V.V. 🏳️‍🌈

The indescribable pleasure of cracking open a TTRPG box set never goes away. Instantly puts me in the mood for game time, too.

I know these are expensive as hell to make (and buy!), but Free League is real as fuck for doing core and basic sets for their games anyway.

I'm so, SO bad about this, especially when I'm writing too much, too fast. It's a struggle.

Seriously considering turning this thread into a blog post and adding 17 more pieces of equipment "borrowed" from Elden Ring and other Fromsoftware titles. *Someone* is bound to find a bespoke d20 table of unique gear useful!

This is one of the many reasons why Vaults of Vaarn is a better implementation of Knave than, well, Knave itself. Tables galore for generating your own shit. Love that game so much.

Absolutely! I always strive to provide examples of what that cool shit looks like, or better yet, ways to generate it. Same goes for enemies; sure, having a bunch of ready-made enemies to throw at the party is helpful, but having the tools and advice on making your own enemies is more important.

Directly engage an enemy When you directly engage an enemy, roll + Danger. On a 7-9, you hurt them and choose 1. On a 10+, you hurt them and choose 2. On a 13+, one of those choices must be You deal a brutal attack. You protect yourself. You’re safe from your enemy’s counter. You protect your allies: Your fellow combatants are safe from your enemy’s counter. You protect others: Civilians, minions, and the environment are all safe from your enemy’s counter. You stop their escape. Your enemy can’t run away or hide. You deal a brutal attack. Your enemy marks an extra condition. If your enemy is still standing and able to fight, they counter. The GM tells you who they target, who gets hurt, and if any players mark a condition or take a powerful blow.

Hey Magpie, hire me for Mask 2e and let me fix your game.

The Bloggies: Gameable Round 1 Welcome to The Bloggies. You're currently voting in the first round of the Gameable bracket. What's in this category? This category includes ready-to-use rules, monsters, settings, and more. What are...

If you feel like it, you can now vote for my articles competing in the Bloggies!
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'Just Use Bears… Or Wolves, Dragons or Spiders' and 'Stacking The Deck – Mining Fallout: New Vegas for TTRPG Setting Ideas' are both mine!

Two of my favourite blog posts from last year!

A wooden shield with flames painted on it

A blue, crystal-like dagger

A marred wooden shield with barbed wire wrapped on it

3/ To illustrate my point:

Flame Crest Shield, halves all fire damage, constantly emits heats.
Truthkeeper's Dagger: d6 damage, glows when a lie is told. 2 in 6 chance of breaking when the owner lies.
Retaliator's Shield, d4 damage to melee attackers; if broken, deals d4 damage to the user.

2/ Coming up with cool gear ain't hard, either. If you feel like you need inspiration, just browse the Elden Ring wiki and steal judiciously. The reference images will make the item pop even more!

And while you're there, steal some enemies, too, and let *them* drop their cool gear.

1/ One thing that keeps equipment-focused OSR games like Knave from clicking with people is that the GM has to actively give the players *cool shit*.

Generic, disposable gear is useful, so is treasure, but a wicked-looking sword with a simple effect (and maybe a drawback) is actually memorable.

Carnaval always makes me feel like a terrible Brazilian citizen, lmao. I hate the February heat, I hate the normalised loudness, I hate the crowds and I hate how dangerous my city becomes at night.

I LOVE the cultural and artistic aspect of it all, don't get me wrong, but I'd rather stay inside.

LOVE it! Great practical example of how to make lore actually matter. The party's actions directly impacted the world in a really fun way. Ten outta ten.

Always happy to be of service! One of the hardest lessons I had to learn as a GM is that play doesn't happen in a vacuum, and prep stops being useful when it gets in the way of play. Nothing is canon until it hits the table, and even then, you can still choose to frame it with ambiguity.

And truthfully, I say this as someone who is prone to lose themself in the details, to the point where GMing games where I know a lot about the setting/genre is actively harmful for my prep and my enjoyment. I have a much easier time running stuff that feels "new" and weird!

When you take that element away, it becomes incredibly easy to get bogged down by minutiae, rather than gameable, interactive lore. Take 1e Forgotten Realms, for one: it felt mysterious, larger than life, dangerous and full of possibility. By 3.5, all of that was gone, replaced by boring trivia.

I feel like when it comes to fantasy TTRPGs, all settings can benefit from a hefty dose of mythical, hazy grandeur. Your wizards can just be weird and enigmatic, your dragons can be forces of nature, and your dungeons can be the ruins of long-forgotten civilizations. No need to fret about details.

Plus One XXXP is now live at TTRPG.link/XXXP

Titillated to launch w/
-Sweatgasm by @babywrist.bsky.social a queer sexy party game we brought to life w/Archie & @silversprocket.net
-Digital Angel by @sandroad.moe a cyberpuke game for high trust perverts.

Let's dive into each & what's coming

1/7

I'd want some props, ideally, such as drawing from a "deck of Polaroids" for enemy encounters. In my experience, the best way to capture the magic of visual-heavy stuff is to make it as tactile as possible.

With a few years worth of updates and QOL improvements such as more equipment, new biomes and increased enemy variety, Menace is gonna be an all-timer. It's already in a pretty good state for an early access release, tbh. Lots of fun to be had!

Hypothetically, if I were to reread the whole thing, I'd probably do some "live commentary" (or whatever people call it these days) over here, highlighting my favourite moments, panels, pages and themes.

But of course I'm not gonna do that. I'm a responsible reader, don'tcha know.

Not me considering yet another read-through of Delicious in Dungeon while my backlog keeps growing.

No, it's certainly not me.

Lovely, evocative piece. *Nothing* about it is superfluous; I feel like even the tiniest details help tell a story.

Definitely a good call. I wish I'd had that foresight, tbh, but that ended up being a lesson I only learned during playtest.

”Combat as Tool” is such a great way to describe the impact combat abilities can have on games!

The journey from zero to hero is a core part of The Dauntless & Destined, so providing PCs with tools to navigate combat was essential. The game is still deadly, but experienced heroes aren't hopeless.

A fantasy-style map drawn by V.V.'s partner

My partner got bitten by the cartography bug too, and she's just finished her first map!

I've always admired her as an artist, so this was a huge treat. I'm a proud, proud V.V., y'all.

Avowed is a great, deeply misunderstood game, and I'm ready to die on that hill. People went in with unreasonable expectations and refused to engage with what the game is, then complained about what it ISN'T (and never tried to be). Obsidian changed, but the fans and their expectations didn't.

3/ All in all, I don't think there's a right answer here, nor a perfect solution. The fact is, most of the fantasies suggested by the classic elfgame classes *are* inherently aggressive, and when trying to support them with talents, it's hard not to engage with that aspect.

2/ I did add a built-in way to prevent min-maxing/build-crafting, in that talents are rolled and not chosen, but rolling too many combat abilities will still provide a player with more violence-centered buttons than problem-solving aids. Conversely, those abilities facilitate the game's heroic tone.

1/ I often find myself thinking about how combat abilities are an incentive to combat as sport. A little over half of all class talents from The Dauntless & Destined are combat-oriented, with some classes leaning more into that than others, and I worry about what that will communicate to players.