makinggarbo-blog

[makinggarbo-blog]

sorry i cant hang out i forgot how to mimic human like behaviour

[makinggarbo-blog]

working on an original cosmic horror game set in alt history 1840s Birmingham. It uses d12s because I like Interlock but figured there were too many crits for my liking.

It's filled with secret societies, strange soft magic, and politics(tm).

Y'all working on any games out there?

I wanna hear about them!

[makinggarbo-blog]

I'm buying another ttrpg thank you old russian professor

whenever i'm trying to talk myself out of buying something i don't need i always hear my old russian professor's voice echoing in my head: "WHAT??? WILL YOU DIE THE RICHEST MAN IN THE GRAVEYARD?" and then i make an unwise financial decision

[makinggarbo-blog]

the name "theresa" is so funny like. theres a what

[makinggarbo-blog]

this is why god sent the eclipse

memeception

[makinggarbo-blog]

Some nights you sleep, others you re-write your entire project from scratch : /

#ttrpg design #indie ttrpg

[makinggarbo-blog]

Long Time, No Time

Time is a tricky thing to track in TTRPGs. I've been toying with different ideas of tracking recovery, downtime, and travel starting with the most simple: don't. Sometimes its easy to forget that you don't need a system for everything. That being said I'm going to toy with some ideas anyway.

The first I had was to borrow from HP style systems and hand out a little recovery each day or few days which when added up to your injury value means you've healed. This would work if I was using Hit Points and tacking on another value to wounds seemed a bit too game-y as well as complex.

In looking for a more elegant solution I sometimes find it useful to write up an inelegant one so I've written this one out as having a recovery time written in days which may be reduced quicker with healing magical or otherwise. It's functional but I don't love it but because of the systems I have in place it'll work for now.

Downtime and Travel can be done much the same way which is a bonus however. Downtime projects may be accelerated the same way as healing, with a roll. Travel follows much the same way.

I'm curious about other TTRPG designers who've come up against this issue of tracking time and wondered what solutions y'all may've found.

#ttrpg design

[makinggarbo-blog]

Into the Blind free rules available now!

Into the Blind is a sci-fi roleplaying game for 3-5 people, inspired by media such as The Expanse, Gravity, Arrival and Annihilation, and TTRPGs like Trophy, Mothership and Alien: The Roleplaying Game.

You are Salvager, Courier, Bodyguard, First Responder, Investigator, Debt Collector; whatever you need to be to make ends meet. You will be eaten by the machine the Company owns and operates, or you’ll die trying to escape it. You are subject to the inexorable forces of the universe. You are a mass moving through a vast field of factors and probabilities. You are a ship alone at sea, and the stories of sailors are the strangest and saddest.

You are a Freelancer. If the debt doesn't get you, the darkness will.

So psyched to put this out and talk more about it in the future. The full version will be coming later, but the basic rules to the game will always be free - everything you need to create a crew of Freelancers and run a session, so grab your sci fi adventure pamphlets and get busy dying in space.

Itch is a little weird about mixing paid content and free content, but visit the itch page and scroll to the bottom, the Free Rules are under the Download Demo header:

[makinggarbo-blog]

TRUST EXERCISE

This is not a rickroll

[makinggarbo-blog]

52 Magic Items For Troika (Or Other OSR Games!)

-Share the dried cysts of a saint! -Pass cerumenal superfluity aurally! -Receive an insectoid enema! -Use a fleshmagnet to tear holes into people! -Unleash psionic Oedipus complexes!

Designed after an old Victorian adverts catalogue, with a distinct weird-fantasy flair.

It was great fun to work on these and I think they'll be a blast at your table. FREE while community copies last!

[makinggarbo-blog]

I cannot overstate how much I love Tom Lehrer's story. It sounds so fake but is entirely real.

He's a goddamn genius- he started studying mathematics at Harvard when he was 15 and graduated magna cum laude. He worked at Los Alamos for a few years before being drafted and working for the NSA, where he claims to have invented jello shots to get around alcohol bans.

He then went back to Harvard for a couple years before starting to teach political science at MIT.

Through all of that, he was writing and performing both some of the funniest shit you'll ever hear (Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, Masochism Tango) and absolutely scathing political satire (Who's Next, Wernher von Braun, Send the Marines). Until the mid/late 60s counterculture gained momentum. He didn't like their aesthetic, so he stopped making music.

Shortly after, he moved to California and started teaching math and musical theater history at the UC Santa Cruz for the next 30 years.

I don't know if non-Californians understand just how goddamn funny that is. It's where stoners and math (and now computer science) kids who couldn't get into Berkeley go. Leaving Harvard/MIT for UCSC is peak academic phoning it in. And by all accounts he had a blast.

Plus the whole putting all of his music in the public domain thing. That fucked.

[makinggarbo-blog]

Magic in Worldbuilding

When working on a world for The Dark Lines based on the mid 1840s Europe I ran into a significant fork in the road. There are 2 possibilities, magic being widely known and used, and magic being superstition. When worldbuilding in the past I've veered towards magic being widely utilized, I've been fascinated by how systems of governance would change if the king could actually be immortal; what would that mean for his sons?

As I design The Dark Lines to be a game of horror I run into the issue of player vs character expectations about the world. If a player sees something magical happen they aren't necessarily sure how their character would react right away. This confusion I think is what diminishes the horror greatly in games like Vampire the Masquerade. After all even a neonate, young by vampire standards, at up to 80 years old has seen much and would have expectations to see the strange and arcane from time to time. The player acting the character should in my opinion not be surprised in character when something grotesquely strange happens. In horror games the most effective moments I think are when the expectation of the characters and players align, that is to say when both are equally faced with the unexpected.

To give an example. In The Dark Lines as it stands where magic is commonplace if faced with a zombie, no matter how horrifying the players could wrongly assume this is a somewhat normal occurrence. That this is within the realm of expectation the issue. This is why I think the thing that does the greatest disservice to Call of Cthulhu is the expectation by players that they'll be facing Cthulhu. That the great old ones not only exist but are inevitably going to appear takes away a lot of the tension.

My attempt to resolve this initially was to divide The Dark Lines into 3 books, the first is the mechanics for the players, the second mechanics for the GM, the third lore for the characters. I think this approach has failed because no matter how try a world of magic is always so distant from the one we live in the stakes have failed to land in playtesting. To go back to the earlier example a zombie in this world as it exists should be a massive sign of dark and terrible things, a mage who has learned the secrets of life and death, a mage who has exited what can reasonably be called human. But to the players a zombie is always a zombie, something familiar and not something to be feared.

The two roads then re-evaluated are to change the theme of the game from one of horror to one of adventure with horror elements and motifs or to change the world from one with commonplace magic to one of secret societies and occult mystery. What road I'll take… I don't know yet, may do both and just write up two versions and see which playtests better but that sounds like a lot of darn work.

#ttrpg design #indie ttrpg #ttrpg

[makinggarbo-blog]

In my experience I've felt fear, dread, and a whole range in between while playing ttrpgs but only in very specific ones. Call of Cthulhu does it for me but only when ran by a very skilled GM, though that goes for most systems. I think the most consistently scary ttrpg for me is Mothership.

Horror ttrpg fans, have you ever experienced fear/been scared while playing a horror ttrpg? As someone who greatly appreciates and enjoys horror (and has made and played multiple "horror ttrpgs"), I'm always curious about other people's experiences with like, instigating fear for fun.

Horror books, movies, and video games always have the capability to do it for me, but I've never really experienced a for-fun-fear-response while playing a ttrpg.

There's probably a bigger dive into this I could do sometime, but that's for eventually maybe.

#ttrpg

[makinggarbo-blog]

sometimes TTRPG design is "hmm what are the probabilities of X or Y when rolling 2d8 + 3 vs 1d8 + 1d12 +1" and sometimes TTRPG design is "here is my YT playlist of historians and archaeologists discussing Bronze Age Mesopotamian magic"

[makinggarbo-blog]

all these are incredible!

so something i think the rpc/writing community may have been sleeping on but i wanted to share…

“MEDIEVAL FANTASY CITY GENERATOR” 

by watabou

it’s a random generator for custom cities/towns that are perfect for things like roleplaying, writing, and d&d. it’s simple but just complex enough to allow for customization of the things you’d like to change

honestly i love this page because it’s so helpful for so many different things?? i can’t show all of the customization options here in the images but some are, but not limited to:

small, medium, or large maps

changing the map coloring

you can add a title and key

you can warp certain points for small adjustments

.png export

saving wips

and so much more!!

honestly the best way to learn all that the generator does is to play with it yourself. i adore using this and hope it helps anyone who also needs a similar resource!!

[makinggarbo-blog]

Obfuscation and a Question

One thing that I've been experimenting with heavily in the process of making tabletop games in general but specifically with The Dark Lines is obfuscating mechanics from the player. It's a fine balance between frustration from not knowing why things are working the way they are and the excitement for the same reason. In the past I've had players both complain about and praise such mechanics, especially when I ran Call of Cthulhu's introductory scenarios.

In The Dark Lines one such mechanic is called Ascendancy, it works in two ways depending on the group but for now I'll focus on the Basic Ascendancy, the more common version for new players to face.

To the players it is a series of strangely labelled cards (tarot like in appearance) which don't have meanings attached that they must guess or divine the meanings of throughout play. In order to use the cards to modify rolls the player must assume a meaning based on the name or up to three descriptors that have been revealed, then argue that it applies to the roll. Should the GM allow it the player gets to decide the outcome, either using it against an opponent to make them fail, or for themselves to succeed.

To the GM these cards are rigorously chosen, curated to fit the theme. The challenge becomes picking cards that will come up often enough the players have a chance to use them. The challenge is one of missing information as well just this time it is the unpredictability of the players.

The complaints I've had with this system when I've playtested it were from a section of players who were extremely vocal and put off by the unpredictable nature of it. Sometimes I try and patch it to work with these players but I think at a certain point it's a case of not pleasing everyone.

For me as a player I think I would enjoy the system but I've not had the chance to play it without knowing the inner workings. 

My question then is has anyone had experience with a system like this and found a compromise that a wider group of players enjoyed?

#ttrpg design #indie ttrpg

[makinggarbo-blog]

I use scribus for making pdfs. It’s free but can be difficult to get the hang of. I recommend markdown editors or gm binder for quick mock-ups as well.

Some questions for my fellow designers:

What resources do you use to make PDFs? I'm looking at a few options.

Does anyone have artist recommendations or are there any artists here that regularly work with ttrpg creators?

I'll likely be posting some stuff for Infinite but will be looking to make pf2e and sf2e stuff that doesn't use Golarion. I know I'll need to look at the ORC but generally don't know what I'm doing with it as there's not many products that I've found that use it. Anywhere I can look to find a breakdown of what I would have to do?