VAT! VAT! VAT! VAT!

The home of Vat, a TTRPG created out of pond scum, internet flotsam, and monkey DNA by Clav.

[vatrpg]

Hey hey, people. I'm still alive and I'm still cooking. I've been in a bit of a low energy malaise this past week or so but it's possibly looking up. My summer semester is almost over and, while there were quite a few rough spots due to the material circumstances at play, we're good we're solid. Vat writing has continued! I touched up a nation or two and wrote quite a few subcultures and movements present in the world. That's the brand new setting stuff, at least. I also did a bit of reformatting and such for AEIC to try to establish some concepts that I want to be present that I forgot about at first. Mainly the whole fact that the expedition the players form in AEIC have a whole building full of support staff on hand and available over the radio that can answer questions and such. Otherwise... eh, I don't have anything funny to say today. I'm still slumped. Shit's continuing and that's all that matters.

[vatrpg]

There's a legend, in the backwoods of Bor. Tales of a dark spirit, a being so chill that it could hang out with even the most dastardly of devils. They say his name is... Clav...

[vatrpg]

I'm like hey, what's up, hello. Crawling out of the yucky catacomb I've acquired as a home to give a Vat update. Module writing is HARD. So, I am solidly over half way with the rough draft of every event and encounter for this module. It took a toll on me, being a fairly tedious task - even if I enjoy it. So I am taking a brief break from writing that specific part of the game. Instead, I'm taking the time to once more revisit previous parts of the game I skipped over, primarily of which being module-specific items. I'm also covering some more parts of the world compendium to more fully flesh out that document.

Notably, I finished the first draft of the Borg part of the section covering cultural/counter-cultural movements around the setting. Behold! A teaser!

Ain't that just awesome? Anyways. These last few weeks were mainly me going through a bit of a mental rut as my summer semester started to establish itself in my routine. Things should be solid and stable and consistent now, but there was definitely a bit of an overall mess there for me for a bit. It has, probably, been rectified. One of Vat's aesthetic touchstones is the Zeno Clash series, and I've been continuing my play-through of the first game in that series after having left off of playing it for like exactly a year. Fun game! a bit jank, but I enjoy it. It's just so nice to look at to me. That's it for now. I think my computer tower is trying to crawl away so I have to go catch and reprimand it.

[tinytablepodcast]

Tiny Table Q&A Part 1: Clutch

Smallest Salutations and welcome Matthew Bradford to the pod! Listen in as we interview Matthew about Clutch in its current alpha form. From looking at where inspirations for Clutch failed to how Matthew balances Weird West and gritty realism, we dig right in in this Q&A! And check out even more juicy questions on our Patreon for part 2!

Listen now!

Check out Matthew Bradford's work here: https://linktr.ee/mattbradford 

Shoutouts from the episode:

Friends and fellow designers https://rox1000000.bandcamp.com/ https://sapphic-flesh.itch.io/ https://crossbladettrpg.tumblr.com/?source=share https://www.tumblr.com/vatrpg?source=share https://rox-wilson.itch.io/

Artists that have worked on Clutch https://www.instagram.com/renzrol/ https://linktr.ee/stickerbugs https://bsky.app/profile/roxonemillion.bsky.social https://squidd1e.tumblr.com/?source=share

As always, if you have any TTRPGs you want us to try out, please email us at [email protected] or contact us at any of the socials below!

[hypothetical-karma]

This interview was a lot of fun. Though fun fact! I was very anemic when recording and I had to go the hospital not 48 hours later. I fucking love having an autoimmune disorder.

[vatrpg]

Check it out. A friend got interviewed and this blog got mentioned. That's cool. Check out Clutch btw it's fun.

[vatrpg]

I haven't made a post in a bit. This is because... I don't really have much to post about! I'm alive, I'm still writing, I'm still kicking. As of right now I have the first draft of 19 out of the distinct 43 Event Hex Sections written. Each section has 3 to 5 actual events going on in there, from actual encounters to just weird things that might be on the battlemap during encounters. I try to write about one of these sections a day, maybe two sections if I have the energy/drive/inspiration. There's a lot of randomization because I think it's fun and will add a lot to the end product. It's just Tedious, even if I do still find it enjoyable. I have a lot of stuff downloaded to watch while I write which makes it easier. The wonders of a second monitor. By "first draft" I mean, like, the bulk of what's going on and what each distinct event IS. No additional tables or outlined additional items or NPCs, but places for those to go and bits reminding myself what will actually be there when I add those in the second go-through of them.

Otherwise... my summer semester has started. It probably won't impact things too much going forwards, all of my classes I take are either in the morning before I even eat something or online. So. Work continues! I planned even on taking a break today from writing, doing some miniature painting instead, but I started writing this blog post and realized yeah I probably can hammer out a few things. That's all for now. See ya'll next time, live from the primordial soup.

[vatrpg]

I'M FUCKING BACK! REJOICE! ALL HAIL! It feels so good to be back. My routine, restored...

[vatrpg]

Dark greetings, my friends! I come to you from the tail-end of the semester, within the dank and fetid pits known as "Finals Season". I've been taking a light break, and will be taking a much heavier break soon. During this light break, I haven't been focusing on new content and module work. Instead, I've been going throw older writings. Rewriting and revamping some aspects, such as the general layout of the worldbuilding book, as well as tweaking the Conditions system to be a bit more robust. The last thing I plan on doing before the soon-to-arrive week and a half where I will be away from home and incapable of doing any writing whatsoever is going through the items and making sure they all are updated to use the new conditions. Dev work has been light, for obvious reasons. When I get back from that break I'll be able to lock in a bit more, but it'll really only be another week and a half of totally free time before my SUMMER COURSES start. Thankfully that'll be a fairly light load. That's all for now! Just a message to say I'm still alive, just taking it easy. I also have another drawing for you all of the Clavsona in generally fitting attire for the setting.

Of course now that I look back at this picture I think I could've made some edits to make it more up to snuff, but. Such is the woe of any creative endeavor ever.

[vatrpg]

So it turns out I went ahead and updated the items to fall in line with current rulings bc I was bored. This often happens. I will go "yeah. You know what, I'm going to take the day off from working on Vat" and then I get bored and go "you know what I should do? I should work on Vat." And then I do it.

[vatrpg]

Dark greetings, my friends! I come to you from the tail-end of the semester, within the dank and fetid pits known as "Finals Season". I've been taking a light break, and will be taking a much heavier break soon. During this light break, I haven't been focusing on new content and module work. Instead, I've been going throw older writings. Rewriting and revamping some aspects, such as the general layout of the worldbuilding book, as well as tweaking the Conditions system to be a bit more robust. The last thing I plan on doing before the soon-to-arrive week and a half where I will be away from home and incapable of doing any writing whatsoever is going through the items and making sure they all are updated to use the new conditions. Dev work has been light, for obvious reasons. When I get back from that break I'll be able to lock in a bit more, but it'll really only be another week and a half of totally free time before my SUMMER COURSES start. Thankfully that'll be a fairly light load. That's all for now! Just a message to say I'm still alive, just taking it easy. I also have another drawing for you all of the Clavsona in generally fitting attire for the setting.

Of course now that I look back at this picture I think I could've made some edits to make it more up to snuff, but. Such is the woe of any creative endeavor ever.

[vatrpg]

Dark greetings. This isn't really an update post or a progress post. I'm working on it, got to a section where I was actually able to figure out the exact progress and whatnot for what I needed to do to finish it and my eyes went wide, you know how it is. So, I got paid today. Decided to treat myself, try to find a video game (preferably on sale) that would vibe with me. Didn't have much luck - most of the games I've been eyeing simply aren't out yet, and if they are out they aren't within my budget or I don't have a good enough GPU. I just recently did a VERY significant upgrade on my CPU, but my GPU's model is still like decade old (I made it in high-school and it wasn't even cutting edge for its time). So. But I wanted to talk about the ideal Clavgame, and how that mirrors what I am doing with Vat and my long-term plans with Vat. I like the idea of simulator games. Just doing a relatively mundane thing in a game. Powerwashing, trucking, whatever. But the thing that doesn't vibe with me is it's all relatively normal with the setting. Normal trucking. Normal powerwashing. That, specifically, is what makes me uninterested. I really love the idea of doing something mundane in a fantastical setting, and seeing how that fantastical setting changes what the mundane is. The main game that I can say solidly does this to my satisfaction is the demo I played for the unreleased game "The Lift: Supernatural Handyman Simulator". An Exercise In Caution, the module I'm currently working on, is... sort of this. It's not built around it from the ground up, but it is inspired through being set in the world I'm building for Vat. Of a world that has fantastical things but also has a lot of mundanity (apparently not a word but you get it) to it. It's not the focus mainly because I want AEIC to be THE starter module, and thus containing as much of the breadth of mechanics in it as possible. Something that contains everything in it necessary to just be able to pick it up and play it while also solidly covering everything in Vat. It's why it's taking so long. There's a lot for me to do to have it up to my standards. But the next module I want to write, once AEIC is out and playable and Vat is something that people can easily access and download, is something with this focus on the mundane inside the fantastical. Current idea in four words - cargo ship point crawl. One thing I like about a lot of OSR games is the logistics of it all. Of figuring out what your characters can carry, what they can carry feasibly, managing their supplies, all that.

[vatrpg]

Dark greetings... I live! Work continues, as always. I've been coming up with the general ideas for each important place's hidden events and secret events, as well as generally just doing a LOT of formatting. Making the tables and such so all future writing I'll have to do has a solid categorization foundation. It hasn't ALL been module work. I've been revisiting and revising certain parts of the core rulebook. Item durability has always been something in the back of my mind, but I was having trouble figuring out a way to make it easy to track and, you know, slick. I finally figured it out. It's very important to the module, even.

I've also revised one (1) of the character creation options to be a bit more in-line with the setting's tone as I consider it. The Servant origin is now the Borg origin, and the part of the Servant origin I enjoyed has been made a unique item in the catalogs. My college's spring break begins, like, tomorrow. An entire week off! At my old college it was just 2 or so days, so I appreciate this one more. On one hand, that means more time to write Vat. On the other hand, not really, because I still have a (thankfully dwindling) backlog of classwork I need to sort through and finish. My work pace is slower compared to a lot of my fellow indie freaks, but at least I keep my pace consistent. Something about turtles and hares? Idk. It don't matter. Vat continues. Vat always continues. The question remains - how the fuck do you write satisfying weather rules for a hexcrawl? We'll figure it out. I stand on the shoulders of giants. Ok I'm going back to my slime pod and hopping back onto the neuro-sphere. Or something like that. Next major blog post comes whenever I feel like it, as is tradition.

[vatrpg]

I should probably write up a new pinned post. It’s, what, a year old now? Two years, even, since I wrote the current one? I know a lot more about what I want out of Vat now, and I also know how to present it better than I did then. Something to think about.

[vatrpg]

Dark greetings... So, remember when I said I quit my job? Yeah, I've been mainly working through that backlog of classwork I missed, but I have been doing some work on the module as well. Reworking the encounters table I have, about to write even more encounter tables. It's a lot of work! I've split the main terrain hexes into distinct different day/night encounters, though I don't plan on doing that with the unique location tiles.

Also, on recommendation of a friend, I've been rewriting and revamping the beginning section of the core book. Specifically - TOUCHSTONES! Originally it was just, like, a list. Just a list, no explanation. Well, that's getting expanding massively, with me now going into the specific WHY of why these are chosen as touchstones and inspirations. It's a lot more work, but I'll never pass up an opportunity to talk about things I enjoy.

That's all for now. Realized I haven't posted much lately, and I wanted to rectify that. No teasers rn, but maybe next post? Whenever that will be?

[vatrpg]

Quit my job bc they wouldn't work with me regarding my schedule and I was falling behind my classes due to it so. We get back to writhing more often ig?

[vatrpg]

Dark greetings... It turns out employment, even part time employment, does in fact take energy and time and mental bandwidth. So. My hubris has come to bite me in the ass. Progress continues! Progress ALWAYS continues! But it's a lot slower than I would like it to be :(

[vatrpg]

Dark greetings... This is a sort of spur-of-the-moment blog post and update. I live in the southeast united states, and guess what! Scary as fuck ice storm is going to hit us this weekend. So I thought I might as well get something out before that hits, because if I don't, who knows when I'll be able to reasonably get something out next. With that being said - I have made a playable placeholder hex map for AEIC. We'll see if I need to make any changes to it after a bit of playtesting, but the tileset I think really gets the vibe across that I wanted it to have.

The purple here represents the fucked up and evil fungus jungle of the area, with the green being a river. Orange marks the Boundary - the fuckhuge manned wall making sure the scary doesn't escape. The red pips are locations of interest, the objectives of the party's expedition. I've started writing the actual keys for the hex, though only the basic jungle tile has been fully written. I wanted to get more done, but you know how it is. N e ways. Until next time...

[vatrpg]

Dark greetings. I think I comfortably have every tile made necessary for the hex map! I made a few test maps to see what needed to be changed for readability, and now? All that's necessary is saving each tile independently for purposes of use in hexkit. I, uh, accidentally deleted the first folder I was part-ways through doing this for, so I gotta start all over. I'll do that tomorrow... probably... Either way, I think the style I accomplished here is basically the exact style I wanted. I'm comfortable with it and can't wait to start making the actual map in earnest. And then once that's made, we get to writing the encounter tables and specifics of the hexes and what-have-you. Otherwise... as of the day of writing this, I finally have some sort of job! I'm no longer unemployed! I have a source of INCOME! This is Good News. Honestly it's unlikely to impact my pace of development too much, even as I've also started my semester back as of two days ago. That's all for now. The next update should contain the map, or at least some sort of sneak peak at the hexmap.

[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...