ratwavegamehouse

[ratwavegamehouse]

There are many ways in this world to shift your form. Professional Shapeshifters take on various different bodies to make it through the dungeons. The Shapeshifter is an individual suffering from a destroyed work life balance. Your strength is chaotic and dedicated. Your struggles are in keeping a hold of yourself.

The Shapeshifter art will probably get a rejig but this is the concept piece I came up with while coming up with the original playbooks.

The options for how you have shapeshifting abilities can point to a lot of different back stories; dungeon magics, potion kits, gene mods or other science bullshit.

All the Shapeshifter's strong move are about how experienced they are with dungeon delving. All their vulnerable moves are about how this is all they have right now.

They have a lower Stress Metre than all the other playbooks. When a Stress Metre maxesbout a psychodungeon will spring from the psychoplumber. The Shapeshifter lives a little closer to that edge than the other playbooks.

PSYCHODUNGEON is a game where your character can change a lot. All playbooks have avenues to grow. The Shapeshifter does too but they also have avenues that remind you changing isn't always getting better.

In PSYCHODUNGEON we delve into nightmarish psychostructures, battle monsters, navigate a hostile domain, and help the mind the dungeon sprung from gain closure. We do this for a meagre paycheck. On the surface we try to get by living our lives in a busy city that wouldn’t miss you if you fell off the face of the planet.

Coming to Kickstarter this May. Please follow the pre-launch page. This is the third of a series of posts I’ll do all about different aspects of the game. Do let me know if there’s anything you’re especially curious about.

#indie ttrpg #game design #ttrpg #psychodungeon

[ratwavegamehouse]

The Wolf may have been around for a long time, longer even then they’ve been able to be scream. The transformation; that'd have been picked up in the dungeons. A lot of people give up if they develop lycanthropy; take a severance pay, retrain or sign on, fuck going back either way. The Werewolf doesn't though. They bite the hand they've been dealt and still go all in.

The Werewolf is all about pain and the struggle to listen to your body. As it relates to work it's about sticking out a job that has already hurt you. I wasn't necessarily starting with that in mind, it was an angle I discovered in the process of writing.

(It's funny, a year or two back when I couldn't crack a werewolf project I was tinkering with I joked that I was the only trans person without an interesting take on werewolves. I finally found one; but it's much less informed by queerness and more about disability, specifically chronic pain.)

Because the Werewolf has a more defined backstory than other playbooks their earliest picklist is instead about where your heads at

Nothing to lose

Looking for closure

Cared for, and aware of it

Maladjusted, unable to fit in

One bad month away losing it all

Coming back from a sabbatical

In PSYCHODUNGEON we delve into nightmarish psychostructures, battle monsters, navigate a hostile domain, and help the mind the dungeon sprung from gain closure. We do this for a meagre paycheck. On the surface we try to get by living our lives in a busy city that wouldn’t miss you if you fell off the face of the planet.

Coming to Kickstarter this May. Please follow the pre-launch page. This is the second of a series of posts I’ll do all about different aspects of the game. Do let me know if there’s anything you’re especially curious about.

#indie ttrpg #game design #ttrpg #psychodungeon #theyre also loosely a puppy girl playbook for those with eyes to see #also maybe the silliest set of names you can pick from

[ratwavegamehouse]

PSYCHODUNGEON Shapeshifter preview!

I remember the first time I watched a whole video of my first stand up hour and realized how much I talk with my hands (I was probably about 22)

The funny thing is I feel fairly sure I didn't used to and I'm not sure where the change came from. Did I teach myself that like I taught myself facial expressions and then I just forgot? Had I repressed this impulse when I was a child worried it'd get spotted as vaguely effeminate? Was it something I subconsciously developed while doing standup to have a more engaging stage presence?

Maybe I'm wrong and I've always been that way. Anyway what does this have to do with the Shapeshifter? Legit nothing, I'm just reminded of how much of a hand talker I am.

#indie ttrpg #game design #ttrpg #psychodungeon

[ratwavegamehouse]

Oh have two PSYCHODUNGEON playlists

#Spotify

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incredible television

[ratwavegamehouse]

your doglike features and string of tragic misfortunes have entranced me

#people are always saying this about me

[ratwavegamehouse]

You have to take a vocational course to become a proper Wizard. Everyday folk might have picked up some things in secondary school, an amateur can still know their way around a staff or a wand but to get a license you need to have completed the course and passed the tests. Then you're a big fancy Wizard! But that's a lot of cost to have sunk into the thing and it does raise the question: are you sure you made the right call?

My editor-girlfriend described the Wizard playbook in PSYCHODUNGEON as Degree Regret: The Class. It's a lot about feeling stuck because of the time and effort you've put into something. A lot of the vulnerable moves are about facing this not being what you thought'd be like.

There's a decent chunk of why I quit teaching there. I also liked recasting the wizard as a working class job rather than something implicitly academic.

When you all make your psychoplumbers you ask questions to your right and left to establish some starting dynamics. Two of the Wizard's options really jab at the heart of the character.

What do you think I'd be happier as?

Why do you think I'm good at this job?

In PSYCHODUNGEON we delve into nightmarish psychostructures, battle monsters, navigate a hostile domain, and help the mind the dungeon sprung from gain closure. We do this for a meagre paycheck. On the surface we try to get by living our lives in a busy city that wouldn't miss you if you fell off the face of the planet.

Coming to Kickstarter this May. Please follow the pre-launch page. This is the first of a series of posts I'll do all about different aspects of the game. Do let me know if there's anything you're especially curious about.

#indie ttrpg #game design #ttrpg #psychodungeon #playbooks #belonging outside belonging

[ratwavegamehouse]

My approach for retaking lines I fumble on during Lifepath recording is was the fumble funny?

#like just dying on the word specificity is funny #whereas spacing out and losing a question isnt

[ratwavegamehouse]

The Werewolf in PSYCHODUNGEON is maybe my favourite playbook. It's lycanthropy as a chronic pain allegory, which the playbook's struggle is in trying to learn to listen to their body.

Is it also a light puppy girl playbook? I'll never tell

#indie ttrpg #game design #ttrpg #psychodungeon #also check the name picklist #some all timers there honestly

[ratwavegamehouse]

Guess what's coming back? And yes I am going with that logo!

#ttrpg #podcast #interview #Spotify

[ratwavegamehouse]

So Godslingers begins with a Storytelling Phase. Each player rolls 3d6 and then uses a variety of tables to guide filling in an Old God's concept, domains and various interwoven stories.

These gods are all long dead by the time Godslingers Roleplaying Phase begins, but their legacy and power lingers in the hands of interstellar drifters.

Godslingers had a really loooong dev period. Like I was working on it simultaneously with the Old Gods and Young Guns setting guide and that came out in '22. It went through various GMless iterations (the book does still include rules for GMless play but that's no longer the focus) and the relationship between the gun and the Godslinger used to be much more fiddly and abstract mechanically.

Buuuut the Storytelling Phase was actually pretty set from very early on. So when it made sense to include some pre-written gods in Thirty Foes OR Once again, we are defeated (a storytelling/mapmaking game about powerful outsiders protecting a dead end village from an entire army, inspired by Seven Samurai) the way I did was I just went through the Storytelling Phase from Godslingers by myself multiple times.

Anyway all three books set in the Fourth Galaxy are pretty sick and also completely stand alone, as much as they can inform and weave into each other.

Godslingers is out now brand new and you can get all three Fourth Galaxy books in a bundle for a tenner discount.

#bundle has only a few days left btw

[ratwavegamehouse]

Got asked about the Witch playbook for PSYCHODUNGEON and how it contrasts with the Wizard playbook.

Basically the Witch is all about having felt the need to monetise everything that brought you joy and wondering if that's going to end up damaging that joy.

[ratwavegamehouse]

Got asked about the Witch playbook for PSYCHODUNGEON and how it contrasts with the Wizard playbook.

Basically the Witch is all about having felt the need to monetise everything that brought you joy and wondering if that's going to end up damaging that joy.

#indie ttrpg #game design #ttrpg #psychodungeon #once Im a little less personally busy im gonna bank some posts on all the playbooks and other stuff #but I can just ramble at a TikTok so theyre coming quicker

[ratwavegamehouse]

One time, the Queen of England decided to knight a loyal member of her country who happened to be Jewish. 

This man knew that knights were supposed to say something in Latin as the Queen knighted them, but didn’t remember the line, so he quickly said “ma nishtana halaila hazeh micol haleilot”

This, of course, confused the Queen, who turned to her advisor and asked “Why is this knight different from all other knights?”

[ratwavegamehouse]

[ratwavegamehouse]

So I'm gonna try and do a bunch of TikToks just talking over PSYCHODUNGEON (and I'll probably cross post all of them, but also will write actual posts with words on most of the same stuff).

The first one is about the Wizard playbook which my editor has referred to as Degree Regret: The Class.

#indie ttrpg #game design #ttrpg #psychodungeon

[ratwavegamehouse]