Velocimancer Games

  Hey it's TTRPG Tuesday, let's see if I get something written before sleep overtakes me. I'm still on that Channelers kick, but today I want to talk about a possible campaign path: The Magpie Offensive.  I see this as a military campaign where the PCs are conscripted, volunteers, or mercenaries for an army that is marching to quell Spirit threats and unite the region under a protectorate. There should be free RP sections as interludes between missions, and missions should be chosen by the party.  The army ensures loyalty with intangible rewards as well as artifact items. NOTE: This whole thing is being designed with the Rascal article on militarization in ttrpgs in mind. What is the thrust of the campaign? It's fundamentally one of conquest.  How do I encourage characters to question their presence and their complicity? How much interpersonal violence is an acceptable price to pay for environmental justice? How can party composition affect all this from jump? How

  What the fuck’s up, it’s a wine-tipsy TTRPG Tuesday! Had a really outstandingly good Playtest Zero last Thursday, wherein I had the Channelers playtest kit updated, but I was second in the running order and when it came time, only two people were down to actively playtest (the rest were kindly willing to observe) and I wasn’t one of them, so we proceeded to somehow embark on a two hour discussion on the themes and mechanics instead of actually playtesting, but that was itself an astonishing good time.  I’m working on getting together a day in October for playtesting Channelers and Star Baker, as well as getting a reading of my new play in front of a live human audience. What would I like to get done before my next playtest? Well, for starters, I need to solidify the changes I made to the playtest kit by backporting them over to the WIP.  I also need to comb through my 20 pages of Devlog and compile all the To-Do items I proposed into a list, then resolve the ones that are complete or

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 terms ne

Hey welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday! Tuesday technically ended 51 minutes ago as I begin to write this, but who gives a shit.  It’s been a while and I feel like I need to get a post out. Today, let’s look at hacks - I’ve written settings, adventures, classes, monsters, and modules for other systems before, but I’ve never done a hack; it’s one of those things where I’d have no issue with someone doing it with something I wrote (game design-wise; playwriting-wise I’d be a bit stroppy) however! I have been advised that it’s a good starting point for folks who have never built a system from scratch, so maybe it’s a worthwhile exercise to embark upon.  So what system would I want to hack? Well, this is just first principles basic concept stuff, but since Aaron Lim’s the one who suggested I look at a hack, I’m going to take one of his systems: SPEEDMECH. MASKS & BELTS Implementing the tactical turn-based combat of SPEEDMECH, Masks & Belts is a game of Driver moves and form-changing in

Alright it’s another TTRPG Tuesday.  It’s late, I have to be up less than seven hours from now for hockey, and my wife’s coming down with something that I’ll probably catch in some form or another.  But let’s gooooo! So with Playtest Zero coming up in uhhh two days, I have to be realistic about what’s achievable by then.  I am close but not close enough to being able to have folks test out combat; and I still think having some pregen characters for that will help me do that.  The issue is I’ve jumped around so much that I don’t have those characters, or a character sheet; so since that’s the first domino, I’m focusing on that as the bit to playtest, and will take what I learn from character feedback to build and stat out my pregen characters, and the scenario I skeletoned out last week. I have split the original Channelers doc into a Devlog and a WIP for the system itself, and have started a little slide deck I can use to introduce folks to the concept.  Between now and Thursday evenin

It’s nine days til the next US-evening Playtest Zero.  I’ve worked on Channelers more days than not recently. Welcome to another TTRPG Tuesday. My goal by 3/14 is to have an MVP that can at least be tested.  An introduction to the game, some pre-gen characters for each of the belief systems, and a scenario to test out the double 3x3 combat grid.  I’ve just been writing down the random bits that pop into my head and are worth figuring out, but I should definitely start with what’s needed for the test and then work my way out from there. So let’s do that today! Test Scenario: The Numinous Spores The Charter calls upon 3-5 Channelers to address a manifestation of the Angel of Decay, an Aspect of the Chanterelle Spirit.  In Heron’s Call Bay, living creatures are wasting away and the scavengers and rot are flourishing.  Three incursion points hold the manifestation in place; binding or cleansing them will release the Angel’s hold on the aread. Incursion Point 1: Three sporestalkers and a fo