I’ve been working super hard on writing a ttrpg!
Would you play Barbie Horse Adventures For Adults, the TTRPG?
Yes 🤠
No 🐎
Maybe? 🐄
Results 🌵
Voting ended onJul 29, 2024
It’s a cowboy game powered by the Kids on Bikes system. I was aiming for a game system about cowboys that wasn’t overly crunchy or gritty. It’s rules-light and narratively focused with collaborative worldbuilding.
I wanted the main goal of the system to be creating a fun and lighthearted cowboy/outlaw romp, with room for telling darker stories with heavier topics if the table desires. It was also vitally important to me to make a system where your horse (or other species of mount) felt like a character in its own right and not just an object, something that grows with you as you bond and gain more experience. Magic does exist in the system, but it’s very dangerous and there are (potentially deadly) consequences to failure. There is also guns and combat, but no Hit Points to keep track of.
I’ve got the basic rules mostly done and I’m currently working on some optional rules for making the game feel a little grittier and for various buckaroo activities (like owning a ranch or going on a cattle drive). Your main stats are Fight, Flight, Brains, Brawn, Charm, and Grit. But instead of rolling a d20 and putting that number into a stat, each stat is assigned its own die based on your character’s Trope. Like, if you have a d12 in Brains, whenever you make a Brains Check you would roll a d12 for it.
The other super important thing to do before I can finish is add a fair amount of historical information and sensitivity information regarding the racism that is baked into the Western genre and how to approach it with your table. It would be wrong of me to leave out how a lot of Western stories use horrific stereotypes about the indigenous people of the Americas, how people of color were vital to creating the cowboy culture, and how sex workers were the jumpstart of the economy in many cases, if not the linchpin.
But I’m just curious if there’s even an audience for this? I’ll probably release it anyway. It’s already at nearly 40k words and it would make me very sad if no one saw it. But I want to know if anyone is even interested to begin with. Let me know? I’ll post updates on this blog!
