Velocimancer Games

Hello hello.  We’re back this week with another TTRPG Tuesday.  This week I figured I’d think out the Experience I want to create with my two WIPs - The Riders 18-card RPG, and the Company scenario The Envy of Ajax.  It’s going to be a bit freeformy - quelle surprise, eh? The Envy of Ajax: Someone who likes The Company and has played it before sees that there’s a short standalone scenario, and picks it up.  The simplicity of the pamphlet gels with the accessibility of the zine, and adds to the small but eye-catching pile. The person wants to get some friends into the Company - perhaps friends with similar taste in films, but not especially versed in RPGs.  The first zine allows them to build everyone full characters, but for first timers with just one evening at their disposal, the Eurydice Incident seems to be too much of a commitment.  Instead of trying to pick one of the scenarios from the second zine, the GM decides that the pamphlet will be loose enoug...

Welcome back to another TTRPG Tuesday! Although I’m still chugging along in MtG and therefore have all sorts of Out of Mana-ish neurons firing, I’m in an RPG state of mind in terms of what I want to noodle out, so that’s what we’re doing.  Still disorganized though, so have some more stream of consciousness bullets: For The Envy of Ajax, my analysis of the pamphlet situation yields these data points: 3 columns each for the GM and the Players, and the columns can each fit: 1 dense table 2 manageable tables 3 small tables 5 paragraphs totaling >1000 characters. Mixing and matching those fundamentals will get me where I need to go, and maybe I start with layout to determine my actual design constraints, particularly since I tend to go raw unbroken up text before sorting, which might hurt me in this case. I’ve never played a DM/GM-less RPG myself.  I’ve read some, sure, but to be honest that constraint is the most challenging part of the Button Shy challenge.  For that rea...

I was planning on completing my daily mission in MTG Arena, and finishing up the blog post I’d started, and maybe getting some playwriting done, but instead I did other very fun and very productive things last night and I have absolutely no regrets.  So since I missed my chance to do TTRPG Tuesday on schedule, we’re going to do a “Whatever I Want Wednesday” - and what I want is to do my TTRPG Tuesday post a day late.  That’s called a compromise! Enjoy. Ok, I’m “participating” in a study right now, so I’ve got some time to kick out some more thoughts for this week’s - TTRPG Tuesday! I’ve been thinking non-stop about The Envy of Ajax, and I downloaded What A Terrible Night so that I could get an idea of the amount of information in a pamphlet RPG, and how that information is presented.  I can visualize the trifold pamphlet stood up, like a DM screen, with Setup and Player information on the outside, perhaps map/environment, and enemies, story beats, items and their conseque...

Here we are, face to face with, I believe, another Tuesday.  I kind of want to keep it short so that I can go for a run, but also have a lot of thoughts buzzing about my brain.  Let’s just barf out some freeform thoughts for this May the Fourth TTRPG Tuesday! Recently talked over the possibility of writing more scenarios for The Company.  While I’m going to write whatever my grotesque heart and sad little brain want to write, what was mentioned as an actually usable contribution is a pamphlet sized (<1k word count) scenario.  The draft of the DOLLIE Extraction that I handed in was ~1600 words, so that’s still a fairly large amount to work with.  I mean, cutting out the Shepherdesses or otherwise reducing the enemy list, building in less plot or backstory - the same concept could easily (ok, perhaps not EASILY) have come in under 1k.  What might make a good candidate for a shorter thing? Well, it should definitely be one Act.  I’m torn as to whether ...