#foramen

[vatrpg]

Dark greetings. I yet live! My last update was basically just saying I figured out how to do a hexcrawl to a satisfactory degree within Vat. This remains true! Here’s the teaser:

I love ASCII art I love ASCII lettering.

Here’s another teaser:

Anyways. It’s… maybe like a third done. Nearing 2/3rds completion with the lore and background for the module that is establishing the setting. The rest is actual gameplay stuff. I’m having fun! It’s awesome researching hexcrawls. There’s so many resources available.

Otherwise… I finally developed a ‘sona? That’s notable. Not like game dev notable but still notable. Behold- me! It’s literally just how I look IRL but slightly different.

Ok that’s been this update. I really should update this blog more often but I’m not social media brained in such a way.

[vatrpg]

Dark Greetings... the holiday season is (mostly) over. There's still New Years, but that's sort of different I think. I got back home last Sunday (not yesterday as this is Monday, I mean the other Sunday) from spending a solid exact week at my parents. You want to know what happens the second I get back? Befouled with ailments. It's because I was away from my neuro-pod for too long, I bet. Sickness and also just not being able to work on shit due to not being home means that I have comparatively little... is what I would say if I wasn't the strongest man alive. I've started work on my custom hexcrawl tileset after a few false starts as I really tried to figure out the Look. I also finished a drawing.

Here's what, as of now, the basic water tile looks like. We'll see if it's too eye-searing and if the pattern is too dense when I put it on the actual map, but it's going to be some shade of green no matter what. Because of the setting, you see.

Here's the drawing. A Crater City (or more like Crater Town, it turned out a bit too small of scale to be a city...) of the Cities of Quod. In the foreground, a tower topped by an image of a Questing Beast, loyal servants of the Giant. Dogs aren't real, silly. They're folkloric figures. I told y'all I'd have beautiful images ready and I didn't lie. Until next time...

[vatrpg]

I study TTRPGs, right. I also study wargames. I sort of have to, for me to be able to proudly call me a TTRPG dev. This means I've read a lot of good. I've also read a lot of bad! And I try to understand why these things are good, or bad, or just ok. Part of that is seeing the developer's intentions behind reasons for things being the way they are. In my own game, I'm adding segments of me, maybe not justifying, but explaining my thought processes behind why I wrote things to be the way they are. Doing this has also made me more deeply think about Vat's intended play style. Vat isn't universal, in any sense of the word. It's heavily tied to its setting, for one thing. For another, players play groups of characters, not just one. That automatically brings a significantly different style and tone to the table than what most people would be used to in the modern scene. I give plenty of tools to the players and handlers, and it's ultimately up to them to figure out how they want to do things. But the specific tools given flavor the end result, right? I don't have an extremely central and pivotal and narrow play style and genre in mind for Vat. It's really just... this game is meant for this world, to explore this world. The elements surrounding genre are more attached to the world. Idk. I'm just thinking, you know? Vat can contain multitudes. I think I lost the point of what I was trying to say. Study games, folks. Especially games you play. Think about why you enjoy things. System mastery is cool.

[vatrpg]

Wow, it turns out making NPCs is a lot of fun when they're actual characters and not generic archetypes you try to make to fill a conceptual bestiary! Btw I'm probably not going to make a bestiary, but I WILL do my absolute damndest to make the process of crafting an NPC as easy as possible. Anyways, crafting guys for the first campaign. I Here's some character tokens! Specifically tokens i'm using that aren't using other people's art, because I don't know how I'd go about sourcing that and sourcing things is something I'd want to do.

Here we have an Etruscan parade helmet serving as the image of an artificial intelligence's automatons, and Arnold Schwarzenegger in a photo-shoot as... I think Mister Freeze, serving as a mythological giant. Vat ideally uses miniatures, but tokens are a good enough substitute for purposes of tabletop sim. I'm not going through all that effort to make a 3d model, something I don't know how to do, for this. Instead we get tokens the size of miniature bases.

[vatrpg]

So, finally decided to start work on the lore doc! I have an absolute fuck ton of notes but it’s just a matter of compiling them into a proper organized thing. It’s going well!

In other news, working on a new guy! Woo! Just need to paint him.

[vatrpg]

So, another doodle! This time I went in with the express purpose of drawing something in particular, instead of drawing something straight from my mind then assigning it something afterwards.

Behold, a Psychic Janissary! Iffy on the helmet, had a different image in mind so that’s probably subject to change in later drawings of one. Shoulderpads could be a bit less… long… as well. But all-in-all, I’m happy with this guy!

Also, I’m back on bluesky! Look up “Claviger” and you just might stumble upon me.

Right now I’m on the back-end of things finagling NPC equipment, which is the main hurdle right now before I can actually do playtesting sessions. Everything else is pretty much ready for it.

That’s all for now!

[vatrpg]

I just went through recent posts and didn't realize how many of them were vatposting... so here's a Normal Post! With the pivot in module writing, playtesting is coming much sooner than I thought! I have made a fairly basic enemy grouping, the Wormrot Warriors, and they are statted out and ready for stress testing in combat. All I REALLY need to do now is set up a basic Battle Law arena in Tabletop Sim and port everything over, and that will legitimately be all! Just need to get a group of players ready and with their teams rolled up, and then we'll be golden! The Wormrot Warriors are right now really simple, only having items equipped that are directly used for combat. I don't think that's going to be the norm for actual campaign play, I want NPCs to also have more rp-focused items equipped just like players, but right now for combat playtesting that's not strictly needed. Last but certainly not least, another pivot regarding the world at large. It's not anything major, more taking the foundation I've been building and extrapolating that to it's logical extreme. The giant corpse that forms the world? Actually just a giant curled up corpse in form. Gravity and oceans and whatnot will basically be shrink wrapped to the form. It's also the only fucked up planet in the system, the rest are normal. This brings plenty of opportunities for things to Get Even Weirder, which is great. I've already had a lot of fucked up biomes planned out like mold fields and meat forests so.

[vatrpg]

I’ve been writing the module and only had the urge to draw a tiny bit. BEHOLD- some sort of merchant noble! Probably! It started off as foreshortening practice and spiraled into everything else. Anyways. Ignore the barely visible shit in the background, that was me trying to distill myself down into some sort of sona on the back of the paper - completely unaffiliated with Vat. I’m going back to my evil sky citadel to continue writing and rotting.