realbrickwall

Available now in PDF and print from DriveThruRPG: The Storypath Ultra Core Manual

Now Available in PDF and print: The Storypath Ultra Core Manual!
theonyxpath.com/now-availabl...

It's a good one, but Crunchyroll has been rolling out noticeably sloppy AI translations of everything for a while now.

I think I've seen stuff like that before, with little "building" animations, but the idea of them trying and failing not to be caught breaking kayfabe would be a lovely flavor.

As a corollary to all of this I would be so delighted to see a loading screen in a game where all the NPCs are running back to their assigned spots and fixing random damage. Obviously in some kind of simplified and scripted representation so it doesn't need its own loading screen.

-More than anything, they must never, EVER, allow humans to discover any of this.
-How and why any of this is true can never be even slightly addressed. It is a fundamental of the world, and to even question it is incomprehensible, socially unacceptable, and perhaps even genuinely immoral.

"What are Toy Story rules?" I'm so very glad you asked
-Their capabilities are suggested by their form, but always allow them basic mobility and communication.
-Their personality is informed by their presentation, but also by how they are treated by Humans
-They desperately crave human attention.

I know there's already plenty of "video game NPCs as fully-realized people" fiction but has anyone done it with Toy Story rules? I would like to see it.

Dana Terrace's 'Knights of Guinevere' Gets Full Season, Trailer Terrace discusses Glitch’s full-season order, her ambition to build a 2D indie pipeline, and what’s ahead for her sci-fi epic.

Dana Terrace’s 'Knights of Guinevere' has been greenlit for a full season, and a new trailer just dropped. We spoke with Terrace about building the series, a bespoke 2D pipeline at Glitch, and what the season order means.
www.cartoonbrew.com/series/dana-...

This bundle is the official launch of Ten Thousand Days For the Sword!
- fight for the wuxia cyberpunk future
- eight martial arts style, a mix of traditional and new
- a uquiz to see whether you fit Yin, Yang, or one of the Five Paths uquiz.com/quiz/B1vYuX/
- 5 recipes, 3 narrators, and 1 horse

This coming Sunday and Monday, come help us raise money for the Women's Foundation of Minnesota's Immigrant Rapid Response Fund!

follow twitch.tv/friendsatthetable now to be notified!

Read here for more info: www.patreon.com/posts/fundra...

(Art by @badbucket.bsky.social!)

Renting a small auditorium is honestly nowhere near as expensive as I thought it would be. Certainly not a notional expense for an individual but affordable enough that I'm trying to figure out excuses to do some nonsense.

TTRPGs are just manuals for having fun. Relax.

i accidentally wrote the perfect eight words in an outline

Bandcamp’s Mission and Our Approach to Generative AI We’re articulating our approach to generative AI so musicians can keep making music and fans can trust the music they find on Bandcamp.

Hey every other company ever, check out how easy this was blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/k...

I think I'd have a 50/50 shot at killing an untrained person outright by looking them dead in the eye and saying that I'm a dark empath and they're only fighting me because of untreated narcissism they inherited from generational trauma. People with psychology education get disadvantage to save.

Look, Dungeons and Dragons is a mainstream game that needs no promoting.

And look, the Vicious Mockery spell was never meant to be a thing that turned normal insults into physical damage.

But I can't hear the phrase "weaponized therapy language" and not consider the implications and applications.

Saw a video complaining about too many men with painted nails these days and I just think of the steak too juicy lobster too buttery line. I say don't stop until we're all out here in full graphic makeup looks. We faltered at 'guyliner' and we must rally.

maybe instead of writing thoughtful blog posts and theory and manifestos that spur consideration and action you should threaten to blow up the sun so that people make the forms of games you enjoy

SHITPOST GAME:

scroll bluesky until you get mad.

instead of responding, roll a d6 and do the corresponding action:
1-2: X # of pushups
3-4: 5X # of squats
5-6: 2X # of mountain climbers

X is the number of times you have gotten mad

repeat until you are sick of bluesky

If the item was necessary, it must be placed somewhere memorable and accessible. To ensure the safety of the world. If not, it should be put in storage, given away, or thrown out.
The player who saves the world the most times does not have to pay for their share of the postgame meal.

If someone thinks the item should be kept, the player who chose it must propose a scenario in which they must save the world, and only that item allows them to do so. All other players act as obstacles and opponents.
Once the scenario is played out, players vote on how well the item performed.

A game called Declutter (or Marie Kondo Battles Satan)
Gather any number of players into a room that is cluttered. Use your favorite method of determining turn order.
On each player's turn, they pick up one item (a coherent collection counts as one).
If all players agree it is trash, throw it out.

I need everyone to make a shitpost game that fits into at most 3 posts on here before the end of the year otherwise thr sun will not rise again

People are making pioneering passion projects, polished professional products, personal playable poems, NO!! fuck!! Make shitpost games!!!! Do bits and poke fun and fuck around!

Not sure how to answer that. There's some D&D homebrew I threw up online in the mid 00s hidden deep in the internet archives somewhere, but one could argue I'm not even in the scene now. The scene's borders are fuzzier than an electron orbit.

Comix Cleric - The Indie Way to Host Indie Comics! A web framework that makes it easier than ever to make and host your webcomic YOUR way! Crafted BY comic creators FOR comic creators!

Introducing Comix Cleric, a web framework that makes it easier than ever to make and host your webcomic YOUR way! Crafted BY comic creators FOR comic creators and jam packed with features, you can learn more by checking out the Kickstarter NOW!

#comic #webcomic #webcomics #kickstarter

Of course, life isn't over until it's over. The future is always being made by our hands unknowing, and I feel privileged to have connected with every creator that I've met. I can't wait to find out what they'll be calling this era of gaming in 15 years. Hopefully I'll be able to say "I was there".

I'm not going to make a show of self-pity in the notifications of Aaron Voigt's exhaustively-compiled celebration of indie RPGs, but I will say here in my own space that it's rather bittersweet to think "I could easily have been there for all that, but for luck and poor choices, I was not."

...And the transcript!

bsky.app/profile/aavo...

Yeah, turns out, pretty good game. I am wondering, in the last 15 years, have you seen any innovations, not necessarily in PBTA, just generally, that get you excited for the next 15 years of the hobby? What have you seen that’s like “people are iterating and moving on.” Do you have thoughts on the way the hobby’s evolved over the last 15 years? MB: Yeah. Online play. Easy as that. Like, This Discord Is Haunted? Amazing. Especially given the [COVID-19] pandemic, the ways that people figured out how to have whole conventions online. It’s amazing from an accessibility standpoint, from a global carbon footprint standpoint, tons of reasons. Do I love being in a room with a thousand of my friends? Yes. When that’s not safe or healthy, do I love being able to see a dozen of them online? Absolutely. I think the way that gaming in general has changed in the past 15 years, or 20 years, is really interesting. It’s not just roleplaying games. The incredible rise of board games, the full on move to mainstream of videogames–from little phone games to big, giant AAA games. We are now in a place that we weren’t 25 years ago where everyone’s excited to talk about what kind of game they play. It gives us a common language in a way, even if we play very different games. It’s a way we can understand each other’s enthusiasm a little more. I’m hopeful we’re starting to move to a place where that is not just my rose-colored glasses, and we’re moving past some of the, “Oh well you’re not a real gamer” nonsense of the past. Because the potential now to hang out and play games is huge. Boardgame Arena? Playing boardgames, online, with friends? Do a little voice call over Discord, which didn’t exist? Amazing.

And I think that’s what’s interesting about PBTA as a phenomenon over the last 15 years. I think it takes those core ideas, that your result can produce this fiction forward result at the table–I think that’s really fascinating. People really latched on to that. Arguably PBTA is the biggest game system–I know y’all don’t like to think of PBTA as a system– MB: It’s definitely a design philosophy. I actually wanted to ask you about that. I’m wondering if you’d like to clarify what the difference between a system and a philosophy is? Because you call it a PBTA philosophy. VB: I don’t. Oh, okay. MB: I do. I do for shorthand, and it is a shorthand. When I think about other creative schools, like the Hudson River School of painting, or the Surrealist School of wordgames, it’s the closest I can get. And with our open letter about PBTA, what it means to call your game PBTA, at the heart it means you’re inspired by our work. And so that’s a philosophical thing. To be inspired by something is not quite quantifiable, in the way a philosophy is not quite quantifiable. So that’s why I use the word philosophy, not game design. I understand the desire to call it a system, but I feel like the work, the real, actual work, that so many people have done to develop their own systems for their own games that are PBTA…some of them can be really close, in the ways they are in dialogue, communication with Apocalypse World, but they’ve done the work to design their own system. Monsterhearts is a different system. Alas for the Awful Sea is a different system. I guess that’s why.

VB: There’s a chapter in Apocalypse World that I called the Ludography that lists a whole bunch of influences on Apocalypse World. It lists probably a third of the real influences. The thing I like to say about it is your own games seem really derivative to you because you’ve read all the same books you have, and you’ve seen all the same movies that you’ve seen. But to another person who hasn’t read the same books and seen the same movies and played the same games, your game is a revelation. Your game seems new. Your game seems novel and seems innovative. So to me, because I’d read all the same books that I’d read and seen all the movies, Apocalypse World was just me continuing to do the thing we were doing. And I knew we had hit on something. I knew it was going to take off. But it didn’t appear from nowhere. It appeared very much from the place that it appeared from. But there’s another really important thing to me about game design. And this goes to “Have we moved beyond the Bakers,” and it goes to “is Apocalypse World a system,” and it goes to this same question now. Which is that games don’t only copy each other, they don’t only descend from each other in that way–they contradict each other. You answer back to the games that influence you. Apocalypse World contracts a bunch of the games in its ludography, really intentionally. It says, “What if we do it the opposite way?” To me, what’s valuable about PBTA games is that they contradict Apocalypse World. That’s what they all have in common. They all disagree with Apocalypse World in some important way. So every PBTA game moves beyond the Bakers. That’s the point. MB: That’s the point of the whole enterprise. VB: That’s the point of making a game, is to tell me, personally, to shut up for once.

The last thing I wanted to see…What do you hope future RPG historians and fans will remember about your contributions to the hobby? MB: Oh glory. No pressure. VB: I hope they remember Under Hollow Hills. I really like that game. MB: That’s a big question, Aaron, I don’t know man. What do I want my epitaph to be? Sorry to bum you out on Monday night. VB: Sometimes I’ll encounter an idea that is a late-stage PBTA idea, a 2025 PBTA idea. And I will say to our kid, Elliot, “Oh my god Elliot, we screwed it up for everybody.” So maybe that should go on my gravestone. “Vincent Baker: Screwed it up for everybody.” MB: One of the things that is easy to have slip away is that we just did it because nobody told us we couldn’t. We did it because we wanted to and we didn’t know any better. Everything that Vincent said about all the antecedents, all the games we played, all the people we talked to, all of our life experiences, all of that is really true. But also there’s a piece that was very punk rock, saying “Goddamnit, we’re going to do a thing.” I don’t know? Just do it. To do it, do it. And you can do it too. And here’s tools that we found that maybe will help you. That’s what I want. Not that we were trying to change the world. No. We were just like, “Look. I think you can do it.” VB: Any historian who says Meg and Vincent made it easier for other creators…[holds up the sign of the horns]

And I could have spent a hundred hours talking to the Bakers and they would have kept hitting me with nuggets of wisdom:

In that spirit of trying to create scripts or sheet music to evoke a certain style or mode or experience, when you are trying to think about designs or concepts or influences that have shaped the way you write those scripts, what would you say has influenced you to get to that appreciation for your art? Kind of a hard question because it’s like, what paintings make you appreciate being a painter? Kind of all paintings, and all art, and several life events. There’s a boundlessness to it. Within games, I got started with LARP, and I was very critical of tabletop RPGs for a while. When you start with LARP, it’s really hard to go to tabletop RPGs. It takes a bit to figure out what’s good about them. Monsterhearts was an early one for me, Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist was an early one for me. Ten Candles was an early one for me. If you want to know why I’m this way, the fact that those are my first 6 months of playing RPGs says a lot of things about what kind of weird person I was. I owe a debt to tabletop RPGs that showed me what they were doing that LARPs couldn’t do. What it means to make an imaginative space that leaves the physical and becomes this strange, transcendent, other zone. What does it feel like to be at the heart of a machine? There’s an abstraction that tabletop introduces that was really exciting once I realized it was there.

Part of this conversation’s going to be about…starting from Apocalypse World and seeing how that DNA gets into the scene in the last 15 years. One of the questions I had written down was… “Thinking about Wanderhome, thinking about Sleepaway to some degree, you’re borrowing a little bit from Apocalypse World. In terms of playbooks, certainly. What tech do you think you’ve borrowed from Apocalypse World and PBTA generally? How do you think that’s changed? Obviously we get the Belonging Outside Belonging framework, but I am interested in what your thoughts are. I think it’s completely impossible to talk about PBTA generally. PBTA generally is a little like saying “what have you learned from comedy, generally? What have you learned from watching movies?” There are things you can learn from those. But you have to understand the vastness…I saw someone this morning on Reddit. Bad start! I know. Someone was talking about how someone always brings up GURPS, and then other people recommend PBTA. And the thought of recommending, “Oh I wanna play PBTA” left me so befuddled that I felt like I was stumbling through a haze for the next hour. Look up any PBTA? No.

When we think about technologies and tools that have been used over the past 15 years–obviously PBTA, but also BOB– Forged in the Dark? We’re awash in SRDs at this point. Do you think that when we are using these systematized schema that have been given to us over the last 15 years, are these systematized ways the best ways to–Is this a systems matter question? I hope not. Oh god. I think that I don’t…I don’t know that I care? It’s just a matter of…people need to make games. And there are advantages and disadvantages of a system that has already been made elsewhere. It’s a tool. It’s a memetic tool you can use to help people understand. I was reading a book that referred to them as “ludemes.” A ludeme is a way to say “this piece moves the way a bishop does.” It’s taking a piece of tech from another game and putting in your game. That comes from The Rulebook by Markus Montola and Jakko Stenros. I don’t think ludemes are unique to the past 15 years. If anything, the past 15 years are defined by the fallout and the shadow of the 2008 recession, and the D20 bubble. The period of time when there was an enormous glut of d20-style games that flooded the market and ruined the RPG industry for a while. And 2010 comes in the shadow of the aftermath of that. So it’s hard to say everyone’s using systems nowadays. That’s not new. For as long as there’ve been RPGs, people have found it useful to learn from other people that continuously reinvent the conceptual wheel.

We're about an hour and a half out from the End of Year Video dropping and I did want to share some stuff that got cut from interviews. For instance, I didn't end up using a lot of my first interview with Jay Dragon, on account of how I didn't know what the essay was yet, but here are some outtakes: