R. K. Kothar

One white boy in arizona always bears the curse

since i'm crystallized in amber i still use it to mean "oh, so like The Mountain Witch kinda"

i think this is an interesting discussion. when i was younger i was drawn to the idea of playing a character smarter or more charismatic than i. but rolling for mental stats just never scratched that itch for me

Don't write Lore, write tables Lore doesn't have to be dumped, it can be drip-fed

One thing I wish I’d been told years ago as a ttrpg writer: Write tables.

Not lore, not stories. Richly written tables. Tables of things that can happen, people that can be met, threats and treasures. Stories are what happens at the table along the way

open.substack.com/pub/davidbla...

i mean if the difference is merely what order you're telling the story in, sure. but if careful prep is actually the difference between success and failure, it allows for a different form of player involvement. scratches a different sort of itch.

to me, the flashback thing feels like me telling a story about someone else doing a heist, and the other method feels like doing a heist.

it's like a DIY zine form of D&D. as if it's telling you "this is how simple this game really is, so take this and do whatever you want with it"

i have this walter benjamin inspired attitude towards it-- i think the gm-player distinction obscures the innately communal nature of what we're doing (eg sharing work load organically among the players has evolved as tradition a few times in the hobby's history)

it's exactly here where i break and take a more rhizomatic view of authorship-- if a player takes (ooc) notice of something, the GM responds to that by giving it further thought (for example) and in fact i think these non-lusory channels of communication are in many ways definitive of the artform

There's an attitude that floats around online like "the most important thing is not that i play games how i want, but that you don't play games how you want". fwiw i don't think people that act like this play games very often

A small hut in a valley, chimney smoking at morning and evening. Home to a lone shepherd and the three playful velociraptors that help guide his flock.

An orkish megalith is set upon a small, wet hill. The flagstone in the circle's center is inscribed with an ancient calendar; the days have shifted in the centuries since it met the chisel. The winter solstice sun would pass through the main arch in the waning hours, meeting the horizon at hex #____

one funny thing is that there's an ideal form of Adventure which is more or less just pre-done GM prep as a toolkit. which i think is good and useful regardless of system but not exactly legible as a mimicry of historical D&D supplements

not yet...

classic traveller. in the past i've gone on kicks where i've been into OSR/NSR stuff, storygame stuff, or crunchy 90s stuff. trav appeals to all of those impulses while being distinct from all the categories. wild and unique game

the dice roll bit is interesting. i think OSR stuff (inasmuch as it exists/existed) is more cool with things being completely arbitrary. "no need to prep this, just roll it on a table and we'll figure out what it means" sort of mentality

An OSR dungeon based on Mark Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle”

no contest. all i would need is art, a license, and a cache of narcotics sufficient to kill me a few hundred times over. and it would SUCK

spirit animal