow buttobn

George H.W. Bush: just thought off an idea i believe to be bad ass. lets find the address of the leader of isis, and mail him/ her pieces of our SHIT

Bill Clinton: were at the point now, that when i offer to impregnate my girl followers, people assume my motives are sexual. disgusting, grow the fuck up,

George W. Bush: friday night gathering up together a big pile of things i like to respect (flags, crucifixes ,etc) and just roll around in it ,give kisses,

Barack Obama: my IQ has increased 10 points ever since i stopped tollerating people mucking about, on the time line

Donald Trump: THERAPIST: your problem is, that youre perfect, and everyone is jealous of your good posts, and that makes you rightfully upset.

ME: I agree

Joe Biden: I will shut the fuck up , IF , it will restore the Harmony. I will get on my knees like a dog and make that sacrifice, for the sake of Calm

[cryptotheism]

Mme Helena Blavatsky is the only human to have successfully achieved Horseshoe Theory. She was an ardent anti-colonialist and proponent of ethnic equality, because she essentially invented a new way to be racist towards ethnicities that only theoretically existed.

[cryptotheism]

You hear stories from the first few years of Eugenics, when the idea hadn't been properly chewed on yet. There was a short window where "Anti-racist Eugenics Advocate" was a sincere nelief that people actually held. This batshit combination of entrenched oppressive power structures meeting an almost-baked scientific progressivism is, --in my opinion-- the 19th century boiled down to its purest essence.

Blavatsky is that, but a person.

[plaguedocboi]

I think Moby Dick artists could use how objectively crazy-looking whale eyes are to their advantage