Mechanic Monday: Kicking Off Out of Mana with Haste

‘Allo! I took a week off. On accident. It’s fine, I still managed to do 52 entries in 52 weeks, so, cheers to me, huh? Anyway I have half an hour to try and knock one of these out. The first entry in my Out of Mana series! No buffer, a clock ticking down, an idea pulled out of my posterior, just like I drew it up!

Timer as Cost

Inspired by Haste, GREEM has cards where the cost to play represents the number of turns between when the card is played and when it becomes active or takes effect. Stronger cards tend to take more turns to activate, or are limited in how many copies can be in a deck. The game is one of timing and disruption.

So what I’m picturing here is maybe a time travel theme, two opposing chronosorcerers trying to pull off immense feats while undermining and disrupting one another. Probably cards that let you add, remove, or move around time counters, destroy cards that are at a certain timer count, get more than one card going, activate cards at a specific high number, etc. Play with speed, play with time. Hell, I could even call it Velocimancer.

Well, that’s all I got! Next week’s entry will be more thought out and written out, I promise, probably!

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TTRPG Tuesday: The Secret Calendar

Welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday! Have I done any this year? Looks like no! On pace to be a pretty low-posting year I guess. Today I actually have a full-fledged one pager TTRPG to share. I was listening to a Ludology with Camilla Zamboni as the guest and was inspired by her collection Roll for Learning. The Secret Calendar came to me pretty much fully formed as I walked and listened to the episode, though I do want to acquire RfL to get layout inspo. Anyhow, the first draft can be found HERE . I think this could be a fun activity for students (was also thinking of Wolfenoot) and maybe I’ll publish it or submit it at some point. Okay I’m out of practice so that's it buh bye!

TTRPG Tuesday: Three Means Of Resolving

Hi it’s another TTRPG Tuesday! First of the year. Let’s get right into it. Saw a challenge on Twitter to make some resolution mechanics. I can do those! Here we go: Hand to Hand The player performing the action and the person running the game or otherwise opposing the action both put their dominant fists toward one another, bounce them three times to get a rhythm, and reveal a number with their fingers, 0-5. Sum the two numbers, and if the number is greater than 5, subtract six, so that the final number is always between 0 and 5. On a 0, the action fails catastrophically, on a 1-2 it fails, 3-4 it succeeds, on a 5 it succeeds spectacularly. The player taking the action starts the game with all five fingers up on their non-dominant hand; after an attempt, they may lower fingers on that hand to add to the sum of the attempt. Ex. Alice attempts to seduce Cat’s character over to the coup conspirators. They put their dominant hands together (right for ...

TTRPG Tuesday: A Glossary of Channelers

Welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday! Hey that last entry wasn’t a bad idea was it? Anyway, I’ve been deep in Channelers land - which means revisiting some major influences, including ones I hadn’t really acknowledged/identified the first time around, like the Dragonball Z anime, and two D&D supplements that made a big impression on me, the Psionics Handbook (from riiiiight before 3.5e came out) and Tome of Battle: the Book of Nine Swords (from riiiiiight as 3.5e was coming to an end). Book of Nine Swords in particular, I’m reading cover to cover right now - maybe I’ll do a deep dive sometime into how it’s aged for me, and the particular juncture it occupies in D&D. Anyhow, out of the past and back to the present: Something plaguing my design right now is that I’ve not committed to terms, and there are lots of things that are fuzzy because the way I think and talk about them are fuzzy. So today’s exercise is simple: I’m going to make a glossary, and hopefully seeing all the...

Velocimancer Games

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