Thursday, October 17, 2024

6 Page Grimoires (Printable)

Download, print, fold, hand to new player, play.


Some design notes:

  • Inspired by: 5e's clunky ass magic system (out of spite); various zines ; Into the Breach, somehow
  • I """"balanced"""" these for a hypothetical all-wizard-no-spell-slots 5e game that will never happen. A more refined game/hack would help these books shine, but I haven't figured out what that would be yet
    • in the theoretical grimoirehack, all players would play wizards, each dungeon would have a new grimoire for treasure, and each player would have some kind of... rubber stamp? yeah, a stamp (unique wizard seal) for marking which pages of which grimoires they've learned. i think that's fun
  • yes, you can learn from more than one grimoire (wizard multiclassing). There's some obvious cross-grimoire synergies in these 6
  • i wanted to make a randomizer that scrambles the grimoire pages and makes a printout, but i got lazy
  • This is technically a GLOGtober post, except its for my own prompt (Physical Game Pieces) so it doesn't count IM GOING TO FAIL AGAI


Wednesday, October 2, 2024

300 Word Hack: EVIL FUCKING TRAIN

For GLOGtober '24, based on other peoples' thoughts on Mothership, deus' review(? retrospective?) of Abandon All Hope, and my own fear and fascination with public transportation.

Unplaytested, probably unplayable. I haven't watched any Twilight Zone but I suspect I'm ripping it off by proxy.

Here's some train ambience.

Monday, September 30, 2024

i've figured it out

er fanart by arles48

[spoilers ahead for Elden Ring, Shadow of the Erdtree, and all the Five Nights at Freddy's games]

Monday, August 19, 2024

scifi slush

have you ever noticed how fucking long this guy's leg is in the movie poster? why did they do that?

There are only two good scifi settings. I write about one constantly and see the other in my dreams.

* * *

The OASIS (yes, that OASIS) is an abandoned metaverse project. Once, it made headlines as the future of telecommuting. Twelve years of development, 2.6 trillion dollars, and four major lawsuits later, everyone collectively realized the technology was useless. GSS pulled the plug, and thirteen billion VR headsets simultaneously bricked.

Except not all of the headsets are dead. Inexplicably, the servers are still online. A few, no more than fifty, offer stable portals to the bloated, over-simulated, advertiser-ravaged, AI-generated corporate hellscape that is the OASIS.

You are stuck at home. You have in your possession, by sheer luck, a working headset. The same is true of your friends, none of whom you have ever met, or could ever meet, in real life. All the people who matter to you are inside the OASIS.

[This setting is not about the OASIS, or any of the stuff Ernest Cline thinks is cool. I think it's about a Discord server.]

* * *

For as long as we've known about extrasolars, people have been sending songs into space. It's cheap, and your music will bounce around in space forever. A bunch of early startups pitched it as a form of artistic pseudo-immortality.

Now it's the Scramble. If you dip your head into radiospace, you'll hear a million million songs playing simultaneously, alongside a billion billion half-baked podcast episodes and a trillion trillion advertisements for products that don't exist anymore.

You can still stick an antenna up, if you care, and try to decode something. A message in a bottle from millennia ago, an out-of-tune ukelele, a "will you marry me?", a conspiracy theory, a jingle for e-cigarettes. It's mostly noise. You can spend hours deconvolving a signal and end up with fartnoise.wav.

Radio communication is pretty much borked. There's no out-screaming the Scramble.

* * *

Microsimulations are modular miniature virtual reality environments. You buy them out of gacha machines (they come as colorful plastic finger-length cubes) and snap them together with magnets. They're inhabited by little AIs, which provide the main mode of play: when you click them together, the two spaces become connected by a swirling portal, and the AIs from each side start talking to/killing each other. It's like a modular ant farm - you're invited to shake the simulation and watch the inhabitants freak out.

So one day a swirling portal appears just outside your window

* * *

[i get a little freaked when cooking videos start by showing you the finished product. The causality of it is all fucked - you haven't cooked anything yet, but there's food. This happens in movies and books ("three days earlier...") but for some reason when it's done casually, with a phone camera and a solo creator, it unnerves me]

We cracked time perception with the PlayStation C. "Dilate your chronosight; turn a five minute breather into a six-hour gaming session; no need for bathroom breaks!"

The limits were pushed. The thought barrier was established: 940 thinks/ms, no further.

You actually can go faster. The technology is widely described as "quantum bullshit" (it actually has nothing to do with quantum mechanics and is closer to distributed computing - you're using more than one neuron to simultaneously process the present and the future. sidebar, can you tell i fucking hate writing scifi because im really bad at it??)

Quantum Bullshit lets you 1) see the future. This is the big money-maker, all the day traders dedicate more than half of their neurons to next year's stock market (they creep further forward in time every day, drifting away in their speculator arcologies)

2) live in the past. Thirty of my neurons are still eating my breakfast. All virtual reality environments are severely chronofucked. There's an ad in the paper for the iPhone 103 before the 102S is even out, because advertisers know your attention will be here when it does. The ad reads: "New features, probably! Maybe it'll look like this!"

(This technology has NOT been introduced to the prison sector because that system is a well-oiled machine with NO flaws and ZERO ethical oversight.)

* * *

The Scramble isn't dying down, like we thought it would. It's actually getting warmer - radio waves shortening into microwave patches, then into infrared flares. Some time in the next millennium, the Scramble will crawl into the visible light spectrum, and the night sky will runneth over with static like an old CRT.

Monday, August 12, 2024

victorian romance slush pile


The goal here is not a "victorian romance game". The goal is a set of rules/mechanics/setting considerations that make genre emulation more possible within a larger game.


http://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2016/01/romance-plots-in-rpgs.html

The Rake, the Heroine, the Wallflower --> strong archetypes- too heavy handed. wallflower class????

xp rewards the goal is to permit genre emulation, direct incentives hog too much space. there are no rewards for happily ever after. there are no rewards for decades of cold, loveless marriage


Secret Identities

Everyone has multiple names which together constitute their true name. If someone knows your true name, they can do wack shit to you, so some of these names have to be secret.

Idea #1: Your secret names are your secret identities. This makes them a limited resource - you can't make up a secret identity, you have eight identities at most

Idea #2: your names are magic. If you walk out of the room and re-enter under a different name, you'll be treated as a different person. You don't need a mask to do this, but you should at least muss up your hair or change your clothes - everyone's a bit faceblind, but they aren't stupid.


Rules of Engagement

Victorian romance is all about living in a society that tells you what to do, then choosing to defy or compromise with that society. It requires restrictions to fight against.

Players defy restrictions instinctually - without those restrictions, victorian romance has no stakes.

Idea #3: The primary means by which social norms are enforced among the elite is loss of inheritance. Your inheritance is your lifeline. In a game with such an absurd degree of wealth inequality*, losing your inheritance is game over. Social change is not possible so long as the same power structures that make the PCs important remain in place.

This doesn't work on players with nothing to lose, i.e. classic dungeon crawling types. It does work on the heiress NPC they are trying to woo, so that's something.

*by absurd wealth inequality, i mean you can commission a dress made of living moths or erect a giant statue of yourself on your private dressage course or buy a mansion and fill it with ghosts without too much thought. let them eat cake type beat


General Rules of Engagement (WIP)
  • All scions are expected to participate in the social season. This is also when all the politics and sports and shit happens.
  • All scions are expected to debut by age 28 at the latest. It is typical to debut by age 22.
  • All scions are expected to be married by age 35 at the latest. If you are not at least engaged by age 30, people will begin making arrangements for you.
  • Bigamy is frowned upon unless you have high CHA.
  • Divorce is frowned upon.
  • Queerness, in all of its forms, is frowned upon.
  • Courtship is formalized thru the exchange of letters. Failing to do so is tantamount to keeping your relationship secret, which is forbidden.
  • Courtship outside of one's House is forbidden except as part of a political alliance.
  • Courtship below one's social standing is extremely forbidden. You will lose your inheritance; your partner will lose everything.
  • The Heads of House have the final say in your courtship, marriage, and sex life.

There's also House specific rules

  • Scions of this House must marry outside of their House. They host debutante balls for foreign royalty.
  • This House encourages bigamy. Their scions are expected to marry at least twice by 35.

Break enough of these rules and you become a failscion - no inheritance, no prospects, just a bunch of relatives who think you're a failure. Failscions play a very different kind of game - one where they crawl into a dungeon with nothing and try to claw their way back to wealth.

Idea #4: Domain management and dungeoncrawling are two very different game modes. The scion/failscion dichotomy matches nicely to it. A game where you oscillate in and out of social grace based on how well you can adapt to a restrictive social code(????)


Binaries

High society can tolerate queerness. What it cannot tolerate is a lapse in procedure.

Idea #5: In courtship, the feminine role is passive and the masculine is aggressive. If a man takes the feminine role in courtship, or a woman takes the masculine, they must overcompensate to better fit their courtship-gender --> if a woman makes the first move on a man, she must also: lead when dancing, drive, and duel any rivals with pistols at dawn. If they get married, she will be the groom.

[why bother? i think gray areas for queerness are good, but i want to make sure i replace any restriction i remove with one thats equally fun (by which i mean annoying). Not sure if this is the right solution]

may 👁cu🏠my🦌