I suppose it's time to actually show people my work. Running Breathless is a game about being chased and dealing with problems along the way, sometimes not even your own. squidlord.itch.io/running-br… Maybe you're a psychic kid who's escaped from the hospital or the school for unusual talents. Maybe you've made the heist of your life. Maybe you're the worst kind of criminal scum. Maybe they're right behind you. Catch your breath when you can. Go to ground if you find someone you can trust or a big enough sucker. The one thing you're guaranteed to do? Run. Running Breathless is a TRPG for one to five players, GM optional, based on the Breathless SRD. Check it out. It's pay what you want, which means you can pay absolutely $0.00, and I won't be mad. In fact, I encourage you to do so. It runs pretty quickly, so you can even throw it up on the table while waiting for other players to arrive for your main game. It's fast, a little bit cruel, and you should have about 50-50 odds of getting away with it. Whatever it was you did. The chasers know.

Simultaneously, this is a classic TRPG from Japan and introduces a style of setting which is extremely rare in Western RPGs: the fantasy mech genre. It is intentionally more crunchy than you might expect, but frankly, I'm a sucker for a lot of fusion settings. So here we are.

Because no groups with differing economic and cultural interests have ever come into violent conflict over those differing interests, to the point entire civilizations were destroyed without colonization being important to that execution.

Someone's channeling me, damnit. (I love this kind of analysis.) youtu.be/a8vPbwYDXUY

Be the American the Chinese believe you to be. youtu.be/f1IEuq__XbQ We see a lot of positivism when it comes to the portrayal of Asian cultures in RPGs, but sometimes it's good to be reminded that the view of America is not always entirely negative and does have historical variation. Though it's true, we are all beefcakes and have at least three guns on us at all times.

The irony here is that I was doing corporate/government level enterprise technical support for large Unix installations on midnight of 12/31/99. I was working that night, and I worked third shift. Thanks to the previous six months of working, it was a relatively quiet night. I don't think anyone who wasn't in the field understands what an undertaking that was, or how the resulting lack of civilization collapsing was in direct opposition to every bit of news coverage leading up to it.

Good advice for all aspects of your life. Practice this on a daily basis. When you can execute it without thinking, you are ready.

Rolemaster Classic - Open-ended rolls. Brutal criticals. Deep characters. I’m starting a video series to make it easier to learn, run, and enjoy. Episode 01 is live. youtu.be/HA7hsc7kuv8

You know what? I'll even accept that the Wild Mage Plaguelord could be an interesting part of a party who are looking to pursue a wider mission. That's the kind of setup that you want for a character who's going to become pivotal to the next major story. Probably not as a member of the protagonists—but I wouldn't necessarily say it's not so. I can think of ways to make that work where the plague is truly the lesser of evils.

Why is it that the first and only example that anyone ever gives of an evil character is of a thief? Nobody likes thieves. We don't care if they're chaotic evil, neutral evil, chaotic neutral, or true neutral. The first thing to do in every party is just slit the throat of the thief. Use the fighter to trigger traps. He can also knock down locked doors. It's fine. They're not that useful. Know a good character to integrate into the traditional fantasy party with an evil inclination is a wizard, particularly a necromancer. Or a fighter, because who's going to notice? Or a cleric, because given that all of the worshipped gods are clearly actual entities, having the favor of an evil one is just as useful, if not more so, than the favor of a good one. All of these are perfectly compatible with the murder hobo nature of most fantasy, particularly D&D adjacent parties. But no one ever talks about that because apparently they don't have the creativity God gave little green peas.

#TTRPG #BladesInTheDark #advice Sick of your tabletop players treating a grim sandbox like a safe, cozy diaper run? Stop begging for permission, force them to answer the hard questions, and learn to drive your campaign like you want to burn it all down: grimtokens.garden/Thoughts/T…

You cannot run a restaurant where you sell sandwiches, 90% of which taste like shit, then make a good sandwich and be surprised people are not buying it.

This link from the author of the *Loner RPG* (which is hacking on a fourth edition right now; lonersrd.zotiquestgames.com/…) touches on something that I think is critical and fascinating about game design itself. It's about how you can depict extremely competent characters with only a handful of descriptive tags. reddit.com/r/LonerRPG/commen… The answer, of course, being that tags are not monotonic. They don't only cover a narrow slit of things that we can see through the keyhole of the character and nothing else. They are broad, all-encompassing, multiply interpretable permissions that describe the character and Batman in particular as an example of how to encapsulate such a broadly nuanced character in so few traits is one of the best examples. This adds on to the fact that really the only thing you need to figure out for any given role is whether or not you've got advantage or disadvantage. No amount of additional advantages after the first will make it more advantageous, just as no greater pile of disadvantages after the first, unmatched by an advantage, will make it any more disadvantageous. It's one or the other (or possibly neither), and that's the way it is. Roll the dice, play to find out. Personally, I love this, but I understand how people can fail to have it catch the right way in their heads on the way to the game space. I really do need to sit down and see if I can get 2 or 3 people together to try and do a little bog standard D&D fantasy using Loner and see if they catch on to how straightforward and flexible it is. Doing it solo would seem to be cheating in a way, if only because it would mean that I didn't make sure that others could quickly come up to speed on what they need to understand. There is something else I would like the author to write about, and that is character advancement when traits are kept sparse and broad. My understanding is that it is done generally by either broadening a trait that you already have to encompass this new thing that you think it should possess, or in extremity, adding on a new trait. This is equally true for traits which hinder you, so picking up broad form weaknesses can be just as important. Anyway, something that I ran into but probably didn't deserve an entire section on Grim Tokens, so I saved it just for you guys.

You know what? I appreciate every bit of this. Am I ever likely to play ACKS2? Nope, sadly not. It's way too GM-centric and crunchy for me to want to actually run it, and nobody I know is likely to run it themselves. I appreciate that it exists in the same way that I appreciate the copy of *Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth* on my shelf. That said, slamming it together with the over-the-top insanity of the Arduin Grimoire? That's poetry. That actively makes me wish I could get into a game that was going balls deep in that. I would put up with the mechanical complexity for that alone. (In fairness, the part of ACKS2 that interests me the most is domain level play, and I don't really care about character level stuff. In my mind, that's where the cool bits start.)

It's a terrible shame that we never got the *Ripper* series that we were promised, because I would have liked to see Giles in his full flower of ruthlessness. Not a thing that you could make these days, sadly.

Two things have added to my dice collection the most over the years: the tabletop hybrid wargame RPG *All Things Zombie* and *Champions*.

#TTRPG #MadMax #Starforged Don't force Twilight 2000 into a wasteland it wasn't built for. In "Mad Max - T2K or Starforged", I kitbash Starforged into a high-octane narrative interceptor. grimtokens.garden/Thoughts/M…

In honor of D-Day on June 6th, I'm giving away my World War II squad-based wargame for free for anyone who wants it. Small squad-level engagements. ko-fi.com/s/c2a0bd4d1c Free till June 7th

Look, frankly, if you're going to give me an excuse to both pilot giant robots and start my own cult, I'm there, my friend. I am there. I am so there, you can't pry me loose.

I'm going to have to disagree with this, in part because it participates in the quote "all things are one things" end quote fallacy, where imagination must be limited to a single archetypical setting and nothing beyond that is considered worthwhile. You know, the dumbest possible interpretation of narrative. But that out of the way first. A horror RPG only depends on the characters being horrified. Characters can only be horrified by things they see and recognize and know. Lovecraftian protagonists start knowing nothing of the mythos, and the horror escalates as they are exposed to it and begin to understand what it is that the things they see imply. A lot of military horror hinges on the protagonists not being powerless in a physical sense, but having that power be inapplicable to the things that they discover and interact with. (Zombies are largely resistant to bullets. Demons don't care about being shot, werewolves regenerate, etc.) Many horror creators fixate too much on "characters should be powerless." This obviously is not necessary. In fact, it's often better if the characters have an element of power, which provides them a tool to interact with the world and for the horror to be manifest around. Which brings us to psychics. What is psychic power in the context of many horror stories? It's a way for the characters to see things they would not otherwise see. The medium can see and talk to ghosts. The telepath can hear the thoughts which echo in people's dark impulses. The prescient can see the nightmares to come if they don't act, and perhaps if they do. The telekinetic has the ability to exert physical power, but that physical power may not be directly useful. All of the above can be opened to the powers of the horrors beyond through the use of their abilities in many settings. Paranormal abilities represent just one more way for the characters to have their power rebuffed, diffused, or made dangerous. Just like guns, cell phones, and social groups, all of which have been called out in the past by inferior writers as detrimental to writing horror. Is it appropriate to every setting? No, absolutely. If your story is about an extremely grounded group dealing with serial killers, then a group of psions might not be your best bet. On the other hand, that also sounds like it could be absolutely fucking amazing, done well. The real secret is there is no secret to good writing. There's nothing to avoid. Just understand what it is you're doing and what the story requires. Everything else is catch as catch can.

I'm not sure exactly how I feel about the playtest of *Ironsworn: Legacies*. youtube.com/watch?v=AdfYmWas… On the one hand, I think Moves being folded into a single die mechanic and then being connected to Codex Dashboards on the back end is just moving around complexity. I'm not really fond of that. On the other, I quite am intrigued by the replacement of the Spirit and Health tracks with impairment tracks in a more Forged in the Dark way. I'm not hating anything, but some things seem changed just for the sake of changing things. Still, this is an early alpha, and I am pretty deeply invested in the outcome.