thy dungeon gal (non US citizen mode)

my name kiki, she/her (hän tai se suomeksi), 18+ years old. I like posting on the internet, it's full of fun people. Maoist struggle session enjoyer. silly Rolemaster girlblogger. my interests include RPGs (both of the Japanese and Tabletop variety) and languages. sometimes I cause problems on purpose.

[thydungeongal]

New post, gonna use this to document my journey as a trans woman

[thydungeongal]

Going to the store

[persbaderse]

[anim-ttrpgs]

A.N.I.M. Income Quota July 13th 2026

The Income Quota has been updated for July 13th. For the like 50 new people, what this means is that A.N.I.M. (that's us, the indie TTRPG studio that makes Eureka and also runs/supports the discord server for all kinds of RPGs) needs to make a minimum amount of income each month in order for our team members to pay our bills (and thus keep making TTRPGs and running this server and overall supporting TTRPGs as real art etc.). The count of how much money we've made is updated every Monday and Friday and if it doesn't hit at least $2,100 before August 1st at least a couple of us will be in financial trouble.,

July Total Income Quota: $772.01/$2,100

Patreon Pledge Drive: $1,360 per month out of $2,000 per month.

I personally have been hit with almost $1,100 of unexpected and unavoidable expenses recently including a $375 car repair bill and really, really need this income quota to be hit this month and subsequent months.

[anim-ttrpgs]

Annie Foxworthy, Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy PC posted with permission of her creator, Cassiopeia. Art by Beabea.

"Annie Foxworth! Daughter of a lawyer and absent mother named Sylvia Foxworth, herself a former PC. She takes after her mom in a lot of ways, but most crucially in a desire to be a lawyer, hence why she's an investigator at all. She likes to gather the evidence herself, and also she's 16 and has been isolating due to COVID and needs an excuse to get out of the house and prove that she's Intelligent. She's very green.

Also her mom's a fairy, but that's fine."

[targetedknowledge]

[vixensdungeon]

Is there a keep on the borderlands nearby? Those fuckers are everywhere

There is! Fort Griffon is part of a line of keeps that safeguards the realm from the Dreadlands. When the wilderness encounter roll indicates a patrol, that’s them.

[natalieironside]

The wizardposting trend feels a bit too specific to "the D&D 5th Edition character class known as Wizard" and/or "Merlin from T.H. White's The Once And Future King" to really reel me in. The wizardposting doesn't encompass nearly enough odinposting and/or solomonposting, imo. To say nothing of väinämöinenposting.

[natalieironside]

I gotta get you guys on the Väinämöinen hype train

[catgirlwheels]

You gotta show us how it's done Natalie

[natalieironside]

alright hold up lemme just

[matkahaltia]

Besides the above

I prefer Louhi wizardess posting myself, the great Queen of the North, Mother of Wolf and Serpent and her dozens of beautiful daughters, Team Louhi 4 Life.

[natalieironside]

The wizardposting trend feels a bit too specific to "the D&D 5th Edition character class known as Wizard" and/or "Merlin from T.H. White's The Once And Future King" to really reel me in. The wizardposting doesn't encompass nearly enough odinposting and/or solomonposting, imo. To say nothing of väinämöinenposting.

[natalieironside]

I gotta get you guys on the Väinämöinen hype train

[catgirlwheels]

You gotta show us how it's done Natalie

[natalieironside]

alright hold up lemme just

[tiffinposts]

VÄINÄMÖINEN POSTING!!!

Women, am I right? *sick kantele solo* Old men chasing after pretty girls are creeps. *boat building montage* Unless it's me. *destroys the prosperity of a nation for no particular reason* Oh shit here comes Jesus. *exit stage right, playing kantele*

[thydungeongal]

I have posted before about how sometimes well-meaning attempts at running D&D without some of the more unfortunate dynamics can often backfire but in a way where most people don't even register it backfiring. Because when you take the step of "oh D&D's various 'evil humanoids' don't just exist in a vacuum and given the renfaire colonialism on display it's kind of impossible not to read them as somewhat racialized" many people will then go "okay but we still need some people who player characters should be allowed to kill guilt-free, so let's replace 'orcs' with 'bandits' because killing bad criminal people is perfectly ideologically neutral." At that point it's like "okay so your characters are no longer the racist kill squad, now they're just the Tough on Crime Vigilantes."

But I feel I should make clear that D&D the game itself is not exactly at fault here: like, okay, it is sort of at fault in the sense that it is a game of fantasy killing people with swords and magic. And it is easier for people to accept the killing with people with swords and magic part when they can imagine that their characters are at least to a degree justified. That is sort of just built into the game (and the game has built into its lore varying levels of making the fantasy of killing certain types of guy justifiable).

But D&D is not at fault for making people go "okay so it's bad when you kill orcs simply because they're orcs. It's better when you kill people who are bandits, who are a class of evil criminals where killing them is actually wholesome and sensible." Like, yeah, most people probably don't think about it that deeply, but the reason people don't think about it that deeply is ultimately ideological.

And the ideology is basically "it is bad to be racist but it's good to be a tough on crime vigilante."

[vixensdungeon]

My general solution to this is to acknowledge the problematic aspects of the game, let that discomfort pass through you, and just enjoy the game for what it is.

[anim-ttrpgs]

May I Come in (Knock Version) - Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy OST

May I Come In but with the knock sound effect we used in Muted Swallow. "Listen and be amazed, fuckers!" - Dame, February 14th, 2026.

Composed by @imsobadatnicknames2

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Would your Escape from Terminus fangame be spooky-and-or-dooky to play, emphasizing the source material's status as a ghost story, or would it just have general dungeon crawler vibes, it just being a board game from the 60s?

I think it would probably have general dungeon-crawler vibes, although skewing towards sci-fi flavored (while the source material doesn't explicitly satet it, something about the name, the fake game cover, the megastructure nature of the labyrinth, and the general vibe of the story make me feel like it's more of a sci-fi than fantasy game)

The only thing where I see myself leaning toward the spooky-dookies is maybe leaning into a weird an intentionally inconsistent tone? Like my idea would be to have the way the mechanics are described range from standard military wargame tone to coldly clinical to occassionally subtly ritualistic.

I think more than anything the spooky atmosphere is something that, ideally, I would seek to have emerge through the feeling of isolation and the lack of combat mechanics.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Althought another subtly spooky idea I can see myself throwing in there would be to occassionally slip in some unsettling but mechanically plausible tables that the mechanics never explicitly ask you to roll on and are never referenced by anything else.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Like e.g. I imagine something like a "Reaction following accidental eye contact" table, but there's no explicit indication for when a roll on this table would ever be triggered, or even that it can ever be triggered at all.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Maybe also I would do the same with modifiers. Like having an otherwise normal table have a footnote like "add 5 to the roll if the Explorer is being followed" but there exists no explicit reference to the state of "being followed" anywhere else in the game mechanics.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

So I guess after thinking it through on these reblogs, my answer would be that like. I would probably want it to be spookie dookie to play but the spookiness should exist primarily in the rules text as an artifcat, and not in the actual events happening inside the fiction of the game. Like the rules themselves would feel creepy but following them would result in a pretty standard (although extremely convoluted and cumbersome) dungeon crawl experience from an in-game perspective

[imsobadatnicknames2]

One of my longest-standing "maybe someday" projects has always been trying to make an as-faithful-as-possible recreation of the titular ttrpg from one of my favorite modern creepypastas, Escape from Terminus.

I haven't really given it much thought beyond the "I wanna do this someday" level until recently, but I kinda have some ideas about it.

The end result would be more of an art-project than an actual thing you'd probably want to olay, it should be playable but it's explicitly meant to be an extremely archaic ttrpg from 1965 and The text explicitly mentions that Rolemaster was a "simpler" game to play by comparison (although this might be a tongue-in-cheek remark from our point-of-view character and not completely literal) so it should be overcomplicated, overengineered, and extremely cumbersome to actually play.

It should also eschew not only modern design sensibilities, but also a lot of *traditional* design sensibilities. Since it's supposed to be a game that predates the original edition of D&D by almost a decade, any concepts invented by D&D should be either entirely absent (preferrable), or visibly independently invented from first principles.

It should be almost entirely table-driven, with most actions resolved by rolling on a table, and probably with most tables directing you to a different table. The text explicitly mentions "hundreds" of tables modified by bonuses from everything from surrounding rooms to recent player actions, so that's going to be fun to figure out.

The creepypasta mentions that the game uses a 6d7 roll plus a coin flip to generate results with an "inverted bell curve" probability distribution. My first idea for this was something like rolling a 6d7 and flipping a coin, on heads keep the highest result, on tails keep the lowest result, but I realized this was probably going to be hard to work with, because it would result in the roll *very rarely* showing anything other than 1 or 7, and a probability space of 1-7 is kind of limiting for a table-driven game. So my idea rn is doing the same but instead keeping the 3 highest or 3 lowest dice depending ok the coin flip, with maybe some special effects for special results such as matching numbers (1 1 1, 2 2 2, etc.) and consecutive numbers (e.g. 1 2 3)

The thing that I think is going to be hardest to pull off is the spawning of the "exit hex", the story explicitly mentions that there are strategies for maximizing the chance of generating it, but that the reason no one has been able to do it is because any attempt to optimize for it also increases the chance of intervention from a sabotaging presence that the game's play culture has collectively personified (and probably unintentionally brought into existence by themselves through decades of houserules) as "the minotaur".

This necesitates that 1) the chance of spawning the exit hex is influenced by a complex web of factors affected by player actions, and 2) that the same web of factors also influences the "minotaur"'s activity.

Idk just putting some ideas down, probably a project that would take me a few years if I actually decided to commit to it, but I'm at least trying to outline the shape of what I'm aiming for.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Tables should probably have overly technical names such as "Ceiling integrity index", "Internal obstruction matrix", "Door hinge noise severity" or "Footwear degradation speed"

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Actually if anyone's got ideas for table titles that would be fun. The higher grade of implied needless granularity the better. Shit like "vermin migration table" or "light source reliability" or "writing instrument failure" or "mold growth severity" or "water contamination index"

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Another thing about the "actions that optimize for spawning the exit hex also increase minotaur activity" part is that, if I'm aiming for accuracy, this connection would need to be achieved through some obscure and roundabout means (e.g. not simply through stacking modifiers that add to the chance of both things) because it textually took the playerbase years to figure out there was a statistical link between the two things.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

A couple thoughts on the creepypasta itself that I've had for a couple years. The author has noted in the discussion section that the "Once you died" and "before the last player vanished in 2008" lines are meant to be taken literally to imply a "if you die in the game you die in real life" thing, but I actually think the whole thing is more interesting without that idea.

Both because if that was meant to be the case I find it hard to believe that the pov character wouldn't be more explicit about the most directly paranormal aspect of the whole thing, because I think that's kind of a cliché sp00ky twist that very rarely comes off as anything other than extremely silly, and because I think that "there's a hostile presence inside this game that was not part of the original rules, makes the game essentially unwinnable, and no one really knows where it came from because the full text of the original release is essentially lost media and the versions people play nowadays have been filtered through decades of reconstructions of missing mechanics and houserules being mistaken for part of the original text" is an interesting and unnerving enough premise on its own.

[paradoxius]

The first thing that comes to mind for how the connection between the exit and the minotaur could be obscured is that if most tables call other tables, rolling the exit hex might require hitting a particular path through the hex-generation tables (or one of several) and near-misses on that path could be filled with "minotaur" effects. This could even entail parallel paths that would further obscure the connection.

E.g. to get the exit you might need to roll a 24 on the Primary Hex Generation Table, which takes you to Hex Generation Sub-table x on which you need to roll a 19 to get to the infamous d777 Special Hex Table (which gives you an unmodified 1-in-343 chance of getting the exit). In order to maximize your odds of getting a 24 on the PHGT and then a 19 on HGS-T x, you need to get as far from the entrance as you can, collect a trinket from each hex-row you've visited, play a reed pipe before you open the door, etc.

But if you get a 23 on the PHGT, you go to HGS-T w, which is likely to lead to a trapped hex if you're far enough from the entrance. And if you roll a 17 or a 11, you go to HGS-T q or k respectively, which both have rooms with a chance of being dead-ends because of a locked door or blockaded passage—more likely every time you collect a trinket. And if you roll a 28 you go to HGS-T β, which is pretty safe—unless there's food scarcity in too many map sectors, in which case it's likely to generate a hex with a frayed rope bridge over a deadly chasm or with every surface covered in broken glass. And of course each time you play the reed flute, there's a small chance to increase Rodent Disturbance in that sector, which increases the likelihood of generating food scarcity when you roll on the Vermin Migration Table you mentioned.

You know, that sort of thing.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Okay that's badass. Writing that down hell yeah.

[impossiblepackage]

you could use the inverted bell curve it mentions to your advantage here. some of those deeper tables could have "helps exit generation" results more common in the middle and "minotaur shit" results more common on either end. you can obfuscate that by having things that cause the minotaur be pretty esoteric and nonsensical but conveniently are also things that make the minotaur more fun. what that means exactly depends on the design and implementation of the minotaur. rough example: increased rodent disturbance leading to more food scarcity due to vermin migration makes it more likely to generate a Failed Hunting Party which can generate an Empty Kitchen which has a chance of generating a Lifeless Tavern (Cannibal) which increases the odds of the minotaur spawning, and the Empty Kitchen conveniently has a bunch of cupboards and pantries and counters to hide in or behind. If you're really lucky, you might roll Failed Hunting Party (Betrayal), where the hunting party failed because they fought over some random unimportant bit of treasure, which wouldn't matter at all except for how finding that specific Failed Hunting Party variant makes it more likely for one of the exit's prerequisite rooms to generate. The cannibal tavern can be something that generates on the upper or lower end of the distribution, and the betrayal hunting party can be something that generates on the center of the distribution. and just fill it with shit like this.

although. my conception here is probably a bit difficult to manage with the player physically rolling tables. wouldn't be too crazy to have a system of rolling on a bunch of tables to generate the dungeon as you go, but doing that in a way that prevents the player from just looking through the tables to find what generates the exit is the hard part. obvious answer there is that it could be a game with a GM. but that's a bit of a standard design convention, so i have a second proposal:

Take all the duties normally assigned to a GM and distribute those duties between several players. I don't mean "you run the monsters, i'll roll the tables, you play the NPCs" type shit. I mean like "you own this batch of tables, i own this batch of tables, you own this batch." each facet of GM stuff gets divided between all the players, so that no one person is always in charge of the same sort of thing. in a fight, the players are playing both their characters and a monster each sorta thing. when it comes to tables, i think you could maybe even let each table have its own rules for what about that table is and isn't allowed to be shared with the other players.

another idea is copying the NPC emotions and roles system from Exanima. in that video game every npc has a current emotional state and a bunch of 'roles' assigned to them, both of which effect each other. the roles come together to dictate behavior. its conceptually pretty flexible. roles can be pretty simple or they can be more complex. so you could, in theory, have NPC behavior be entirely dictated through a series of enormous tables where various roles determine where 1 on that table starts. or maybe just add or subtract from your final result but they often have really big numbers so like a d100 table has results going all the way to 1264 or something. For example, in the Combat Decision Matrix (Ready) (ready being their current dominant emotional state), the lower end of results could have stuff like "flee" and "avoid the fray" be more common, and the NPC role "Coward" lowers your result on the CDM(R) table by some amount. But if that NPC also has the Knight role, maybe that increases the result, so that NPC usually winds up with results that show a more average amount of bravery.

maybe that's a bit much. that specific idea would require a lot of tables, but something in the general vein could be the move. You could even tie various roles into other tables in some way, even roles that normally wouldn't really impact much of anything but they still have just so that those roles can be used for other tables.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Much to consider here. I really like the main gist of what you're putting down, and I had something similar in mind to use the uniqueness of the probability distribution to my advantage. Not exactly the same things you're proposing ofc, bc I'm still not sure if I want the minotaur itself to actually ever *show up* as a thing the player may encounter instead of being an implied presence sabotaging the player from the sidelines, and I'm not sure if I want to have NPCs either, since the source material implies the game itself is kind of an extremely lonely survival experience.

I do want to say that things such as "being difficult to manage with the player physically rolling" or "requiring way too many tables" are not dealbreakers for me for any idea I might implement in this project, I'm walking into it with the idea that the end result of this project won't be anything other than *very* intentionally cumbersome to play, and I fully intend to take the "several hundred reference tables" part of the source material extremely literally (to the extent that, rather than having any centralized resolution mechanic, I intend for any action the player character might attempt to be resolved through its own specific dedicated table).

Tho if I wanted to make a version that's actually like. Playable in a more frictionless and unencumbered way I'd probably at some point automate all tables in the game using something like Chartopia (I already have some experience with this, since the dungeon and hexcrawl generators I set up for my other project are already an exercise in Automating A Complex System Of Procedures and Interlinked Tables. So once I have the tables written down for Terminus it would just be doing the same thing I did for those generators but with hundreds of tables instead of dozens)

[impossiblepackage]

i think the hardest part of managing all these interconnected tables is less the rolling itself and is really gonna be keeping track of all the variables that might send you to different tables based on what you’ve done previously.

as far as the NPC thing goes, the roles thing i was talking about can be applied to anything which make decisions, not just traditional humanoid NPCs. you could have like a wolf with the a series of roles defining its behavior. hypothetically its list of roles could be something like Canine, Tracker, Predator, Cooperative, Starving, and Injured. some of those impacting the way it rolls on tables, some of those giving it access to new tables to roll on. you may not necessarily want to have things like animals and monsters, either, in which case i’ll eat shit, but yeah.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

I definitely want there to be Creatures at the very least, and this is definitely not a bad way to handle it. The one thing I wouldn't want to do with creatures would be an explicit combat system (both because the lack of such is explicitly noted in the source material, and because even if it wasn't explicitly mentioned, I don't really think this kind of extremely archaic early survival ttrpg would have a set of standardized combat procedures). I probably would make it so that any situation where a violent confrontation is unavoidable automatically results in the death of the player character, but your procedures are a solid idea for how to handle things *before* they get to that point :p

[shinolavolume1-deactivated20240]

Dragonball: Evolution (2009) BEST SCENE

[ntrider]

Hello miss ntrose, girlfriend and I are both huge fans of your posts. We were first hiding it from each other for understandable reasons but she caught me a while ago scrolling your blog. One thing led to another, we decided to include you in some way but because we don't know what you look like we got a lego mclaren from ebay tht we keep in the bedroom till we actually fuck then we lock it outside. I just thought you'd want to know. Keep it up!

😦

[innumerable-voices]

About a week ago we found a 5cm (2 inch) tumor in the motor cortex of my eldest child's brain

It's almost certainly benign and it is operable, we have a surgery booked in for a couple of weeks from now, but it's a miserable time and they've lost a lot of their mobility and can't do much for themselves any more

We also have reasonable health care so it's not like we're now hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, but the three adults took a week off work each, we spent a few hundred on a wheel chair, a couple hundred on a walker, a couple hundred on other mobility aids, a couple hundred on takeout because the hospital is a few hours from home, a couple hundred on fucking parking, and so on. And we have to do it all again in a couple of weeks.

Which adds up to a huge hole in our normally fairly stable budget

I want to be clear that we probably don't need help, we can probably call in enough favours, eat two minute noodles for a few days, maybe borrow money to make rent, we could survive. But it's just another wildly stressful thing that we don't need whilst trying to support our newly disabled child and help them through the worst few weeks of their life

So if you can help, if you want to help, we would really appreciate it

Support Miss Innumerable

[my-life-is-a-sidequest]

Dear people who think they can spread hate Campaigns through me, please stop

[straightboyfriend]

if it’s your birthday: happy birthday

if it’s not your birthday: reflect on why that is. 👆🏽

[oleskyfm]