Inspired by a writing prompt from Sarah's PatreonYou hear the ice crack. You hear day and night pass in their endless dance. And you awake ( Read more... )

This one's for my incipient Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine campaign, a pastoral campaign set in the Fortitude neighborhood of Town. The only concise way I've found to explain Chuubo's pastoral is to compare it to Ghibli movies. ("You've got characters with great cosmic power, but the important things are living well and connecting with ( Read more... )

So, Sarah's finally got me watching Buffy, and so I'm noticing some connections between that sort of show and Chuubo's. One thing I've particularly been noticing is the pattern of "refer to things that happen off-screen on-screen to make the audience feel like they're happening before they become plot-relevant". This is something Chuubo's can do ( Read more... )

One interesting thing about storyline quests in Chuubo's is that they provide worldbuilding in a way that's not present in most RPGs. I feel like most RPGs worldbuild in two main ways: directly, by telling you facts about the world of the game, and indirectly, by the traits, capabilities, and abilities of characters and how they interact. A related ( Read more... )

So, in doing character creation for my incipient Chuubo's campaign, I noticed that, unlike most systems, Chuubo's has quite a few ways to state "freeform" facts about your character. (Borrowing some of the perl nature, perhaps?) And it also came up some how much Sam is still into Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist, which is always a fun way to look at ( Read more... )

This is the foreshadowed Hitherby Dragons playlist, which has a fair amount of existential stuff but also magical realism and stuff that just makes me think of specific characters.

• 7 Stones, Lindsay Mac. This might have been the genesis for this playlist, because it seems like the sort of thing Liril or one the other Nephilim might do in ( Read more... )

So, a related concept to "saying yes" is how you model world truth. This is sorta related to how canon is often said to work for book series or tv shows. Basically, things that aren't shown or stated definitively "on-screen" are in an indeterminate state. Did someone get caught in an explosion or fall off a cliff, but they didn't die on-screen ( Read more... )

I’ve got two “existential” playlists going. This one is basically ones that didn’t fit my other playlist, which is inspired specifically by Hitherby Dragons.

• Breathe (2 AM), Anna Nalick. I bought this specifically to listen to when writing my vaguely existential X-game “The NPCs Are Dead”, which ended up not actually being that interesting. I’m ( Read more... )

There's an oft-quoted maxim in Dogs in the Vineyard to "say yes or roll the dice" (and the concept has been stated in other ways elsewhere). The idea is whenever a player tries to do something, you either have it just happen or have them roll for it, but you don't say "you can't". This may be obvious, but I was recently thinking about how this ( Read more... )

I've been thinking about, if I were putting together a full system for Librarians Errant (aka Battle Librarians of Gnosi), what it would look like. I've thought about it both in powered-by-the-apocalypse terms and Chuubo's terms (which makes sense, as those are the main systems I'm manic about these days). And in thinking about how I'd express ( Read more... )