Velocimancer Games

  Welcome back to Mechanic Monday! Been a minute hasn't it? Remember when I did one of these a week for a year? 2020 was such a productive time! Totally worth the complete decay of my sense of self! Today I’m going to go about things a little backwards.  Normally I start with the mechanical kernel, mock up how it would look in a hypothetical game, and then do a little theorycrafting around it.  This time, I uh already have a v1.0 prototype.  So let's start there. Gradually Shorter Engines In Paper Moth Dynasty, you play a young Monarch, with nine Role cards flipped to either their Sun or Moon side.  In the first round you will place 7 of the 9 available cards in your Court tableau, then Exile a card and play the next round with one fewer card to draw and one fewer to play, then do the same again before the third and final round.  You will therefore place 7 cards in the first round, 6 in the second, and 5 in the third round. So engine builders (and th...

  Hey it's TTRPG Tuesday.  Well I’m gonna start writing one on a Tuesday.  We’ll see how it goes. Been doing a lot of writing on Channelers lately.  And this time is no exception! In particular, I’ve been wondering if there's room for a sixth Calling: the Haunted. The Haunted There are those who live with a Spiritual affliction: a family curse, intermittent possession, psychic wounds from exposure to a manifestation - whatever the cause, the Haunted lives with a power they can try to manage but never fully control.  The act of Channeling itself is risky, with twisted and unpredictable Techniques and Incarnations, and a tendency for the Haunted’s power to run away from them. The hidden truth of every Haunted is that they bear their burden because they believe they deserve it.  They may despise their state or try to suppress it, but they will remain cursed only as long as they believe, consciously or otherwise, that they should be.  If a Haunted eve...

  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? H...

  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 a...

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...

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-cha...

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...

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: Thre...

Yo uh is it another TTRPG Tuesday? I think it is! I said I’d bring something to Playtest Zero on Thursday, and you know what’s been rattling around my head? Well, Channelers still, and Cold Iron Company, but today in particular: this post on mechanics inspired by Blue Lock.  But I don’t want to make the Blue Lock fan game - I want to take an already insane feeling system and map it on a world I care more about - Tartans Hockey Live! THL is, as everyone knows, the narrative fiction podcast series that exists entirely in my head and various Google docs, following a ragtag team of players in the fictional Hockey Elite League, which includes games played atop a moving train, trapped in a time loop, or in the shadow of Goshzilla, the Great Lakes Kaiju.  While THL follows a specific cast, I think for this game (which I might call Outside Edges or WHEEL BABY WHEEL or the Top Shelf system) we’ll play a lot looser, somewhere in the middle of the “This Is An Insane Approach To A Real S...

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 ...