The Keeper's bag A friend of the Lady of the Wings and a fellow moth enthusiast, the Keeper rarely ever appears during the daylight hours. Instead, they prefer breaking into my bazaar at midnight to request some specimen from a far-flung corner of the earth. If not for the pay, I would have thrown them out by now. But these moth eccentrics know the power of coin, especially a pile of them.

From the article:

NASA has released a free, original tabletop role-playing game, and it’s one part educational experience and another part sci-fi/fantasy epic with magic and dragons. The crux of The Lost Universe, the organization’s first TTRPG,involves a mystery: What would happen if the Hubble Space Telescope disappeared? It’s a simple premise and one that hides the complex backstory underscoring the events of the role-playing game. Without getting into the weeds, the game takes place on a planet called Exlaris, which was once thrown into chaos when a black hole moved too close and kicked it out of its orbit. The planet has since gone back to some degree of normalcy and is now almost completely dedicated to academia. In one city, a scholar named Eirik Hazn made a spell to connect with Earth to study the Hubble Space Telescope, which has famously collected data on black holes. However, the spell and telescope are stolen by a dragon, and researchers working on the project have been disappearing, so the players — Earthlings who worked on the telescope at NASA who were brought through a portal to Exlaris — have to save the day. The official 44-page gameplay book is available to download for free on NASA’s website. You can play it in a party with 4-7 players, but you may need to fudge a few things to graft this narrative onto your TTRPG system of choice. The book says it’ll take around 3-4 hours to get through the adventure.

i got nostalgic for my boys

Stargazer, Stargazer

Happy three years to the original batch of nice emojis!

I've remastered all of them in the new style. Thank you for the support, I hope I can continue contributing to the community! The high res bundle is below.

Since the base emojis are, and will always be free, all remasters will be PWYW with a minimum $1. All of this goes towards the cost of living! thank you so much you guys for the support over the years ^_^ <3 We also have a discord server with all the emojis for any nitro users that are interested!

Flash Sale! ✨

Just dropped a 15% (!) discount on my Winter/Holiday Stock dice bags, seeking some homes!

Thank you!

years later, i am once again pondering printing personal copies and/or publishing the TTOU/TWOL stories... much to think abt

(Dec. 16)

Thinking of outfits for a new character, Lateu a drow cleric of Eilistraee. Wanted to play with the themes of moon, many many moons and stars, laces, gender fluidity and in eilistraee fashion, showing lots of skin.

The Narrator for @toastysquire !

Trailer for The Hidden Isle campaign — now live on Kickstarter ✨

done by me and @vivtanner in collaboration with Reinhold Bidner for motion designs!

do you have any recs for solo ttrpg?

im just gonna list pretty much every solo game ive finished playing so far because ive had a good time with all of them! i think theyre all journalling games, im copying some of the descriptions from their respective pages

also if youre interested in solo games i highly recommend buying any of the 'solo but not alone' bundles on itch.io and just tearing through any that catch your eye

Thousand Year Old Vampire - A solo roleplaying game of loss, memory, and vampires. In TYOV, you chronicle the many centuries of a vampire’s existence, beginning with the loss of mortality and ending with inevitable destruction. (very fun and also free! go grab a community copy! the first solo game i ever played)

Artefact - a story game from the perspective of a single magical item, and its history as it passes through the hands of many different keepers. You’ll feel the weight of time as the item is lost or abandoned again and again, the dust & decay piling around it until it’s found again by someone new.

Bucket of Bolts - A game of iconic spaceships and their infamous captains for one player. (same system as above but with spaceships!)

Long Haul 1983 - tells the story of a dangerous journey through an empty world. You play a long-haul truck driver trying to make their way home through the end of the world. Very good, DID make me cry.

The Empress and Her Seer - a solo game requiring tarot cards. Does the Empire dream of its Empress – its human handler, master, prisoner? She does not shoulder her duties alone. She has advisers, generals, spies, poison tasters, lovers. But she has no one so important as you. For you are all these things, and more. You are her Seer.

Princess With A Cursed Sword - same author as above, a game requiring tarot cards that follows a princess. A figure stands in an ancient ruin, bare feet on crumbling stone. Her gown far too fine, her sword much too dark. She can not put down the sword until she finds where it came from. So she has come.

A Fool's Errand - You are the jester in King Lyrics’ court. Through mere observation you discovered a conspiracy threatening their rule. You now have the fruitless task of warning their majesty. A single page, Solo-Journaling game about the futile effort of trying to warn a king about their inevitable destruction.

Lost Among the Starlit Wreckage - A 1-2 player journaling/storytelling game of war, loss, hope, and reflection from the cockpit of a deteriorating giant robot. <- f@tt coded

If anyone has more recommendations feel free to reply to this bc i dont know much and would love to play more games lol

One of the first games I ever played was Mage: The Awakening. To this day, I think about the design of World of Darkness games a lot. A goodly amount of the 90's trad-game design philosophy has always been too fluffy for my taste. It feels like playing a frayed blanket; there are bits that dangle out of the edge of the whole, not connecting back to the rest. But the core of the thing is nuanced, elegant, and very fun to play.

Needless to say, I was destined to take my own shot at an urban-fantasy wizard game at some point. The end result of that particular effort was...

Broke Wizards

... which is one of my proudest creations. It's a fun, silly game about making magic - and minimum wage - at the same time. It was my first go at dice pools, and to this day it's the biggest game I've written.

I really love this game, and it's a work I'd love for more people to see too.

A lot of people talk about Actual Play podcasts giving unrealistic expectations for TTRPGs (Surprise! Trained Actors improv differently from your average player, and even for indie APs, playing for an audience is completely different from playing among friends)

But I absolutely think that watching other people play CAN inspire new ways to play, in a way you can’t really get elsewhere.

It wasn’t until I listened to Friends at the Table and listened to how Austin Walker narrates the games they play that I considered the potential of treating a TTRPG less like the kind of collaborative improv we normally treat it as, and more like storyboarding.

The major difference being: Austin regularly talks about ‘the camera’. It is practically its own character with how much attention it gets.

“So I’m imagining this like one of those shots where everything kinda freezes in place, and the character is still moving to show the out of body experience they are having right now, and when the scene cuts back, these are the parts that are different.”

“Oh yeah, you open the box, and it’s like that scene in Pulp Fiction. Where we just see this golden glow from what’s coming inside. Your characters know what’s in there now, but I have no idea, we haven’t gotten to that point yet. We will come back to it.”

“Okay you see this symbol, and your character wasn’t there for it so they don’t know what it was, but we the audience can immediately connect it back to this one cult we were dealing with.”

At one point just blatantly goes “Oh man, actually should we change it to this, for a better thematic parallel to what happened in that other session? That might be a really good resolution for your character.”

It’s such an INCREDIBLE example of what you can do by treating the fiction so casually, and like the work in progress it actually is. Genuinely one of the best GM practices I have ever seen, and something that very quickly became a tool I make heavy use of in my campaigns.

The story isn’t a finished product, and it turns out treating it like a draft instead of a finished product makes the game able to do SO MUCH more cool shit.

Because I’m curious, I wanted to make a couple of polls. This one is essentially a poll version of a post by @mookybear12404

Please reblog for sample size!! And feel free to tell me about your first characters!!

We wore dragon onesies to slay a dragon ⚔️