greysfic
Grey's Fiction Blog
Fantasy, Horror, Poetry, Sometimes Smut MDNI
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anthrakhan
Kazan
disformer
Why are you as a man combining with other men? :/
strawberrysundayz
forever only.
kimbayskafe
oh, okay, i'll leave
drowsysights
Drowsy Sights
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If you feel so inextricably bound by the narrative cruft around an RPG ruleset that you can't imagine doing anything nuanced or interesting with it, that seems like a you problem.
I don't know what this is about but I suspect it's about my "you shouldn't try to reframe the text of D&D as something it is not" post, in which case my reply to you is "if you can't understand the point I was making with that post, that seems like a you problem." :)
Cause I explicitly say that you should do whatever you want with D&D: but that you should also be aware of what kind of assumptions the text itself presents and what the expected gameplay loop is. Because once you start to deviate from the assumptions presented in the text and the expected gameplay loop without stopping to examine how rejecting the buy-in will change the game, the game itself is bound to suffer. You silly goose. :)
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Why on earth did I let myself get nerdsniped by a project which will take many hours doing fine-detail shrimp-backéd work?
Here's a tease:
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the night is young and empty and
all my pleasures are ash in my mouth
all silence all stillness and then
a thousand miles away a hundred miles away
a screen away
I see lights. I linger in the dark at the edge of the scene.
Someone might know my name and ask how I am.
I know how I am; unreal. Not here. Not there.
There is nowhere left for me in this world that there are also people. I've forgotten how to speak to you. I don't know the rules here.
The nature of a ghost is to forbid the living.
I forbid you. I deny you. I abjure you.
Please let me be dead. I belong to nowhere else.
My love is your love like moonlight is sunlight
Eclipse me so I can no longer
want (what) you (have)
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i hate that "that that" is grammatically correct. why is english the joke language
#If I see a 'that that' crop up in a sentence I will contort that paragraph like I'm fucking a gymnast to avoid it#terrible vibes
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Folk Songs for Flying Circus
Folk magic and folk music are not as separate as one would believe at first glance. Out there there are folk songs to call upon the great forces that govern this world, anyone can learn these songs, the GM determines what songs exist and the potential outcomes of each song. A song becomes more powerful the more people join in.
Draw Upon the Power of Song
When you utterly believe in the power of song, and lead a song representative of your community, roll flat. On a 16+ choose who responds. On an 11+ additionally choose what is needed in return. On a miss; no one answers, but it provides some comfort.
Who Answers the Call?
A Fairy Lord
A Gremlin
A Local Nature Spirit
G_d
Sigvird
The Dwellers of the Dark Sea
The Three Goddesses
What is Needed?
Acquisition of an Artifact
An Offering of Food
A Sacrifice of Material Wealth
A Secret
Days of Prayer
Just a Fraction of Your Soul
To Prove Yourself
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you ever have a weird ass dream about a weird critter and its so strange that you still think about it years later and decide to use it for something
anyway the vampires in revenant can get a bit Quirky
yes i know what it looks like. please say something else. lol.
#hell yeah fellow Very Normal Vampire appreciator#looks like a Revenant vampire could be isekai'd into Crucible and feel pretty at home
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Random HP-related ideas this prompted and I'm posting before they evaporate from my stupid skull:
Damage to a health clock applies in ticks - you take 3 damage, but it only removes a segment of the health clock at specific intervals. May only be distinct from a generic damage over time if there are triggers on certain segments or you need to find ways to juggle segments being restored, or halting the ticks. Maybe you can even manipulate the interval rate to effectively delay the ticks? Maybe there's a tactical advantage in allowing a certain number of segments to tick as a trigger for moves?
Similar to the above, but the damage applies when the clock ticks down and then it hits a health track or applies a consequence before resetting. Might be a good way to model some kind of inevitable but slow attack - torpedoes? A spell being charged? Some kind of creeping poison? I feel like this could be applied to some kind of cool cosmic horror encounter but that'd need more thought.
If you are in combat your health clock is ticking down until your luck runs out.
Hm. None of these are really good but that middle one might have legs for something about Voltaics in The Cruelest Animal.
I should dig up whatever other games are using clocks for HP but honestly I feel like some of the more interesting things you could likely work better in a videogame. I don't like Blades In The Dark as a game but as a game design thesis I do, and the way clocks can provide a concrete source of pressure for pacing a scene is probably the best use for them.
I feel like there might be something you could do with a clock and positioning. It can describe a full circle and in my mind the different points for the hand, the different segments, are conjuring images of Dante air-juggling monsters or an anime character teleporting around between attacks.
Definitely makes the most sense to conceptualize a mechanic with the clock as an integral part rather than making something a clock later.
Could also do something literally involving combat time-travel but generally time-travel stuff makes my teeth itch.
I see clocks more as a countdown to something - so one that disappears is like an alarm clock, or a stopwatch - it ends when its triggered, while in other cases a clock can lead into another related one, like the hand of a clock moving from midnight into a new day, so not necessarily repeating a cycle, but starting a new one. But also, nothing wrong with just using tracks, lol. I think I just have a different perspective on it
i think that this metaphor can be useful in the case of apocalypse world (where the clock is divided into uneven segments that represent time) but i think if yr gonna use this concept of time u gotta do something with it, especially since the metaphor can be really opaque to anyone who hasnt encountered it before, and that need to be learned should somehow pay off in the design
what is the difference between a 6-segment clock representing health and 6 HP? how does the game make that difference productive? how is the sensation of the object valuable?
its not that clocks are useless its that people dont use them, they just toss em in because Thats Whats Done and its like. why. why not just have this be a number or a track or anything more intuitive
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"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."
--Robert Frost
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The trouble with trying to talk about "the players just dick around while the GM does all the actual work of making the game happen" as a dysfunctional mode of play in tabletop roleplaying spaces is that it's so normalised that a lot of GMs genuinely don't realise that's what's happening. They'll look at a description of the problem and with a perfectly straight face declare "yeah, that shit would never fly in my group, that's why we [proceeds to describe a way of organising play in which the GM does all the actual work of making the game happen]". And we wonder by GM burnout is such a universal phenomenon!
#I was paid to GM for around six months once and it absolutely makes that shit easier#When I GM for fun players had better fucking come to me with a strong character motivation grounded in the setting#If I say the party are from a specific background and working together for a specific reason you stay within the damn brief#I already have 10k words of context here don't make me waste them
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Likes don’t increase visibility to others! Please reblog this to spread the word!
I think Werewolf is an inherently queer medium
This is all a part of a larger long-term project.
I am trying to hold the World of Darkness to higher standards of inclusivity.
Book 1: Cliath
Meet The Gaians — a chosen people blessed by Gaia of whom among them there are heroes who are born, blessed with the power to Change. They have been charged with the duty of protecting her and her brood, and among them are fellowships from every culture. They are largely comprised of Kinfolk. Vanguards of the earth, they follow the Codes and Creeds of renown in chiminage to the spirits in exchange for favor, protection, and power to strengthen their Fellowships and they form one of several primary factions.
A small number of Gaia’s chosen have been gifted the ability to shapeshift through either bite or birth into animals; warriors joining the fight against the Wyrm. The Gaians have many secret names for these shapeshifters between their cultures, and they range across many animal species and tribes, but the most common among them in these times are Garou.
This sourcebook includes information on First Changes, Rites of Passage, how people become werewolves, and what they're fighting for. Book 1 is effectively a players guide, including enough comprehensive character creation rules for people to create rank 1 Garou.
The World of Darkness is implied to exist just beneath a facade that all others take for granted as simply being a world gone wrong. When the Change happens to a Garou, human or otherwise, the world they once knew ceases to be. The Apocalypse is said to be something happening to everything, everywhere, simultaneously, and on every level. This transcends the concept of everything succumbing to a singular event but many small ones.
In many ways, the Garou themselves are emblematic of this Apocalypse, with these former lives ending and sweeping the cub into something far bigger than themselves. A Call To Action is the theme of Book 1.
Book 1: Cliath goes into warborn, bitten, wolf-born, and human-born lives leading up to the change. It presents a curated depiction of the Garou from the perspective of those who would mentor them. There are not a lot of conflicts, profound lore, or politics so much as 'this is what we are, this is what we do.' Functionally, this can be considered a Players’ Guide, containing your attributes, abilities, advantages, and Merits and Flaws. Gifts and rites will be truncated to rank 1 for the most part. Guidelines for new STs will be found here, including enough powers and enemy stats to keep their troupe of players on their toes. This will also include things like chargen and descriptions of attributes, abilities, and advantages. This will also have many details on packs and the importance of one's packmates. And what better way to introduce new players than to have it happen in an all-new setting for storytellers to introduce their players to the game: the first three chapters of Dead Mountain!
Dead Mountain isn't going anywhere. In fact, it will be used as the foundation for this series. Already-finished parts of the Dead Mountain will be released over the next few months, and a delayed release of the full chronicle will come next spring. The scope of Werewolf: the Essentials will strongly diverge from past game traditions. In past core books and settings, there was an intent to showcase the world at large, written from the perspective of people who had never been to these places. In the end, many details were laughably wrong or mediocre representations that didn’t appeal to the groups they represented. We want the World of Darkness to be HUGE. So, we will be laser-focusing this project to represent the Garou from the Pacific Northwest as an example, with guidelines on how to make your own World of Darkness at your locale HUGE too!
CALLING ALL CHARACHS!
We cannot make this happen without your help.
We are putting out the call for folx from all parts of the queer, lesbian, trans, bisexual, gay, and asexual werewolf fandom looking to help make this the best possible release we can:
Artists
Horror writers
Editors
Consultants
Hype Wolves to help spread the word
Indie TTRPG creators
Working together, we can create a game that is fun, engaging, and genuinely representative of the diverse community of players and fans who love Werewolf.
To help us out, click here
We look forward to providing you future updates!
UPDATE: Our team has grown huge, and we're grateful to the fandom for rising up and howling with us! We received far more applications than we were able to fully process, but we promise to deliver you the best possible Sourcebook anthology we can!
Meet the Writing Team
Meet the Art Team
Follow our official account for future announcements!
To check out a book preview and help us hire cultural consultants click here
Social Media Shout-out! I offer my thanks to @peltofash and @a-boros-named-seamus for supporting me on the Adren and Athro tiers! Your contributions are directly helping make this game more inclusive!
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did some miscellaneous work on ultraviolence at the end of time now that GB's mechanics are solid the level 3 is a secret but it has "The Sword of Deleuze" as an install feature
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MAYBE ONE DAY, IT'LL BE ENOUGH.
plaintext version available on my itch page, here.
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Echopistia
A biomachine has many uses. Versatile, regenerative, capable of learning, produceable with less specialized materials than one might expect. Calories and biomass go in, and with some patience, a tool emerges.
The more useful the tool, however, the more capable of defiance.
And so some long-dead forerunner asked; what if a machine could be taught faith?
Mastery of genetics and neuroscience could not wholly unravel the mystery of cognition, but it could identify some of the gears. The right patten of lights, the correct frequency of sound, and the subject is wholly unaware their response isn't a decision. Unaware even that they are manipulated.
And so are high priests marked with bioluminescent patterns on their carapaces, which can flash in striations to tickle the right synapses and induce terror, or awe, or trust. The modulations of their voices are entheogenic, sermons which inspire feelings of divine communion.
A prayer for deliverance soothes, the cadence chosen carefully to control cortisol levels, and it is also a command line. The guardian daemons of the city roused to protect the supplicant or forestall their wrath, their simpler, violent minds overwhelmed by a code prompt for 'end' spoken like repentence.
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One thing I dearly, dearly miss from before COVID and also economic pressures sending my friends & I to the four corners was hanging out in the evenings of conventions, drinking, going over how our games ran and spontaneously coming up with fresh ideas for next projects. I have less cool concepts bouncing around in my head since I've been cut off from community.
Like yes ok there's Discord, but it isn't quite the same as sitting comfortably around a table with some cheap pizza and pitchers of whatever we could afford. You don't riff as easily, you don't get in a flow, you can't often compel people to hang around talking shit for two hours - it ends up more formally workshoppy, in my experience (not to shade to the people who definitely get the same or as much value from Discord friends or to dismiss the value of a focused workshopping sesh).
I have more money, these days, but I am so much poorer for it.
"I use chatGPT to assist in writing" is the type of shit you say when you haven't discovered the ancient and time honored writing trick of day drinking with your friends and spitballing.
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🪷PEACE AND LOVE USED LIKE A BLADE WILL CONQUER⚔️
If you haven't yet, you can try out the Martial Epic Fantasy Tabletop RPG skewered through by Southeast Asian story and lore GUBAT BANWA for free with the quickstart! A fantasy take on what a Southeast Asia looked like before the rise of modern borders and categorization!
GUBAT BANWA'S FREE QUICKSTART and MUSANGHARI, a GUBAT BANWA MODULE have both been updated. Want easy ways to get into Gubat Banwa's system and setting? Check them out!
Quickstart:
Musanghari on Itch
Musanghari on DrivethruRPG: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/422021/Musanghari
Additionally the game has been given a Patch 1
I always say that I can only personally reckon with these things, Southeast Asian past, directly through Fantasy because so much of is it lost to us and it is a false venture to found a National Consciousness from Pre-colonial Cultural Artifact so Gubat Banwa is a violent revelry of the things we've lost and the things we know we've lost, the connections removed to us, the similarities severed through borderline and empire. Everyone is welcome to join the feast! Also we should be having our Backerkit set up pretty soon!
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