I have muted the reposted "D&D is Mid" joke from yesterday.

Something I was surprised about, being so long in my RPG bubble, was how many people legitimately didn't know where else to *go*.

"I want to play an indie game, but what even is the name of ONE?!"

A 🧵of my faves: Caveat: This is an incomplete and arbitrary list.

Lots of good games I like a lot are not here.

All of these games are made by deranged online game designers. You can find them on Twitter and yell at them/with them.

Rulings Not Rules means you can come up with quick subsystems to represent weird random table events that feel notably different than the rest of the game.

An example, from recent play: A 🧵

(Rules given in HIS MAJESTY THE WORM format, but lessons adaptable to any game.)

+ In my game this week, a random city event was "War horns ring out as crookhorns attack pilgrims on the road"

I described a militia raised to fight the attack.

We aren't playing a skirmish army game, but I wanted the players to be able to participate in this sort of thing.

+

In honor of Halloween, a spooky Middle-earth🧵Tolkien used two words for magic: sorcery and enchantment. Though neither was inherently "evil," sorcery is the word exclusively used for the magical works of the Enemy. The Witch King and the Mouth of Sauron were both "sorcerers."
+ Tolkien associated Sorcery with the practice of "Goetia." If you look up Goetia, you'll probably find the Lesser Key of Solomon - a sequence of magickal sigils to summon an array of demons.

We can infer that sorcery deals with summoning and commanding spirits.
+

There’s a scene in the GRRM book A Feast for Crows that's a good example of “social combat," by which I mean a social puzzle.

A short 🧵about how to use social puzzles in RPGs
+ First, the premise.

Jaimie is tasked with ending a siege at Riverrun. Because of his oaths to Catelyn Stark, he would prefer to do this without violence.

Riverrun is currently held by Brynden Blackfish. Jaimie has Edmure Tully, Brynden's nephew, as a hostage.
+

It's a real shame that the flaming sword has been reduced to a vanilla, boring, stock magic item. In a random Pathfinder game, I might actually be disappointed if the GM gave me one.

A flaming sword has the potential to be *so cool.*

Here's how I'd put the magic back in:
🧵 First, I mean, just think about how it'd *feel* to wield one.

"The fire roils off of the blade. As you test the blade, the flames trail along the arc of your swing. It's so bright it almost hurts to look at. Your companions have become detail-less shadows in its brightness."
+

It's lame when you can choose X additional starting languages and the choices don't matter. "I can speak Elven and Goblin," doesn't mean anything if you never see elves and goblins.

I'm a big fan of languages that have broad uses. Here's some I've come up with. Looking for more Common can be understood by everyone. Literally everyone. It's a magical language that forces its meaning into your brain. If you don't speak Common, this is very uncomfortable.

People seemed to like the Tolkien art thread yesterday, so here's a another one.

The international editions of the Hobbit are funny things. Fantasy conventions haven't yet been established. Each illustrator filters the translated terms through their national fairy tale lens. The result is bizarre but charming.

What did fantasy look like before Tolkien? How did people picture elves, dwarves, dragons, goblins?

Tove Jansson, who made my beloved Moomin, pictured Gollum as some sort of huge lily-pad wearing giant

Y'all know this account is like 50% RPGs/50% yelling about Tolkien. Time for some Tolkien hollering today.

This week I found two new-to-me Tolkien illustrators: Anato Finnstark and Denis Gordeev.

A thread of me yelling about why I like their art. First, Anato Finnstark
All pics from their Artstation: artstation.com/anto-finnstark

Has a real focus on servants of the Shadow, contrasting with the bright vivid colors of Middle-earth. He pulls on threads of details (like the crown of the Witch King) and evokes them in other scenes