Wee! WARDEN, my genre-agnostic d20 game based on PF2, is finally out! ghost-spark.itch.io/warden #ttrpg

A thing that kinda fucks me up is that being a successful [Creative Job] almost always requires a presence on socmed but being on socmed literally rots your brain as per science. What a goddamn trap!

I'm trying to reclaim my "experimental game designer" badge after losing to making two trad game hacks: Game that you start with no rules, but with meta-rules for creating rules. Now, I've actually already made a game like this (Goblin Tax Fraud), but this time you start entirely from nothing.

pov: you're never getting out of that parking garage in the first mission of Driver for the ps1

If it's okay, I want to comment on exactly one dimension of the recent Rascal story about Yazeba's B&B, Possum Creek Games, Jay Dragon (note: a friend), and leaving vital contributors in the lurch: I hate the warping impact that boom-or-bust product launch crowdfunding has on the TTRPG industry.

using talented to describe someone = betrays liberal christian ideology using skilled to describe someone = reveals luminous communist buddhist Truth

Until I realized, yes, we could role-play without mechanics, but that also meant the stories our games presented would almost never venture beyond a relatively narrow comfort zone.

My wireless mouse has complained "battery low" for like 3 weeks now. At this point I'm just gonna wait until it doesn't work, because I feel like it's just bluffing at this point and will actually never run out of battery.

We need to embrace "mediocrity" in art. Because things like caring about only fidelity and polish makes more way for the big corporations and plagiarism machines. Let's focus on intent. Art IS intent.

wayne

It is really sad this was why S/P became a thing and things remain as dire as they were.

Tough choice between Fallout (1997) and Final Fantasy Tactics (1997)

What is a skill both a cook and an artist benefit greatly from having? Rendering fat.

OKAY DO PHONES NEXT 2026, THE RETURN TO CD/CASSETTE FUTURISM!!!!!!!

For those who have just left twitter/X and are afraid for their financial security as they try to rebuild, I want to share my experience as it will hopefully provide a bit of comfort. Earlier this year I ran a Kickstarter. Bsky outperformed Twitter for backers by more than 3x.

We were in first place in this film award voting. A film made purely with AI just netted over 150 votes in 12 hours. Now it's personal. Please. Help us kick this THING's ass fair and square. ART FOR ARTISTS. Reshare? VOTE! www.shortoftheyear.com/audience-cho...

invincible #art

I won't be a Baker, I won't be a Gearing, and I won't (thankfully) be a Mearls. The only choice I have is to be me.

Check this out, I do all of these WITHOUT trying to network in the scene! Flawless plan!

in order to network in the ttrpg scene, you must: - accept that you are not everyone's cup of tea - reinvent a mechanic from first principles - make games that drive 10-30 other designers mad - speak with the confidence of someone who thinks very long and hard about how to play pretend more good

The thing holding me back most in drawing is simply the wholeness of it. Every day you can learn something new, but it never ends. And I feel the impatience to already know "enough". But I also know that day will never come. Not if I strive for more. And it kind of paralyzes me. 🧵 I guess?

Reading my notes for my magnum opus (Endless Expedition) and I'm realizing how it still influences my design works today. What a strange feeling. The game was never finished, but maybe now that I've written a game double its length the width of the game doesn't daunt me anymore.

If you read enough hagiographical work about very specific men gamers in the 1970s and couple it with a lifetime of people dismissing your (freeform larp / "storygame" / Erzählspiel) game tradition as "not really games" in part due to their community's gender, then you see where I'm coming from.

To no one’s surprise, the secret history of RPGs has always been women innovating ideas that men “discover” anywhere from 10-400 years later! Fantastic thread from one of the hobby’s coolest academics.

I've started to make my first game using my own native language (Finnish). It's really weird to be basically lost with my own language since I've learned how to write rules in English for a decade. But, getting to use a whole different vocabulary has given the game very different texture.

I love passionate people, who transmit their passion to others. I love enthusiasm, which builds and compounds with others. I HATE "hype."

YEARS OF FONT DESIGN yet NO REAL-WORLD USE FOUND for using anything other than BEBAS NEUE AND MONTSERRAT

The art direction in some PC-98 games just fucking RIP. Goals.

“AI is ok as long as it’s not taking anyone’s job” and whose work is it trained on. Did you forget that it’s a bunch of stolen fucking shit? Are we moving the goalposts already? “it’s sticking around so you have to get used to it, be realistic” no I don’t. Eat my shit and hair

Man, what a joyful time to be learning art.

Art journey update: I started doing sketches daily, and now I hit 100! I'm thinking of aiming for 200-300 before I start advancing into full-body sketches, clothes, and even *thinking* about colors outside of values.

I played Horses this weekend and I wrote down some messy thoughts not only on the game but especially on the specter of formalism that emerged to haunt us all for a moment. transgamerthoughts.com/post/8023277...

My rig is going to waste with my gaming habits LOL 7800XT running Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (1992) on a CRT monitor

I've been doing daily sketches to get comfortable with drawing different body parts, I use Sketchdaily as the site of choice, I think it's really good. But this fucking site wants me to become a foot fetish artist. I checked the numbers, and I should not be getting this many foot references.

Of the games I know and know how to run (in chronological order!): - DREAD (It just hits different) - Shepherds (PbtA without Playbooks) - Fractures (A scene setting game I made) - Genesys (For the funky dice and otherwise trad gameplay)

No! Not again! Beset by another game idea. These just never end, do they?? Anyway this time it's a migration and fantasy evolution -based solo (?) game, where the Vo' people migrate from The Heartland to form the different fantasy peoples in the setting, and gain traits depending on player choices

Oh no not the BOOMER SHOOTER IMMERSIVE SIM DUNGEON CRAWLER WITH PC-98-STYLE SPRITE ART Game idea wrought in pure gold attacking my head. One of these days one gets made, but I have a lot of stuff on my plate already, uggghhhh. Anything that gets me to work on my art, I guess!

Drawing hands is fuckass. Gonna need seventeen years of more practice to make them not look like mittens with hotdogs glued to them.

Is English the 5e of languages?

Sometimes it's just having the right project to push you forward. I'm starting a side project called CITY OF DOOM, which is a sort of OSR X PBTA sort of dungeoning game, and it has kind of lit a fire in me. I just want to draw the art for the game myself and make dungeon synth for the game.

1. A landmark study was just published in The Journal of Pediatrics. It found a 68% reduction in suicidality for trans youth getting HRT. It also found only 7 of more than 400 stopped taking HRT... and of those that did, 4 still identified as gender-diverse. Transgender care saves lives.

this is all fun and games but you gotta go outside and breathe the fucking air to live, this shit ain't real, this is the fucking illusory realm, this is the realm of spectacle and unsuppressed urges man, this is 100% performance, none of this means jack shit, peel your fucking eyes away

she got bottom surgery! i'm happy for her

We did something different with the credits for Demonschool. We used this format: name, title, lengthy description of what they did. Often you see credits in games where you don't know what the credited developer was actually responsible for. We wanted to give people proper, actual credit.

I don't often say this, BUT. Fractures is probably the best game I've ever made. It's 2 pages, barely has rules, and still somehow allows for the most cinematic gameplay I've ever managed. It's like a culmination of all my narrative games. Also it's free. ghost-spark.itch.io/fractures

> Watched Counter Monkey Videos from Spoony in very early 2010s > He recommends Pathfinder 1e as the first RPG to play > Get the game, GM a campaign, learn to hate the game > I start making RPGs > 10 years on, here we fuckin are

I haven't read this yet but I see my name and therefore must repost it.

Okay silly TTRPG idea: A game about violent corporate espionage and organized crime. To play the game you gotta but multiple Employee Handbooks and sell them to prospective players, who can, after playing, run their own games and sell Employee Handbooks themselves. The name? The Pyramid Scheme RPG