w.s. healed | the HORIZON MACHINE

"babies are born worshipping unknown gods" is one of the most incredible dwarf fortress bugs i have heard of. its poetry.

whether that's a solid removal package or something like hashaton or kenessos in the command zone, it does wonders for keeping me engaged in games

edh tip: if you're like me and have trouble paying attention to stuff that doesn't involve the most important and specialest person at the table (me) i can't recommend enough playing a deck with lots of instant-speed plays

Buried Alive {2}{B} Sorcery Search your library for up to three creature cards, put them into your graveyard, then shuffle. The scrape of shovels and the tumble of cold dirt soon muffled their pleas. Illustrated by Greg Staples Altered with a trans flag in the background of the sky. The text box has been painted to look like pavement with chalk writing “there is still time”

My heart is like a claw machine
It’s only function is to reach
It can’t hold on to anything
No, I can’t hold on to anything

white people trying to express their dislike for an inanimate object: okay imagine a racialized minority

i fucking love the duo cards. what an incredible way to emphasize that bloomburrow was about multiple factions coming together ahd finding common ground, literally printing cards featuring two different animal folk with mechanical effects bridging the common ground between those animals' mechanics

it is generally very strange that you put out a piece of writing saying "here's a cool way of playing and designing games, that i'd like to see more of" and people's reaction was like "the despotic child-empress is enacting another kafkaesque decree upon us"

ULTRADAMNATION: INDEBTED TO THE GODS OF THE DARK -- a first look | rose quarter-drifting Get more from rose quarter-drifting on Patreon

first look at my upcoming chuunicore ultraviolent teenfeelings ttrpg ULTRADAMNATION: INDEBTED TO THE GODS OF THE DARKNESS is up on my patreon:
www.patreon.com/posts/ultrad...

people who think the badass antihero who looks cool is badass and cool are not in fact producing an illegitimate or unfounded reading of the work just because you disagree with it. Yes even if the antihero does a bunch of bad stuff and is really sad

See, the trick is that "the GM exists for the players' amusement, whose job is to ruin their plans for fun" and "the GM rules like a king, and the players exist to be their playthings" is that these SEEM like opposite maladaptive approaches to play, but they both result in the GM doing all the work.

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...

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