*walks up to a gay couple* which one of you is the ruler who thinks that this time it’ll totally work out fine if you don’t pay your troops and which one of you is the ruler who creates a professional and well-funded standing army that eventually becomes so entrenched and self-serving that they keep trying to kill you
I'm in the process of reorganising the extended inspirational media section of Eat God to include proper subheadings for ease of reference, and it occurs to me that it would be both potentially helpful and very funny to include a "Nonfiction" heading that's just a bunch of books about comparative theology.
So remember how I said I was designing a TtRPG of my own? Here's how I'm planning characters out for now
Stats
Your classes are:
Vigour: which directly controls how big your healthbar is
Vitality: which controls everything else, like your stamina bar, resistances and the like
Strength: brute melee damage, and also your ability to boost said damage. Most meleé weapons are Strength focussed
Skill: more subtle melee damage, but also casting speed and ranged weaponry
Mind: "physical" magic, alongside a host of damaging spells, but with a very limited support pool
Faith: God dependent spells, but with a lot more support options with only a couple of straight damaging stuff
All players start at level 6 - which is 1 per stat. I haven't figured out the ideal function for it yet. You gain a level once you gain enough Experience Points, and can assign it wherever
Classes
You can broadly place any character, PC or otherwise into a class purely for the sake of convenience. There are NPC only classes like Merchant, Wandering Merchant, Apothecary and the like, but they aren't as important as your Player Classes.
Basic Classes are the backbone of the class system, which give you the basis on which to build further.
Fighter: meleé as a standard. The only class able to use every class of Shield and light to medium meleé weapon
Mage: standard mage. You can use all kinds of magic not locked behind a specific God, and come inherently with a more powerful heal skill not tied to a specific spell
: ranged physical weapons. Only the lightest of weapons, but with an inherent evasion skill.
You can then hybridise your classes once you have twenty points to allocate per stat, or double down on the same class, OR you can advance your class.
Warrior is a more brute strength focussed advancement to the Fighter. You get to wield Crows' Beaks and warhammers and great swords. You are basically immune to being staggered. You can scare enemies into following you
Sorcerer is a more raw offence focussed advancement to the Mage. You get to summon a meteor strike. You get to summon a light so potent it kills by sheer radiation poisoning. You can fly!
Ranger is the all-round jack of all trades Advanced class, which can use some spells, most weapons, and a few skills.
The Dancer is a dex focussed Warrior who gains a Consecutive Attack skill with an evasion bonus at the cost of armour protection.
The Hybrid classes I haven't fully thought through the mechanics of yet. Feel free to ask me questions! I'd love to answer!
The goal of Greyplains world building is to combine a number of various elements of extant cultures and history, mix it with the specifics of how magic works in the setting, and unleash entirely new and fantastic ways to construct awful medieval societies based on theoretically enlightened ideals.
The end result of all this mixing is that, unless you are very familiar with the source material, it's hard to perfectly get at what I'm referencing. And usually I'm just pulling at the themes and general ideas of these cultures' beliefs as opposed to specific details. Like I'm not copying words but more so analyzing ideas and patterns and reframing them in conversation with other elements.
This can be seen by the numerous cultures in which I borrow and recontextualize elements of Cuban history and modern political systems. Like, do you know what a CUC is? If you do, you'll find a refreshing, comedic take on how a CUC might be alternatively adapted to a more capitalistic, imperialistic purpose. This isn't to say that I believe the CUC is capitalistic nor imperialistic. I'm actually quite fond of the way Cuba handles its currency as a model that could be adopted by more nations if they socialize their economies. That being said, any system which has the purpose to liberate can also be used to oppress, so the CUC, and the subject of state communism as a medieval-fantasy society, becomes the focus of discussion and elaboration within Greyplains.
However, that is not the only element of Cuba that I'm drawing from. A different culture discusses the role of Santeria as a vector of revolutionary spirit among the farmer class of Cubans during the revolutionary war. However, despite Santeria being an important aspect to the revolution's success (the people believed Fidel was an avatar/divinely inspiration of Xango), the structure within Santeria is, in many ways, fundamentally antithetical to the project of communism. That's an interesting dynamic, and it's one that I explore in a culture that is entirely separate from the one that has the conversation around the CUC. In this society, I also blend the ideas of neoslavery on the island under the Batista regime with the post-revolution ideals within the fictional society. Basically, what if the Cuban but medieval and the Santeria priests were to install a Santeria government instead of communism (with socialist characteristics for flavor).
"Have you noticed, uh, that in the last 3,000 years, we haven't changed the design of the circle? Here at testla, our engineers our at work redesigning the future of platonic solids. We asked ourselves, 'what are the properties of a circle?' Well, uh. It's symmetrical. And it's round. So we're introducing the next gen of circle for the next gen of planar geometry!"
the stupidest fucking shape you've ever seen rolls up
"So, as you can see. We made it irregular. Yep. And, uh, we gave it straight edges. Pretty badass, huh? *dumbest fucking chuckle* We call it the 'Paul-we-gone.' Check it out. We made this thing bulletproof!" Shoots it with a gun. It's not even remotely bulletproof. Euclid rolls in his grave,
"You couldn't even put that thing on a fucking cone, you godamn idiot!"
I'm working on my seminar explaining "Value-Negative TTRPG gaming." One of my points is to build situations with unclear morals. I talk about conceiving of the base problem as a series of escalating trolley problems, and I'm pretty happy with the result.
Is it the autism, or is this dilemma a quick one from step 2 onwards? I thought they were going to swap roles as the "good" victim, but absent any further information (I admit I don't know if Behr deserve to be robbed) I think my table would plump to kill mom without many qualms
Okay, yeah. Not knowing about Behr is a major element of the problem here. Behr Chemicals like, really super-duper sucks. They are the current owners of all Monsanto products. Behr is just giving children (and farmers, particularly) cancer for the love of the game. They are maybe the most evil company.
It doesn't say she works at Behr, only that she is laundering stolen money from Behr.
Thus adding another level of moral ambiguity.
What is her relationship to the Bher? What is her relationship to who actually stole the money? what is their relationship to Bher? Does any of this matter?
Continue down this path until your players are convinced that nothing is real.
I want to run a campaign, but don't have the budget to actually get into a pre-existing one. So I'm doing the logical thing and building one from scratch
Thankfully, TTRPGs are among the most affordable hobbies you can get into. Yes, you could spend a lot of money on it, but there is a huge wealth of legally free material, in addition to piracy, that you can access to play for free.
This is a pretty good list of free games that are "sold" as free games. You can also find pirated copies of just about any game if you're resourceful enough.
Designing a TTRPG without ever having played one does sound pretty funny, though. If you decide to go that route, I hope you will keep us informed and not cheat by getting advice. Just raw-dog guess what's supposed to be in there from first principles.
Come to think of it, it would be funnier if I tried to derive a TtRPG from first principles. I've already got a sort of functional combat system on that count
It feels like testing for the highest rate of lowest quality engagement with media. There's never a "explain how the themes of Frankenstein evoked feelings and changed your worldview" contest. Think you had a more moving emotional experience by engaging with the melancholic feelings of the inevitability of child birth, despite not even being a woman hey that's weird don't think about it, than ME!?
Well, step right down and prove it contestant—on this week's episode of
I want to run a campaign, but don't have the budget to actually get into a pre-existing one. So I'm doing the logical thing and building one from scratch
Thankfully, TTRPGs are among the most affordable hobbies you can get into. Yes, you could spend a lot of money on it, but there is a huge wealth of legally free material, in addition to piracy, that you can access to play for free.
This is a pretty good list of free games that are "sold" as free games. You can also find pirated copies of just about any game if you're resourceful enough.
Designing a TTRPG without ever having played one does sound pretty funny, though. If you decide to go that route, I hope you will keep us informed and not cheat by getting advice. Just raw-dog guess what's supposed to be in there from first principles.
Logically, if you want to play a TTRPG, you must know enough about them for them to appeal to you. This is surely enough to design a TTRPG, by simply putting everything in the game that appeals to you. Because of this I am entirely on board with this experiment.
Every time I see this post I think about that study that was done on how cats recognize visual imagery. They weren't sure if they track by color? shape? outline? movement? So they did an experiment where they showed cats clips of birds or rodents, visually altered in various ways -- light-inverted? color swapped? upside down? stills? mocap? slowed down, sped up, stretched or warped? And they found that cats could continue to recognize videos of animals even when they were just a skeletal ball-and-socket model, so long as they still moved like the animal.
Cats can recognize animals by only their structure and their motion. I wonder if a cat would be able to see a cat in this, too?
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