Ben L

Thoughts On Talislanta - Dungeons & Possums Talislanta, by Stephen Michael Sechi, is a fascinating thing. Not just its contents, which are interesting as heck more often than not, but also its existence. It has had a long, but sometimes very di...

I wrote about Talislanta on my blog. I wouldnt call myself a dedicated fan per se but I have a couple books and Ive liberally stolen ideas from them for home games for years!

dungeonsandpossums.com/2019/01/thou...

The creator was a really nice guy to me & he's released his game freely now!

Oooh this looks good

Fake it until you make it as they say. And I’ve been playing the role of a TTRPG game designer for about 12 years! Now the mask has become my very nature. I am going to play the Masquerade game with vampires, for real. After years of working as an independent game designer, like a good Anarch, I joined the Camarilla. I am now the Lead Game Designer at White Wolf, the legendary publisher that made me realize TTRPGs could be about a lot more than killing monsters. I can be one of them, and surprisingly be even more human! The first book I ever read in English was Vampire: The Dark Ages, and now I get to work as a game designer full time for the first time with the World of Darkness? I couldn’t be happier! To live and breathe the universe of Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Hunter, Changeling, Wraith, and all other games every day, and be able to collaborate in shaping its future is a dream come true. These games were formative in my TTRPG industry, in the Brazilian TTRPG community, and are incredibly relevant to this day. Especially these days I would say. And with me I am bringing my game design philosophy of “playing more with less” to help make the game more accessible while honoring the more than 30 years of World of Darkness! I just want everyone to enjoy the game as much as they can, with as little effort as they can afford. Oh, and I am still an Anarch at heart, don’t worry!

Me with a Bloodlines 2 tshirt setting in a throne under the Ankh banner!

A castle with the ankh banner hanging from a window

Me wearing a shadowy cloak

So this happened…

I am White Wolf’s new Lead Game Designer!

I will figure out how to post the whole text here, but there is a picture with the announcement and the alt text has the full thing!

#TTRPG #RPGLATAM #VtM #WoD #DnD #NotDnD #ShowYourWork

3d6 Down the Line is my favorite actual play podcast because they actually sound like me and my friends playing games.

that's neat. as if I needed another reason to move talislanta up in the queue

interesting

yes, true. as people have been pointing out some dice pool systems do this too. But I was implicitly thinking of a single roll, making it more elegant and minimal, which is the opposite of huge dice pools.

Oh my god reading this fan translation by @claytonian.bsky.social of a Japanese ttrpg called Pearl Seed and it's so elegant! Very relevant to my design interests. h/t @icastlight.bsky.social

ooohhh!!! 👀

lol this is almost identical to the system I just came up with, but with a higher range of failures (all the way up to 6) and a max of 6 damage (at 12+). Things have less hp in my system since HD rarely goes up and maxes out for a PC at 4d6. (It's interesting how 2d6 math makes damage less swingy.)

Good point! Any system with a critical hit triggered on a nat 20 (or double, or whatever) does at least a little of this.

ooohh, that's very close to what I'm doing, which is also a 2d6 systems. it's maybe even more elegant! I need to read tunnel goons rn. Thanks!

wild I was just designing a 2d6 system that works like this. is it translated?

Booklets graced with the His Majesty the Worm logo, in a rainbow of colors

The character sheets in HIS MAJESTY THE WORM are designed to be folded together, like a little book!

Look at how sweet the character booklets look when sewn bound.

(From the Worm discord)

I'm familiar with systems that separate to hit and damage rolls, and other systems that jump straight to auto damage. But what are the combat systems that combine to hit and damage in a single roll, so you roll to hit, and can miss, but the better you roll on your attack the more damage you do?

Wow!

To be more specific, I’m imagining abstract 1 min combat rounds using grit and flesh, where grit depletion = fatigue, losing the tide of battle. Flesh depletion = minor wounds like cuts, bruises, etc. The potential killing blow is treated as a single culminating action we zoom in for. 3/3

Has anyone ever explicitly used an abstract combat round but zoomed in for potential killing blows and allowed BRP style parry and dodge? It’s like a more cinematic version of giving people a generic save against death, or roll on the death and dismemberment table, when hp hits zero. 2/3

While I do enjoy the cinematic blow by blow quality of RQ (and BRP), I’ve written about the charms of the abstract combat round in older editions of D&D. But I do love dramatic high stakes single rolls when it comes to death or wounding. It would be fun to make it cinematic.🧵 1/3

Weapons meaningfully distinguished by tags; elegant weapon crafting rules; theater of the mind tactical combat that uses areas from Old School Hack rather than distances in feet; elegant combat stunt mechanics; on and on. Everyone rightly talks about the art, but what a ruleset! 👨‍🍳💋2/2

For no particular reason, I am back on my Jorune bullshit. I'll be sharing a bunch of stuff on the newsletter and blog soon! The biggest single influence on the rules by a country mile is going to be Break!! @naldodrinan.bsky.social and @greywizard.bsky.social, so much to love in yr game! 1/2

Ooohh! @amandalee.bsky.social adventure stretch goal for Eco Mofos!

Gene Wolfe wearing dark glasses and holding a cane. He looks morose but probably only because of poor image quality.

mfw the narrator is reliable

This is why it's all worth it. And fwiw some of my most fun sessions have been with Szadu and the Heart of Halidicar. I know it's less dreamy than TUD #1 but I still think the Catacombs of the Fleischguild is my tightest dungeon design!

"Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a lawn, which was the stage, and the lawn went back towards the lake in the grounds of the college, and the play began in natural light. But as it developed, and as it became time for Ariel to say his farewell to the world of The Tempest, the evening had started to close in and there was some artificial lighting coming on. And as Ariel uttered his last speech, he turned and he ran across the grass, and he got to the edge of the lake and he just kept running across the top of the water — the producer having thoughtfully provided a kind of walkway an inch beneath the water. And you could see and you could hear the plish, plash as he ran away from you across the top of the lake, until the gloom enveloped him and he disappeared from your view. And as he did so, from the further shore, a firework rocket was ignited, and it went whoosh into the air, and high up there it burst into lots of sparks, and all the sparks went out, and he had gone. "When you look up the stage directions, it says, 'Exit Ariel.”

A story Stoppard told several times, in several places:

I know this has been theorized to death in the OSR but what interests me is the sharp disjunction in my experience for me in what they experience as continuous. 4/4

I'm delighted to act on the basis of ordinary understandings of how people's psychology works, and to defer to the GM's sense of how they would react. I don't feel at a loss at all, and it doesn't feel loose in the slightest. 3/4

What's interesting is that I agree with them about what I experience as the "broken" rules abt combat or whatever. They lead to a weird looseness, or counterintuitive results, that often feels like it's hard to judge consequences before acting. But I completely disagree abt social situations. 2/4

I've been playing alongside 5E players in a game using rules light systems. They not only home in on kind of broken rules abotu combat (fair), but also on e.g. social situations b/c they don't have skills on their character sheet like persuasion. For them both are "mother may I" sitchs 🤯. 1/4

could everyone please help my cardinals elect a new space pope. it isn't healthy for them to be stuck in a conclave. they only do this when they are very distressed