titanrpg

[titanrpg]

[titanrpg]

[titanrpg]

caltrop core hit 20,000 downloads??

thank y'all so much!!

if you've ever wanted to make your own ttrpg but didn't know where to start, click here to check out caltrop core. it's free and open license. and it uses exclusively d4s!

#indie ttrpg #ttrpg #caltrop core #indie games

[titanrpg]

After The Bomb

There's an official Fallout ttrpg. I've read it. It's okay!

There's also, completely fanmade, After The Bomb.

And I want to put After The Bomb on your radar, because it's very, very good.

ATB uses a simple d20 + stat system, with bonuses from gear and perks factored in. You have a HP track, which burns at both ends from radiation and damage, and also a survival track that breaks pieces of your equipment whenever it depletes. Rolls are player-made, and the system spends a lot of time in that osr headspace where it cares more about the choices the players make than how they built their character. The game's currency is Junk, and you spend it repairing your gear and crafting consumables.

Levelling up is surprisingly rich with choice, and fights and obstacles are tense and deadly. Again, the core mechanics are simple, but they use this simplicity to push complex choices towards the players. You see a piece of valuable Junk floating in a bog. Do you go in and take a point of radiation? Risk coming back later? Waste your own Junk fashioning a contraption to try and get it out?

After The Bomb comes with its own sandbox campaign set in Minnesota, plus a *lot* of GM support for stuff like factions, monsters, and basebuilding.

It's a gem in our current pre-apocalypse, and I strongly recommend giving it a look.

[titanrpg]

A call to action: review games you love!

If you enjoyed an independent TTRPG you played recently, go give a review! It takes less than a couple of minutes and can really help the creators of the games you love! I've just reviewed a few of my recent favourites (Exquisite Biome, RUNE and I'm Sorry Did You Say Street Magic) and wanted to encourage others to do the same!

I'd love if people reblogged with their favourite games, I'm always looking for more to check out!

[titanrpg]

You have to take a vocational course to become a proper Wizard. Everyday folk might have picked up some things in secondary school, an amateur can still know their way around a staff or a wand but to get a license you need to have completed the course and passed the tests. Then you're a big fancy Wizard! But that's a lot of cost to have sunk into the thing and it does raise the question: are you sure you made the right call?

My editor-girlfriend described the Wizard playbook in PSYCHODUNGEON as Degree Regret: The Class. It's a lot about feeling stuck because of the time and effort you've put into something. A lot of the vulnerable moves are about facing this not being what you thought'd be like.

There's a decent chunk of why I quit teaching there. I also liked recasting the wizard as a working class job rather than something implicitly academic.

When you all make your psychoplumbers you ask questions to your right and left to establish some starting dynamics. Two of the Wizard's options really jab at the heart of the character.

What do you think I'd be happier as?

Why do you think I'm good at this job?

In PSYCHODUNGEON we delve into nightmarish psychostructures, battle monsters, navigate a hostile domain, and help the mind the dungeon sprung from gain closure. We do this for a meagre paycheck. On the surface we try to get by living our lives in a busy city that wouldn't miss you if you fell off the face of the planet.

Coming to Kickstarter this May. Please follow the pre-launch page. This is the first of a series of posts I'll do all about different aspects of the game. Do let me know if there's anything you're especially curious about.

[titanrpg]

DEATH OF THE AUTHOR is a solo tarot TTRPG of character autonomy.

Play as a Character attempting to gain agency by wresting narrative control from their Author.

Gameplay involves drawing tarot cards for Scene Prompts, events written by the Author. The Character then edits these prompts to shape the story to their will.

Use caution - tampering with the narrative draws the attention of the Author, who might retaliate by using the Character’s own words against them.

Death of the Author will be crowdfunding on Backerkit starting May 14th. Follow the page to be notified when it launches!

[titanrpg]

could you explain what you mean about neon white? bc I felt the same way when I finished it but couldn't quite articulate what I didn't like about the story

sure--on a pure plot level, right, 'believers have usurped the true will of god by being self-righteous and self-serving and it must be restored' is the core premise at the heart of the game. god is Good, god's system of judgement and mastery of the cosmos is Good, restoring it is Good. "christianity is fundamentally good, but the people who practice it have lost sight of the Real (Good) Christian Morals" is not an uncommon take among liberal christians, but i think it is silly and wrong because religion is not true, it only exists as a social fact, there is no 'christianity' that can be divorced from christians, because 'christianity' can only be located in the world within the actions and beliefs of christians.

and then on the thematic level, the game has a singleminded obsession with the nobility of forgiveness, a moral it beats in with a sledgehammer like a sonic sez segment every chance it gets. red forgiving white, white forgiving green, violet and white forgiving each other, green not forgiving blue--the game is very very explicit that forgiveness is the be-all and end-all of morality. and this is like a spectacularly christian concept!

so yeah depiste the like edgy demon 2006 scene kid aesthetic i think neon white is ironically much less subversive than the edgy anime and pop punk music it takes its aesthetic cues from because it essentially comes out swinging wholeheartedly for christian morality. embarassing tbh

[titanrpg]

a poem about amorphous things

this poem, along with four others and five by the beautiful mineral magnesium oxide, are up for PWYW on my itch. plaintext under the cut:

I am vat-born and decanted into my new body. I am holy, neutral, features soft and melting into clay injection molds. It took one thousand frantic iterations to persuade myself into this solid state. Born on a winter’s parasite eve.

My first unsteady steps across the tiles trail my crimson clues. I transform myself across the floor. Through every doorway. Trademarks and copyrights for third-party games and characters are chances to live a bigger life.

Half of you became dulled when the earth produced a new American naturalist, when God gave me a few more stolen inches of undersampled skin. When I chew up the day and spit it out I give no credit to the culture or the flame.

[titanrpg]

it’s so insanely fascistic that literally every children’s movie is about how important and good the nuclear family is

[titanrpg]

I have friends at Indiana University and they've been saying there are snipers on IU Bloomington campus. And theres a bunch of cops everywhere. This is wild.

[titanrpg]

Two ongoing digital games bundles are offering more than 200 tabletop RPGs (among video games, soundtracks, books and other goodies) in order to raise money in support of the Palestine Children’s Relief Funds. The Palestinian Relief Bundle is being hosted on Itch.io, while the separate TTRPGs for Palestine Charity Bundle is taking place on Tiltify. For $8, the Palestinian Relief Bundle is offering nearly 400 total items, 103 of which are tabletop RPG systems, supplements and adventures. Mapmaking game Ex Novo is joined by the paranormal gunslinging satire FIST: Ultra Edition, along with Takuma Okada’s celebrated solo journaling game Alone on a Journey. Weird and dirty iconoclast game about money, the mind and everything else, Greed by Gormenghast is also on this list and is well worth a look. And if you’d rather keep it cosy and introspective, Cassi Mothwin’s Clean Spirit will get the whole group taking care of their domestic homes. The TTRPGs for Palestine Charity Bundle focuses solely on analogue games, providing nearly 200 tabletop games for $15. A full spreadsheet of the included titles can be viewed here and includes Nevyn Holme’s Gun&Slinger, where one player embodies an occult cowboy while the second plays their sentient, magical gun. Wendi Yu’s Here, There, Be Monsters! approaches monster hunting media from the other side of the camera with a decidedly queer lens and unapologetic politics. Makapatag’s Gubat Banwa is a lush and dynamic collision of wuxia media, fiercely romantic and tragic melodrama all set against the backdrop and folklore of The Philippines.

[titanrpg]

"Rent should be no more than 30% of household income" is a really funny and roundabout way to say "property owners as a class are entitled to 30% of gross wages"

[titanrpg]

Communists and anarchists will spend all day talking about abstract concepts and structures like capitalism and the state, but willfully ignore the very real, tangible curse placed upon me by the foul necromancer

[titanrpg]

I think a lot of folks in indie RPG spaces misunderstand what's going on when people who've only ever played Dungeons & Dragons claim that indie RPGs are categorically "too complicated". Yes, it's sometimes the case that they're making the unjustified assumption that all games are as complicated as Dungeons & Dragons and shying away from the possibility of having to brave a steep learning cure a second time, but that's not the whole picture.

A big part of it is that there's a substantial chunk of the D&D fandom – not a majority by any means, but certainly a very significant minority – who are into D&D because they like its vibes or they enjoy its default setting or whatever, but they have no interest in actually playing the kind of game that D&D is... so they don't.

Oh, they'll show up at your table, and if you're very lucky they might even provide their own character sheet (though whether it adheres to the character creation guidelines is anyone's guess!), but their actual engagement with the process of play consists of dicking around until the GM tells them to roll some dice, then reporting what number they rolled and letting the GM figure out what that means.

Basically, they're putting the GM in the position of acting as their personal assistant, onto whom they can offload any parts of the process of play that they're not interested in – and for some players, that's essentially everything except the physical act of rolling the dice, made possible by the fact most of D&D's mechanics are either GM-facing or amenable to being treated as such.*

Now, let's take this player and present them with a game whose design is informed by a culture of play where mechanics are strongly player facing, often to the extent that the GM doesn't need to familiarise themselves with the players' character sheets and never rolls any dice, and... well, you can see where the wires get crossed, right?

And the worst part is that it's not these players' fault – not really. Heck, it's not even a problem with D&D as a system. The problem is D&D's marketing-decreed position as a universal entry-level game means that neither the text nor the culture of play are ever allowed to admit that it might be a bad fit for any player, so total disengagement from the processes of play has to be framed as a personal preference and not a sign of basic incompatibility between the kind of game a player wants to be playing and the kind of game they're actually playing.

(Of course, from the GM's perspective, having even one player who expects you to do all the work represents a huge increase to the GM's workload, let alone a whole group full of them – but we can't admit that, either, so we're left with a culture of play whose received wisdom holds that it's just normal for GMs to be constantly riding the ragged edge of creative burnout. Fun!)

* Which, to be clear, is not a flaw in itself; a rules-heavy game ideally needs a mechanism for introducing its processes of play gradually.

[titanrpg]

Certain words can change your brain forever and ever so you do have to be very careful about it.

[titanrpg]

I am now taking suggestions for worldbuilding ttrpgs to build a setting for a Masks campaign!