#elfgames

[bad-quail]

My haul from Between Two Cons at the charming Norse Hall in Portland, Oregon. Not pictured: Sunrot, which the creator is graciously shipping to me.

[scrumpyfan43]

Humblebird's Infinite Monsters - Humblebird Publications | DriveThruRPG.com

Humblebird's Infinite Monsters - “A living ribbon of water rises from the deep, draped in seaweed. It asks if you know any students who need a math

Humblebird's Infinite Monsters is a high-concept monster generator with an emphasis on behavior: what the monster does, and how it relates to the rest of the world. Choose from a dozen or more answers to questions including:

Where does the monster live?

Why does the monster exist?

What drives the monster to do what it does?

How does the monster spend its time?

Humblebird’s Infinite Monsters is a monster generator and not a bestiary. Because of its scope it requires the user to fill in the details, including any mechanics, and can't be used to generate monsters on the fly. Instead, use it to generate your own bestiary ahead of time, as well as iterate on existing bestiaries and monsters.

Features:

System and setting agnostic

Supplements other monster generators and bestiaries

Suggestions for generating monsters for different genres

Internal links for convenient navigation between table of contents, trait tables, and trait descriptions

Spooky monster art by @bowelfly

[inklesspen]

What makes a good RPG?

Lately I’ve found myself talking with different people about how to pick a RPG system, or how to design a RPG system for a particular setting. There’s obviously loads of approaches to this question; here’s my answer, in the form of five questions. Jared Sorensen put forth three questions that get to the heart of RPG design, John Wick (not the Keanu character) added a fourth, and I’m gonna add a fifth.

What is your game about?

This isn’t about the specific setting. There’s a lot of games out there that do people with superpowers wearing their underwear outside their clothes and punching people, but those games will generally have different things on which they focus.

Dungeons and Dragons is basically about going into unusual locations, killing the things that live there, and taking their stuff. It’s so much about that, it’s in the name! Star Wars: Edge of the Empire is about people who live on the fringes of society (smugglers, bounty hunters, mercenaries), and the tension between the obligations they owe to powerful people and their dreams of living free and easy. Monsterhearts is about teenage melodrama with supernatural powers, about what life is like when your body is changing and relationships at school are getting complicated, about having to hide who you really are because you don’t think anyone could possibly accept you.

Sometimes a game doesn’t do a good job of communicating what it’s about. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad game, but it makes it harder to get useful answers to the rest of the questions.

How does your game do this?

Whatever your game is about, there need to be rules elements to support it. D&D has tons of rules about creatures you can kill, the stuff you can take, and the locations you can go to do this. Edge of the Empire has a few different ways to leverage PCs’ obligations, either as “heat” (Jabba wants you mounted on his wall), notoriety (I’ve got a bounty on my head in ten systems; are you sure you want to cross me?), or even a way to get resources (if you do this for me, I’ll owe you one). Monsterhearts has “Strings”, narrative currency that represent emotional leverage one person holds over another, and “Darkest Self”, the part of yourself that you’re ashamed of and keep hidden, and sometimes comes out to play at the worst time imaginable.

How does your game reward this?

You can have all the mechanics you like, but if the players never have any reason to use them, then they’re not really playing the game, are they? D&D incentivizes players to kill creatures by giving out XP for killing them and allowing the XP to be exchanged for more powers to use. It encourages players to take their stuff by, well, offering interesting stuff to take and use. EotE incentivizes players to manage their PCs’ obligations by tying them in with reputation, resources, and threats. Monsterhearts lets PCs avoid death by becoming their Darkest Selves, removing all damage taken in exchange for the risk of doing something unforgivable.

How do you make this fun?

There’s a lot of different ways that a game system can be fun. Some people really like devising the best spell selection for their wizards, or claiming top status in the high school power plays, or turning a trap against the bounty hunter who set it. Other people enjoy managing the resource expenditure of a D&D battle, solving supernatural mysteries, or outwitting Imperial bureaucrats. In my experience, good RPGs pick a handful of play styles to specialize in, rather than trying to equally reward every possible approach to the material.

How well do these answers match the players’ expectations?

This question is my addition. If players walk into an Edge of the Empire game expecting to dive into the mysteries of the Force, there’s a mismatch right there. (That player group would likely be happier with a different Star Wars game, such as Force and Destiny.) For various historical reasons, Dungeons and Dragons has become synonymous with roleplaying games for many people, which leads groups to try playing campaigns filled with romance and intrigue using a system designed for killing creatures and taking their stuff. A good group can have fun using most any game system, but if your expectations aren’t a good match for the system, it’ll be harder than it would have otherwise been.

[bad-quail]

I've grown to really dislike the framing of tabletop RPGs as being about story. To some extent this is unreasonable and knee-jerky on my part. I've talked to several people who just use "story" and "imagined world" interchangeably. But, I do think talking about RPGs in terms of "story" does impose, intentionally or not, the concerns of storytelling on the act of play.

For me, the draw of playing an RPG is in adopting the persona of a character and seeing how they mesh with the imagined world, treating that world as a real place. Putting that in the frame of story can nudge the concern of play from engaging with the world organically to engaging with it as a narrative canvas; in terms of "what makes a good story?" or "what is narratively satisfying?"

RPGs are their own artistic medium. And, they are a medium for play. I think we do a disservice by burdening our expectations of play with the framework of storytelling mediums.

[bad-quail]

After letting it sit on the backburner for a few years, I finally got Mud + Laser in a state to post. I had the opportunity to run a one-shot of it at Between Two Cons last weekend, and had a blast with it. Truly the biggest barrier to getting anything done has been play: since 2020, I haven't been able to reconvene my old in person group. Anyway! Mud + Laser is a baroque military science fantasy game about partisans fighting in a Great Galactic War against a crumbling interstellar empire. It's inspired by Rogue One, Andor, Dune, and (very roughly!) on 17th and 18th century history. Built on the bones of Mausritter. It has a few unique features including:

Variable armor values based on damage type.

Goal-based XP.

A character upgrade system based on decorations for diagetic achievements.

Currently available exclusively on RPG Trader.

Mud + Laser on RPG Trader

Space: 164X

[bad-quail]

"We've been having the same conversations about elves for 50 years." Just imagine how long ELVES have been having the same conversation about elves. Get on their level.

[bad-quail]

How is this for a pitch?

The Basics

Plunderdark is a Dice Game for Heroic Adventures in a Late Medieval Dark Fantasy Anti-Canon Sandbox. It centers play around underdog Heroes pursuing their Convictions to make their grim and perilous world a better place.

Dark Fantasy

Imagine the world at the start of Willow or The Dark Crystal. The world is in the grip of an Evil Despot. The forces of Good, insofar as they exist, are in hiding or on the back foot. Foolhardy scholars collude with the powers of the Hidden World to work sinister sorceries. Remnants of past ages dot the countryside, promising wealth and fame to those who plumb their depths, and doom to those who linger too long in their hollows.

Late Medieval

Imagine our world in the decades preceding the Protestant Reformation and the invasion of the New World. Armored knights exist alongside castles and early firearms. The printing press is a new invention, allowing information to move and propagate faster than ever before. The progeny of conquerors and despots have grown fat on the exploitation of the common folk for nigh on a thousand years. Wealthy merchant adventurers exploit the trust of their common kin and the greed of the nobility they aspire to surpass to amass their own great fortunes.

Anti-Canon Sandbox

The Gamemaster is not solely responsible for defining the setting of play. The entire table collaborates to define the contours of the world, and creates Heroes invested in that world. Play is directed by the Heroes and their Convictions. The Gamemaster does not compose a plot, but provides opportunities and obstacles for the Heroes to pursue their Convictions.

[bad-quail]

An Idea for Hexcrawl Random Encounters

Borrow a page from depthcrawl procedures and have your encounter table be 1dX+Y where X is the size of the die you want to use and Y is your "depth", measured as distance in hexes from a central "safe" hex. The higher the encounter roll result, the more dangerous or weirder the encounter. So, you can get the feel of the world becoming more and more dangerous the farther from town you get.