w.s. healed | the HORIZON MACHINE

if you dont like the insane and bigoted mods on bsky dont worry you can go to mastodon and choose between one of infinity billion sets of insane and bigoted mods with more free time on their hands #dencentralization

thinking about my favourite low empathy characters... racter... wenduag... villanelle... delaney 'regina-saskatoon' pollack... aracely sosa... baru cormorant... c'venash vishneri... insul... ianthe... notice how much like any other narrative trope its cooler and better when girls do it

skills are often most fun when they are provided 'by' something... (background, npc, class even)... it turns something that is only a technical competency into something produced by a history and a social world... +2 to lockpicking or basket-weaving can be a narrative ability if you let it be...

"if your whole personality is hating men-" have you considered that the ease with which you are willing to shrink a woman down to one single trait that you have perceived based on what you've been told is "man hating" may be an indicator of misogynistic thinking?

THE GAME OF THE BALL, PT. I | rose quarter-drifting Get more from rose quarter-drifting on Patreon

for my patreons--the game of the ball, pt. i, a short fable helping illustrate some of the paradoxes of defining 'the game', and a prequel to an essay i'm hoping to have out next month :)

www.patreon.com/posts/game-o...

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an online woman, in possession of an interesting post, must be in want of really annoying guys replying to her.

& i feel like many people taking it upon themselves to write About Trauma take that Rupture as a given and to some degree yknow create narratives that kind of reifnroce it as prediscursive state-of-play and not as like actual social process... and i think that kind of sucks

like yknow in Underside i take quite specific pains to tell you what i (or at least, what the game) believes trauma to be: it is Rupture, an event that is so unthinkable to the people around you that merely experiencing it immediately ejects ytou from society

it is veryu fashionable to be making games About Trauma (no judgement, my current big project is About Trauma!) but perhaps we could all benefit to uhhh take the pains to Define Trauma when we do so and actually be thoughtful about what our chosen definition means and what that says

jay dragons evil manifesto grew legs came to my house spat in my salad etc... its all Really Fucked Up

currently working on:

- Underside (traumatized capes struggling with identity, out as playtest!)

- PRAXI: Protocol Against Xenoimperialism (OSR-flavored guerilla communist xcom, in dev)

- ULTRADAMNATION: Indebted To The Gods of the Dark (chuunicore urban horror fantasy teenfeels, early dev)

"Just tell them" is such an underrated piece of advice for telegraphing dangers in RPGs.

"How can I hint that the hallway is trapped? How can I hint that if they defeat the dungeon lord, they become the next dungeon lord?"

Just tell them. Tell them out loud. With your words.

UNDERSIDE PLAYTEST | rose quarter-drifting Get more from rose quarter-drifting on Patreon

UNDERSIDE is a dark superhero TTRPG about the rupture between ordinary life and the exosociety you're forced into when trauma marks you as different and inhuman--and about dressing up in a colorful costume to punch people. Get in on the playtest now at my Patreon:

www.patreon.com/posts/unders...

solo rpg where you write out your opinions on the new sabrina carpenter album cover on a piece of paper and you bundle it up and you Eat it. You eat it

i say this a lot but it's really baffling to me how the popular reaction to wanderhome was that it's 'cozy' when it is literally like a desperately sad game first and foremost

SCREAMER-KILLER 6e Character Sheet by the HORIZON MACHINE the long-lost character sheet, updated for the newest edition

After years of fruitless negotiations and exhausting archival work we've finally managed to dig up the long-lost character sheet for the acclaimed SCREAMER-KILLER: Sixth Edition Core Rulebook!
thehorizonmachine.itch.io/screamerkill...

if you're anti-AI you need to stop making it sound awesome and cool. "slop generator" thats good, accurately conveys that LLMs largely produce worthless garbage. but "theft machine"? sorry thats awesome "automatic collage machine" thats badass "copyright infringement" yippeee!

Regardless of how one feels about the Catholic Church or about Pope Francis, now is a time to come together to claim that JD Vance killed him

[on the phone to the board[] yeah. Yeah. i know its a shithsow. the projects getting shitcanned because its 'insensitive'. yeah were just going to have to cancel KILLPOPE: THE TTRPG WHERE YOU KILL THE POPE (FRANCIS SPECIFICALLY). yeah. no dont refund the kickstarter backers are you crazy

its very cool to be a hater and dunk on stuff that sucks but you can't do it for its own sake. you can't hate to numb yourself to a world of slop. you have to hate because you know art and other things can be true and meaningful and hold the things that take your time to the standard of being good.

as underside release gets closer and closer im going to have to start using this account For guerilla marketing. [picks up rifle] [pritning elf scuttles up my shoulders and whispers in my ear] ah [puts rifle down sadly, kicks a rock]

ttrpg stands for tabletop rocket propelled grenade

the ideal format for a doctor who video game would be a dialogue-heavy party-based CRPG. like disco elysium or a combatless planescape torment

Text appears on a black background which fades in an hombre from deep black to light gray, left to right. Palestinian flags appear in the top left and right corners. The text “GAMES FOR GAZA” appears in a capital font in red flourescent lettering. 

The following red flourescent text appears inside a box, outlined in green: “An itch.io bundle to benefit Medical Aid For Palestinians To donate games, scan the OR code or email itch URLs to esther@oakgrove.games” The hashtag #Games4Gaza appears in red flourescent text at the bottom middle of the image. In the bottom left corner, there is a graphic of two lower arms and hands, one dark-skinned and one fair-skinned, lifting a Palestinian flag. In the bottom right corner there is a heart with the colors of the Palestinian flag.

Hey game designers, especially all my folks in the ttrpg space: I'm making an itch bundle to benefit Medical Aid For Palestinians. If you'd like to donate your game(s), hit up the QR code below or email me at esther at oak grove dot games. Please share widely, and Free Palestine!

the problem with dnds play culture is the big hydrogen canisters they include in every book

Please give this a look. This is such a cool concept and it'd be an absolute shame if it didn't fund. If a 4-game/1-essay anthology on death sounds like your thing even a little, give it a read, I doubt you'll regret it.

www.kickstarter.com/projects/mar...

a hot take i have is that the dmg and ph being two different books is at the core of a lot of d&d's pervasive culture problems and severely hamstrings the possibility of it ever designed well. unofrtunately wotc will never change this because they want to be able to sell two $50 books