Rose Skye

Every artist I personally know struggles with the fear that no one really cares about their work. Don't let them go on believing that, it isn't true.

I spoke to a friend who was deep into TTRPGs years ago but was out of the loop, and the big thing that shocked them was that people weren't Angry About Storygames the way they were in the past. A lot of that tech is normalized now in the indie sphere, even in "OSR" games. Branches are reconnecting.

You've just died.
The 6th picture in your phone gallery is what killed you.

Somehow I'm not surprised about having been done in by tea. I accept this end.

I gaze upon the map and see that I, too, am made of star-stuff.

I know it isn't much to say, and doesn't address your interpersonal and financial sorrows, but for what it's worth, I've been following what you make since 2013 and it's mattered to me.

The different splats want different things - it's a bit like combining characters from a police procedural and an office drama then arguing that it's fine because they all come from the real present day.

(It's actually pretty different, since the set of possible risks and rewards of a situation are handled separately rather than as a singular aim with possible fallout, but I had to check to make sure.)

Working out a system of rolling pools of dice and allocating them to win stakes (including bringing in new assets to get out of losing situation), and suddenly realizing that I've recreated Dogs In The Vineyard from first principles.

Man with "Sickos" shirt laughing while looking through a window.

I really like that cover art, it has a foreboding feel to it.

I find SRDs useful for extracting the underlying mechanical ideas from a text for study and consideration, but never manage to actually make a game conforming to one because I always end up wanting to tweak things and end up making something too different to fit the original label.

I would want to be a part of the hivemind if it actually was a complete merging of minds and memories Childhood's End-style, but after that discussion of the novels in episode 4 I am no longer convinced.

(Also I'm not sure the hivemind would be good at RPGs, it doesn't seem capable of acting.)

Ran a second playtest session for Protoplastic. Feedback has consistently indicated that drawing from a dice pool sequentially isn't especially engaging, but allocating all of them at once feels good, so I'm massaging the system into revolving around the latter.

Review: Honey in the Rafters — Prismatic Wasteland A short and sweet review of a starter adventure for Mausritter.

A 2nd blogpost for #MausritterMonth! A short review of the starter adventure that came with the original boxed set. The impressive proliferation of Mausritter adventures is part of what has made the game so successful, but what about Mausritter’s Keep on the Borderlands equivalent?
#osr #ttrpg

Void shift box at an angle. You can see the cover, the side, and the bottom with dice visible.

Binary Star Games shop showing discounts of 20% for 3 products

VOID_SHIFT PHYSICAL IS OUT and BLACK FRIDAY(ish) SALE IS ON

shop.binarystar.games

Read on for more detail!

YouTube video by Direct Sun The Tomb of Eight Gates: Puzzle Dungeon Workshop

@directsun.bsky.social Invited me onto his podcast talking about Puzzle Dungeons and it was real fun. Give it a listen.

Youtube: youtu.be/NNiIE3DwChE

Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/5JyZ...

I settled for "Fish Fear Me".

I just finished playing through Subnautica, and my biggest complaint is that the entry field is too small to let me name my rocket like a Culture ship and call it the "I'd Rather Be Fishing".

The Scylla/Charybdis trade-off of actually having enough energy to accomplish anything today versus sleeping enough to accomplish anything tomorrow.

That sketch of a game is just one possibility, though. Properly executed, the core structure shouldn't require any supernatural elements, nor be strictly political. A good, sufficiently modular design would scale down to playground friendships. The tone is up to the individual implementation.

7PP is definitely one of the systems I have in mind here, it's part of the cutting edge moving toward the ur-social game.

I'll turn it into a blog post pretty soon - I have many thoughts. A large part of what turns trad-adjacent players off from social games, I think, is the perception that they lack strong goals and structural grounding, but that's not inherent to sociality. Real life is mostly talking to people!

There's a bit player skill/lateral problem solving, not focused on "how do we circumvent this trap" but rather "how do we get this guy to like us". You need to, because that guy can get you into the Eyes Wide Shut party happening next week, and you need those votes for the upcoming Shadow Council.

I'm mentally gestating a game about navigating a global conspiracy of immortals - vampires, cryofrozen industrialists, Vandal Savage - for whom killing is off the table, leaving influence as the key amidst the schemes within schemes. Something like the VtM LARP but in a tabletop format.

All of these thoughts spun out of an excellent blog post I was musing about recently - make sure to read the two follow-up posts as well. It's triangulating closer to the elephant I'm feeling the trunk of, here.

I'm sure there's a way you could divest the structure of all the super powers and expectation of violence, though. A game all about managing relationships as the core source of interest. It can still be cutthroat if you wish, but in the way of political intrigue rather than war.

A book I find myself often returning to is Sixteen Sorrows, a Godbound supplement for procedurally generating complex, systemic problems for players to solve. That game tries to foreground this sort of play even in the core book with "courts", an attempt at a social equivalent of a dungeon.

The other half, though, the part that's less articulated, is the structure for creating situations that reliably generate those scenes. There are a lot of great one-shots that toss you into charged social situations with clear goals, but it's hard to find that for longer-form campaigns.

The need for simple, bedrock solid social mechanics is part of it, balancing the need to add to the conversation while remaining out of its way. Abilities that give information (what do they want, what are they hiding; AW Read A Person-type questions) rather than exert control are key here, I think.

There's been a lot of development in the direction of this submerged shape in the last 15 years - Hillfolk and Dream Askew come to mind, as well as a series of other games contributing pieces of the puzzle. We're triangulating ever closer to it, someone's going to put it all together eventually.