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When we reach 21%, we will fund our first milestone: front and back covers illustrated by Roque Romero. We ask for your support to fund all our milestones and reach the goal of our solidarity Spanish edition of Liminal Horror RPG by Goblin Archives!

Al 21%, financiaremos nuestro primer hito: portada y contraportada ilustradas por Roque Romero ¡Pedimos apoyo para financiar todos nuestros hitos y alcanzar la meta de nuestra edición solidaria en español de Liminal Horror RPG!

#rolentuidioma

#ttrpg #rolenespañol #rpglatam #tabletop rpg #ttrpg dev #indie ttrpgs #ttrpg community #rolentuidioma

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Hello people! I'm La esquina del rol. I'm a small publisher behind the Spanish solidarity editions of Cairn, Fallen, Firelights, Skyrealms, Beetle Knight Quickstart and many SRDs you can download at itchio.

Our next project is Spanish edition of Liminal Horror RPG a modern cosmic horror game written by Goblin Archives. Therefore, we want to raise funding to be able to pay Roque Romero for the art commissions (cover and interior art) and also acknowledge the editing/layout work of our volunteer contributors.

Unlike other crowdfunding, which you may be familiar with, we are not conditioning the final product on whether or not we reach our goal. The core rulebook will be released in PDF for free and your contributions will pay for the cover/editing and then include interior artwork.

Right now we are using the Ko-fi of La esquina del rol to collect donations, this allows us to have the cash immediately the day after your donation and to be able to make the corresponding payments. We are very close to reach our first milestone (21%): new original cover of the game.

We ask for your support to reach our goal.

#ttrpg #rolenespañol #crowdfunding #rpglatam

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🚨 Nuevo post del blog 🚨

Riftwalkers: Crónicas de los guardianes del Nexo (edición baterías no incluidas) de @deathdieclub.bsky.social

#rolentuidioma

#rolenespañol #ttrpg #rolentuidioma #rpglatam #ttrpg community

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How to do "old-school" rpg design.

Dungeon Crawl Classics is a gonzo bundle of extremes. It’s a speeding train of disco balls and kerosene—the Nic Cage of RPGs. You can’t look away, and you shouldn’t, because it’s doing something special. DCC is great. That's news to me because it has every oof-inducing visual design error you can imagine on its pages. As a designhead, that's hard to look past. But here's the truth: DCC does it for a reason, and it might actually make it the king of pulp fantasy rpgs. If you like Dungeons & Dragons, if Stranger Things, Freaks & Geeks, make you yearn. (Yeah, I used that word.) Go get yourself a copy and read it. And for a quick shot of this funky, musty rpg, read my blog/newsletter/design delve where I go off the rails talking about Werner Herzog, polyhedrons, and funhouse mirrors.

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🔥 This solo friendly game is in the wild!!! 🔥

#ttrpg community #ttrpgs #ttrpg #rolensolitario #solorpg #indie ttrpg

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Recommendations: Books about RPGs

I’m always trying to level up my RPG knowledge and this has led me to look for books about RPGs. And there don’t seem to be that many! There are some academic books but while they have their strengths, easy reading isn’t one of them. Even as I wrestle with these academic texts (and I will emerge victorious), here are some books that are both interesting and fun to read:

Play Unsafe and Stealing Cthulhu by Graham Walmsley

Play Unsafe is a book of RPG advice. It’s a quick read (quicker than its 82 pages would suggest) and has some really gentle, grounded advice. For example:

If, while gaming, you can’t be clever or try hard, what can you do? The answer is: be obvious. Do the obvious thing: the thing that obviously happens next in the story; the thing that you think everyone expects to happen. Paradoxically, that obvious thing may, to everyone else , seem original and brilliant.

Stealing Cthulhu, by the same author, is about how to take inspiration from the stories of HP Lovecraft in a way that makes your own cosmic horror games feel fresh and unique.

Age of Ravens: Vol 1 and Vol 2 by Lowell Francis

These are two collections of various essays originally published on the Age of Ravens blog, formatted for easy reading. They’re essentially a greatest hits collection and do a good job of that. Volume I: Running has some of my favourite articles about running conspiracies, one shots, online games, and more. Volume II: Tools is mostly resources for play: story seeds and ideas to drop into your game whether sci-fi heists or apocalyptic hexcrawls. They aren’t connected by theme so you mostly can just dip in and out of them.

Unchained Mysteries by Jessie Burneko

Unchained Mysteries is a passionate call to ditch clue-based mystery design. Instead, the book proposes coming up with much more richly-layered scenarios where the players are drawn into a crime or crisis with no easy solution, where the players are caught up in a web of NPCs who are actively dealing with the situation, rather than passively waiting for someone to solve their problems. It ends up at around 100 pages so there’s real meat there if you want to engage with it.

The entire Knutepunkt line

Knutepunkt is one of the biggest larp events in the world - half conference, half festival, full of larps and talks and so on. Since 2001, they’ve been publishing books with essays (some more academic than others) about larp. They’re very well-respected. And as Evan Torner explained to me, if you’re not interested in larp, you can just mentally replace the word larp with TTRPG and still get lot out of these books. I’m nowhere close to finishing them but felt like I had to share them anyway. (Thanks to reader Mo, here’s the link to the books.)

The Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide by James D’Amato

I have not finished this yet either but I can already tell the voice of the Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide should resonate with newer players who don’t have a lot of set ideas about RPGs already. The author is the founder of the One Shot podcast network and clearly has a philosophy of play. For example, the first chapter is titled “Understanding Audience” and basically uses the idea that everyone has preferences in what they consume (books, moves, etc) to segue into the idea that RPGs emerge out of everyone’s shared preferences. It’s an interesting approach and if you want to know more, there’s a nice review here.

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Hey folks,

the pre-launch KS page of OUTER RIM: UPRISING is live! ORU is a bundle for the sci-fi survival horror RPG Mothership. The bundle is packed with 15+ 100% original entries from seasoned indie Mothership designers. All items are 1 Edition (which means the new one!) compatible. Below is some info on the bundle and pics of some entries.

OrU builds a huge setting, at the fringes of the galaxy, where corrupt corps fight rebel factions. Each item of the bundle can be used independently, but the items are also tied together by a common implied setting, sharing NPCs, story lines etc. A Campaign Handbook acts as the connective tissue of the bundle: adding factions, procedures, locations etc.

Half of the bundle items are written in a system neutral way, and can be used with any RPG.

We've just ignited the pre-launch page here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thelostbay/outer-rim-uprising, if you dig the project give it a follow, as indie publishers it means a hell of lot to receive the community support.

About this, if you are a blogger, streamer, podcaster and want to talk about this, see drafts or organize an actual play please reach out we'd be happy to help.

Below are some details on a couple of entries, they are sick!

The Hunger in Achernar, zine by D. Kenny (designer of Nirvana on fire)

Survive the void-haunted halls of a cursed derelict; solve the mystery of a missing ship, an experimental hyperdrive test, and a cultist plot; or save the galaxy from a taint leaking through a crack in the universe. Choose one in “The Hunger in Achernar”, a MOTHERSHIP RPG adventure.

BLINK, zine by David Blandy (designer of Eco MOFOS!)

In this short guide to faster-than-light travel, we’ll show you how to bring the mind-bending possibilities of instantaneous jumping between two distant points in space to your game.

Rusted to the Core, zine by Chris Airiau

The androids on Poe-V Station are on strike. Descend through the gas giant’s toxic clouds to uncover how the source of this disruption goes deeper than worker mistreatment. A faction-based adventure.

Surviving Machine parts, zine by Zach Hazard Vaupen

Out in the fringes of the system, a type of cybernetic implants called Machine Parts are popular with those who are savvy enough to find and afford them. Commonly made with recalled corpo tech and stolen military/alien technology, these implants are highly illegal and especially dangerous. This document covers 12 different Machine Parts and their consequences. Can you survive Machine Parts?

Sentience Assessment Procedure, player facing accessory, by Nyhur (Alien Armory) and IKO

SAP cutting-edge, neuro-semantic analysis technology allows management, officials, and security personnel to perform human/android triage effectively. SAP toolkit is portable, works in any-G environment, and can also be performed remotely.

Outer Rim: Uprising Campaign Handbook, zine by all the designers of the bundle

The connective tissue of the bundle

I'll stop here :) that's roughly one third of the items included in the bundle, I'll share more info in the next few weeks

Give it a follow here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thelostbay/outer-rim-uprising

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Some extraterrestrial nautical scenes I made for the Mothership module THE OCEANS ARE ENDLESS ON MERIDIAN. https://mysteryspice.itch.io/the-oceans-are-endless-on-meridian

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Dino Goons is a Tunnel Goons hack (shocking, I know!) about playing intelligent dinos on a planet terraformed by Earth scientists who then disappeared. In the millennia since, the dinos have formed languages and societies, and it is an age of adventure and exploration for those who seek excitement!

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He actualizado los archivos a la versión 0.2, luego de detectar erratas. Pueden descargar los nuevos archivos en el mismo enlace

¡Playtest de procedimientos de Cairn 2ed!

¡A por tu copia gratuita de los procedimientos de exploración de mazmorras y entornos salvajes de Cairn segunda edición en español de Yochai Gal

¡Sé parte del playtest de esta segunda edición en tu propio idioma!

#rolentuidioma #ttrpg #rolenespañol #rpglatam #indie ttrpg #ttrpg community

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Available Now!

Giant hamsters have appeared in Willowdale!

Their flowing, shining coats tell of pampered creatures on a rich diet full of keratin. However, the townspeople are terrified and have no clue where these creatures came from or why they are here. 

Children ride them like ponies as they devour all the flowers, and uproot Ol’ Harold’s pristine lawn he has manicured to perfection over seventy years. The roads through town are impassable as they bask in the streets. Poor Edna was even trampled by their dainty paws while shooing a group off her porch with a washrag and is still in the hospital.

That's when you, the president of the local book club, and self proclaimed gumshoe, knew exactly who to call for help.

Three himbos with courage as big as their muscles.

Big Thighs, Big Arms, and Big Heart may not be the brightest bulbs in the box, but they sure know how to make things happen. Paired with your deductive reasoning and strong sense of plot cliches, the four of you embark on the investigation of a lifetime across Willowdale to uncover clues and discover the truth behind the giant hamsters.

A Hints and Hijinx mystery!

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Esto realmente parece interesante 👀

The preview for Carved by the Garden is out now!

Carved by the Garden is a forthcoming solo journaling game inspired by folk horror stories like The Witch, The Ritual, Midsommar, and those found in Damnable Tales: A Folk Horror Anthology. Featuring a sprawling forest as a backdrop, Carved by the Garden blends self-reflecting questions with unsettling and often bloody discoveries. 

Learn more and download the preview! 👇

#rolensolitario #solorpg #journalingrpg

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¡Hoy inició el primer gran evento de rol en mí país (mx)! En esta ocasión no pude estar presente por cuestiones laborales, pero me fascina saber que el movimiento está creciendo. ¡A por más!

#rolentuidioma #rolenespañol #ttrpg #rpglatam #ttrpg community

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¡Playtest de procedimientos de Cairn 2ed!

¡A por tu copia gratuita de los procedimientos de exploración de mazmorras y entornos salvajes de Cairn segunda edición en español de Yochai Gal

¡Sé parte del playtest de esta segunda edición en tu propio idioma!

#ttrpg #rolenespañol #rolentuidioma #rpglatam #indie ttrpg #ttrpg community

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What Is A Cinematic TTRPG?

(Originally published on the Indie RPG Newsletter)

So let’s talk about the term “cinematic” when it comes to roleplaying games. It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot and I’m not sure I’ve read someone actually explaining what they mean by that. So I’m going to try and explain what I think the term cinematic should mean when it comes to TTRPGs.

Now this isn’t something I normally do. Normally, I am a kind of descriptivist - I just try to describe what other people mean when they use a word. But in this situation, I’m going to be more of a prescriptivist and propose what I think this word should mean.

The first thing to note is that the meaning cannot actually be too specific. Cinema isn’t one thing. So when we say “cinematic”, we usually mean a specific type of cinema - which you might have to deduce from context. Someone can describe their game as cinematic and mean “Hollywood action movies in the 2000s” and someone else could describe their game as cinematic and mean “like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings”.

Okay, to me, when I describe a game as cinematic, I mean that:

the shared imaginary space (the thing we are all imagining in our heads) looks and operates like a movie of appropriate genre

the speed of the game can be compared to the speed of those same events in movies

So by point one, I mean that cinematic games are ones that lean on the look and feel of movies as you play them. Players might frame and imagine the game as a movie - describing camera angles and so on. (“The camera cuts away to reveal…”) They might also expect the game to feel like a movie in terms of logic. Like in a cinematic action game, we might expect action movie logic, i.e., the hero can only get flesh wounds from no-name bad guys. Or hey, maybe, in this game, you can leap a car off a building into another building. Or smash a helicopter with a car. Or take a car into space?!Are we doing Fast and the Furious logic? Got to be explicit about that stuff. How else can I know if my car can fly or not?

And by point two, I mean that cinematic games are also talking about how fast they play. A game that promises cinematic fights should be judged by how long those fights take, compared to fights in movies. In that sense, we could compare D&D 5e to the recent D&D: Honour among Thieves movie and say that the game doesn’t have particularly cinematic combat because of the obvious difference in time taken. If you’re making a martial arts game inspired by the movies of Bruce Lee, well, most Bruce Lee fight scenes are around the 5 minute mark. SoI think if a game says it’s cinematic in that sense, it better at least try to get close to that number!

Like all definitions, I expect this can be torn to pieces. So let me know what you think! Have games like Feng Shui got a better definition that I missed? Let me know!

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¡Skyrealms pronto estará en español!

New Itch Games for April & May

Been quiet on here but I'm back now!

It’s the itch.io round-up of new games! Now coming to you once every two months because that sounds easier. Usual disclaimer: This comes from be browsing itch.io and people self-submitting through the form. I haven’t played these games and mostly am just going by how interesting they sound to me. Okay, let’s go:

The Hollow Queen: This is a GM-less horror game from Venezuelan designer, Felix Rios, about a dark force haunting the streets and the people trying to uncover it. It uses the diceless Ten Coins system and is available in Spanish.

Contact: A game where you use a music playlist and tarot cards to play through a story about trying to make contact with aliens. I think the idea is that the songs contain encoded messages from the aliens, which is a neat reversal of the Voyager Golden Record. By j strautman.

Tangled Blessings: This is a solo dark fantasy game set in a magic school. It’s a solo/duet game, building on Anamnesis by Sam Leigh. You explore the secrets of this weird school while dealing with a rival who’s making your life difficult. Designed by Cassi Mothwin.

Strike Force Omega: This is LUMEN game about science-fantasy supersoldiers coming back for one last stand, defending their homes in a time of war. By Chris Longhurst, designer of See Issue X and Pigsmoke.

Thirty Foes  (OR Once again, we are defeated): In a similar premise, but much more focused on the drama rather than tactics, this is Seven Samurai but cosmic cowboys. They sling cosmic power and defend against bandits. And they’re probably going to die. From Rat Wave Game House.

Thief and Druid: Two games from Stéphanie Dusablon. Both are solo games with an optional journaling element. Thief uses the Push system and Druid uses the Firelights system. I’m not sure if this is a series that will expand to all the D&D classes but it’s a neat idea.

Skyrealms: This is a fantasy bestiary, setting, and solo adventure game about three floating islands in the misty heights, full of secrets and strange creatures. It’s from Iko and Armanda Haller. You can also use the bestiary as a colouring book apparently!

In The Blind: This is a sci-fi horror game about working class people trying to do their job and instead facing the darkness of space. This is a free preview and showcases how good Riley Daniels, designer of As The Sun Forever Sets, is at visual design.

Queenless: This is another Firelights game from solo game blog, Croaker RPGs. You play as members of the hive, exploring the world and protecting your home from destruction.

When Prophecy Fails: Nick Wedig makes a game about cultists and what happens when their foreseen apocalypse doesn’t happen. I’ll give you a hint: they often get even more radical. Based on the For the Queen. (PWYW)

The Score: Tin Star Games GM-less storygame where you tell a heist movie in 18 minutes using 18 cards.

SDM: Eternal Return Key: Luka Rejec follows up Ultraviolet Grasslands with a full OSR-style rulset and more weird setting. It has the same much-loved psychadelic vibe from the original and there’s a free art-less version as well.

the city begins to exist: A citybuilding game with some solid prompts. I can always use more citybuilding games! Designed by kay w.

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The dynamic duo is heading to Backerkit for a two player TTRPG!

Follow us on Backerkit to make sure you don't miss out on Badger + Coyote and their Daring Adventures!

40 cozy, loving pages of adventures from realistic, to fanciful and magical!

A two-player duet game

Each player has their own rules.

Miscommunication Mischief! Only Coyote can attempt to communicate in the game, and if they fail their roll, Badger decides how they interpreted Coyote's intentions to it instead.

Guidance for new TTRPGs players.

Tips for two different play styles (GM-led and GMless)

Sections on how to play as badger- or coyote-like characters!

Wonderful artwork throughout

What Kind of Adventures, you ask??

Work with beavers to restore a dried up stream and save the locals in A Dam Shame.

Help a family of raccoons trapped high up a mysterious, magical tree in Climbing to Great Heights.

Contain a raging forest fire and evacuate the animals to safety in, In the Heat of the Moment.

Outwit poachers setting traps to capture endangered creatures in Sunny Side, Not Poached.

Negotiate with a clan of mountain goats for access to a mountain spring in You Goats to have Water.

Break the spell that is afflicting the Otters wreaking havoc along the riverbank communities in Otterly Unbelievable.

Puns are important.

Launching July 11th!