Velocimancer Games

Right! Welcome back to another TTRPG Tuesday.  I’m still on my kick for The Company RPG, so today I’m going to brainstorm more scenario pitches, but as opposed to throwing out premises like last time, I’m going to use my Experience-First approach and come up with some of the right feelings I want to evoke, and work backwards from those. There are a lot of corporate horrors that take advantage of cold settings.  Space, the Arctic or Antarctic, various other frozen hellholes.  The cold echoes the unfeeling, inhuman nature of the company that is pushing the characters to keep going despite the deadly environment.  The cold also creates conditions for some horror to hibernate, only to be awoken by the hubristic intrusion of the characters.  So how can we meaningfully invert that temperature? Personally, I love the cold, it’s the heat that drains me.  Extreme heat, wiping out the characters’ fatigue, making them want to shed their armour, making their weapons and tools too hot to touch, mak

Well a TTRPG Tuesday didn’t happen last week.  So, I’m back with another Mechanic Monday! And I’m going to keep Out of Mana going, but with a twist: Instead of fitting an existing MtG mechanic into boardgameworld, I’m going the other direction: I’ve made up an MtG mechanic! Now, the more perfect inversion would have been if I’d taken a non-MtG boardgame mechanic and adapted it to MtG, but actually this one’s entirely made up (insofar as any idea is original any more etc etc).  Sue me! Inflamed Counters An inflamed counter grants +1/-1 to to the creature it’s on; the effects of multiple inflamed counters are cumulative.  When a creature with inflamed counters deals damage to another creature, that creature gains an inflamed counter. Short, simple, to the point.  Very thematically fitting for Red, in fact I now realize that +1/-1 is the Flowstone modifier; could also work as -1/-1 if I wanted to distinguish it further.  As is fitting for MtG, it’s not too convoluted in and of itself, the

Alright, I’ve gotten way too little sleep, my blue light blocker glasses broke, and my eyes are exhausted.  So let’s get right to it today, shall we? Piece Height as Rank GREEM is played on a checkerboard, rotated by 45 degrees.  Each player has a corner opposite the other, and the same setup of one empty square, two stacks of three checkers, three stacks of two checkers, and four single checkers.  All pieces may move four spaces at a time, but stacks of two can change directions once, and stacks of three can change directions twice.  Pieces that move into a space occupied by an opposing piece may capture (remove) the opposing piece, as long as the capturing piece is of the same or greater height.  Pieces of lesser height may not move through or capture pieces of greater height.  The game ends when one player has lost all the pieces of two heights (singles, stacks of two, or stacks of three). So this, believe it or not, is Flying.  The feeling that the mechanic invokes, of opening up a

Hallo hallo hallo.  I’d have liked to get this Mechanic Monday written sooner but last week’s focus was a Writer application, and along with the press of grants reports and proposals due in the month of March, and those deadlines needed the dedicated hours.  And now I’m watching GBBO (a Bread Week no less) while I work, which is hardly a RECIPE for success.  But I still think I can get this post out on time, especially as I did spend a good chunk of my drifting off last night pondering Magic! at the Gathering.  That’s right, it’s another Out of Mana! I’d like to take a stab at flying, trample, regenerate, some classics there, the tribal concept, cipher, scrying, kicker, but the one I want to write about this week is the other keyword from the Kaldheim set: Boast. Cascading Conditional Triggered Abilities In GREEM, the ordinary turn order is alternating actions by each player, but that order is disrupted whenever the conditions are met for a piece’s ability.  When a piece’s ability cond

Time for another Out of Mana! How many of these am I going to do? Let’s see if I can get to ten or twelve of these and then evaluate.  That’s a ways off either way so I’d better get writing. As I don’t believe the pandemic will end anytime soon, I expect the only gaming I’ll do this year (for the first half at the very least) will be remote/digital, I’m looking forward to when MTG: Arena hits iOS, and may even dip my toe sooner using my laptop.  As long as I strictly limit my budget, I think it’d be another fun way to get some social gaming into my diet - between Terraforming Mars and Star Wars: Squadrons, I’ve spent a grand whopping total of $50 on at least 50 hours of human-to-human social time gaming, and I’ve actually really enjoyed it.  I’ve grown even weirder in isolation, and my speech patterns especially veer wildly between halting and Podcast Played At 1.5x Speed, my sentences twisting and splitting and tangling unresolved.  A little extra human contact, attached to an exercis