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#Weird fantasy
weirdtimes · 6 months
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Word to the wise: You shouldn't believe everything you read in books.
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lil-tachyon · 3 months
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She works her art in sinew and gristle
For The Electrum Archive RPG by Emiel Boven
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pulpsandcomics2 · 8 days
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Brocal Remohi
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emielboven · 6 months
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The Hollows
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injuries-in-dust · 2 years
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Random thought...
Modern jobs for fanatasy creatures:
- A bridge troll who works as a tollbooth operator. It’s a lot easier than trying to scare people into paying you, and slightly less chance of being stabbed with a longsword.
- A fairy who works in a coffee shop, or bakery, who’s customers always think they make the best pastries. It’s okay to take the food and drink, since the money exchanged makes it a fair trade.
- Dragons who work in the banking industry. They may, or may not, fully understand what investments, mortgages, or interest rates, mean but they do know that their horde grows year after year and that’s good enough for them.
Anyone got any other amusing ideas? Then feel free to add.
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trigonomicon · 7 months
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Guys I tried drawing a horse from memory for this knight but I think I fucked up???
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curus-creations · 2 months
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After Lacerta conquered the south, those rich and powerful who had sided with the elves were given strange new guard dogs - a product of Lacertan magic. That some of them responded to the names of the nobles who had opposed the invasion was kept secret from the public.
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tomoleary · 1 year
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Al Feldstein - Weird Fantasy
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aaronsrpgs · 1 year
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Patchwork World is a weird fantasy game that mixes principles from powered-by-the-apocalypse (PbtA) and old school renaissance (OSR) games. I wrote it for people who prefer or need simple character sheets and rules and for people trying to move away from D&D. I’ll go into more detail about each of the bolded terms below.
1. WEIRD FANTASY is the genre description I settled on because the game is fantastical, it’s about fantasizing about a better world, and it doesn’t draw from the same fantasy traditions as D&D.
Instead, I wanted to recreate the feeling of playing games like Zelda: Link’s Awakening or Super Mario World for the first time. I drew inspiration from books like Hav by Jan Morris, Iceland’s Bell by Halldór Laxness, Circe by Madeline Miller, and A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar. I wanted the game to feel like my favorite surreal comic books, like Krazy Kat by George Herriman, Rudy by Mark Connery, and the works of A. Degen.
In Patchwork World, you can burst into a herd of cats, be haunted by your troll grandma, speak with birds, and tend a crystalline garden.
2. PbtA: Patchwork World draws on the principles and system originated in Apocalypse World by Vincent and Meguey Baker and the “roll with the questions” iteration created by Brandon Leon-Gambetta for Pasión de las Pasiones (one of the finest RPGs ever written).
Players (including the GM) have clear principles to help them get started, like being a fan of each other and being open to change. Players have a lot of power over what a session will look like based on the moves (special abilities) they pick for their characters—a group that owns a castle (the Castle move) and can burst into cats will have a much different approach to problems than a group with a Magnificent Weapon and a bunch of curses.
And rolling with the questions means that every time someone makes a move, they have to consider the state of their character, both emotionally and fictionally. You have a better chance to avoid danger if you made an ominous prediction about it, for example, and you’re more likely to win a fight if you’ve witnessed your enemy acting unjustly.
3. OSR principles are tailored around “old school” gaming and are often phrased as in opposition to newer “story games” like Apocalypse World. But looking at the headings in the classic Principia Apocrypha, one of the building blocks of OSR culture, there’s a lot that aligns! And a lot of stuff I love.
Embrace chaos, telegraph lethality, subvert expectations, build responsive situations. These are all principles I love, and I tried to give the GM advice and tools to do this. There are lots of tables to roll on in Patchwork World to build strange places and drive the strange occupants of those places.
It’s also really easy to make a character in Patchwork World, much like in OSR games, because...
4. SIMPLE CHARACTER SHEETS & RULES! I run games for people with full-time jobs, people with kids, people with ADHD and memory issues. And it can be such a barrier to say to people like that, “We’re going to have a bunch of fun! But we’ll have to reference this big book, and you’ll have to parse this tiny text, and if you want to be a cool wizard, you’ll have to flip back and forth between even more complicated rules.”
Patchwork World has no stats (thanks to rolling with the questions) and no classes. Making a character is as simple as choosing two moves (and if I were richer, I would have printed them on a deck of cards so players could just have them that way) and describing who they are.
(And because I embrace chaos, there’s also a table to roll for random moves instead.)
Other than their two moves, players will need to reference a simple sheet to track their wellness and experience and a sheet of basic moves that everyone has. And you’ll only need two six-sided dice to play.
5. MOVING AWAY FROM D&D is hard! You get invested in those big books and the time and money you’ve spent on them. You’re invested in the stories you’ve told. I get it. But D&D ended up actively pushing against a lot of what my weird friends wanted to do in a game, and we’d either have to follow the rules (meaning stuff was less cool), write new rules (more homework for the DM), or toss the rules away. And if we did that, why bother using them in the first place?
If you’re moving from D&D to Patchwork World, you can still play an elf wizard, a human fighter, a dwarven barbarian, or anything else like that. You can have cool weapons, fancy magic, and roguish charm and stealth. Just choose those moves and get going.
But you can also be an elf barbarian without having to worry about balancing your stat bonuses. Or you can be sneaky and cast spells without having to make it to a level three subclass or deal with multiclassing. And my hope is that once you start getting weird with that stuff, you’ll only get weirder.
6. A FINAL WORD: Making Patchwork World was an intensely personal experience for me. I was writing it in 2020 and 2021, in the rise of COVID and the aftermath of my city’s police murdering George Floyd a mile from my home. I was thinking about building communities in a broken world. I was struggling with the solitude of lockdown, away from my joyfully radical and queer communities. I was thinking about how much I’ve changed and how much I still want to change. So this is a game with rules for building communities, for mutating, for going on dates and making friends.
But you can also have a cool sword that takes memories or an eyeball helmet that sees through walls. Players have been grubby raccoons, otherdimensional children, necromancer puppets, and sullen teen busboys. This game has brought me a lot of joy! Maybe it can bring you some too. (It’s free, btw.)
(Doing a little post here about each of my games so that they’re around for me to reblog or link to. Reblogs welcome!)
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st-just · 1 year
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Ninfa by Mirco Paganessi
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weirdtimes · 6 months
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... I do believe this will affect the nocturnal migration of moths.
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lil-tachyon · 1 year
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Masqued Infernal
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newvyreoffice · 9 months
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i really love A House of Many Doors
when you look at a setting like Fallen London, you have a lot of space for weird stuff but you don't have infinite space, or infinite time. eventually, if you want to throw in new weird stuff, you have to explain where it came from and why nobody happened to stumble across it before (unless you're an olympic gold medalist in foreshadowing and your writer's bible has more prophecies than the real one). you can manage it a few times, but eventually the world starts getting cluttered
this isn't a problem unique to fallen london, far from it- warcraft has been getting away with it for decades, though it's gotten to the point where a whole new undiscovered island with a whole new undiscovered threat has started to wear thin even for its target audience
House of Many Doors has a solution to this problem, one that isn't unique to it but which it leverages to great effect: stuff just shows up sometimes. the house steals things from other realities
people, monsters, whole cities, whole armies, gods, all these things can kinda just appear anywhere at any time
this has implications- the House's local reality (without getting too heavily into spoilers) is porous and subjective, with artifacts and individuals from other realities come some of the rules of that place. things don't just lose their potency entirely, and often enough can keep a good portion of it
it's not a perfect solution and, like the other, it's a trick you can only play so many times in so many ways
but i like it a lot, i like when it's used well and House absolutely does so
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emielboven · 3 months
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The PDF of "The Grafter's Tomb", the first adventure of The Electrum Archive Issue 02, has been sent out to all backers!
I'm so happy this piece of the zine is finally getting into people's hands! 🔥
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gameraboy2 · 1 year
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Weird Fantasy #8 (1951), cover by Al Feldstein
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comicartarchive · 8 months
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Weird Fantasy 16 Cover by Al Feldstein
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