I'm going to talk a bit a bit about Never Knows Best: An RPG Inspired By a wild anime I watched as a teenager named FLCL. I'm proud of the design work I've done on this and I'm gonna highlight a couple things here. kickstarter.com/projects/16354… Mechanically it's got moves, like in most PbtA games. There's tiered success and it uses six-sided dice. You build dice pools looking for the highest die rolled, like in Blades in the Dark and others. The pool stems from two things:

My name is Fraser Simons and I think I’m generally known for designing the cyberpunk tabletop roleplaying games The Veil and Hack the Planet, as well as blogging about the sub genre @cyberpunkblog
#AprilTTRPGmaker My games tend to focus on emergent play, have a rich dice component (where a roll conveys more than just a target number), and often lean into suggestive designs rather than prescriptive. They’re also usually cyberpunk, or have cyberpunk themes (not always tho)
#AprilTTRPGmaker

Had a great time with Forbidden Lands, some of it down to the players and our fantastic GM, @edige23. We snuck around in a tower, evading these Skelton creatures and finding some loot, as one does in #osr type games. We also found an alchemist lab, which was very cool because... I found this golden fluid in a beaker and immediately drank it, of course! It slapped some of my strength at first... but then gave me an epic die to use! We also disturbed this area and a strange glob thing eating up chemicals formed so I decided to throw a lantern oil refill...

There’s a bunch of cool RPG zines happening right now. I’m going to thread a few I’m aware of here.

First: The Demon Collective, 4 horror RPG adventures written, illustrated, and edited by trans and non binary gamers.
kickstarter.com/projects/gmdk/… D.I.R.G.E Ezine, Diversity in Roleplaying Game Experiences. A focus on world building, design, and art.
kickstarter.com/projects/reign…

There is a lot of things to be excited about in the #tabletop #rpg games hobby. As much as we need to be critical of text, and folks making games, there's a lot to be thankful for as well. Particular if you're privileged enough to have a gaming group where you can try new stuff. Being a part of the @GauntletRPG has allowed me to play 50 systems this year. 50!!!! Roll20 forums and in-person groups in Calgary, Alberta had me fucking starving for other systems because all anyone played with Saga Star Wars, Pathfinder, and D&D--and those games aren't for me.

@GauntletRPG Symbaroum last night was great! I didn’t expect such a good starter adventure. Somewhat disillusions you as the colonizers escaping their dying land and going into a new one, where indigenous folks are already about.

If you don’t mind spoilers continue reading! (Pic from the core book) Our characters were all a part of a caravan going to the new land. To get on we had to fight some guards to prove ourselves able and basically entertain the leader as he was fucking with us. It’s a fairly trad #ttrpg /2

I played Trophy last night on @GauntletRPG Hangouts by @jesseross. It was super fun and good! You play folks going into a haunted and deadly forest, seeking treasure. Built on the Cthulh Dark engine, this iteration is much more interesting to me. (Thread) For one, I am just more interested in this concept, where the endgame is becoming a part of the forest you’re trying to rob for the characters’ gain; playing to lose. You have rituals you can do that are in keeping with this dark fantasy, such as hollow, /2

With @nahualrpg Kickstarting I wanted to talk about a few things I really liked about the one-shot I played a couple days ago. So, Thread, and you can back it here: kickstarter.com/projects/19710… The entire time I was playing it I wanted to know more about the world; it is so interesting. You play a Mexican in poverty, there are no Look options that are different and I like that. You’re Nahual, people who hunt angels for actual sustenance. /1

Let's talk about the #PbtA games. In particular: mechanical design that leans prescriptive or suggestive. Neither term is probably as precise as it should be but are useful for discussing the trends in this design space. All of the games have mechanics and have moves that reflect both of these trends. Prescriptive moves are usually extremely precise and specific. Therefore, they are also less open to interpretation from the player.

Stress dreams. Those are fun. This one had me cutting through a large space that had kids in a semi circle with a projector going like a movie theatre. A teacher grabbed me and told me that I wasn’t cutting again. I said something like ‘I just don’t understand this stuff’/1 She got pissed and as we were walking she was saying something like ‘you don’t get to choose’, poking me in my back. When we ended up in the office the teacher appeared to be a high school student as she was yelled at by the principal, the only adult in the room now, apparently/2

All in all, super fun session. We started in medias res where we had been captured by The Golden Wurm, a centipede looking ship. We were on route to deliver an obelisk to a Planet when we were captured and taken to the ship, which was super cool and had an Egyptian motif. Our princess playbook character, a cyborg-esk species has a powerful family and cowed them into releasing us until a sneaky jerk one killed their leader and attacked us. After a few misses things devolved and I shot the window out to suck them out into space