Velocimancer Games

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!

  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 ...

Hello and welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday! I’ve put together a barebones introductory document for We Won, Didn’t We? and, well, I think it speaks for itself.  Check it out HERE ! This introduces the skeleton of the game, as well as walking through the steps; I’d say next up is a rudimentary character sheet, and maybe I can bring this to a Playtest Zero session and see what folks think of character creation within one of the starting Bulbs.  I’ve opened the doc up for comments, so if you have thoughts dear reader, fire away.  Brain fried, go read the doc, til next time!

  Hello from high above the Rockies, as I make my way back to Chicago from Big Bad Con 2023.     This was my first con in five years, and only my second ever.     I had a better time at it than I did at GenCon, which I understand derives largely from this being an industry con vs a consumer show.     I made a modest number of purchases but it was easy to stick to the constraints of my limited luggage space, which was fine; shopping and new releases were not the attraction here.     Gaming, panels, and (as I soon learned) networking were. This con was certainly less overwhelming and I think my expectations were clearer and my FOMO much lighter, but I’ll readily admit that I had a lot to learn.    I misunderstood or made mistakes regarding almost every event I signed up for, including happy accidents like sitting in on the wrong panel only to learn a ton, or expecting a mending workshop to be about fixing one’s writing when the app...

Hello and welcome back! Another post? So soon? How? Why? Don’t question it.  It’s a TTRPG Tuesday. Today we’re revisiting the concept a few posts back where I proposed a magic system based on hosting spirits that consume you.  Since then I’ve attended my first Session Zero hangout, as well as a local TTRPG designer meetup here in Chicago, and have been very energized by the conversations I had in those spaces.  Session Zero in particular was great for iterating on the >1 minute’s worth of explanation I had for the magic system (which I’ve dubbed Channelers for the time being), which yielded many realizations, one being that this is inherently more horror-sympathetic of a system in feel and inspo than any of my usual stuff.  But the main exciting thing to come out of that convo, is Philosophies.  These stand in as classes/backgrounds, but have less to do with the combat role of a character (as the Spirits can shape that) and more to do with how the charact...

Hello and welcome back to the blog! Since my last post where I laid out a milestone checklist for getting a prototype of Guildmanager (fka Fantasy GM Squared) to GenCon, I put my head down, worked hard, and… actually pulled it off! I finished making components for, and actually printed, the nicest prototype I’ve ever made.  I did NOT figure out a VP component, and I did not get as far as doing the rulebook in Canva, but I DID make all the other non-Hero components (including the double-sided Streak markers at the very last minute) and expanded the rulebook with diagrams.  And I DID re-learn Canva enough to (after a half hour of truly baffling false starts) make a Sell Sheet like I planned to.  It even had a QR code to the website I finally got off my ass and built/paid for. While the prototype went to GenCon, it did not get demo’d, but that’s okay.  Just hitting my deadline is a pleasant surprise for me, and while it came down to the wire, the important bits of th...

Hello and welcome back to the blog for another Mechanic Monday! This one's kind of a catchupdate as well - for starters, this blog is likely moving soon.  That's because I'm finally getting my act together and building out a proper site for Velocimancer Press - a central internet place for all my creations, game design, playwright, and beyond.  Of course, I'm not going to throw out existing work, so a lot of stuff will still link out to itch, NewPlayExchange, this blog - but it's time I did this properly.  Past time, really.  And so what if this breaks all my old tweets linking to this blog in the velocimancer.com domain? Hopefully I can set it up so that all error pages eventually lead any visitors to their target content anyway. But back to the Mechanic Monday - I don't actually have some new thing kicking around my head (well, besides the idea of adding solar panels to Armberlodge; and revisiting the possibility of moving the Legacies off the FGM-Squared c...

Hiya, welcome back to another TTRPG Tuesday! A brief one today, as I just had the barebones of an idea pop into my head and I wanted to gently fan that spark.  One trend in games that I haven’t attempted yet is the journaling form of the solo TTRPG.  I’ve purchased a few, started one, never actually gotten all the way through any.  But I think it’d be fun to do one that has accounting/ledgers as the premise: Perhaps the game is an ledger for a business, and the further into the game you go, the more pages reference previous pages; so the direction of the business is influenced by how faithful the accounting is There are a couple of supplemental materials, mostly brochures; some are referenced by the Ledger, as the prices of products for the business But some of the brochures are costs for various niceties - luxuries, vacations, escort services, offshore accounts, all the big and little things people embezzle for Part of the game is crunching the numbers for the busines...